Mini Mansions, Camden Barfly, London

Despite incorporating a moonlighting member from stoner rockers supreme Queens Of The Stone Age (bassist Michael Shulman), Mini Mansions’s set at the Camden Barfly veers more towards the psychedelic pop favoured by The Beatles at their drug peak or even Swindon’s finest, XTC.

Gentle melodies, baroque arrangements and indecipherable lyrics abound – all very 1967 but very pleasant nonetheless. What Mini Mansions exude, both musically and with their visceral on-stage presence is sheer emotion, no longer a dirty word and it certainly had the cool kids of Camden up in arms. Lead track ‘Monk’ is a spellbinding pop deconstruction and the cover of Sparks’s ‘Sherlock Holmes’ is strangely fitting, a nod to a no-longer bygone era of hallucinatory weirdness.

Mini Mansions don’t seem to function though as a simple, straight-up pop band; as one would guess with a QOTSA member in tow, the entire set is shot through with a certain subversion, like meat(y) hooks coated in sugar candy. In fact, the song ‘Kiddie Hypnogogia’ perhaps best points to the band’s appeal – a hypnogogic mix of glo-fi pop craziness, on the same page as their fellow LA outsider Ariel Pink.

The band may sound as if they are permanently on the verge of a kaleidoscopic breakdown at any moment but trust me, this is a good thing. Loungecore never sounded so, well… cool.