Bingo Fury are an avant-garde post punk band, sharp and tumultuous in their presentation of chaos.

Their range of sounds is almost as impressive as the players who command them, with the quintet rarely ever standing still as they rotate and exchange instruments around the stage. Their thirty-minute set was more like an act from a ballet orchestra swan-diving through compositions which seamlessly elapsed into each other, piecing together a dark and graceful spectacle on stage.

Their music is a cacophony of tom-heavy drums and jaunty guitars, unnerving pianos and clattering percussion clashing with the wild musings of cornet player Harry ‘Iceman’ Furniss (local avant-jazz legend from their hometown of Bristol). During the most intense parts of their set, they explode with sounds which confront you in their lack of obvious harmony or unison, reminiscent of other cutting-edge bands from Bristol such as Squid and Lice; yet everything is played with such precision and the band’s chemistry so coordinated that the whole spectacle becomes an orderly chaos, a polished but teetering display on the precipice of collapse. They provide a beautiful experience which sets them above others in their genre who perhaps do not understand their limits, or how to appreciate subtlety like Bingo Fury do.

This calculated grandeur gravitates from singer and frontman Bingo (AKA Jack Ogbourne), who delivers beautifully bleak lyrics in a clear baritone vocal, anchoring and humanising the wilderness of their music. Bingo’s words themselves are confounding, trawling through disjointed images and feelings which he unconsciously observes, but they are delivered in such an earnest and sincere way that we latch onto every word he says, following him down the dank backstreets and rusty bathrooms of this sinister world he speaks of. There is a theme of noir in the storytelling, of old jazz lounges enmeshed in smoke and shady characters, but Bingo observes these environments from a detached and almost anachronistic perspective. I was reminded of something like Jack Kerouac tripping in a Hitchcock film, or Hunter S. Thompson finding himself among the characters of the Great Gatsby. This lyrical world and the unmistakeable sound of the band complement each other well, as do Bingo’s moments of quiet, solitary balladry upon the piano. Contrasting with the more manic and furious sides of the music, these ballads hint at a deep vulnerability which Bingo is not afraid to demonstrate.

The band’s compositions are compared with Nina Simone, which makes sense in many ways; the melancholic vulnerability of Bingo’s vocals, the raw piano mastery, the elements of jazz woven into more genre-bending music. They also draw parallels with Liquid Liquid in their ecstatic, raucous energy, and their rhythmically intoxicating set. A new song they played included a lyric which, for me, aptly described the Bingo Fury experience:

‘My cup overflows… at your feet.’

How their concoction of unyielding energy and emotion stays afloat in the cup, I do not know – but the balancing act is deeply moving and impressive.

Bingo Fury’s album ‘Bats Feet For A Widow’ will be out February 16th via State51.