Bob's Yer Ungulate

I recently edited footage of myself naked with film of two ladies. It was my first montage a trois.



HOT HOOVES – AVOID BEING FILMED (Rivet Gun LP)


Indulge in cults, embrace hegemonies:
Amuse your friends! Enrage your enemies!

Sounds a bit like a Hot Hooves lyric. Not equal to the sterling opening couplet to “Help Shape The Future” (“Your overactive thyroid gland/ Is pumping like a silver band”), but close enough. And it’s fitting, when you consider how many young, excitable or simply paranoid people believe some shadowy clique controls Oxford music. With a band like Hot Hooves, bringing together veterans from cult local bands like ATL and Talulah Gosh, you almost want to see a bad review to dispel any fears of back room favouritism.

Well, tough luck, chum, because this is a cracking little album (and little it is, ten tracks that never reach the heady prog heights of three minutes). Any gin-soaked old hack who has heard of YouTube and got a deadline looming will tell you that our culture is an embodiment of Warhol’s prediction that “in the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”; Avoid Being Filmed seems to ask what happens for the rest of their lives. This brief spasm of an LP could be read as the memories and opinions of someone who was briefly feted by the music scene some unspecified time ago, an unstable mixture of bile, supercilious amusement and nostalgic fondness for an awkward, illogical industry. A sort of cross between John Osborne’s Archie Rice, and Creme Brulee’s Les McQueen, perhaps. Indeed, the LP draws a line from the clarion call of “This Is It, This Is The Scene” to tales of fights, breakdowns and post-gig boozing on “The Plot”, euphoria to “artistic differences” in ten short tracks.

But, whilst we aren’t sure if Hot Hooves are saddened, tickled or frustrated by rock music, we know they have a bloody good crack at making it. Each tiny nugget of a tune is a tough alloy of dirt simple rock rhythms and cheekily catchy melodies that is immediately accessible but sculpted with enough pop nouse to remain memorable. “This Is It, This Is The Scene” is a bit like “Something Else” swimming at half speed through a vat of custard, and our favourite “The Sparks Up Agenda” barrels along like a schoolyard winger hurtling towards an open goal, unaware that the bell has rung. Occasionally the feel is new wave in inverted commas, and can seem somewhat third hand – “The Plot” veers rather close to Elastica, and the album’s only real misstep “Hot Hooves” sounds like a mildewed old Family Cat record that has been gathering dust under the bed for twenty years – but in general it’s impressive how visceral and sweatily enjoyable this album is. The tunes Pete Momtchiloff sings are perhaps the best examples of Hot Hooves’ space between the nihilistic romanticism of Guided By Voices and Half Man Half Biscuit’s pub carpet cabaret.

To say that this record sounds like the vibrant work of musicians half Hot Hooves’ age would be patronising. To say you’d be hard pressed to find rock music in Oxford that packs a good old fashioned punch whilst peppering the lyrics with archly acidic little witticisms seems redundantly self-evident. Let’s just say this is a lovely little collection of high quality, scuffed tunes that anyone with an interest in Oxford pop should listen to...fuck’s sake, it only takes about twenty minutes, what have you got to lose?

Nothing Gonna Stop The Floe

I have to write a "best of 2011" for one person and a "ones to watch for 2012" for another. I hate that kind of stuff.

I also hate it when adverts say "Terms & Conditions apply". Of course they do, otherwise there would be chaos; there's no way I could make you an offer without delineating it in some fashion. "Buy one bottle of Head & Shoulders and get...whatever your mind can conceive of absolutely free - the accepted parameters of scientific governance notwithstanding". Idiotic.


TERJE ISUNGSET, OCM, The Northwall, 5/11/11

We don’t normally care about a musician’s equipment - start talking like that and before you know it you think Stevie Vai is better than John Lee Hooker – but we watched Terje Isungset’s Ice Music desperate to know what gear they had backstage. What sort of refrigeration rig is required to bring instruments carved from Norwegian glaciers around the UK?

