Gig review: Cherry Glazerr at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

The One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-referencing track distills the most immediate components of the LA quartet’s oeuvre into three minutes of fizzy grunge in the style of The Breeders.

Yet it’s obvious from the opening moments of their set, when singer / guitarist Clementine Creevy crawls onto the stage on all fours, that this is going to be heavier and more intense than the average indie show.

The front-woman crackles with an untamed energy with which even her band mates seem to struggle. “Can you turn down her vocals in my monitor?” asks keyboardist Sasami Ashworth after a particularly enthusiastic bout of yowling. It’s unclear whether the look that Creevy shoots back is playful or whether Ashworth should expect to be handed her P45.

It’s an unpredictable energy that also infuses the band’s material. Broadly working within the confines of garage rock, such neat categorisation ignores their more experimental diversions. ‘Told You I’d Be With The Guys’, from latest album Apocalipstick, starts as conventional rock before spiraling into a sub-metal thrash. ‘Only Kid On The Block’ takes an unexpected turn into a psychedelic Radiophonic Workshop. And ‘Nuclear Bomb’ shows rare glimpses of moody softness.

By the time they launch into a Kiss cover version and Creevy yelps ‘guitar solo!’ she’s already firmly established herself as a tongue waggling rock demi-goddess.

The wackiness of her improvised song for tour manager Alice and poker-faced order for the audience to ‘shut up’ nonetheless make it difficult to work out how much of this posturing is role play and how much is the real deal.