It looked perfect on paper, but the ­combination of two of the most ­engagingly eccentric acts of the ­moment proved incapable of overcoming the handicaps of ULU, a venue whose very brickwork seems to rebel against ­anything but the most workaday indie.

LA's Music Go Music, despite the glorious FM pop of their debut album, still seem tied to that indie model. They appear as a five-piece, with ­guitar, bass, drums and keyboards behind singer Meredith Metcalf, but cannot ­recreate their record's lush, ­Technicolor pop. The muddy sound and lack of ­instrumentation leaves the songs sounding underdone. Only the most direct moments – Explorers of the Heart, or the Abba homage, Light of Love – ­leap out of the murk. It doesn't help, either, that three-fifths of them look not like aspirant pop stars, but like the hapless stoners killed in a drug-deal-gone-wrong movie. This should be a party people are fighting to get into, but it looks and sounds like the kind of office bash one leaves after a single drink.

Headliners Miike Snow are based around American singer Andrew Wyatt and Swedish production duo Christian Karlsson and Pontus ­Winnberg, but expand to a white-masked six piece to perform live. Theirs is a slinkily ­sophisticated synth pop, in which the dynamic builds and releases of dance music are applied to pop songs, but here the emphasis is placed too firmly on the dance part of the ­equation. Their masks, although removed after a few minutes, and the backlighting ­create a facelessness that the songs are never strong enough to dispel. The sound for Miike Snow, too, is ­horrible – A Horse Is Not a Home is buried beneath a hum of bass – and those dance music ­dynamics detract rather than add to the songs. The best songs, the likes of Silvia, manage to emerge with only minor injuries, but it's an oddly ­dispiriting evening for those ­hoping for a burst of pop colour in the ­middle of winter.