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The Skinny Wolves Club, September 2005.

Descending the stairs into the Hub is always a tentative business; you are never quite sure what is lurking behind the door. Its subterranean nature has ensured a sinister mythology has evolved around the venue's ownership.

The tiny stage is set to one side of this rectangular room, rather than a more traditional positioning to the back. There's some cosy semi petitioned candle lit seating spaces, populated by seventies style furniture. Smatterings of expectant heads are dotted around the place, engaged in idle conversation or gazing vacantly at the looped visuals.

On the tiny stage there's some well worn musical equipment and the first band up Cap Pas Cap: Gavin Duffy, Grainne Donohue, Jamie Farrell, Ed Kelly, are in readiness to bang the blithers out of them. The various members have stood gel lit in similar clubs and venues around the island, players in more well known bands and even more obtuse side projects.

The music on the PA fades as the first song kicks in. A small grouping has gathered on the dance floor, glasses in hand. This is music for the head not the feet. Reflection and polite applause are the metered response.

In sparse syncopated rhythms, bass heavy throb and synthesised mouldings, in the brash declamatory vocal, and anxious delivery they recall the spirit of 1978-1983. This is not the raw sound of punk, it's more dispassionate. The spark of something more literate and experimental. If you can jump the needle of your musical memory and drop it on the shellacked spirals of post punk, you'll decipher Cap Pas Cap as you choose.

As the band clambers down, the dj plays some relics of a transistor era. Tellingly nobody jumps to the beat. There's an odd tension between the earnestness and urgency of this music that impedes movement other than the pogo or the skank, which the self conscious and the uninitiated will not replicate.

Out step Tera Tora. Their image, which lies somewhere between southern college fop and Ian Curtis cast offs, sits awkwardly with the cacophony they thrash out. At its most digestible this teeters on the brink of At the Drive In and the oh so desperately unfashionable terrain of American emo. They're a cheek boned three piece Hell Fest in Farrah kheks (with a grievous drummer who wouldn't look amiss in Coldplay).

Skinny Wolves sires a revolt against the unimaginative club night. Will the masses follow? Well it certainly merits a loyal and devout following of card carrying members.

ENDS