When (then) Reykjavik-based five-piece Mínus released Jesus Christ Bobby in 2001, Kerrang! labelled it “a brilliantly abstract, tumultuous, paranoid squall… [Mínus are] the most important noise band to emerge in years”. The statement reads like typical journalistic over-enthusiasm, but as anyone who has heard said ‘squall’ would attest to the statement was spot on.

When the follow up, 2003's Halldor Laxness, was released the plaudits kept coming, with publications as varied as The Independent and Metal Hammer lavishing heaps of praise on "the rock ‘n’ roll band the world has been waiting for” and their most recent full-length release, The Great Northern Whalekill, has been as widely appreciated by the music press as its predecessors. So why does no-one in Nottingham seem to care about Mínus?

On record they more than live up to any critical acclaim they’ve receive, and in the live environment they are all the more urgent: flailing limbs and thousand-yard stares spouting out from sandpaper bursts of guitar noise and vocals that switch schizophrenically from guttural to snarling to shrieking in a matter of milliseconds, yet these limbs and stares find motionless bodies and around 20 eyes staring back.

Despite free entry being available to the hundreds of wastes frequenting the club night a floor above the gig they pass over it, choosing instead to dance to the same songs in the same place as they probably have for the past weeks/months/years. The RIAA can say what they want: file-sharing isn't killing music, people are.

To keep with the method of quote stealing 'Cats Eyes' and 'Romantic Exorcism', album highlights on their respective opuses, are hard-rock anthems that “Queens Of The Stone Age would have produced had they come from the arctic tundra rather than the desert wastes”, driven by razor-sharp riffs and rough-edged croons.

Granted it takes the band a couple of songs to get into full-gear after the sonic maelstrom of support act Tortuga, who despite playing to a crowd twice as small as the headliners manage to astound with their earthly sabotage of ISIS's post-metal blueprint. Imagine Cult Of Luna thrown headfirst into a vortex and you're wasting time meditating on bullshit descriptives instead of checking out one of the United Kingdom's darkest hopes.

But when they get to full pace, with surprising detours into their Jesus Christ Bobby album with the lightspeed white-noise coated hardcore of 'Pecadilla' and, perhaps appropriately, 'Frat Rock', they are simply one of the best live (and not live) bands around. Hopefully another four-year wait will not precede their next UK tour, but in the face of such nonchalance and apathy it would be hard to blame them if it did.

Photo: Asta Sif