Pariah Carefree

Well, I was clearly in a good mood when I wrote this one. Sometimes you're just generally well disposed towards a nice friendly piece of pop music.

ODD ONES OUT – demo

Recent internet waffle has maintained that the predilection of Oxford’s reviewers for leftfield music is killing the local scene. Grade A nonsense, of course, but interestingly here’s a band that are about as far from the experimental as they can get, and yet we don’t think they’re bad at all. Yes, despite the name, Odd Ones Out play some of the most unchallenging melodic rock in town, but they play it so jauntily it’s pretty hard to bear any ill will towards them. Aside from some annoying Aaahs lifted from “La Bamba”, ”Rollin’ On” pretty much does what it’s name suggests, chugging by at a friendly lope and making some perfectly pleasant noises whilst about it. It would take a hard heart not to find a little something to like here. “Taking In The Sunshine” is better still, a Scouse rock ballad that could easily have sprung from a lost La’s session. “Floating away on a sunbeam” may not be the most startlingly original imagery we’ve heard from a band, but the music makes a fair representation of the ride, and it’s a pretty pleasant place to be.

Admittedly, “Serge Fontaine” is as sludgy and dull as a newsprint marshmallow, and “Mr.Critic” is a fairly anonymous blues shuffle (plus the title puts us in mind of the abomination that is “Mr Writer” by Stereophonics, though we can’t really hold that against it), but we’re happy to make time for Odd Ones Out. Aside from the odd overly accented rock drawl in the vocals, nothing on this demo sounds in the least forced, and that’s the band’s real strength: there are surprisingly few acts who can just plug in and sound as charmingly natural as this. “Mr. Critic, I’ve heard just about enough of you,” they sing at the end of the demo. Kind of begs the question why they sent the demo to us in the first place, but we don’t care – think what they may about us, we’ll be happy to see what Odd Ones Out do next.