Tuesday 31 August 2010

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.

Sunday 29 August 2010

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”.

Tuesday 10 August 2010

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.

Thursday 5 August 2010

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.