The instruments not only look gorgeous in subdued theatre lighting, but they sound phenomenal: an ice marimba is somewhere between a balafon and a tabla, and a pair of glistening ice horns sound like Jan Garbarek mournfully morphing into an elephant seal. But, once you’ve marvelled at the logistics and the concept and the beauty of ice instruments, you’re unfortunately left with something aimlessly pretty. Take Lena Nymark’s breathy vocals: she may be adept enough with her effects pedals to build a wash of Cocteau Twins ambience, but her voice is rather thin when what the show needs is a steely soprano or a gutsy folk chorus to raise it from the morass of politeness.

To be honest, we far preferred the first half of the concert. Tribute To Nature is a piece for drumkit augmented by elemental wood and granite percussion, but the rough-hewn instruments offer more than earthy novelty. The click of stone on stone is a Neanderthal telex, and a Jew’s harp passage sounds like a Tuvan version of Aphex Twin’s “Didgeridoo”; at times the windswept stillness is Biosphere unplugged, at others the frenetic crackling rhythms are bebop played by a huge insect. A Max Roach, maybe? No, no, you’re right, we’re sorry.

Tribute To Nature may be too long, and the shamanistic groove is too Howard Moon (“Coming at you like a jazz narwhal!”), but the piece is hypnotic and evocative, and Isungset is modest enough to break the sonic spell and make people giggle by creaking his drum stool: ice is nice, but sometimes a musician finds their best material in jokes and accidents.

Alter Boys

One of the few times I've ever written a review at 20.00 on deadline day...and I think it shows. Not bad, as such, but disjointed. I wanted to put bits in about the keyboard playing, the relationship between The Marshall Suite and The Mayor Of Casterbridge ("It just goes down and down, that book" - MES) and why Hollywood never latched on to The Metamorphosis ("Right, so you got this cool giant bug and all he does is moan about the office?!")



BORDERVILLE – METAMORPHOSIS (Own release)


Sadly, we don’t get sent records any more, just links to downloads and audio streams. That’s OK, we understand the advantages in terms of ecology, energy and economics. Borderville, however, eagerly sent a hard copy of their latest, perhaps indicating their love of a holistic artwork, and their pride in a deeply considered package, rather than a string of ditties. Of course, anyone with cash can create lavish CD artwork to detract attention from drab music, but the mandibular folds of Borderville’s CD box fit the insect theme perfectly, and the flea image echoes Joe Swarbrick’s assertion that the German “ungeziefer” doesn’t necessarily imply the giant roach most publishing illustrators leap on for editions of The Metamorphosis.

Because, yes, this album is a musical retelling of Kafka’s novella. If you think that sounds pretentious, do yourself a favour and turn the page now. Go on, there’s plenty for you later: there might be some big pictures, or ads for gigs by tribute bands like Saxon & On, or Junior Doctor Feelgood. Anyone who isn’t put off by theatre or erudition will happily discover how approachable Metamorphosis is. In fact, you don’t need to know anything about the book, because what’s great is that the album has the shape of a story, the taut arc of ineluctable tragedy, the encroaching claustrophobia of macabre fiction. It’s fantastic that Metamorphosis sounds like a tale being told, rather than a band noting how clever they all are.

It’s perhaps inevitable that Metamorphosis shall be labelled as Prog. That’s fine, but inaccurate. Most of the music is built on material from the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, be it the Rocky Horror cod-jiving of “Open The Door”, or “Anchor”, where a soda hop ballad is suspended in - sonic zeitgeist alert! - cold reverb. Rather than ELP trickery, Borderville take scraps of everyman rock, like Richie Valens or Queen, and cover them with black dramatics and queasy dissonance – from the infected cicada swoon of the opening moments, the record is held together by synthetic hums and electroacoustic dizziness. Perhaps, because of this, “Capitalypso” doesn’t quite fit. Sure, it’s got a portmanteau title, funky guitar and a clever link between insectile chitin and workplace relationships in the line “toughen up my skin, sir”, but it almost derails the record by being too good a rock song: we need soliloquies not melodies, Greek chorus not pop chorus. Forget tunes, it’s the rhythm section’s album anyway: check out the Rolling-Stones-play-Aphrodite’s-Child stomp of “I Am The Winter”.

Add some balletic keys and a thespian vocal that can convince in both the dark bombast of “The Human Way” and the resigned resolution of the closing track, and you have an album of the year. If some will turn away in the opening minutes, everyone else will adore it till the final curtain.