Hiss And Hearse

I know, I know, it's been ages since I posted anything. And you won't get much out of mwe now, either, I'm afraid. I have to unpack my bags from the obligatory family visit, and then go and watch the Only Connect final. I wonder if the other 7 regular viewers will be tuning in...


WHITE NOISE SOUND/ THE BRAINDEAD COLLECTIVE – Pindrop, Bully, 12/12/10

By all that’s rational and reasonable, The Braindead Collective should an embarrassment. Imagine it, Seb Reynolds, ex-Sexy Breakfast and Evenings keyboard player, being smug enough to convene a loose improvised collective based around whichever of his old scenester chums is around on a given night. Imagine the self-serving tiresomeness, imagine the sickening in-joke winks. But, imagine is all we’re able to do if we want this band to be bad, because in actuality they’re excellent, not only a surprisingly well-controlled unit, but also one that can balance awkward noise with alluring melody better than many bands that have practised twice a week since the fourth form. They start with an eerie, reverby pulse of a piece that sounds like “Astronomy Domine” left out in the rain for six months, and develop a balance between Chris Beard’s chiming, ingenuous vocals and some oscillating keys. Over all this Seb spills reverby sax trills and Jimmy Evil throws in some ornery guitar figures that were left over from Suitable Case For Treatment. The reading from William Burroughs might be somewhat sophomoric, but in other ways the band is highly original, at one point sounding like exotic sonic mould growing on a forgotten Chris Isaak ballad. Irrational, unreasonable, and frankly wonderful.

White Noise Sound’s drone rock owes a fair amount to Spacemen 3, although the unexpected synth chugs also recall Add N To (X). Although the simple music might sound as though it just fell out of bed into a bigger bed, the material is actually carefully thought out, and it’s rare to find a band with three guitarists that can so effortlessly control the texture of a piece, especially when none of them go within a mile of soloing. The emphasis on song structure makes the band come off a little like Black Rebel Spaceship Club, and this is what lets them down a little. Nothing wrong with any of the vocals, but tracks stop because the song has finished , when it sounds like the music is just warming up. The final two pieces are comfortably the best, a pair of longer instrumentals that use the humming guitars as a launchpad for hypnotic repetition, rather than a peg on which to hang three verses. It’s not often you see a band, and wish they’d done half as many tracks in twice as much time, but if this is space rock, it helps to give it some space.

'S'All Bellow

I just had to choose my favourite local records of 2010. I hate doing that every year. Firstly, because I hardly have the time and cash to listen to every local release so I'm sure there are some great records I could vote for (for example I suspect the new Bellowhead and the Colours CD are both brilloiant, but I haven't bought them), but I have to leave them out; and secondly because it's not the end of bloody 2010 yet.

And speaking of Bellowhead, here you go. Question: are they an Oxford band or not? The debate rages on...


BELLOWHEAD – Oxford Folk Festival, Regal, 18/11/10

It’s clear and light with a surprising fruity afterbite and – what’s that? We’re not supposed to review the beer? OK, but it’s damned unusual for a touring band to bring their bespoke ale along, especially in the gutted grandeur of The Regal, a gorgeous art deco hangar held together by a lick of emulsion and a few coats of Carling and party foam. Whilst we’re not naive enough to believe Bellowhead themselves nurtured the brew, any more than Christina Aguilera slaved long nights in a lab perfecting her perfume, in some ways a thousand pints of real ale on trestle stands is the perfect symbol of Bellowhead: it clearly communes with craft and tradition, but also says unequivocably, “we are here to party”.

And party we do. It’s unfair to judge any musicians by their fans – we’d have to throw out those Wagner CDs if so – but the Bellowhead massive are so infectious, swaying like a vast choppy sea to Jacque Brel’s “Amsterdam”, and leaping like randy crickets to “New York Girls” (not bad when the room’s average age is double that of many events), until it’s physically impossible to leave having had a bad time. But then again, the music would do that if the gig were in an empty undertakers.

Spiers and Boden’s folk cabaret juggernaut has been rumbling for six years now, but we’ve only just realised the genius twist that makes them unbeatable. Yes, the vocals are seedily dramatic, yes the rhythms are thumping and carnivalistic, but it’s the four brass players who add the secret spice, pitched somewhere between Oktoberfest oompah, jazz abandon and Stax horn stabs: they turn folk standard “A-Begging I Will Go” into a taut blaxploitation theme, a stakeout outside Cecil Sharp House. At moments like this, Bellowhead remind us oddly of Blood, Sweat & Tears (owners of the greatest funk tuba solo ever recorded), being as they are a huddle of kickass musicians who don’t let their chops obscure their sense of fun, but who don’t let the craic prohibit intricate arrangements and sensitive playing. It’s a week where Oxford’s self-styled Blessing Force movement dandles the London media like a Machiavellian puppeteer; best of luck to them, but how many of the thousands of people reading encomiums of bands barely out of the bedroom stage know that one of the best acts to come from Oxford this millennium is currently touring the nation? If they gave Bellowhead a chance, they’d never look back: trad, bad, and euphoric to know.

The Slip Case

I'm going to Klub Kak tonight and Audioscope tomorrow, and I saw local heroes Stornoway and old chums Foxes! last night. Some other people shall be watching explosions in the drizzle, but I think I've got the better deal.


BELOW THE FALL – COMMISSIONER (Witch Hunter Records)

Tinkering with Google in an attempt to find out who Below The Fall are, and how they’ve got a professional CD single with a really lovely inksplodge raven illustration when we’re sure they’ve never played a gig inside the county boundaries, we stumble across their record label’s website. There we discover that this record is one of five releases, two of which are by acts with the brilliant/atrocious (toss a coin if, like us, you’re not sure) names Trippy Wicked & The Cosmic Children Of The Knight and Bumsnogger; the other two releases are both by Year Of The Flood, a sludge metal act “based on the books of Margaret Atwood”, one of whom used to be in a band called – wait for it - Jesus Of Spazzareth.

Call us jaded, and enticed by the merest novelty, frippery or bagatelle, but all of these records sound as though they’re more interesting than the one we’ve ended up with. However, Below The Fall are clearly a decent act, especially considering they’d never played a gig together at the time of recording this pair of tunes, who have created a beautifully recorded and solidly played rock record with a strong melodic sense, and the tiniest hint of a goth billow to proceedings to keep the music atmospheric and on the right side of tedious emo bluster. Rhythmically it’s pretty spotless, if also somewhat earthbound, and Alex Breadmore’s drums exhibit precision without ever quite capturing the head-nodding power of great heavy rock. If the A side is an arching effort that loosely recalls locals Days Of Grace, the accompanying track “Just Run Away” is probably the better of the two, Dan Hunter’s airy voice surfing some crashing guitar on a preposterously catchy melody. He manages a convincing delivery, despite the fact that an odd Thames Valley Scandiwegian accent means he pronounces “change” as “chiynge”, and “memories” as (hyuck hyuck) “mammaries”.

If you like your rock music approachable, well structured and sounding a lot like it came from about 2001, then this could well be the band for you. This record is a great effort but, if there’s a choice between listening to an impeccably made piece of High Street rock, and just sitting back and imagining what Bumsnogger might sound like, then I’m afraid we’d choose the Eject button every time.

Gamelan Ding Dong

I have a brutal headache, so I'm not going to write anything, just paste the review and have a little rest.

PLAID & THE SOUTH BANK GAMELAN – OCM, Oxford Playhouse, 1/10/10

Promotion can really matter. We recall a Swiss Concrete gig starring ultra-twee poppets You And Me, with backing vocals from actor Ewen Macintosh. Had the promoters swapped their tasteful A4 posters for a banner across Cowley Road reading “See Keith off The Office: Fiver!” a sparse turnout could have become a sell-out crowd. With that in mind, this event advertised as Plaid with the South Bank Gamelan may have enticed the mid-30s Artificial Intelligentsia who grew up on Warp, but if anything the billing should have been reversed. The gamelan made by far the bigger impression, not only in the quality of their playing, but with the arresting sight of their exquisitely turned Javanese metalophones, xylophones and assorted percussive devices.

