Cymbals Eat Guitars / Milagres @ ABC2, 8 January

Conjuring enthusiasm among a disappointingly thin crowd, on a Sunday night in early January, is a test for any band, and New York’s Milagres are too meekly inoffensive to pass it. The quintet peddle an assured melange of recent fashions: Kyle Wilson’s vocals recall Fleet Foxes’ ethereal neo-folk, while the omnipresent delayed guitars spiral around the mix in a Deerhunter-esque manner.

Despite the deftness with which those elements are married, however, Milagres seem unsure as to whether they are pursuing a kind of endearing whimsy, or a Radiohead-style cinematic tension, and consequently find themselves positioned awkwardly between the two.

Fellow New Yorkers Cymbals Eat Guitars, by contrast, have narrowed their emotional range with productive results: these songs feel tensile, dynamic and focused. Shore Points is one highlight: clocking in at under three minutes, yet encompassing within that bursts of psychedelic noise, rapid structural shifts, and an intriguingly awkward poppiness, it encapsulates Cymbals Eat Guitars’ fierce determination to infuse the 90s noise-rock that underpins their sound with new energies and ideas.

Elsewhere, the otherworldly depth of current LP Lenses Alien doesn’t always come across in the live context: despite a sharply-defined sound and impeccable musicianship, there’s a dreaminess to the recorded material that the band evidently struggle to translate. Things turn against them, too, when singer/guitarist Joseph D’Agostino is unexpectedly afflicted with heart palpitations. The set is valiantly finished, however, and for all of the evening’s difficulties, Cymbals Eat Guitars manage to generate warmth by its close.