Punt In The Mirror

So, this year's Nightshift Punt festival was announced yesterday, to the usual moans, arguments, and shockingly punctuated internet missives. In celebration, here's the first Punt I ever reviewed...or at least, the first full night I did (The Punt being a glorified Oxford music pub crawl). I did review 3 acts, I think, the year before, but that review has been lost, along with many others. Try to contain your devastation, please.

Parts of this review were printed in Nightshift and www.oxfordbands.com, but some are being seen for the first time. Try to contain your devastation, please.

THE PUNT, various venues, 10/5/06

For the truest response to the Punt’s opening acts, at Borders bookshop, we should probably get the coffee sippers and meandering browsers to write the review. Whilst the pastoral strummings of last year’s performers probably didn’t impinge too much on a quiet flick through a slim volume of verse, I suspect that this year’s more angular sets might have raised a few eyebrows amongst the store’s afternoon clientele. It’s not just his horizontal guitar technique that makes Ally Craig stand out from the acoustic crowd, it’s the fact that his intricate music owes far more to Slint and Sonic Youth (namechecked in the lyrics) than to Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Some of his songs were as spiky and awkward as the Finnish verbs in the lexicons beside me, and his guitar playing had a tensile attack not normally associated with singer-songwriters, but Ally’s warm voice stopped anything getting overly austere and calculated. Perhaps there was one gratuitous falsetto break too many, but ultimately this was a perfect opening to the evening, from an outstanding local talent.

Ally stayed on stage and was joined by a ‘cellist, to accompany Rebecca Mosley. Her vocal style may be a little more in the acoustic singer tradition than Ally’s, but her intelligently awkward compositions continue the trend he set. It’s as if Rebecca is performing a set of soaring love songs, only to be undercut by Ally’s dissonant guitar picking and enveloped in sheets of wonderfully sour ‘cello. Occasionally the ornate arrangements get a little too much, like a room crowded with art deco furnishings, and not every song has the flowing ease of Ally’s set, but Rebecca’s prog acoustica approach is refreshing blast for anyone bored with the current proliferation of acoustic balladeers.

In the over lit and reverb drenched school hall that is Jongleurs, Witches’ trumpet led pop gets a bit oppressive, and starts to sound like a Northern colliery garage band. Perhaps their baroque arrangements are hard to reproduce live, or perhaps it’s the unfortunate booming acoustic that makes them sound like Belle & Sebastian playing Slowdive, but this performance can’t match the grandeur of Witches’ recordings. Things work best when they find some space, letting a subtle glockenspiel lead the tunes, and giving room to some surprisingly melodious vocals. It’s very good stuff, but hear them on record to get the full effect.

Speaking of being better on disc, here come Xmas Lights. It’s a paradox that metal, like hip hop and reggae, is a genre that relies in the passion and intensity of its performance, yet oddly tends to fare better in the studio than on the stage. Seeing as Xmas Lights boast local isolationist soundscaper Umair Chaudry in their lineup, they’ve set themselves an impossible task to recreate the claustrophobic intensity of their recordings live. But they do have a bloody good stab at it. As in stab, rend, tear and, quite possibly, devour. Xmas Lights produce some seriously brutal metal, the pummelling force of which is only matched by the underlying exactness of the construction. Not only that, their lead vocalist has got a serious scream in his armoury, which marks itself indelibly on your eardrums long after the set has concluded.

In a brief visit to The Purple Turtle we discover a few minutes of Dusty Sound System, who bring a nice, relaxed campfire feel to proceedings, as they drift unconcernedly into songs and openly wonder where the other members of the band can have got to. Nothing revolutionary, maybe, but I wish Goldrush could capture some of this lackadaisical attitude, it’s very hard to dislike.

What was I saying about live hip hop? Zuby gets it right, not overloading the performance, just getting back to the basics of rap: some head nodding loops and a tight MC in the spotlight. Whilst he doesn’t get the crowd he deserves, the emptiness of the room lets us hear Zuby in all his wordy glory (if there’s one thing that’s pointless, it’s rap where you can’t make out the rhymes). Big Speakers are great in their very British way, but it’s amazing to hear such assured mainstream rap in li’l old Oxford, and Zuby has all the braggadocio and swagger of American hip hop, plus he’s got the flow to match, shooting off quick fire rhymes with barely a pause. Not surprising that he advocates that we wear a “lyric-proof vest”, then. His sometime vocal accompanist is also a delight, curtailing an excellent, jerky style so as not to over egg the pudding. Too shiny and clean for some tastes, perhaps, but Zuby deserves support for bringing us the sort of music you won’t hear in Oxford every day.

And at the other end of the scale, we have the more abstract stylings of Asher Dust. Using beats with more than a hint of Aphex acid, interjecting some lovely raggafied singing and stalking the stage with his dapper hat, there’s a little hint of Buck 65 cabaret to AJ. Not that it’s all a joke – there’s a suppressed violence to the impassioned vocals for all the lo-fi feel of his stage show. At times it reaches a level of intensity to almost match the humid fug of The Wheatsheaf. Again, perhaps the live arena isn’t the best place to meet them, but Asher Dust boasts some fascinating compositions that switch styles without warning.

My mate advises me that 100 Bullets Back are like “The Pet Shop Boys crossed with Franz Ferdinand. They’re alright”. Well, that’s my review written, cheers very much. With stuttering new wave guitars, pumping synth lines and bouncy, shouty vocals there’s plenty to like about 100 Bullets Back, especially at this time of night, when the beers and the running around town start to take joint effect. The preppy look of the band gives them a slight 6th form common room feel, which is at once endearingly energetic and slightly forced. They may not be quite the sum of their parts, but the parts are so great it doesn’t matter a great deal, especially not on a night like this.

You’ve got to see a band that The Holiday Stabbings have described as “loud and a bit abstract”, so it’s Deguello next. The tempo is doomily slow, the riffs are monolithic, and the style is definitely Stoner. With extra stones. And such hair! It’s like the sweepings from a busy barber’s glued onto the skeletal remains of a metal gig. I can easily imagine a situation in which this band could eat us alive, but tonight it just doesn’t seem to fit together. I suspect that this music demands complete attention and immersion to work, and I fear my palette is getting a touch jaded by this point, but there’s a secret part of me that would rather be watching Phyal.

“Funk: jazz’s deformed cousin”. That’s how The Mighty Boosh described it, and there’s a lot of truth in this, which is why Jaberwok don’t hit the spot as well as they used to. Their acid funk instrumentals with widescreen Floyd moments are toe-tappingly decent, but they seem to have lost any sense of focus or development that they once had, which is where they could take a leaf from the jazz tome. It’s all impeccably performed and crowd pleasing, but somehow they’ve become rather unexcitingly easy on the ear. If they ever make elevators big enough for fifty people to dance stupidly in, I daresay Jaberwok will be on the PA.

“Easy on the ear” is a phrase you won’t often see connected to gabba massacre The Nailbomb Cults. The Sound Of Music and Lulu are sliced and diced into supersize me breakbeats and swathes of digital noise by one man and his musical Moulinex of destruction to impressive effect. The sneaking feeling that there could be more to this music than an endless string of mentalist tropes is easily counterbalanced by the density of the sound, the nearest musical equivalent to the Alien facehuggers that Oxford has to offer. It’s fitting that a set that mangles and samples such a vast array of sources should conclude what has been one of the most eclectic and varied Punts yet, and it proves yet again what a diverse and healthy scene we have at the moment.