LIVE REVIEW: Yaang, Daffodils & Rae Charlea @ The Shipping Forecast, Liverpool

To get into the venue space at The Shipping Forecast, you must first descend a winding staircase, an experience that could only be compared, on Friday the 4th of April, to Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

The evening opens with Rae Charlea, who slap a layer of woozy vocals onto the walls of the basement, which drips down into a scattering of drums. The brooding guitar lays a hazy layer over the stage which remains there, twisting and turning, until the end of the evening.

Photo Credit: @jessfilms._

Daffodils take this haze and mold it into something that can only really be described as spectacularly silly. Before they even begin, they introduce “Jake the clay guy” who spends the set sculpting his mass of clay into increasingly bizarre forms.

They ricochet between genres, starting as a 60s psych band, with 'DEAD', a bouncy 2 minute pop tune. Dominé brings a slower, more monumental backing to the guttural vocals, a song that would almost fit in the Twin Peaks soundtrack. They end with 'Young Guns', their latest single, which is a frenzied swarming of guitar and organ, sounding a little like a very frantic Velvet Underground, perhaps the sound they would make if they had a humanoid clay monster accompanying them on stage.

Once the stage is cleared of organs and drum kits, and clay, YAANG can finally make their entrance. They’re a patchwork three-piece band: an Elvis shirt, a pair of 70s bell bottom jeans and a Liam Gallagher lookalike and their sound is just as erratic. Comfort, the opening track from their new EP 'No', is a scuzzy wash of sound, made uniquely gothic by the drum machine accompanying them. Lead singer Davey Moore, who ditched the Gallagher act early on by admitting that he’s “not actually a dickhead” throws himself around the stage like Ian Curtis, layering beautifully unsettling vocals above the walls of guitar.

They cut through this with the bouncier track, 'Billy', which feels like an early 2000s Indie Pop hit that has been put through a mincer. As the band admit, there is little consistent about their sound, only “our 180 bpm” and the ever present attempts by the audience to keep up with Moore’s dancing, which makes the gig look like a deranged, yet infinitely cooler, Joe Wicks workout.

They run through songs, announcing the names of very few, admitting they know the lyrics to even fewer and spinning wildly between genres. The summer-y riffs of Speed McQueen blend into the rough electronic beats of 'Too Much Money' influences from bands like The Fall meld with sounds from the likes of Galaxie 500.

'Till Morning Light', their penultimate track, has a habit of tripping over itself, notes sparking between the guitar and the bass, each line catching on the previous one creating a fitful, LCD Soundsystem-esque beat. The drum machine drives the set towards the final song, the live debut of 'Horsepower Is God', a cinematic blend of everything that has gone on that night, ending in a drone that never seems to quite disappear.

As you ascend the stairs, drones still ringing in your ears, the world seems a little too sharp, a little too normal, and you are left with a yearning to go back down.