Mudhoney @ HMV Picture House, 9 Oct

Tonight’s homage to the fuzz pedal begins in earnest as St Deluxe knuckle down to the business of evoking Dinosaur Jr at their eardrum-popping best. With an aggressive array of riffs, they give the PA a fair workout as the set’s brevity curtails their more typically melodious side. It takes a powerful closing cover of Johnny Cash’s Big River to break the tension, with frontman Jamie Cameron’s Bolan-like delivery of the song showing off a welcome nuance to his vocal style.

Now in the second year of their full-blown reunion, The Vaselines have honed their harmonies and shed some of the ramshackle qualities of yore, exhibiting songs which – some 21 years after they were first committed to tape – have been beefed up into a fearsome ramalama. Yet twee pop staples like Son of a Gun and Molly’s Lips have lost none of their naive charm and the stage rapport between Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee is endearing as they muse over the BBC’s belated censorship of Monster Pussy and seek consensus on the lure of Granny pants.

Mudhoney are bound by a promise to play a song from each of their albums, though the set ultimately leans more towards 2006’s Under a Billion Suns and the ever-lauded Superfuzz Bigmuff than on dalliances with the psych rock wilderness years they weathered in-between. Whatever the record, there’s an infectious – almost vindicating – element to the Seattle veterans’ catalogue which elicits a mass reaction seldom seen at latter day gigs in Auld Reekie. It takes Mark Arm all of three minutes to find his Iggy-aping stride, by which point the batshit, crowd-surfing audience are already guzzling the scuzz from the palm of his hand. His energetic body contortions and the wide smile on Steve Turner’s face are proof alone that they still relish tearing the house down with wrecking balls like Sweet Young Thing and You Got It in all their proto-grunge splendour. Arm picks up a sweat-sodden shirt he finds on stage when it’s all over and laughs: “Oh look, it's flannel.” Looks like we all found what we expected here tonight. [Dave Kerr]