Ironically (or perhaps hearteningly) at a gig to raise funds for the Women’s Equality party at Islington Assembly Hall, it’s not really ladies’ night. Gang of Four are playing, and as a result it’s a bit of a sausage fest in the audience, a fact that WE co-founder Catherine Mayer has noticed. “You will have spotted,” she says in her interim ‘public service announcement’ between bands “that Gang of Four have an all male line up…” Yes Catherine, we spotted when we arrived. They are all men. The audience is all men. The men are all wearing caps and not dancing.

Thank god for gender-imbalance redressing, Sleater-Kinney supporting, all-round badasses, PINS, who don’t really give a crap. Faith Holgate’s voice pierces, flashes and shines its way through a barn-storming eight song set, while drummer Sophie Galpin kicks the shit out of her drums like they’ve just called her ‘darling’ in a pub. Each member of the band bounces off each other in a feedback loop of growling riffs and drums - in fact not a million miles away Go4 themselves. “This is for the ladies,” Holgate announces before ‘Girls Like Us’. The women in the audience put their hands in the air.

Between the two headliners Mayer takes to the stage to talk about the WE, a political party seeking to address the breathtaking inequality of the profoundly sexist British society we live in. Despite the year being 2015 - nearly a century after women received the honour of, er - ACTUALLY BEING ABLE TO VOTE - the music industry in particular is still dominated by men, because it’s endemic and ingrained. Regrettably, Mayer has to point out “Canada’s prime minister has recently appointed a cabinet comprising more than half women. Why?” she asks, “BECAUSE IT’S 2015.” It seems obvious when she says it.

After Mayer we come to the slightly bizarre choice of WE night headliner, Gang of Four, fronted by Mayer’s husband - professional Stratocaster-torturer, Andy Gill. From the start to the end Gill stands, foot up on amp like a Roman emperor delivering a judgement, tearing into his guitar and delivering some of the most blistering, urgent riffs anyone has ever wrung from the instrument. It’s invigorating to watch.

Much has been made of the substitution of skittering jitterbug, Jon King (who left in 2012) for the big-eyed NME front cover-fodder that is ex-Gaoler’s Daughter, John Sterry. As Gill has pointed out though, Gang of Four has always been a postpunk Sugababes, a revolving door of members rivalled only by The Fall for length of roster. On top of which Sterry is on top form - from the first ‘A WA WA WA OWW’ of ‘To Hell with Poverty’ to the chorus of ‘At Home He Feels Like A Tourist’, he inhabits the role. In fact it’s so good that the men-wearing-caps-and-not-clapping relinquish their previous role to start up a fight pit. This means they approve.

From the tight 3/3 of ‘Damaged Goods’ to the shredding at the beginning of ‘Love Like Anthrax’, Gang Of Four really know how to tear a place up. And bonus - tonight it’s for the ladies. As the opening riff of ‘Damaged Goods’ starts, a woman in the audience starts dancing by herself with her eyes closed. It’s a good night.

It’s a Friday, and 23 year old Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg of Avi Buffalo stands on the deck at the Islington Assembly Hall, relaxed and working his way around an arpeggio. The band have opened with ‘So What’, lead single from his second album with his band. Although your average Avi Buffalo show contains a fair amount of fret-wanking, Zahner-Isenberg’s confidence as a guitar player is pleasantly at odds with his self-consciousness as a lyricist - as this small, white-jeaned Long Beacher cranes his neck to reach his microphone, it’s hard to work out exactly where he’s trying to pitch his tent.

With the rather sad title of At Best Cuckold, the band’s second outing is less winsome, more crafted and a bit less obnoxious than its predecessor. It’s been a four-year wait, and it’s not just the absence of any questionable song titles (although the first album’s delightful ‘Five Little Sluts’ doesn’t get an airing tonight, we are treated to a stripped-down solo rendition of the evocative, ‘Summer Cum’) that belies his maturity. The new album feels less throwaway, more carefully put together. After the Californian insouciance of their self-title debut, Zahner-Isenberg describes new LP as his ‘tribute to the ballad’, and although the lyrics occasionally still smack of hash-brownie nonsense (“I’m a cheese ball on fire” from ‘Memories Of You’, or the cod-confessional “I ran over two dogs / Then I ate them” from ‘Overwhelmed With Pride’ [unless he actually did that, in which case, harsh mate]), there are some more moving passages to Avi Buffalo songs, more touching than the hey-nonny nonniness of his debut. Although often the vocals still sound like Steven Malkmus having his balls tightly squeezed, when the rest of the band leaves the stage and it’s just this guy in a spotlight, eyes closed, noodling around on ‘Jessica’ or stripping down tracks on a piano, the whole shebang seems less smug, a bit more heartfelt. As he says, ‘I can’t express these thoughts without mistakes’. It almost makes you want to forgive him for the faux-mantic reference “my boner pressed, up to your chest” on ‘Memories Of You’.

And even some of the stranger tracks from Cuckold have a blistered nerve sticking out of them, as the oneiric piano of ‘Oxygen Tank’ (a song borne out of Zahner-Isenberg’s Cormac McCarthy dream about a murderous man with an oxygen tank) is punctured by a heartfelt, non-falsetto “if I don’t start seeing through those lies you tell me every day”. This split between nonsense and tenderness is actually a powerful weapon, because although this Californian wunderkind can nail a distorted a spotlight guitar solo like it was Baker Street in a jazz bar, the mood of his songs can shift from psych madness to sad, alter-ballad in the space of four minutes. As the band return to the stage to finally whip out 2010’s, light and breezy ‘What’s In It For Me’, one is struck with the feeling that four years seem to have taken their toll on Avi Buffalo. And this is no bad thing.