The physical presence of the gamelan sound is incredible, whether it’s playing with piercing volume, or with a limpid, elegant stateliness. A fascinating contrast between complexity and simplicity arises when repeated iterations of brief melodies are made on many instruments simultaneously – not only is the sound miasmic and mysterious (one piece is like the bleached bones of a 60s spy theme deep underwater), but the sight of five sets of ornate mallets being dropped in unison looks like eerie alien choreography. Plaid’s dinky electro doesn’t really mix. The duo has spent many years taking the 808 boom out of Detroit techno, and replacing it with a the twinkle and patter of a perpetual motion toybox – Rest Proof Clockwork, as their third LP would have it – so their sound hovers oddly above the surface of the gamelan’s resonant overtones. Plus, for the most part, despite the programme’s bombastic trumpeting about new vistas, the gamelan and Plaid alternate their playing. Joint composition with gamelan master Rahayu Supanggah is more a patchwork of ideas than a collaborative creation, more a musical Exquisite Corpse than a fresh stylistic alloy.

All very pleasant indeed, in short, but not a touch on the inscrutable architecture of the centuries old music that opened the evening. However, two moments showed that this young collaboration could still blossom into something wonderful. A subtle arrangement of Aphex Twin’s “Actium” revealed not only how dynasties and continents could be brought together, but also Richard James’ knack with a killer melody, no matter how fragmentary. The encore was apparently played for the first time the preceding night, and yet it was the highlight of the concert, a melding of an old Plaid track with a traditional Javanese song. The synthesised clicks and the warm percussion tones truly meld together for the first time, and suddenly we saw performers working on the same wavelength as well as the same stage, musicians who shared an exciting vision and not just a publicist.

Cowley The Beast

A review of a pretty bad day out. Mind you, they're all bad days out now aren't they?


OX4, various venues, 9/10/10


Throughout the afternoon, passersby are enticed up to the doorway of Cafe Tarifa by the music the Oxford Folk Festival has booked, only to turn away after discovering the £5 entry fee, yet the vast majority of those who have spent twenty quid on an OX4 wristband don’t venture out to see anything until the sun has set. Somewhere in this paradox is the promoter’s eternal frustration, and the problem couched at the heart of OX4. You can go on all you like about “Oxford’s Creative Quarter” and musical diversity, but whilst this festival may superficially resemble The Punt, OX4 is more like a touring gig writ large: there are a handful of big acts (all from outside the county, if not the country), and the rest of the multifaceted day is like one long local support act that nobody goes to see. We visit the open mike at the new INevents space, to find the host begging for participants – it seems a musical community, like music itself, just can’t be forced.

But good music there is, and it’s OX4’s secret victory that all the best acts we see are homegrown. The Folk Festival stage is strong, with highlights from Bellowhead’s John Spiers, and Huffenpuff, a duo of accordion and soprano sax/flute, which blithely skips through the glade of musical history grabbing fragments of Breton, klezmer and jazz like so many falling blossoms. Hretha build intricate yet reserved instrumentals that are full of delicate mystery, and construct their arrangements with clockwork precision when most post-rockers rely on sketchy dynamics. Despite taking far longer to set up than one man with a keyboard has any right, Chad Valley make a quietly euphoric music that isn’t far from late 80s Scritti Politti or a sun-bleached Beloved, and once you’ve forgiven the fact that the vocal sounds like Tony Hadley with hiccoughs the set is strong.

Some days it feels as though every band in the world can be defined with reference to The Beach Boys. In that sense Fixers fall somewhere between the approaches of Animal Collective and The High Llamas, but more importantly they play the set of the day. The smooth, AM sound beneath the soaring falsetto serenades is as much Dennis Wilson as it is Brian, and intrigues those of us who feel that Surf’s Up is at least as good as Pet Sounds. The pastel-tinted songs are also dusted with mid-80s synth tones and Phil Spector drum patterns, yet manage to retain a cohesive and individual air.

Fixers are proof that music can be retro and still feel fresh, but the lesson has been lost on most of the larger acts. Everything Everything offer a stilted ersatz funk that could make Arthur Russell spin in his tragically early grave, and Glitches are the same but worse, a Wanky Goes To Hollywood melange of syn drums, stupid hair and ineffectual yelping. Jesus, we love the 80s and these two acts are making us sound like we write for Proper Music Pub Rock Weekly by their sheer lack of vision. Dog Is Dead are a tight band with some decent tunes, if you can battle past the fact they sound like Level 42, and Willy Mason is impressive in holding a large audience with just an acoustic and some slow paeans, but does remind us queasily of an unhoned Springsteen. More reference grabbing from Abe Vigoda, who make a passable swipe at Talking Heads artfunk and Devo japery without having the character to equal either.

The hipster homogeneity of the name acts, with influences stretching from Now 5 to Now 8, takes the edge off the event, but as with all art, the gems are there for the dedicated. Our final act is the excellent Mr Shaodow, for whom half the room sadly leaves within minutes, but who energises the remainder with pure expertise, originality and intelligence. As someone who has lived in London, China and Oxford, he could tell you that good musicians are united by hard graft and talent, not their postcode.

The Song Remains The Sam

Not been much going on here, has there? Well, that should all be changing, as I wrote two (2) reviews for MIO on Sunday, the first of which is below, and there are no fewer than two (2) reviews in this month's Nightshift too, so expect plenty more coruscating opinion to come.

SAMUEL ZASADA – NIESEN EP

Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly what it is that makes an artist. Michael McIntyre, for example. Come on, his material’s not that terrible. It’s hardly comedy gold, but if other stand ups were delivering it you might give a half smile or a light chuckle, before wandering off to make a cup of tea. But something about McIntyre’s repulsive comedy style makes you want to destroy your telly. In fact, he’s so mind-meltingly infuriating, you want to throw out your flat screen and climb up to the attic to find your old cathode ray beast, just so you can have the pleasure of sticking your foot through the screen and watching as the exploding sparks shower your living room; snapping a McIntyre DVD just isn’t satisfying enough, so you have to slog back up to the attic to lug down the old VCR, record all his Comedy Roadshow routines onto VHS, solely so you can enjoy the thrill of ripping every inch of tape from the cassette and tossing it into the air whilst naked and daubed with woad.

And Samuel Zasada are the same in reverse. It’s easy to point out impressive elements of this record – the slinky bass, the warm chocolatey voice, the winning melodies – but it’s hard to work out why it’s quite so wonderful, and why it’s so enormously likely to end up on Oxford best of year lists when December rolls around. Like so much great pop music, this EP is far more than the sum of its parts, meaning that it cuts right to the heart without leaving the listener dissecting the construction as they might with classical, prog or jazz.

Despite a jarring, wistful note in the arpeggiating guitar figure in “Omit”, this EP is a little less dark than previous Zasada offerings, and the incisive rhythmic accordion stabs give the track a buoyancy that would not have been feasible in the dense introspection of Samuel Zasada, 2009 vintage. Similarly, the jaunty banjo on “Of Late” adds a wry smile to the gothic folk misery we’re used to.

Perhaps the real development on this record is in the vocals. David Ashbourne has always boasted a rich, resonant voice, but on previous recordings we’ve always been concerned that he was foregrounding his vocal ability at the expense of the song. Take a listen to “Losts & Founds”, our favourite on this EP, and you’ll hear how far he’s come. There’s passion here, but whereas once we’d suspect that he would have groaned and sweated his way through proceedings like an over-egged 80s rocker, now he uses his impressive pipes to further the song: listen to the delivery of the line “You crazy people”, it has just the mixture of despair and incredulous amusement that the words demand. The fact that the tune is a funky little acoustic strut built on a sassy hi-hat rhythm, like an open mic twist on blaxploitation soundtracks, doesn’t do any harm either.

We could go on, but as we said the songs here work best on their own terms, and it doesn’t add much to pick them apart looking for secrets, or to cast our net around looking for musical analogues. This is an immersive collection of quality melodies that should entice even the weariest acoustic critic: hell, it’s making us smile, and we have minor burns, a broken toe and several feet of knotted video tape cutting off our circulation.

