The Besnard Lakes @ Sneaky Pete's, 17 Aug

It’s been three years since Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters. Ample time for a trio of young lads known as Heart Beats (****) to graduate from The Twilight Sad with honours. Not that this is to their detriment, as their bone-shaking, unrelenting bass salvos cut with straight up vocal melodies that wouldn’t sound out of place on a James record merge wonderfully throughout their tight set.

Quite what happens in the intervening half-hour remains unclear, but by the time The Besnard Lakes (**) take stage the sound is somewhat muted and on opener Like The Ocean, Like The Innocent, frontman Jace Lasek’s crunching guitar bridge is all but inaudible. The feeling is very much like listening to The Roaring Night through a dry clay wall. The sound issues are never satisfyingly resolved despite frequent shouts for “more guitar” from the crowd.

Huge gaps between songs to fix broken strings and suchlike hardly help matters. Light Up The Night finally manages to transcend such issues due more to its structure than anything else and in such moments its clear what we’ve been missing out on tonight. [Darren Carle]