Paris Suit Yourself – Lost My Girl // Song Of The Day #245

I’ve not seen many great bands at the Dublin Castle. That sticky-floored bastion of Britpop nostalgia has become home to thousands of suburban acts playing their first show In The Big Smoke, and consequently tends to be a venue to avoid.

On Sunday night, though, near the end of a long Camden Crawl weekend, I saw one of the most exciting live bands I have had the pleasure of watching in a very long time.

Paris Suit Yourself are normally a four-piece, but immigration problems meant that their drummer wasn’t with them. Instead, the band played as a three-piece: a hooded, dreadlocked singer, a strangely intense bassist, and a Johnny Depp-lookalike guitarist-and-drum-machine-basher.

The show itself was chaotic; songs dropped in and out of time, audience members left in a steady trickle. But despite being depleted by 25%, the band were completely, jaw-droppingly compulsive. One moment leftfield hip-hop, the next thrashing distorted guitars, the next Kuti-esque afrobeat, Paris Suit Yourself played are impossible to pin down. The whole thing wasn’t so much a gig as a performance art piece; a post-Situationist experiment.

The band’s debut album, the curiously titled My Main Shitstain, is out now on Big Dada, and it is (almost) as exciting an experience as their live show. Londoners can see them at CAMP this evening. Go, go, go.