I Don't Recall Writing This, But I Mastodon!

I'm just plotting a pub quiz I intend to write soon. Last time I did it the music round got booed, because I expected people to name not only the act who had a dance hit from the 80s or 90s, but also who they were "featuring" in the offical act name. I called it Late Twentieth Century Chart Dance Crediting Minutiae, and I thought it was a great round, but hardly anyone got any of them. And I never even used any of the three Jellybean tracks I had up my sleeve, just to make it easy!

Anyway, I've thought of something even more horrible, so I shall report back if it ever transpires.


MAMMOTH & THE DRUM – Demo

Mammoth & The Drum’s Myspace comments on their experiences in the studio recording this album, “we've felt like big kids in a sweet shop...'what about if we tried this?'”. Well, what did the tracks sound like before these additions? This record may be a lot of things, but a blueprint for sonic experimentation it is not: somehow we can’t imagine Brians Wilson and Eno sitting up all night with their furrowed brows resting on the mixing desk before one of them leaps up with dawn inspiration, shrieking “Eureka! Synthesised strings!” To be honest, before getting all wild-eyed and putting fake vinyl crackle on the intro to “Johnny Lightening [sic] and his Blue Ray Gun”, should Mammoth & The Drum perhaps have gone back to make the drums less clunkily elementary? Should they have checked that the vocals didn’t sound like Harry Enfield’s DJ Dave “Nicey” Nice? Not ‘alf!

The thing is, M&TD are not a bad band at all, but in recording a full length CD they may have bitten off more than they can chew, when a four-tracker and a bit of gigging experience might have been the best step. We hate to penalise musicians for stretching themselves, we despise artists playing safe, but in challenging themselves to create a big, varied LP, M&TD have ended up challenging the listener to sit through it all without throwing the stereo into a bloody tarpit or the middle of a glacier, with the other mammoths. Whole tracks could happily have been excised from this recording: “Back to Zero” is nasal, clodhopping, constipated folk rock that makes the ears itch for something better, and “It’s Now or Never” is a charmless trudge through a blasted pub blues wasteland: ironically, with its cheeky jibes at rockers who think they’re cool and Russell Brand’s coiffure, there’s an ironic distance between target and effect that can be filed with Chad Kroeger’s “Rock Star”. “Dawning of the New Dark Age” also has stupid lyrics, which goes off like a 50s editorial by likening the Far East to a sleeping giant, before claiming it will “consume everything in its wake”...surely “in its path”, not “its wake”, right? Or is it just those snoozy Orientals being damned inscrutable again?

This is all a pity, as there’s evidence that M&TD are a decent proposition. “Who says you shouldn’t surf in Jimmy Choo shoes?” is a perky slice of pub rock (in its best sense of music to experience with a full pint and a few mates), with a chorus lifted wholesale form The Rolling Stones, which is fine because they filched most of their early tunes anyway. “No Ordinary Day” has a nicely phased 60s guitar and lyrics about naughty drugs that nods politely to Oxford’s hippy roadshow Redox, whilst “Extracts from my Brain - Part 3 (Do Replicants cry?)” is the pick of the bunch, introspective like Wish You Were Here era Pink Floyd, with an interesting arrangement and some more restrained and affecting vocals. The duo seem to treat music as a bit of fun, and we salute that, as rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Oxford, can sometimes lose sight of the value of a good night out, but sad to say listening to the whole of the LP isn’t much fun. In fact, it’s a bit of a chore. Most of the music sort of happens unconvincingly, and it feels as though somebody is desperately trying to divert your attention. Hang on, whilst we’re typing this, is somebody downstairs nicking the telly?

Like a panda shuffling listlessly round its cage in Colchester Zoo, we feel that judging M&TD on the back of a full length recording isn’t the same as seeing them in their natural habitat: get them on in some cheery boozer on a Friday night, or stick them in the middle of next year’s Hanneyfest lineup, and we can imagine having a grand old time, but for now we’ll pass. The band may have felt like kids in a sweet shop recording this CD, but we feel like diabetics in a sweet shop listening to it: there’s lots and lots here, but it’s not for us.

Chat Lines

Today's entry is dedicated to Oxford music photographer Johnny Moto. Not that he's dead. Or, I guess he might be, he doesn't check in with me every hour, so how would I know? God, I hope he's OK. No, hang on, let's assume he is.

Anyway, Mr Moto gave me a pen when I was writing my first review of this year and the venue was so damned cold the ink froze solid in my ballpoint. I never gave it back. Anyway, whilst writing this review I dropped said pen and said Johnny trod on it. He was so apologetic he bought me two new pens! So, now I'm in his debt to the tune of three pens (and each pen rather niftily had four differently coloured nibs, so perhaps it's more like twelve pens - although they were short pens, so let's call it six on aggregate). Still, he's dead now, so I suppose I'm off the hook...


CATS IN PARIS/ UTE/ COLOUREDS, Pindrop, Cellar, 16/9/10

The surprising thing about electro duo Coloureds – aside from the hand-crafted face masks that make them look like Ray Harryhausen’s Michael Myers maquettes – is how much contemporary club music seeps through their distorted, jittery IDM. Just as Funkstorung a decade ago took hip hop rhythms and twisted them into Wire pleasing glitchfests, so Coloureds seem to have taken garage and funky as their base metals, to be experimented upon ruthlessly. The music is all about texture, and there isn’t much in the way of theme or melody (although the odd arpeggio recalls Orbital, and a scuzzy three note organ breakdown sounds as though Philip Glass tried to create one of his scores on an Etch-a-sketch), but the rhythmic intensities, the subtle twists and the theatrical performance make this set musically captivating as well as pummellingly excoriating.

We’ve vacillated in our opinion of local trio Ute, and tonight we find ourselves doing so mid-set. The first half is all keening vocal lines and twitchy semi-acoustic rock, and it’s fine, but apart from the excellently regimental drumming, doesn’t truly excite us: at its best it’s Radiohead enveloping Robert Wyatt, but at its worst it sounds like a generic copy of any lightly groovy artrockers (and does the refrain “Psycho killer” suggest anyone, hmmm?). But then, suddenly they win us over again, with loud and well thought out rock songs, one boasting a bass that impersonates a truck burping, and one which is a manic grunge thrash, like a skiffle Mudhoney. Most importantly, the vocals switch from annoying self-conscious wheedle, to an effective growl that drops into unexpected valleys of delicate harmonising. If this gig were a football match, you’d assume the half time talk had been ruthlessly galvanising.

Manchester’s Cats In Paris also rise in our estimations, but this is probably because it took us two songs to calibrate ourselves. What does one make of their maximalist maelstroms, where jazz funk bass meets keyboards from a budget ELP and vocals from a literary EMF? But, once the fluent violin came in, the power of the rhythm section became apparent, and the joyful refrain “This is modern British cooking” had invaded our mind, we decided their Zappa child grab bag of pop oddity was something to be cherished, and in retrospect the fact that opener “Chopchopchopchopchop” sounded like a mixture between “O Superman”, the theme from Let’s Pretend and Flaming Lips made perfect sense. They didn’t fulfil the promoter’s description of their sound as “electro spazz swing”. They surpassed it.

Brook Shields Required?

Here's the game: 1) choose a composer 2) imagine what their most incongruously named offspring might be, eg Wayne Tchaikovsky. Playing this led me to the realisation that "Terence Trent Wagner" is the funniest group of five syllables I've ever heard.

Warning: preposterous PJ Harvey/prefix pun contained below.


SPRING OFFENSIVE – THE FIRST OF MANY DREAMS ABOUT MONSTERS

Unlike some drunken old colonels, we don’t lose any sleep over the way the word “gay” has changed its meaning. Unlike one of our old English teachers, we aren’t upset by current usage of the word “nice”. She used to get riled because the word was supposed to mean fastidious. Yeah, in the seventeenth century, when lest we forget, “healthcare” meant “being bled by your hairdresser”. In English, words mean pretty much whatever we want them to mean; unlike in France, the British government does not officially control the language (Jesus, can you imagine if it did? Three year waiting lists for the subjunctive, datasticks full of pronouns left in bars, creeping privatisation of the irregular verbs).

