Sure enough, it takes the Trail of Dead a while to get into their stride. Opener 'Mark David Chapman' seems unusually sluggish, as if they're intimidated by the big venue. 'Mistakes and Regrets' picks up the pace, but then things take a turn for the worse as one of the guitar amps packs up and they improvise for a while until it is replaced. You can sense first-time Trail of Dead gig goers thinking "But you told me they were GOOD live!".

Thankfully it improves considerably. Some impressive new songs are given a debut and they start to gel really well on material like 'Aged Dolls' and a particularly manic 'Totally Natural'. They manage to lose a guitar to the over eager audience (!) and most of the band get over the security barriers at various points.

After a nod to their influences with a Minor Threat cover, a mighty closing song and a trashing of their instruments - all of the drums are kicked over and end up in the crowd!- they've gone. No encore due to lack of equipment but another great gig. Like I said last year, they still need a few more great songs to be truly brilliant, but they're getting better all the time. Worthy headliners after all.

 
And then to And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, whose appeal was never about the vocals, the lyrics, or even the tunes, but the Sonic Youth-inspired wall of guitar noise which hits you somewhere in the stomach.

The stomach-hitting only happens a couple of times tonight, since the band experience a lot of 'technical problems' and it just isn't loud enough as a consequence. When everything comes together, though, as on 'Mistakes and Regrets', it's great. From pink hotpants to the Trail of Dead in four hours; a truly bizarre journey, but ultimately an unmissable one.

 
Fresh, and still hyped up after last nights gig, but I knew I would be coming away disappointed. Tonight was a totally different band and an entirely different type of audience. Crowd surfing, moshing and the normal general big squeeze to get to the front were the order of the day - so it was back to the uncomfortable type of big gig.

'Trail Of Dead stem from the same state as At The Drive In, but preach from a different church. Jason and Conrad swap roles as guitar player, drummer and singer, and, while both are larger than life, it is Jason who indulges in wrecking most of the equipment. They both have forays into the crowd itself while the bemused bouncers look on. Tonight they are tight, loud, bold and put on a good show.

The award for the hardest working person tonight has to go to their guitar tech. Running around tuning, repairing, re-plugging in equipment, fixing the mic stand - he has a job for life as long as they keep playing.

At the end they did the now customary smashing up of equipment, and then proceeded to throw it all in the audience. I wish that the dates had been changed and I'd got to see Trail Of Dead before ATD-I, as this way I would have been built up slowly - but this weekend nothing could top ATD-I. Tonight was just another gig. I guess it would have worked better at a smaller venue, than the coldness of the Astoria.

 
Rocket's shadow initially seems to daunt And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead. "It's a hard act to follow," admits bassist Neil, as they stalk onstage. But these four mad-eyed shitkickers from El Paso make a valiant attempt to match Rocket's barnstorming. It's a more graceful and coherent Trail Of Dead than of recent London shows, as if they're eager to show their depth and mystique as well as their unarguable instrument-trashing and crowd-baiting prowess.

The threat of implosion still hovers - this is a band, after all, with the genius to call a song 'Richter Scale Madness' - but there's beauty amidst the friction tonight, and a nod to their righteous punk roots with a cover of 'Minor Threat' by hardcore legends, um, Minor Threat. When, at the climax, they kick the drumkit into the audience, sending gear spinning over the moshpit, it feels much more like a necessary release of tension than mere nihilist theatrics. A fittingly wild end, in fact, to a night of classic values emphatically restated.