Domestic Partners: Live at The Shacklewell Arms
A ping on my phone saved me from whatever fever dream I was having at the time. The harsh light of an unexpectedly hot day was blazing through the windows, beating on my eyes like hammers. I reached for the phone and saw a text from Eliza (of course it’s her, who else would it be?)
Just checking ur up for the gig later
Jesus tap-dancing Christ it’s today! It had totally slipped my mind over an avalanche of mucus. I had every reason to cancel; the deep-sea pressure building in my skull from blocked sinuses, a cold sweat prickling over my body, and a cough that’d concern Kafka. You’re in no position to leave this bed, I told myself; but because I get a nameless thrill out of disrespecting my own boundaries, I texted back;
ABSOLUTELY! What time queen?
She replied immediately;
I think domestic partners are on at 8 at the Shacklewell Arms.
Right, it seems I’ve got about seven hours to locate what remains of me. Nothing a shower and a cup of tea can’t fix. It wasn’t just masochism that drove me out of my bed that day. Eliza had caught Domestic Partners at MOTH Club on the 17th of August 2025 and sent me a short video of their set. From that moment I vowed to see this bizarre three-piece in person who very rarely play in London considering they’re a small band from Liverpool. The following paragraphs will attempt to explain what is it about their music that made me put my well-being aside for an evening.
7:23 PM.
With a nose full of Vicks VapoRub and a dwindling sense of self, I waited on a brick fence opposite the Shacklewell Arms in Dalston. I was wearing camo because I didn’t want to be see in this state. Eliza and Tabby turned up a couple of minutes later, both of them also infirmed; Tabby suffering from the same nasty flu we most probably caught at SXSE and Eliza with a tortuously stiff neck.
We went straight for the water jugs and downed multiple glasses of water each. Three bands were on today; Vera and newbuild playing after Domestic Partners. Come 8pm and the stage room was still empty apart from two members of the band – keys/vocals and drummer – preparing their instruments on stage.
“Are we too early?” Eliza asked furtively, halfway through the door.
In a soft American accent the vocalist invited us in. They were waiting for more people (and the electronics player of the band) to arrive before starting. We three offered to grab a crowd from the smoking area. Going out back, we announced like ushers at a theatre the commencement of the show.
With the whole band present under the stage lighting of a blood moon, they decided to start.
“Thank you to all five of you for coming,” quipped the vocalist. The room was expansively empty but I don’t think that mattered to anyone. “We’re Domestic Partners.”
With only a couple of singles on Soundcloud, their short setlists are practically the same each time. But they get around this with the baffling structural complexity of these songs. They could note-for-note repeat their set back-to-front and it still won’t sound the same. The mischievous opening piano melody to All I See Are Dead Fishdidn’t hover in the air for long before the whole band blasted it away with a sonic shockwave. With an angry rhythm wound up tighter than a coil they charged through the song, capriciously changing time signatures every couple of verses. Brutal hand-to-hand combat between keys, drums, vocals, and electronics characterise their sound. Frantic and panicky keyboard melodies are tied to a post and shot full of holes by the drummer’s firing squad while disturbing electronic droning screeches over this musical execution. And we’re all complicit in this act of aural violence.
Though far from a full house, the room was filling up with very confused people who were digging what they saw and heard. Even if the room was totally deserted, the band’s sound is dense enough to fill the room by itself. I’m tasting very distinct flavours of jazz, death metal, classical, and noise in this delicious slop I’m being force fed.
During the second tune, Sleepwalk, the keys player picked up a violin and began garrotting it into the mic while a robotic death rattle emerged from the synths. What is the meaning of all this, I wondered as my headache intensified a thousand-fold. As if in silent response to my prayers the bombing run ceased and soft twinkling nots floated out of the keyboard. It sounded like a passage from some piece of classical music, over which he sang in a soft and yearning voice. The synth player picked up a saxophone in anticipation as the drummer began decorating this unfurling melody with rapid and hissing taps on his cymbals. Without warning the whole thing devolved into a nightmarish instrumental freakout; the drummer pounding his kit, the electronics man blowing his sax with one hand and torturing his synth with the other, while the vocalist punched and elbowed his keys, his primal screams dwarfed by the decibels. His voice longs for something essential yet impossible. Such moments of threatening tension are numerous throughout the band’s songs where calm is butchered into chaos. But even at their most feral there’s a consummate tightness to their playing. Every note is in its right place because they know they’re not supposed to be where they are.
A cerebral assault ensued during Turbine Failure Blues. During those quiet and sensual moments, the keys player felt like evil Bo Burnham, showing his true colours once the band kicked into depraved gear and leaped crazily through these freaky funk passages. His hand blurring across the keyboard, he struck out chords and patterns with such feverish force that the instrument kept sliding off the X-stand. Continually he had to move the keyboard back into place as if he was striking keys on a typewriter.
Sinking further into nightmarish depths, the band closed their set with Dreadful Thoughts of the Sea. Opening with a ballad, it carries us on a slow descent into the waves as the mind recoils deeper into itself with fear. Once we reached deep enough into realms where no sunlight penetrates a psychedelic psychosis took hold over the band as they flitted through these raving courses of lunatic sound. As this odious odyssey was reaching its climax, the drums exploded, the synths wailed away, and the keys catapulted up and down with his serene vocals. A final drowning breath was exhaled upon a peaceful chord that hung horribly in the air.
A smile on his face after whatever demon they’d just exorcised on stage, the vocalist said, “Thank you very much! We gotta catch a train to Liverpool.”
“That was like watching a pantomime on LSD,” Tabby turned to us and said. Well, the band don’t call themselves “headache distributors” for nothing. Unable to hold ourselves upright any longer, we left – regrettably without catching the other bands.
More damage had been inflicted upon my hearing in the last half hour than the next decade ever could. My bones were still vibrating from the force of whatever the hell that was. But throughout their whole set I felt oddly cured. Such manic noises had made my body too inhospitable for any illness to seek shelter in.
