Eagulls are not a band to rest on their laurels and give their audience the music they expect. The dark, brooding post punk which characterised their first album was a way removed from the more hook-laden songs of their first EP, eschewing anthemic choruses (with some notable exceptions) for the angular, paranoid bursts of sound which had threatened on their opening salvo more than been pushed to the fore. Similarly, Ullages (an anagram of the band’s name, which is very slightly more adventurous than both the self-titled EP and self-titled full length) is a step further in the band’s evolution than the previous release. While some artists are content to find their furrow and plough it, Eagulls give the sense of a sound in continuous development.

Ullages is a lush soundscape of biting guitars, chugging, Joy Division-esque rhythm and singer George Mitchell’s unique voice, cut with just the right amount of darkness and heaviness to remind you of who you are listening too. The album chugs onwards, never getting out of second gear tempo-wise but never falling into sounding lazy or slow; something due, no doubt, to the force which lies behind every guitar stroke, every drum beat, every strangled note which is dragged from vocal chords like a hanged man to the gallows. The album is introduced by the hypnotic guitar riff of ‘Heads or Tails’, a song which brings to mind The Smiths - both bands’ sounds are undeniably birthed in the post-industrial north, so comparisons are bound to arise. This is no nostalgia project though; despite obvious ‘80s post punk and new wave influences having risen to the fore with this album, the band’s wide range of tastes still creep in.

‘My Life in Rewind’ might sound like the soundtrack to a first train comedown from Manchester to Leeds (in the best possible way), but the instrumental ‘Harpstrings’ sounds like something Ennio Morricone would compose if he’d ever had to write music for a scene in which a serial killer loses his mind on LSD in the desert. This morphs into the woozy tramadol melodies of ‘Velvet’ which, along with ‘Psalms’, holds an incredible amount of energy within an on-the-surface slowed down, reflective pace; a far cry from their earlier, higher velocity output. ‘Skipping’ in particular gives the impression of the rhythm section as a barely contained beast, with a bassline threatening to jump out of its time signature at any moment while guitar and vocal sounds float across the top.

‘Lemontrees’ would probably sound most at home on the EagullsLP due to its driving drum beat and bass lick, but with enough of the new sound they have grown into to have made a perfect choice to pre-hype the record. ‘Aisles’, one of the heavier songs guitar-wise, offers a lush background for Mitchell’s vocals, while closer ‘White Lie Lullabies’ flexes the band’s songwriting muscle – building as it does from lilting shoegaze to a heavy, brooding beast.

Ullages is a brilliant snapshot of a band in a restless state of flux, an ambitious move away from their earlier sound which still retains the nervous, twitchy energy which made them stand out in the first place. Get hold of a copy and embrace the darkness.

Ullages is available from iTunes and Amazon.

Evening two of Incubate 2015 starts off with a walk to the Hall of Fame, housed in what was previously an NS Rail machine shop or something. As per the previous night the first act taken in are Belgian. Partisan are so new they apparently have no internet prescence as yet (other maybe than this). Theirs is a pretty edgy punk/post-punk amalgam that is hampered only by noticeably large amounts of tuning up.

Heading down to Midi it's time to catch one of this year's undoubted big names as Merzbow is playing the second of his three shows, solo last night & tonight with Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi (tomorrow's show is with Full Of Hell). An appreciative crowd is in situ by the time I get there & the two players are respectively pounding away on the kit and doing all sorts of guitar murdering and button pushing to create an unholy racket. Not for the first time tonight will my enjoyment of utter noise be tested to the limit due to a seeming lack of a head & a tail to the piece being performed.

Round the corner I go in search of something more akin to recognisable music and pitch up at Dudok, which seems to be in one of the city's older buildings with a good vaulted ceiling which hints at good acoustics if the sound's mixed right. First onstage for the Rats On Rafts showcase are Dutch indie quartet Nouveau Velo. They experience a bit of difficulty in hearing each other on stage and so are maybe initially rattled by that but for me they never seem to get into anything resembling their stride, sounding too earnest and lightweight to really make any impact.