And yet, we still get miffed at the way “pretentious” is used. To us, it will always imply someone simply making a pretence. Therefore, in rock terms, it would be pretentious to hide your Eton accent with ersatz glottal stops whilst preaching revolutionary punk politics, and it would be pretentious to dress up in flimsy scraps of leather and prance round the stage looking like you want to fellate any passing roadie in a paddling pool of Jim Beam, when you actually prefer an early night with a mug of Horlicks, but it would not be pretentious to make a 14 minute single based on Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stage Grief Cycle.

It might be a bit bloody silly, but it wouldn’t be pretentious.

Yet, this is precisely what Spring Offensive have done, with their free download track “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters”, and whilst it might be easy to dismiss behaviour like this as sophomoric, or needlessly ostentatious, but we feel that we can defend them. First up, there’s nothing wrong with shooting high, because you just might make it – we’re surely glad that Brian Wilson tried to make “teenage symphonies to God” and not “a couple of catchy tunes to net me some pussy” – and secondly, the conceptual elements of this song may have been useful for the band in its composition, but really we’d defy anyone in the world to work it out in a blind test. In fact, the handwritten notes that are supplied with the track conclude “we sing about the act of writing about grief”, which shows how far they are from producing Grief! The Kubler-Ross Story On Ice, although we do feel the distancing is a little meaningless, as if their intent was to present us with a concept and then immediately hide it behind layers of obfuscation (“Don’t you wish you’d never, never meta-“).

Add to this the fact that the lyrics are, as ever, wonderfully vague and allusive, having more in common with the imagistic snapshots of William Carlos Williams than your average pop song. “Beware the intruder/ I have scissors in my hand [...] He says he’s an artist” doesn’t give us enough data to construct any real picture, but does make a truly evocative yet unspecified image with a powerful economy of words...which is perhaps what all good pop songs do, after all. And it’s especially effective when delivered with a mixture of reticence and declamation by Lucas Whitworth, whose voice is sounding better than ever on this recording. There are other fantastic elements to this single, especially the guitars’ undulating shimmer in the quieter sections, the wonderful percussive loop at the start that sounds like an old typewriter being pecked at by a fledgling reporter, and the fact that the mammoth song hangs together without ever feeling stretched.

But this impressive release isn’t perfect. The seems a little too much in awe of local heroes Youth Movies in the crescendos, and we can’t help feeling that the rubbery Foals guitar lines and massed choruses are the least exciting part of Spring Offensive, even when they do them incredibly well. So, we urge everyone to download the record, it’s incredibly impressive, and hugely enjoyable, and yes, it’s a bit bloody silly, but the weird part is that Spring Offensive have released what might look like a magnum opus, a career summation, but have in fact revealed how swiftly they are outgrowing the old sound. There’s lots to get excited about here away from the obvious moments, and it could be the first glimpse of enticing new paths and alleys for the band to follow. The first of many, doubtless.

Comboverdose

I was going to write you something fascinating, and then settle down to submit another CD review to MIO, but I feel like cack, so I may just take a Night Nurse and go to bed with the Prom. You'll survive.


JUNKIE BRUSH – WHAT YOU SEE, WHAT YOU HEAR (Rivet Gun)

Why does nobody talk about the huge volte face in the history of punk?

How come no one comments on the fact that punks seem to spend most of their time in the company of hippies nowadays? We know that not all punks bought into the swastika-badged, vomit-flecked attempt to bring down civilisation by slightly scaring old ladies, but surely all original punks saw their movement as a tabula rasa for music and culture: no more hippies, no more well-heeled prog indulgences. And yet, sometime around 1985, when the rest of the punks had given themselves up to electronics, black eyeliner or proper jobs, the hardline of believers found themselves in the company of their old enemies, fraternising with hippies, playing free festivals, supporting left wing causes. Of course, by the time the 90s rolled round, with the advent of crusty folk rock and Megadog trance, punks and hippies had lived together for a few years, and already it was impossible to say which was which.

And so it is with Junkie Brush. Despite sounding a lot like the clinical autopsy hardcore of Black Flag at times, you’re more likely to find them playing for genial dopeheads Klub Kakofanney than anyone else, and you’ve a greater chance of finding them on a bill with acoustic strummers and Gong-a-likes at some oddball West Oxfordshire all-dayer than playing to moshing revolutionary youths in some Friday night sweatbox. None of which detracts one iota form the high quality of this new EP, which balances brutality with beery japing perfectly, and may well be the best set of tracks Junkie Brush has put on record, but it is intriguing nonetheless.

There is a picture of a protester winding up to hurl a projectile at a wall of riot police on the cover of the record, but in reality, the politics have no more depth than the inlay card. The title “Problem-Reaction-Solution” seems to hint at revolutionary activity, but doesn’t go so far as to specify anything in particular that’s good or bad about society, and elsewhere phrases like “Don’t you want to destroy the other?” and “You are the enemy” are vague enough to be essentially meaningless. Also, throwing such dumb-ass yelpalongs like “Fucked In The Mind” and “Monkey Boy” onto the EP could be said to detract from any cogent political message that might be lurking somewhere.

The music, on the other hand, is simple, direct and uncontentiously excellent. Marxist - and, like Big Tim from Junkie Brush, Zappa fanatic - critic Ben Watson once postulated that all great rock bands were essentially drum circles, and that all rock instruments should be counted as percussion. If that’s the case, then in “Problem-Reaction-Solution”, Junkie Brush have gone one better, turning a three piece band into one giant bass drum, bashing steadily away as if haranguing some Phoenicians slaves to row a Roman galley. Nowhere on the record does the musical construction get far beyond the rule of “riff, refrain, and slight dynamics”, and is all the better for it. “Sickening” has a sprightly bounce that caries tiny hints of Rage Against The Machine, “Fucked In The Mind” is scuzzier and more leaden footed, and “Monkey Boy” might be paying homage to local punk daddies Headcount, but whatever slight alterations the band makes to their recipe, they don’t diverge too far from insistent, declamatory, hugely enjoyable chants (although “You Are A Target”’s nods towards The Prodigy’s “Poison” are unexpected).

But none of this musical dissection can actually capture the sense of barely controlled rage that Junkie Brush embody. The vocals have a reedy, Dead Kennedys intensity, which is offset by the roiling sea of guitar noise, and drums that sound like deep-fried cannonballs being dropped onto your ears from an Olympic diving board; Jim, formerly of mildly convincing artrockers City Lights Just Burn seems to have found his spiritual home hitting things in Junkie Brush. Come to think of it, there’s another difficult truth about punk that doesn’t get aired often enough – when it’s done as well as it is here, it still sounds miles better than most of the turgid guff that passes for rock and roll. This EP made us want to smash the nearest radio and jump up and down on every half-arsed Myspace band in existence, which can only possibly be an enormous mark in its favour.

Truck 2010 Sunday Pt 2

One thing we noticed at Truck is how many photographers there are nowadays. Impressed audience members come up to ask what lens a snapper is using, when once they would have been checking amp manufacturers or DJ set lists. Luckily, Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou have framed the pictures for them, by standing in the very centre of the main stage and singing into one microphone, which cleverly gives the impression that we’re all in some poky, cosy folk club. We only really love a couple of their songs, but you simply only see a duo whose voices complement each other like this once in blue moon: he is querulous and melancholy, whilst her voice is lucid and liquid, and when they harmonise it sounds like one astonishing folk organism. Joe Bennett turns up once again to play some rather nifty trumpet, proving their music is even better to share.

Nedry usher in the return of the epic reverb pedal, offering us icy clicks and cuts glitch ambience surrounding girl-lost-in-fog vocal mantras. The songs are something like the forlorn ghosts of Donna Summer tracks in some laptop purgatory, except the one that sounds like a dubstep Stina Nordenstam. Another wonderful Truck discovery a long way from the main action.

