The Leeds stop of La Dispute’s short stay in the UK almost never happened. Salvation came with a venue change from Royal Park Cellars to The Well saving the band’s only northern date.

Due to technical difficulties with the guest list, the events of Curses’ set are a mystery. As you can only review what you’ve actually seen, I can only describe their set as a live rendition of their songs, played at volume to an audience within a room. Check out their myspace or head down to a future show to see Curses; the band that got away.

Second on were We’ll Die Smiling who took to the stage looking to vindicate much of the growing local hype surrounding them. Unfortunately, their set was an incoherent mess. Each song sounded as though it had been written with an old, jerking lottery machine filled with screamo cliches rather than any clear ideas, thoughtful structure or flow. Their efforts lacked any sense of direction or intention with any possible meaning lost in a sloppy, shapeless smudge of hap-hazard banality. On the vocal front, their whimpering and whining down the microphone sounded more like a stubbed toe rather than anything meaningful. Tonight, We’ll Die Smiling, sounded like kind of band that give their attempted genre a bad name, sounding exactly how a populist tabloid pastiche of screamo might. Theirs was a set lacking in intelligence, meaning or thought.

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