Keen now to finally get the night underway as far as actually enjoying a performance I'm thwarted yet again at Cul de Sac as Holland's Tamarin Desert can't quite convince me with their take on Byrds etc.-ish '60s sounds. Flat vocals and a lack of the sort of element Umungus had last night sees me head off after a couple of numbers. Thinking a change of musical style might be the catalyst required I head off to the Paradox jazz club for the second of Jasper Stadhouders' performances with his Improv Ensemble (all six of the group's performances over the festival will be released as a boxed set in the coming months).

The club's well set out and you can clearly picture it with candles on the tables and performers doing their stuff on stage to awed silence. The Improv Ensemble are though, as the name suggests, improvising away like mad and whilst they can probably all tell what each is doing or about to do and so join in it all comes across as folk just making whatever noise they feel like in the hope that it somehow fits into the whole. Jazz has its shades like any other music and this just happens to be one that doesn't suit me. Still, as I have a seat and the facial expressions of those involved (particularly the central drummer who seems to not play more than he does play until the dual drum workout near the end of the piece) are interesting in themselves, I hang around and catch the soundcheck of Khyam Allami, master of the Oud. Unassuming and clearly affable his workouts on the instrument just to get the levels right are thrilling enough that I'm hopeful that by the time he came back on stage the audience had bulked out and were treated to something special.

On now to tonight's second act with two drummers as The Melvins play the first of two shows at Midi. They've drawn the first truly big crowd of the week and so the balcony has been opened up, where I mange to plonk myself in a pretty comfy seat and marvel at King Buzzo's Paisley printed muumuu as the quartet pound away. This is great grunge rock performed for a crowd who know exactly what they want & are exstatic to be getting fed it. There's a small pit to the left of the stage but in the main it's just one single entity swaying and bouncing as the band play with hardly any let-up. It'll be interesting to see how tomorrow's show compares.

Buoyed by Buzzo et al's envigorating performance I head back up the road to Hall of Fame to see further hardcore from Belgium in the shape of White Jazz. Theirs is definitely the highlight show of the night for me and it's viewed by a barely double figure number of people. Where are all the pit starters from the Cheap Drugs show? Wherever they were they missed a searing performance from a band that put all their effort into supporting the sterling work of their mesmeric frontman who's firmly in the Rollins/Ian MacKaye mold. Only the destruction of a guitar string & the inevitable delay whilst that was replaced roused me to head off and see what else was happening.

Stage times started to be missed around this point so I wandered back & forth between the Stadskelder, Cul de Sac & Dudok attempting to see The Vickers, Girl Band and Useless Eaters. All were eventually seen to some degree or other. The Vickers giving out a good '60s performance of fairly psychedelic elements with a bit of beat attitude, Girl Band focussing a lot of angst and power into their show (Dara Kiely performing in a wheelchair clearly had some extra stress to exorcise despite also looking half-sedated when not howling his head off) and Useless Eaters smartly channelled the sound of '80s US punk to a packed house.

And that was it, until it turned out I could get a lift rather than wait for the bus by heading back to Paradox to see the end of Jeffrey Lewis's Sonnet Youth (readings of poems based around Sonic Youth songs) performance. This I duly did, joining a mere handful of punters watching him rather stumble through the final bits of the show. Not though that it wasn't without some gem-like moments - his being slightly put on the spot by having to reveal to Gary Lucas that he didn't really see the point of Jeff Buckley when asked to join a tribute show to the late singer/songwriter and the classic deluded rock star tale of the time Johnny Marr had the bright idea of having his tweets illustrated with Jeffrey being the artist in question. As he was the first to admit more (or even some) rehearsal of the night's material would have been wise & as it was I've seen him better in the past. Still, I got a lift home.