From Dunedin (NZ) to Dunedin (UK), as was, Die!Die!Die! hit town to promote new album Harmony & bring it home to me that now's maybe the time to invest in some earplugs for gigs. This was a damn loud show.   They perpetrate this sonic terrorism at breakneck speed, battering out such selections as 'Blinding' (from the Promises Promises album of 2007) with barely a gap for any light to get in between one song and the next.

In the terrifying collision of man and machine that is twenty-first century electronic music, ‘performers’ are disappearing behind the cut and paste, loops and samples. Emphasis has been put on making the machines sing ,whilst faces behind them exist only as an extension of the instrument. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in dance music, and nowhere is dance music more prevalent than Berlin.

Biffy Clyro are a band who's stage presence and charisma really needs to be seen to be believed. Tonight will be the third time we've seen the band, and, if the previous performances are anything to go by, it's going to be something special. From their performance at the 2010 Leeds Festival, which saw singer Simon Neil throw a monitor off the stage, to their astounding performance at Manchester Central that Winter, each time the band take the stage you know something memorable is about to happen.  Tonight the support comes in the form of City & Colour an acoustic/folk/rock amalgam fronted by Alexisonfire's Dallas Green. Unfortunately due to a delayed train and the venue's somewhat overzealous security we only catch two songs. 'Happiness By the Kilowatt', a hangover from the days of the aforementioned Alexisonfire, receives a riotous reaction from a half-capacity crowd whilst set closer 'Sorrowing Man' sees the arena aglow with the lights of phones; it's a far cry from the days of people holding up lighters, but given a lot of the crowd's obvious penchant for  hairspray, that's probably a good thing.

One of the first things which strikes you about the live set of Polica is the surprising lack of intensity to the sound of a band who perform with two live drummers. With so much vocoder and synth work propping up the melodic aspects of the songs, it might be considered the duty of the dual, organic drum patterns not only to provide a sense of anticipated intensity, but also to provide the sense of humanism which the music might otherwise lack. But on stage, the drums and the rhythm take a surprisingly backseat role, the two drum lines generally hugging one another quite closely as they slink through the modest grooves of songs like ‘I See My Mother’, in their relatively unassuming way. To be sure, moments like the climax of the tumultuous closer ‘Amongster’ see the duo pulling apart from each other and really letting rip into a clattering chaos as sophisticated as it is intense. But these moments are more anomalous than might have been expected.