Live: They Call Him The Cocaine Kid. The Icarus Line, The Lexington.

Once the perpetrator of internal ear destruction with a vitriolic brand of hard-as-knuckles, penetrative hardcore, The Icarus Line has incontrovertibly become the Joe Cardamone show. It's gone ten by the time he cocksurely struts onstage with the canny conviction of a gambling, toothless jailbird, flouting the smoking ban as the perfume from his roll-up washes over his admirers. And admire is precisely what many are here to do: the agitated fidget, commenting on his petite stature: "he's smaller than I imagined" and the like, garbled anxiously and excitedly. However while Cardamone's more contemporary material makes Mono and Penance Soiree sound quite literally like the Inferno incarnate ("he's gone soft" utters another devotee), what he lacks in height and bulk he more than makes up for with resolute braggadocio and vainglory. And by God does it make for a captivating spectacle.

Latest LP Wildlife, recorded at Sunset Sound (allegedly in Studio 3, the room in which Prince committed Purple Rain to inevitable platinum), is a glammed up affair reminiscent of former touring buds Primal Scream at their most rawkous. Think Islington resident Bobby Gillespie fronting the MC5 at their most anarchic and perhaps coincidentally, Cardamone seems to have acquired several central components of Gillespie's look, as he totters about atop Cuban heels, his face oft obscured by curtains of jet-black mane that is, it must be said, impeccably clean. Visually however, he also bears an uncanny resemblance to Iggy, hurling himself around a cluttered stage quite precariously, dangling off the DJ booth like reptilian vermin, and in the sultry blues rumble of It's Alright, has something that is, aurally, highly evocative of I Need Somebody. It helps that his depilated torso is in full view, tangible to the outstretched arm as a blazer is swiftly disposed of a few blurred songs in. Leaning heavily on the aforementioned record, Cardamone displays an evident neglect for previous efforts and with no prescribed setlist in taped place to dictate proceedings, whimsically picks and chooses songs he's in the mood for. That he's tonight got a taste for posturing and Lana del Rey-like pouting, they open with the pulsating, bloodthirsty King Baby. The rancourous We Sick follows, its lustful slump heightening the palpable sexuality within the room. It's such that the air tastes of the pubescent-to-teenage kicks of a signing session, with both genders in suitably screamish voice. The ominous thud of Bad Bloods is stripped of haunting piano to reveal simmering menace, the venue assimilating an atmosphere redolent of Santa Monica Boulevard's Troubadour, before the (for the time being) quartet gallivant towards the backstage area. They return for a one-song wrecking ball of an encore, the one song being the frenzied slide guitar-led, heck-raising Slow Death. It's anything but slow, and nor is it painful, and is quite possibly the best way to go. Cardamone thanks us for attending, before voicing a lament of how it's been merely "medium rare". It's been a bit raw, a bit bloody, and bloody incandescent.