Look mum, no teeth!

Some bands might smugly claim they've never staged a comeback because they never went away. More often than not, this means they've hung around like a bad smell, and the "comeback" simply means they've released their first album in years that wasn't a total stinker.

In the case of South London's Portion Control, however, they very much did go away. The trio of Dean Piavani, John Whybrew and Ian Sharp existed as another excellent band called Solar Enemy for the duration of the 90s, which deserves another post of its own, and then reappeared (minus Sharp) at the start of the new millennium sounding so lean, clean and muscular you'd think they'd spent the previous decade being pumped full of experimental steroids in a secret military lab.

Portion Control are now over twenty years into the most stunning comeback any British band has ever staged, but their live appearances on these shores have been few and far between. Ask anyone who caught Skinny Puppy at the Forum in 2004 if they remember PC's opening set and their face will light up with giddy glee at the memory of the duo's devastating sonic assault.

Skinny Puppy are noted PorCon fanboys, as are Front Line Assembly (if memory serves, either Bill or Rhys wrote the liner notes to the PC compilation album The Man Who Did Backwards Somersaults). Portion Control is your favourite industrial band's favourite industrial band and, as you may have already guessed, your favourite industrial blogger's, too. n0teeth had both mixes of The Great Divide played at our wedding, because one simply wasn't enough. You might say we're big fans...

Sunday School presents: Portion Control live, Number 90, Hackney Wick, 23rd August

You have to hand it to Sunday School. Not content with simply bringing the freshest underground punk, noise and electronic talent together under one roof at their recurring bank holiday weekenders, the DIY promoter managed to land a pretty hefty fucking fish this time. Promoters on London's "established" goth-industrial circuit might want to take a look at themselves and ask how they've managed to let Portion Control slip through their fingers all these years while rotating the same handful of scene faces. Surely Inertia and Mechanical Cabaret must be washing their hair at least one evening out of 365?

The first thing we noticed upon entering Number 90 - a venue we've sung the praises of on here a couple of times before - is that they've got a new floor! n0teeth's feet can attest: far better for stomping on in Doc Martens than the old one.

Warmup for PorCon came in the form of the preposterously cool and enigmatic Nik Colk Void, the de facto frontwoman of Factory Floor since Dominic Butler's departure in 2013. Armed with a couple of modular devices, she teased out a steady buildup of rumbles, rattles and clicks that got heads nodding until the dam burst and the sound became full-pelt analogue techno, by which point heads were practically banging.

In anyone else's hands, an electronic jam like this could easily become an exercise in self-indulgent knob-twiddling, but dance music DNA and warm bubbly acid house grooves run through the veins of everything Void and her past & present collaborators do. The real heads came here expecting to skank, and skank we did, or at least bob furiously up and down on the spot as NCV laid down the law.

The headliners, too, know a thing or five about getting bodies moving. Anyone unfamiliar with Portion Control might at first have wondered what their old IT teacher was doing setting up a presentation at the front. This was Portion Controller John Whybrew, bespectacled and unassuming in his sensible thinsulate fleece, preparing to unleash hell from an impressively minimal set up - two laptops and a couple of lightly knobbed boxes between them.

He was soon joined by Dean Piavani, whose venomous, corrosive London/Estuary snarl hasn't mellowed one bit since early comeback efforts like the superb Filthy White Guy heralded the reactivation of the PC machine. In terms of programming and production, Portion Control leave most other contemporary industrial artists in the dust. While the sound of PorCon mk I was characterised by endearingly tinny-sounding synth horns, mk II is a far crunchier beast; a monstrous construction of concrete & stainless steel that melds surgical digital precision with rumbling low-end filth.

Your average prancing aggrotech band would sell its plastic dreads to sound as bludgeoning yet atmospheric as this. Tonight, even old cuts like Refugee were given the PC mk II treatment, showing that a PorCon banger is a PorCon banger whether it's in its original form or given a new crisp digital punch.

PC's set went from a mid-paced build up to a slow, grinding peak - show me another modern industrial band that so gleefully embraces slower means of being crushingly heavy instead of aiming for gabber BPMs (sludgy guitar-heavy Godflesh imitators don't count) - before ramping up the pace until limbs were flailing furiously wherever you looked. The absence of the stage allowed Dean to get right up close to the crowd, capering and frollicking around the crowded dance floor like he was having the time of his life.

Portion Control have achieved that Front 242 thing of becoming impossibly cool by simply leaning into being older industrial geezers, confident in the knowledge that their act needs no 'ard case persona to land heavy blows. When Dean says to the crowd "Let's have some fun shall we, boys and girls?" he comes off as both avuncular and subtly menacing, like a schoolfriend's perfectly affable dad who happens to work in "waste management".

Some of the best British bands are just a singer and a guy with some sort of machine. For their tunes, their moves and the sheer breadth and depth of their sound, Portion Control deserve a place in the pantheon alongside Underworld and the Pet Shop Boys.