Unfortunately, lightning doesn’t strike twice and our next off-piste venture brings us to Summer Camp, who play something like late period OMD, which would be passable, if it weren’t for their horribly plastic wedding singer vocalist, who ruins any small chance their songs have of winning us over. The crass lyrics mostly boil down to “Ooh ooh, nice things are nice”. If you think it would be good if all towns were like Milton Keynes, this is the band for you; if you’re fully functioning adult, steer well clear.

No adults in Egyptian Hip Hop, they’re a band who are very young to have received the plaudits they have, but we shan’t let that affect our judgement. And it turns out they’re...alright. There are plenty of ideas in their songs, and they can chug through a slack riff like Dinosaur Jr before flipping out some cheesy Huey Lewis keyboards and throwing in some hi-life inflected jerky guitars that remind us of – oh, you know – FUCKING EVERYBODY! They sound more like a promising band than a good one, but that’s no crime; also, they’re less than half our age and we think they look bloody ridiculous, so they must be doing something right. Misleading name, however; someone should book them with Non-Stop Tango and try to start a riot.

We’re much more excited by the sounds of young Britain when we visit Unicorn Kid, and his hyper-active Nintendo toybox rave, in a style we christen “Arpeggi8”. “Where Is Your Child” and “Tricky Disco” would have come out a few years before he was born, which intriguingly means that he saw them the same way we saw The White Album. And, let’s be honest, they’re better. His music is also better than most on offer this weekend, and whilst it has its florescent charms, the material is strong because a lot of care has clearly gone into the construction, there are lots of interesting ideas in his Wonky Kong palette. Despite being one of the oldest people watching, we love it as much as the teenagers; although when there’s a stage invasion of day-glo youths, we do feel as though we’ve stumbled into the Byker Grove wrap party. Gigs are rarely this much fun.

We get our final Bennett-spotter points with Common Prayer, as they’re both present and correct, as is a French horn which would be brilliant if it were only audible. This is neo-country Truck mulch to a great extent, but the singer does have a lovely unhurried voice, so we end up in favour, even if we can’t sincerely say, “we’re loving it”.

Watching Blood Red Shoes we remember why we like Little Fish. Their guitar and drums business is all very well, and they have some decent rock tunes, but we can’t really get a grip on any of it. They do, however, have far superior stage banter to Little Juju, whose nervous ramblings can get pretty tiresome. There’s exactly nothing wrong with this set, but after two days of music we want something memorable nearly as much as we want a nice sit down.

We are a smidgen disappointed when we realise nervous_testpilot is going to play a straight trance set with none of the madness of previous Trucks (although we’re sure he sampled the Crystal Maze theme at one point), but then we decide that hearing truly exquisitely crafted music is enough, and begin to appreciate the subtly melancholic melodies hidden amongst the snare rushes and thumping vorsprung durch techno. It may be the end of the weekend, but the crowd are still eager to dance, one of whom has discovered some discarded fragments of the Keyboard Choir’s costumes, which brings The Beathive’s day nicely full circle. The set turns out to be an understated triumph, and Testpilot’s loving ridicule of the dancing crowd is fun to watch.

We finish our festival away from headliners Teenage Fanclub, with The Epstein, stars of many a bygone Truck. They play a beautiful set, the jewel in the crown being a glistening “Leave Your Light On”, and we realise that whilst Truck may have got bigger, louder and – let’s not skim over it – more expensive, it still feels very much like it used to a decade ago. As ever there have been surprises, charming atmospheres and far too much rubbish country, and we relish the fact that Truck can hold on to this frail ability to welcome everyone, yet not blandly smooth itself out to try to please them all. The programme’s editorial might be written as an embarrassing cross between Mr Motivator and Jack Kerouac – “this movement that says no homogenous same-old phoney crap but new real expression” – but there is something in it, and Truck realises that being professional is great, but treating people like profit units isn’t. There’s still a natural, unforced wonder about Truck, and no glib corporate slogan is ever likely to encapsulate that feeling.

Inside Truck

And here's Sunday from Truck. Nothing more to add, I feel wierd today & I'm going to lie down.

Truck, Hill Farm, Steventon, 2010 Sunday

The Holy Orders are almost beyond criticism, because they came all the way from Leeds and they’re playing at 10.30 in the morning in a Barn that has a forceful smell of bovine faeces that even the Bisto kids couldn’t convincingly pretend to like, when they’d probably like to be lolling on the grass like most of the Truckers. Luckily they aren’t half bad, melding Mudhoney’s rock slur with something altogether less acceptable that’s more like Wyld Stallyns. It’s all rough hewn and unrefined, but undoubtedly enjoyable, especially “Paper, Scissors, Stone”, which is a budget At The Drive-In blast.

Some people have complained that there aren’t enough slots for local musicians at Truck, which is odd, because it’s never claimed to be primarily a local festival. It’s like criticising Kind Hearts & Coronets for not having enough car chases. As it is we enjoy stumbling across the odd smattering of Oxfordshire acts, and Sunday continues with a hat trick of strong scenesters. Minor Coles impress with some spicy indie, and are followed by an excellent offering from Phantom Theory, who play a drum and guitar set that hasn’t got an ounce of fat on it, and who marry spotless arrangements with full tilt rocking to cut directly to even the most leaden Sunday morning brains, and who live in a world made entirely of RIFF. Like Truck alumni Winnebago Deal shaved and spruced for a job interview, Phantom Theory have clearly spent long hard hours honing their music, but waste no time in cracking it out onstage. Mosh and go.

But even they are eclipsed in the Beathive where The Keyboard Choir are making music hand built by robots. It’s a simple proposition: a bunch of synths, music that is pitched roughly between Klaus Schulze and Luke Slater, and a fifth column of dancers dressed in woefully poor android costumes. Not only is it musically one of the best things we see all weekend, but Seb Reynolds alternately doing a gangly newborn foal dance and trying to fix broken machinery is officially funnier than anything in the cabaret tent, ever.

After a quick trip to the Butt’s ale stall (great beer, no queues, Truck 7 prices – why go anywhere else?), we drop in on The Horizontal Instrument. There’s a fair amount of electronic music on today, and some people would say that it isn’t proper music. Well this is. And it’s properly awful. What we see is like Motley Crue with all the fun excised and surgically replaced by disco. Yes, that unpleasant. We only lasted two songs, so maybe it got better; maybe the end credits of Eldorado were a psychedelic funk explosion, but you can forgive us for never having found out. Sucked like an Electrolux.

We cock half an ear to Dead Jerichos as we pass, who seem to be today’s Shaodow, retaining local fans and winning over newcomers in equal measure, but the temperature in the Market Stage is about 4000 degrees, so we walk on by to the Beat Hive again. There’s also some “proper music paranoia” about Miaoux Miaoux. There he is plucking a guitar, playing Korg and programming in drum machine beats live. It’s decent electro, but it would be better if we didn’t have to watch each track being painstakingly put together. All very commendable, but it’s a bit like watching a glass blowing demonstration when all you want is a pint.

Sometimes we wonder at the logic of which acts play the main stage, as it’s so much bigger than any of the others, but with a band like Flowers Of Hell there must never have been any question. Their music is vast in scale, torrents of miserablist strings tumbling over humming guitars to form a whirlpool where Mogwai meets Morricone. They even do a Plastic People Of The Universe cover, which has got to be worth points. Every little helps.

At points all of Islet play drums, and yet theirs is not an aggressive sound – it’s more Stomp than Shit & Shine, and the music is built more on a cheeky bounce than a pummelling thud. With slinky basslines and plenty of barely controlled yelping the set comes off like Stump quirking out at Notting Hill Carnival, and is almost obscenely enjoyable. Highlights are a ritualistic dub number, in which the band chants and clatters over chubby Jah Wobble bass, and the almost poppy moments when they become a special needs Foals. Plenty of acts try to marry experimental showboating with a cohesive rock sound, but most fail; this is the real thing.

