Cottonmouth Rocks, The Hope, Brighton, July 11

4:26pm Monday 14th July 2008

The sinister urgency of tonight's gig was characteristic of the best sort of music-making: lean, insistent and bewitching.

Cottonmouth Rocks are a serious band in the best sense and their sound is marked by an inquisitiveness born of passion and integrity, and pitched somewhere between Kate Bush, Portishead and the Velvet Underground.

New single Witch Doctor was, as the title suggests, a dark and brooding meditation that wouldn't be out of place in a David Lynch movie. The video for this track, shown after the band left the stage, was a highly accomplished piece of work in itself.

The plaintive vocals, set against the sonic drone of the instrumentation and punctuated by percussion, were exhilarating, ethereal and conveyed a sense of isolation and solitude.

The result was a sort of psychic unease akin, I imagine, to spending a night with Edgar Allen Poe.

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