Ten Kens, London ICA

The Institute Of Contemporary Arts often feels like a naughty little secret on nights like this. Located within spitting (sorry Ma’am) distance of Buckingham Palace, tucked just out of Piccadilly Circus’ colourful and annoying reach, it could well be an exclusive members club run by a cheeky, rebellious princess who has slipped unnoticed through an elaborate underground pathway to open the doors. One can’t help but wonder what The Queen would think of the absolute noise going off in her front garden tonight.

Opening proceedings is a band that should be finishing them more often than not in the coming months. Toronto four-piece Ten Kens’ self-titled debut album is a fine musical introduction by any standard, while playing live they seem to be incredibly well tuned and quite visceral; the sole guitar is really given some room to explore by some weighty and often distorted bass lines, backing vocals pulling off what the (most) annoying member of The Automatic so miserably fails at: screaming to add depth. Guitarist Dean Tzenos’ impressively large beard makes way for these backing parts that are delivered only when necessary.

A nervous entrance is met with the kind of muted response you’d expect for a support act in an artsy London venue these days, but opening song ‘Bearfight’ is certainly far from inevitable. Building from the ground up – rising and falling between low and loud/dark and light – with an extended intro that raises both anticipation and pressure, the album opener is also perfect here. Pulling the microphone to his mouth with arms that are ready to rip the sleeves from his T-shirt, hair popping from underneath a cap like a young Brian Johnson, lead singer Dan Workman is giving the crowd something to think about with an energetic and magnetic presence even before he has sung a note. 

While he strikes a power figure, Workman sounds more akin to Josh Homme circa-Kyuss. An angelic quality about his voice that shapes and moulds itself into any musical landscape his band mates muster behind him. And by the time ‘Refined’ is strutting its funky stuff, the band themselves are really getting into groove. One of the more foot-tapping, hip swinging tracks of the year becomes the angry love child of Nirvana and At The Drive-In. The pounding, pulsating wall of sound moulds the song into a new animal altogether, providing the highlight of the night. 

Ten Kens entered with an apologetic and humble “hello” for a crowd who were only just beginning to wander in. Leaving the stage, following an unashamedly bouncy and cocky rendition of ‘Spanish Fly’, there was a sense that this was job well done. To come were Sian Alice Group and A Place To Bury Strangers, who both make a fairly nice racket themselves. But there is something far more exciting about their Canadian tour buddies here tonight.

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