Hey Friend, What You Doing?

Where have all the good new British bands gone? Hello? Is there anyone out there? The answer is a pretty resounding 'nope.' Stop and think of a genuinely good new band you have heard in a year that is already way past half-done and I bet you ten Chomps you'll struggle.

Then we saw Pens and it changed everything. Their set lasts about fourteen minutes and the girls swap instruments in between tunes mainly because it appears none of them really know what they are doing. The whole thing is so swathed in static and reverb and shambolic about-to-fall-apartness that it's like watching that YouTube clip of the kid kicking through the granite wall and getting his ankle snapped in half: kind of bite-your-bottom-lip atrocious but kind of the best thing you have seen since ever.

They also do a cover of 'Sex Beat' by the Gun Club that sounds like the Germs trying to be the Shangri-Las through a gauze of early K Records fuzz.