They’ve got three guitarists. That’s the first thing you notice. Three guitarists means noise.

But when Menace Beach come onstage, it’s not so much noise as an assault. The band takes its cues from the tail end of 90s grunge, and the three guitars (two rhythm, one lead) build a wall of distortion loud enough to rival Dinosaur Jr. Towards the end of the gig, they use a pedal effect which seems to crumple all three guitars into one. It’s like scrunching the sound into a mass of screaming feedback, and then tossing it around the stage.

There’s the danger of it all turning into a bit of a mess. With so much going on onstage at such an extreme volume, lesser musicians wouldn’t be able to prevent their instruments from merging together into sluggishness. But for a band whose members rotate so frequently within the Leeds music scene that they’ve been called a local supergroup, Menace Beach are impressively well-rehearsed. There’s barely a beat dropped at any point in their set, and their drummer Nestor Matthews is so bearlike behind the kit that you suspect there’d be aggressive repercussions for anyone who missed their cue.

They sound like a band who’ve been on the road for years. The Portland Arms sound mixing helps too: it’s tricky to bring out the nuance of a loud band in a small venue, but the bass and vocal levels here are spot on. It certainly makes them look better than their support, Bruising, whose obviously talented singer was drowned out in a tide of chugging guitars. Despite Menace Beach’s aggression, no-one gets in anyone else’s way. It’s a very controlled performance.

“They’re pop songs trying to dig their way out of the layers of violence and distortion which the band have buried them under”

But this isn’t just a great gig by comparison with a weaker one. For all their homages to Pavement and Dinosaur Jr, Menace Beach are an idiosyncratic band in an indie scene littered with failed next big things. Much of their distinction stems from Liza Violet, who plays keyboard and guitar and co-founded the band with singer/guitarist Ryan Needham back in 2012. Standing centre-stage but rarely facing the crowd, Violet effortlessly draws attention. It’s partly physical, because she’s tall and aloof and her silvery hair is cropped at the chin, Sia-style. As the only woman onstage, she stands out sharply from the rest of the band, and that she only occasionally acknowledges the crowd or her own bandmates makes her feel distant, almost separate.

But it’s not just about appearances, because her music cuts her off, too. Set against Needham’s barked lead vocals (which owe as much to The Ramones as they do to Kurt Cobain), Violet’s voice is as tranquil as a choir girl’s. The contrast is unsettling. Similarly, on tracks like ‘Lemon Memory’, her organ-tinged keyboard parts balance precariously atop the band’s crashing guitars and drums, always threatening to mingle with the rest of the instrumentation but never quite doing so. It shouldn’t work, but somehow the incongruity sharpens the sound. The band is essentially two separate entities: there’s Liza Violet, and then there’s everyone else. As both a sonic and visual outsider, her presence is ethereal.

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And they’ve got the songs to back up the style. The opener ‘Give Blood’ screams “why d'ya always sing about death” against a stomping riff, and the rest of their set is similarly fast-paced. The lyrics are ominous, but the choruses are often startlingly sugary.  They’re pop songs trying to dig their way out of the layers of violence and distortion which the band have buried them under. Like the otherworldliness of Liza Violet, this only adds to the group’s jarring appeal. If there can be any complaint, it’s that they didn’t play for longer