In the wake of Fuck Buttons there’s a new breed of leftfield musicians who aren’t afraid of offering tribute to simple, hedonistic musical pleasures. Take Masks, who may have the Vivian Girls t-shirt and Explosions In The Sky guitar hazes, but who also aren’t wary of throwing a huge 808 bass drum pulse behind one of their spidery numbers. In truth, the show is slightly hesitant, and the two guitar lineup can’t quite make enough noise to complement the backing tracks: they play a piece that’s supposed to sound like Godspeed, but it’s more like an old walk-on tape for Saxon. Near the end of the set things come together, and suddenly they make a sombre yet insistent post-goth groove that could soundtrack some hip torture dungeon. This isn’t just music, this is S & M music.

Dog Is Dead exist at the other end of the spectrum, completely unashamed about their away day pop with its sunny sax breaks and bleached funk guitars that put them equidistant between Pigbag and Vampire Weekend. We hate to admit it, but we rather like this uptight, grinning mess of Haircut 100 and Steely Dan, and find ourselves singing the line, “this is a zoo, could you not feed the animals?” all afternoon. Pop music: it’s not just there for the nasty things in life.

Truck 2010 Saturday Pt 2

We decide to watch Thomas Truax in the Rapture tent instead of the main stage, as there’s a something wonderfully intimate about his music, behind all the carny Meccano band schtick, and it’s nice to sit close enough to see the manic madness in his craggy eyes. A young lad of about eight leaps up to take a photo of mechanical drum machine Mother Superior with the same excitement most boys would reserve for David Beckham, so we conclude that the nation’s future is safe. The music is wonkily great as ever (clunk click, every trip), but his cover of the Eraserhead theme is like an ice cream van in Hades, which is just about perfect.

The name Man Without Country sounds like a Truck billing rebellion, and they also sound great on paper, but they’re running late and Bellowhead are starting early, so we never find out what they actually sound like. Bellowhead don’t get mentioned often when people compile their top local acts, but they should: find an act that can mix musicianship, melody, arrangement and danceability together anything like as well, we dare you. Everything about their big band folk concoction is amazing, and if our notes are illegible it’s because we were trying to write them whilst dancing like a stevedore on annual leave in a Threshers warehouse. Bellowhead have thrown so many ideas at the wall they’ve had to build another wall, but what’s astounding is how well it all works, and how much fun it manages to be underneath all the musical cleverness. Reassuringly extensive.

After that Lau are a let down, which is harsh because they’re clearly a superbly virtuosic folk act, but we’ve had our folk bones reset in funny shapes by Bellowhead. Next time, maybe.

“This is the future” chant Phantogram, because they’ve got some synths, see. Not really the future, is it, more a refracted present, seeing as they sound like The XX mixed with Crystal Castles. Bloody good, though, as only glacial synth pop drenched in reverb (splash it all over) can be. Ah, the reverb, surely it’s the sound of 2010. If you want to taste the zeitgeist buy an Ariel Pink album. Or sit at the bottom of an empty culvert with a broken radio playing Heart FM, there’s not much in it.

Mew sound alright, but their gate reverb stadium drum sound reminds us of Simple Minds so we sneak off to see Ms Dynamite. Us and the rest of Oxfordshire, as we don’t get in, but it does let us watch the headliner we should have been watching all along, The Original Rabbit’s Foot Spasm Band. Most trad jazz and blues comes to us pickled and dried with all the life leached out of it by some dead-eyed sense of heritage; The Rabbit’s Feet let the music live, but this time it’s the band that are pickled. Seriously, half of them seem to be drunk. And the other half paralytic. But they can still play fast, loud, funny and with as much passion as anyone on the bill. They’re grrrreat.

Truck Or Treat

Hello.

It's been a while, sorry about that. I'm as busy as can be over here. I shall get this blog back on track hopefully in the enar future. Anway, here's the 1st part of my Truck review, elements of which appear in the current Nightshift.


TRUCK, Hill Farm, Steventon, 24-5/7/10

SATURDAY
In recent years Truck has been all over the national press, popping up in The Independent Magazine or The Guardian’s guide to festivals, but whilst this may be deserved none of these culture jamborees seem to capture what we think is good about Truck. Forget your indie cred and girls in fifty quid wellies, we adore the vicar frying donuts, the Round Tablers serving reasonably priced tea, the slightly makeshift feel of most of the stages, and – in short – the fact that it doesn’t look like something that’s ever likely to excite the staff at The Guardian. The other great thing about Truck, which is perhaps true of all good festivals, is that it always surprises you with great unknown acts. Openers Meursault aren’t a bad little group to stumble upon, volleying melodic laptop rock into the balmy afternoon. Their inherent drama reminds us of Witches, and our only criticism is that they come across as desperately earnest, as if they were pleading before a medieval ducking stool.

Something Beginning With L are a new name to us as well, and if their woozy cover of Whitney Houton’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” marks them out as hypnagogic trendies, the majority of the set is just good old guitar and keyboard rock music, finished off with a gorgeous plangent voice. At times they remind us of Texas – even down to the cowboy hat – but not in a way that is infuriating. “Lovely” begins with L.

It’s the same every year, we want to like the cabaret tent but never find anything good. We’re desperate to enjoy Jim Davies, who seems like he’d be a great man to share a few pints with, and who has a natural humour about him, but who must have left his punchlines behind in the rush to get packed. Sadly his tales of working as an advertising copywriter are good, but don’t really connect; it does, however, give us an excuse to pepper this review with idiotic promotional slogans.

In a swirl of NASA suits, bubble machines, theremin and stylophone Spaceships Are Cool prepare for takeoff. Their wonderfully tuneful music is akin to something on the Duophonic label minus the furrowed brows, and at least three tracks sound like White Town’s bedroom wonder “Your Woman” covered by a cheery Glaswegian indie band. They’re one of the best acts of the weekend, but if they have a Smile-Off with members of Alphabet Backwards stand well back, you might get caught in some hideous chirpiness crossfire. Put the freshness back.

They also give out tiny origami space shuttles to the crowd, which we find scattered around throughout the day; is subliminal craft merch a new sales concept? God knows Atlantic Pacific could do with some of that subtlety, they play a very dull yet not upsetting set, which is only interesting because it provides the first glimpse of a Bennett brother onstage. What do we win?

We were fervently hoping Thomas Tantrum in The Barn would be Thomas Truax going ape because all his machines had gone wrong, but sadly not. Nothing else about them is a let down, though. Get past the ultra-contemporary pared guitar sounds, and you find pop gold something like The Cardigans, or perhaps even The Cowboy Junkies, if they were cooked in a cutely effervescent pixie pie. It’s musically spotless and hugely enjoyable, at times reminding us of pretty 90s popstrels Tsunami (not the later Oxford band of the same name). Swiss Concrete don’t make shit smelling barns, but if they did...

The programme tells us “Luke Smith hasn’t missed a Truck Festival since he first played ten (??? citation needed) years ago”. How sweet, he’s so much a part of the scenery, they don’t even bother proof reading his write up. And as such criticising him would be like visiting Wiltshire and giving Stonehenge a bad review, but luckily we adore him anyway. We could ramble on about his intelligent lyrics and adept piano, the excellent growling John Harle tone of the soprano sax or the warm comic humanity of his delivery, but all you really need to know is that throughout the set the sound engineers were grinning like loons, and they’re a notoriously surly bunch. Smith is somewhere between Betjeman and Stillgoe, and is an English eccentric to be valued...and he does make exceedingly good tunes.

Active Child plays some lovely harp, but spoils it by covering the music with horrible Eurhythmics drum programming. The he stops playing the harp. Then we leave.

Boat To Row are likened in the programme to Stornoway and Bert Jansch, which is phenomenally generous and puts us off their folky pop at first, but eventually we warm to them, and we mentally file them alongside Sonny Liston as pleasing acoustic troubadours. Still, nothing here to get the pulse racing, so we let our fingers do the walking and pick something at random from the programme.

Fucking fingers. We’re back at the Cabaret tent, where two men (who may be Bishop & Douche, but we’re not certain) are playing the introductions to cheesy records to inexplicable applause. God, how we hate the Nathan Barley world we live in, sometimes, that equates recognising something with understanding it, and thinks quoting something is the same as criticising it. This is desperately unfunny and makes Boat To Row seem like a halcyon age, so we leave ASAP. Because we’re worth it.

