Gordon Husband attends an evening at The Wheatsheaf in Oxford

Duchess, Bright Works and Yellow Fever are like brothers and sisters in an Afrobeat pod. All three share a fondness for riddling high-fret guitar work, bouncing bass lines and rattling drum beats which teeter on the brink of falling out of time while keeping the ear hooked.

In the case of female-fronted Duchess, who opened the evening at The Wheatsheaf on Saturday, that rhythm section is strung together by three percussionists who swap and change between a miniature drum kit, a percussion tree of brightly-coloured blocks and bells, and a massive Japanese Taiko drum.

You couldn't ask for a more appropriate opener for this world music-inspired night. With their samba and salsa rhythms, Duchess draw on street party music from across the developing world. Lead singer Katie Herring adds a homely touch with lyrics to songs like Our Design, written about working a dull day job, and South Parade, all about going on a night out in Oxford.

The great thing about having such a smorgasbord of loud, bangy things is when they deploy them for their full effect during the powerful choruses of songs like Our Designs. Katie, backed in harmony by guitarist Gerry Nickless and stick banger Will Madgwick, belts out the catchy refrain “Take your computer, rip it off the wall, my life’s too short for me to feel this small!”

The downside, if there is one, of having all those percussionists, is when they drown out the delicate guitar play and fragile harmonies of the melody makers.

Bright Works tend to leave their audience at a loss for words, either in awe or confusion. Tonight, they leave a few people perplexed. Although they draw a lot of their sound from the likes of popular bands such as Foals and Vampire Weekend, they twist plucky tunes in clever ways, distorting catchy riffs into odd timings and cutting them up with pointless pauses. Their sound owes more of a debt to Foals’ predecessor band in Oxford, the Edmund Fitzgerald, in their angular guitar jabs and lead singer Liam Amies’ droning, poetic, post-rock vocals. The anger of disco-punk dance number Sikhism and energy of closing number Houses, however, just about keeps the crowd on side.

Yellow Fever are rising stars. The four Oxford lads have been turning heads in the past year; their twiddly guitar puzzles, like Bright Works’, calling to mind their local forebears Foals as well as new Indie kids on the block The 1975. Lead singer Dele Adewuyi’s elastic and plaintive vocals are reminiscent of Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke. Drummer Alexis Panidis makes extensive use of all parts of the kit, bouncing around from the rims of the snare to the bell of the ride.

Their studio recordings show off brilliant songwriting talent, although live tonight some of their subtlety is lost to a pop-punk wall of noise.