With citations of their influence on music press-bothering acts – I Was A Cub Scout being the most immediate to spring to mind – spreading, the time’s never been more perfect for Seattle’s Minus The Bear to rise to the challenge laid down by the enormous potential they’ve exhibited since their 2001 formation and finally crack the UK market. Certainly their take on hyperactive dance-rock – guitars that bleep and chirp accompanied by crisp drumbeats whose sole purpose is to get the toes tapping furiously – is perfectly in tune with contemporary trends: they’re forefathers of everything new-rave and electro-emo (or whatever they’re calling IWACS and :( today) without ever being informed of their offspring’s spiralling out of control.

Fronted by the full-of-voice and spirit Jake Snider, the quintet don’t look particularly up to speed with current trends, but it’s their sidestepping of what’s So Hot Right Now that’s enabled Minus The Bear to grow to this level – tonight’s venue is the largest they’ve played in London, and it’s crammed from front to back – on entirely their own terms. This tour’s been organised without the assistance of any high-profile booker, and the band’s UK label Undergroove is still, really, a bedroom affair best-known for its metal-orientated output; if there’s one pigeonhole Minus The Bear most certainly can’t claim to dip a toe into, it’s metal in its traditional, riff-heavy guise. They’re a truly underground act with every chance of exploding out of the soil and flying straight to the stars. It’ll just take one spark of journalistic risk-taking at a mainstream magazine for the wheels to begin moving in earnest; or, rather, for the rocket fuel to be ignited.

Easily persuading attendees to get their hands waving wildly, half-full pint glasses spilling their contents onto an already sticky floor, Minus The Bear neatly balance the ‘hits’, as it were, with a spread of new arrangements; of the efforts culled from the band’s two-album-and-some-EPs back catalogue, it’s set-closer ‘Pachuca Sunrise’ that draws the greatest reaction from the assembled throng. The song should be unleashed as a single at some point in the near future if the audience’s reaction is anything to go by: the room vibrates to the leaping and falling of a few hundred pairs of booze-sodden feet. Successes aren’t exactly restricted to Menos El Oso material: ‘Monkey!!! Knife!!! Fight!!!’ from the band’s Highly Refined Pirates debut attracts the sing-along treatment from the hardcore, and They Make Beer Commercials Like This EP highlight ‘Fine +2 Pts’ receives a similarly realised physical expression of appreciation.

Leaving their audience quite visibly wanting more, Snider departs from view with a statement of reassurance: “We’ll be back soon.” Let’s hope so, and let’s hope, too, that when Minus The Bear do land on our shores again they’re booked into venues bigger even than tonight’s. They’ve strength enough in their old material to fill the largest of capital city auditoriums, and the news songs aired in Islington suggest that there are even better things to come. This is a band on the cusp of something truly special; fingers crossed that everything their hard work and brilliant musicianship deserves comes their way.

Photograph by Emma Hampson-Jones