Guernica start out sounding pretty unremarkable. The relentless emo chords and anguished vocal utterances undoing a lot of the good work that the clever arrangements seemed to be doing. Still, as time goes by, they cheer up a bit and reveal themselves as a tight band with some pretty good songs in a 90s American alt-rock kind of vein. One weird point though, especially considering the U.S. influence of the music, is the singer's alarmingly East London accent whenever singing in English.

Ikochi draw their influences from a little closer to home, coming across like Miyuki Nakajima getting into a fist fight with Shiina Ringo, but not as bad as that sounds. That enka-meets-punk thing has been done plenty of times before by groups like Go! Go! 7188, but the showmanship that goes with it still beats yet another bunch of Number Girl wannabes on any day of the week. Bass player Minato Kota has the right idea with his MC5 t-shirt and even more MC5 afro, and singer/guitarist Chikako is so defiantly beyond gender as to cause all manner of sexual confusion to members of the audience boring enough to consider themselves anything so simple as merely "straight" or "gay". Still, for all this, there is something fundamentally conventional at the heart of these really quite good songs and it leaves me wondering what manner of wonderful things they would be able to produce if they allowed more of the wildness that they display onstage to filter into their music.

Buchibuchi2 are genius. Making a virtue of their complete lack of fashion sense, they take the stage looking like an explosion on a charity shop and launch into a brutal Aburadako style rhythm experiment that just suddenly blossoms into a beautiful, harmony-fuelled slice of American indie pop. Throughout their set, the music jumps forwards, backwards, sideways and any other way it can find; so catchy and accessible that your feet can't help trying to move, but so schizophrenic and unpredictable that dancing is all but impossible. Really, unbelievably good.

Ato are at an interesting but awkward stage in their development. As the band take the stage, the audience is looking around, jumping nervously every time someone opens the door at the back, just wondering from where Yosuke Otsubo is going to make his entrance. He surprised everyone by jumping out from behind the drum kit, but there's an overriding sense that he's taken his gibbering lunatic frontman persona as far as it can go and that if people aren't going to get tired of them, the rest of the band are going to have to push things forward. The good news is that the return of their second guitarist has added an extra dimension to their sound, and that there really does seem to be more and more interesting stuff going on with the music. Even as Otsubo reins in his performance slightly (and I really mean only slightly), the guitars are getting sharper, and playing off each other in an increasingly interesting manner, and the rhythm section is developing along icy funk lines that recall Public Image Limited, The Pop Group and even a touch of Pigbag. More interesting things to come. -Ian Martin, Sep.12.04.