The gig last night was interesting. The support acts were both great, while the headliner was on autopilot – and mightily pissed.

First support was Dyspraxia, and it was rather good. Stomping, bouncy rhythmic noise that had boundless energy and with a more noise-orientated audience (more of that in a bit) would have gone down even better than he did.

Avoidance of Doubt were something of a revelation, compared to the somewhat mixed reports I had heard previously. The visual side of things is a real plus (and really makes things easy for photographs, too!), as is the fact that the charismatic frontman is quite happy wondering the crowd. As I understand they are now, apart from the frontman, a totally different line-up from last year. Musically they are fucking loud, stompy metal-with-samples in the vein of Static-X and White Zombie – and it works. The electronics could have been a little higher in the mix at points, but in the main the crushing sound was unusually good for Corp (as it was all night) and helped to make a good sounding band even stronger.

And so onto Ultraviolence. Johnny Violent dressed in (mountain bike, by the look of things) racing gear as usual, comes on to a Carpenters song – and insists on singing along. The beats start, the anglegrinding starts, we have a female singer. And nothing really varies. All the “classics” are rolled out, as is an odd cover of Ministry‘s Stigmata – oh, and a messy attempt at merging Whole Lotta Rosie into Hardcore Motherfucker.

I think the problem with Ultraviolence now is that they fall between two stools. Back in their ninetie’s heyday, they were extreme and different (Earache Records got some stick for going for a techno act at the time, as I recall), but now, with the popularity of various parts of the noise scene, if you want “extreme” techno-based music, you head there instead. UVR are becoming/have become an irrelevance – and even Johnny seems to be bored with it. The one new track offered nothing new, either. Time to give it a rest?