Luckily it means we catch some of Mr Shaodow’s set from the door of a packed Beathive. Only a few years ago he was fumbling his way through a Punt set whereas now he (and battle brother LeeN, amongst others) has the crowd by the scruff of the neck, and is sending it, frankly, loopy. The only down point is the overlong freestyle section, where Shaodow starts asking for suggestions from the audience like a hip hop Josie Lawrence. The improv raps are good, but why try to impress on the fly when you’ve already written such astounding rhymes?

We think that Y was on our bus, trying to impress some 15 years olds and telling a dizzy girl she was psychic; on Sunday he’s refusing to leave the tiny Rapture Records stage whilst he slurs non-sequiturs and plays fudged arpeggios on a weeny keyboard, like a horrific cross between Suicide and John Shuttleworth. Somewhere in the middle of this embarrassment, though, he put a tiger in his tank and churned out a steaming wall of psych rock noise, along with an ace jamming band (double Bennett score!). Imagine all the great sounds that influenced Spacemen 3, and then put them together replacing the narcotic mope with a Watney’s Party 7 barrel of fun, and you get a set that might not be complex, but is exactly what is needed as the afternoon tails away. Some toddlers are also going nuts for it, alternately dancing crazy and running their fingers through the pebbles in the Village Pub tent like people on their first acid trip. “Dude, my hands are so big. For a three year old”.

Mage To Make Your Mouth Water

It's still all a bit frantic over here, but I've found time to sling up this review for Music In Oxford (hereinafter to be known as MIO). It's an interesting example of how to pitch reviews for a site like this. I could have reviewed this in the style of The Wire, but it seemed to me that whilst some of the readers would know a lot more than me about drone based improv, lots of others would have no experience whatsoever, so something more open-ended seemed to be required. It's sort of interesting to have a readership and peer group that's defined, not by social or musical similarities, but by simple geography. So, was I too chummy, or too obtuse here, for the random reader? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

And why not talk to each other in the comments, as it seems as though my not posting anything does very little to affect the number of views the site has - in fact, if anything the last fortnight has seen more visitors than usual. As curious as Alice Lidell with a curious orange that kills cats.


VILESWARM – THE SHAMAN’S LAST WALTZ (Eyeless)

They call it “doom drone”.

Leftfield musicians – or at the very least their admirers – are madmen for creating genres. We’re all familiar with electronica’s offshoots spliced into ever narrower branches, with sub-genres breeding deformed offspring like so many rampant Chernobyl rabbits, but keeping tabs on the myriad diffractions of noise, improve, alt rock and out metal can induce dizziness, nausea, and a strong yearning for some nice simple pop music. Despite all this, Vileswarm’s coinage is a useful addition to the lexicon. This CD might be a collection of gestural, amelodic drone music, but it has a density and sense of sludgy ritual that it shares with the more evocative, leaden shades of metal. This music may well be improvised (although there could easily be an over-arching structure, we’re not entirely sure) but it’s a long way from Derek Bailey’s “non-idiomatic improv”. The Shaman’s Last Waltz is, in many ways, unmusical. It generally avoids motifs or rhythms, and “incidental” noises are foregrounded as much as recognised musical sounds – we can hear guitar strings being brushed as much as we hear them being plucked, and the sound of sitting at a drum kit is given the same space as hitting it. We hear Vileswarm “playing” in the way that children, not musicians, play; we hear performers exploring their instruments as much as we hear them mastering them.

“The Shaman’s Last Waltz Pt I” is a long track, but it feels more like a series of sonic tableaux than a single piece. There are sublimely eerie moments, the sound of a creaking dead cart in a toxic fog bank vying with a recording of someone raping a harmonium in a medieval microwave for our affections. Drums are brushed in scuttling clusters and guitar tones waver. At the end a knob-twiddling electronic sound lets the side down, as it isn’t inherently mysterious, coming straight from a Tom Baker Dr Who soundtrack. “Pt II” is less eventful, and has an oppressive, pressurised atmosphere. An oscillating synth near the conclusion has the overbearing power of very early Tangerine Dream, and envelops us with a slow amniotic presence. This isn’t so much music you listen to, it’s more music you live in.

Ironically, despite the fact that it’s separate from the “Shaman” sequence, closing track “Lotus Prayer” is the most ritualistic track, sounding like a recording of Gyoto monks at their devotions (or, at times, like some old janitors clearing up trestle tables after a village craft exhibition). The track even obliquely approaches musical structure, being a set of variations on a non-theme (two notes and a rhythmic rustle). It’s certainly the most cohesive piece here, but in a way the least intriguing.

This record may not be as good as some work by the two collaborators: it doesn’t have the stark organic beauty of Euhedral’s best music, nor the wired Manga velocity of a great David K. Frampton gig, but it’s an enjoyable listen. Most of all we like the way the LP feels exploratory. So much music that calls itself “experimental” or “leftfield” is drawing on a whole raft of ossified, time-honoured tricks and traits, with a standard sonic template as predictable as any 12 bar blues. Vileswarm conversely sound as though they’re truly trying to find new ways of working together, and attempting to conjure up - the record’s title and cover art imply this is the right term – new experiences. In an odd way, it sounds like the work of alien musicians, who are fully trained in traditional musical forms, but who have never seen human instruments before, and aren’t sure whether the rub them, blow them, or stick a spare tentacle into one of the holes. And if that doesn’t give you a clear idea of whether to investigate this act or run a mile, nothing will.

Update rape

Afternoon

Everything's a bit busy at the mo, so I'm just checking in with an update. The Truck review is done, but I shan't post it till Nightshift is out. I have sent a review to Music In Oxford, and you can have that once I return from madness next week. I also have another demo to review for them, so I'll try to do that soon. Thereafter, I'll decide what to do with the site. Now the archive is strip mined I'll have to look in to whether I'll make this into a real blog, to allow you the three posts a week average you've been used to, as there shan't be ebnough proper reviews to keep up this frenetic, whirlwind pace (ahem).

What was that? Music In Oxford? Yes, www.oxfordbands.com has changed its name, so go to www.musicinoxford.co.uk for your local music news, reviews and poorly typed rage.

In the meantime, read the old posts, I bet you missed some. Or go outside and do something less boring instead.

Cornbury 2010 Sunday Pt 2

The infamous Cornbury rain kept off for the festival, and the feeble little drizzle that did start evaporated in the face of Raghu Dixit’s whirlwind of bouncy positivity. T shirts describe it as “Indo-World folk rock”, and whilst we’re not sure “Indo-World” makes any more sense than “Anglo-Oxonian”, the “folk” bit is fair enough, and the “rock” bit is beyond discussion. Dixit’s voice is keening and powerful enough to knock you back on your seat even as the funky fusion rhythms make you want to get up and dance as though David Gray were a distant memory. The band is fantastic, varying the tone with fizzing violin, snaky bass and Dire Straits guitar. At one point they sound like a carnatic Levellers, and at another they build up a chunky rhythm like a Bollywood Los Lobos, but at the heart of the music is a warmth and exuberance you won’t often find. Normally when we describe an act as “a good festival band” it’s a back-handed compliment, for Raghu Dixit it’s a golden commendation. Simply joyous.

Were we implying earlier that sound engineers are childish? Well, here’s Flash Harry PA mainman and outstanding engineer Tony Jezzard with Reservoir Cats who definitely aren’t children: they play proper grown up blues with big boys’ growly-wowly vocals, clever twiddly-widdly guitar solos and sophisticated lyrics about women with whom they might have had sexy-wexy. Genre assassination aside, they’re actually a good group, having plenty of fun onstage, boasting a reliably sturdy rhythm section and, God help us, some of those wailing guitar solos sound pretty decent. Plus we know that nothing we say will change this band one fraction, and that in itself is worthy of respect.

Folk: is it music by the people, music about the people, or music for the people? For Oxford Folk Festival star booking Seth Lakeman you have to feel it’s the latter two definitions that count, as he is keen to ground each song in real events in his introductions, often celebrating people otherwise off history’s radar, and because his music has a simple, easily apprehended structure. Forthcoming album title track “Hearts And Minds” is a crowd rousing song, but in the sense of “Let’s all believe the same thing”, rather than “Let’s get some cudgels and duff up the ruling classes”. It’s a performance of egalitarian, humanitarian music, spiced with his fluid fiddle playing and outstanding double bass. It wasn’t our favourite show of the weekend, but it did demonstrate that there is plenty of excitement to be found in mainstream music, and that Cornbury’s conservative roster can provide all the elation, surprise and fun as experimental or obscure music. It also reminded us that no music is more boring and enraging as music that is professionally boring and unadventurously enraging, so we’re not complete converts to the Cornbury ethos just yet.

Last Of The Summary Whines

And with this I have no more reviews to post. Maybe it will spur me on to finish the Vileswarm review I've had on my pile for about a month. Review of last week's Truck is looking good (or long, which is the same thing nowadays), but you'll have to wait till Nightshift is out before I post that. However, you can buy this week's Oxford Times and read their scintillating review, which mentions all of four acts, and very nearly comes close to making a critical judgement on one of them; plus they've got a huge snap of Marc West from BBC Oxford grinning like a village idiot disguised as Rusell Brand, which is so much better than a well framed portrait of one of the performers. I aspire to reach that journalistic level one day, once my prentice work is through.


CORNBURY, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

Sonny Liston (FKA Dear Landlord, which was a much better name) won the BBC Oxford Introducing competition to open the Second Stage on Sunday, and worthy winners they were. Their songs are uber-perky folk-indie strums, with lots of vibrant trumpet and literate lyrics about Charles de Gualle, generally sounding a bit like Belle & Sebastian rewrites of “Summer Holiday”, which is a lovely way to start the day. With two great vocalists who can deliver even wordy lyrics convincingly whilst keeping the summery pop melodies afloat, we could be hearing from Sonny Liston again before too long.

Jon Allen maintains our relaxed bouyant mood. He may come from Devon, but his songs all have a laidback pseudo-country singer songwriter waft that we like. To be frank, his songs all sound like Bob Dylan circa Desire, but that will do for now.

The Lucinda Belle Orchestra entice us at first, because they have a harp in a leading role, which is especially welcome as Sonny Liston left theirs behind, but you strictly need more than five people for an orchestra, right? Belle has an excellent voice, but one can ruin the effect by milking it, right? “My Voice & My 45 Strings” is a top tune, but a standard harp actually has 47 strings, right? AOR cafe jazz with a contemporary radio sound is very nice, but we’ve heard it all before, right? So how was the set? Alright.

The Blockheads were always an odd proposition, pub rock passion mixed with punk sneers and funk chops, topped off by a tone deaf romantic/cynical poet obsessed by sex, ethics and Essex. Dury has of course sadly passed on now, but we’re glad the band have chosen to keep the unique vision alive, and if the set was a bit of a chicken-in-a-basket cabaret turn, you can bet that if Ian is looking down on us, he’d hate his memory to be enshrined too formally. Now, getting an impressionist to replace your lost vocalist is a dangerous ploy. It can work – as anyone who saw The Magic Band at The Zodiac can testify – but the cartoon character on the mike for The Blockheads just goes to show how much more there was to Dury’s performance than swearing and glottal stops. It’s a slightly 2D show, that sounds like the aging cast of Grange Hill jamming with Redox, or perhaps the Mighty Boosh hitcher joining Hall & Oates.

That’s the criticisms out of the way. On the plus side every musician on stage is simply astonishing and, what’s more, is still clearly having the time of their life. The band delivers a hits selection, but don’t shy away from original arrangements to keep things fresh, the sax solo on “Clever Trevor” being the greatest musical moment of the festival. Plus, they have a vault of cracking tunes so deep, they make Squeeze look like Milli Vanilli.

We dropped off during Danny & The Champions Of The World, which had more to do with our exhaustion than their music, though it’s still probably not a press cutting for the rehearsal room wall. In fact, we thank them for it, as our impromptu nap meant we missed Reef. We wake to the sounds of the last track by Harper Simon (another from the Taylor Dayne reject list?) on the Nero’s stage, and it sounds like nice jovial shiny drivetime pop, so good luck to her, but Fisherman’s Freinds are the real deal.

They are late middle aged men from Port Isaac who sing a capella shanties. They have some intelligent harmonies, but they aren’t precious about the performance, honking out the songs like nine Cornish vuvuzelas filled with navy rum. This is folk music with big balls and simple melodies (Middle eight? Never heard of one, chum) that cut straight to the heart and force even the most reticent tongues to shout along like eighteenth century street vendors. All this, plus oodles of camp innuendo between songs, what a simply brilliant band. They get a huge response from the healthy crowd, which does the soul good to witness. The surprise find of the festival.

And we had to bloody follow that with Brainchild, whose charmless, brash rock is like a cross between The Towers Of London and Evanescence at a greasy bike rally. There’s a girl singing in a disinfected raunchy style, some “Baker Street” saxophone, and a raddled looking specimen done up like a drunken cross between Alice Cooper and Screaming Lord Sutch at the front. All of them look and sound like they’re from different bands, each of which is equally atrocious. We last two numbers. Later, we return to find the sax player signing autographs for kids, and the front of house mixer telling us they were the best band of the weekend: either this tells us that they got better very quickly, or that you can’t trust engineers and children to choose your music for you.

But our revolt against Brainchild meant we got unexpectedly to see Newton Faulkner, who turns out to be a surprisingly decent showman. He quickly builds up a conversational rapport with the crowd, which is no mean feat on a big stage after a day and half of music, so that the set flashes by. He also has an agile voice, and an impressive array of extended guitar techniques. Pity that we didn’t care for his songs much - we could have sat and listened to him telling jokes and playing covers all afternoon, but his own tunes didn’t grab us. It’s a masterclass for boring acoustic strummers the world around, however: gig is a doing word, after all...

Cornbury 2010 - Saturday Pt 2

The employees at the adjacent Nero’s coffee tent seem to have been getting high off their own supply, dancing manically behind the counter to Staton’s set, so we stay to see what their tiny stage can offer. Edinburgh boy Alex Cornish has some Damien Rice style tunes and is backed by a useful trio. He’s just as good as some of the people on the big stages. Obviously there are two ways you could take that...

At a festival with a slightly more mature demographic, over 50% of those watching Ben Montague are under 20. Poshstock is all very well, but a festival’s not complete under you’ve seen some drunk kids (though we were less forgiving when they kept us awake all night). Anyway, what drew the youngsters to his rather likable Radio 2 pop, has he been on Hollyoaks or something? Whatever the story, he has a warm voice, and the band make a decent fist of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” alongside their own sprightly tunes. As the girls swoon over his tasty looks and the adults tap along to his decent acoustic everyman rock, it’s like the second coming of Craig McLachlan & Check 1-2.

After Montague has put a spring in our step, Imelda May knocks us off our feet. Her band play a turbo-rockabilly, all slapped double bass, Duane Eddy guitar, scorching trumpet and battered tambourine, over which May’s feisty Dublin voice wails with a sassy, gospel passion. The songs are relatively generic, but played with firy conviction, and even “I’m a creepy, sneaky freak” can sound like Byron if you sing it as viscerally as Imelda May does.

After these two, all Riverside have to do is keep the party going. And they give us David Gray. That’s like having ten minutes to score a hat trick, and bringing on Heskey. His set is just as tedious as you’d expect, and he doesn’t even interest us by being particularly awful. He does that “Babylon” one. He does that one that sounds like that other one. He does some we know and some we wish we didn’t. Then he does several million more. Everybody at Cornbury is watching this, or has had the sense to get out of the arena, so we have the odd experience of visiting a deserted toilet block at a crowded festival. Turns out that taking an echoey piss in an empty trailer housing 22 well used urinals is just like watching a David Gray gig.