Horror Novel

Another review, obviously. What were you expecting?


NEW NOVETA/ LISTING SHIPS/ MANACLES OF ACID – Neural Ohmlette, MAO, 27/1/12


Let’s just clear up a few things before we start.

1) Now they’ve moved the cafe upstairs, Modern Art Oxford is a fantastic gig venue, low, sweaty and loud, but with a handy airy upstairs that sells nice coffee. More events should happen here.
2) There’s a reason why most side projects aren’t in the spotlight.
3) Neural Ohmlette is a hideous name for a promoter, it sounds like something Ozric Tentacles discarded as an LP title. Let’s never talk of it again.

Watching Manacles Of Acid, you wonder, who exactly is being manacled? Does it mean heavy, controlling music, to enslave us on the dancefloor (or something equally retro-dystopian) or does it refer to the constrictions inherent in using vintage hardware? Not sure either of them work, really: the music is surprisingly airy and attractive, despite jackboot kickdrums and inevitable acid swampgas bubbles, and the sonic palette is intricate and varied enough to put any number of SoundCloud-vomiting brosteppers to shame. Literally anything with a 303 squelchline sounds great to us, but in fact Manacles Of Acid are at their very best when they veer closer to Bellevue techno than pure acid – both the opening and closing moments of this set remind us of the great Model 500. An act that originally looked like a music shop worker’s sly joke is bearing unexpected fruit. Let’s hope they’re rifling through the Derrick May and Drexciya twelve inches for inspiration as we speak.

Tonight Listing Ships fail wholly to convince us. Not only do the drums appear to falter uncharacteristically once or twice, but an annoying mix of earth hum and bass feedback mires a band that has a much better grasp of interesting dynamics than the vast majority of krauting post-rockers. Because of this we find ourselves concentrating less on the Godzilla lumber of tracks like “100 Gun Ship”, and on lighter touches we’d previously missed: a synth organ part that sounds like mid-80s Tangerine Dream, a death disco rhythm that seems to cross ESG with Joy Division. A compromised set by a very strong band.

We saw Maria & The Mirrors at last year’s Supernormal festival, and were suitably floored by their glam tribal hedonism, so we leapt at the chance to see them in Oxford. We soon discovered we were actually seeing a spin-off called New Noveta, but hopes were still high. However, New Noveta are not so much a spin off as a deliberate miscue and a white ball in someone’s Bacardi, taking the digital noise underpinning Maria & The Mirrors, and using it as the backdrop for some ritualistic performance art that boils down to two women wrestling in a puddle of fruit and raw fish. As a spectacle – not to mention an olfactory experience – it certainly has a power that very few gigs can match, and inevitably an image resembling Tweedledee and Tweedeldum bickering over the remains of Luke Skywalker’s eviscerated tauntaun hangs in the mind’s eye for a while, but the entire experience is only partly satisfying.

Firstly, lose the strobe: unless it’s the 60s or you’re David Lynch, strobe lights are a tired signifier of chaos, and are far more annoying than they are thrilling. Secondly, is ten minutes really enough to justify a headline appearance? Thirdly, we do get bored of half-naked body-based performance: in the past feminist performance artists returned to their bodies in desperation that all traditional media were tainted by association with a patriarchal art history, whereas Viennese Actionism saw the corporeal as a final frontier in visceral, confrontational art – but performance nowadays often means arsing about with some flesh on display, and it gets dull quickly. Fourthly, the musical aspect of the show is thin, at best, and what promises to be an industrial soundscape soon becomes a forgettable hiss.

Actually, fifthly, you know what? Ten minutes was plenty. An act worth witnessing, perhaps, but not one worth celebrating

Hearth Hearted

Big Bang Theory, I meant, of course, in the last post.

Not like when a soldier dies, the bit below.

Anyway, here's a record review from this month's Nightshift, amazingly the first ever to have no live reviews. This means I gave the only actual bad review in the whole issue, excluding the demo pages. Yay.



SHAKER HEIGHTS – SITTING IN THE FIRE (Download single)


This single features “exclusive artwork based on the music”. It’s a line drawing of a man staring at a wall in an empty room. Yep, that’s roughly how it makes us feel, too. The single is not precisely bad – it’s well made and shows evidence of talent – but it is dully anonymous. The title track starts with good ingredients, a maudlin country-inflected vocal and some pleasing keyboard embellishments, but doesn’t know what to do with them. After a repeating these fragments a few times, the song drifts to a halt, like a finance administrator who realises that people stopped listening to his quarterly sales report half way through.

The B-side “Poised As Robots” is apparently “attack-rock”, if the press release is to be believed, although in reality it chugs along cosily like a vintage traction engine. It’s a simple heartfelt tune that’s far superior to the A side, but it still has trouble asserting itself. It’s as if the band have no faith in what they’re doing. So, we’ve got about one twelfth of a Beautiful South song coupled with a self-conscious Then Jericho track. Hmm, might take a look at that wall for a bit.

The Acquitable Snowman?

I just watched a whole episode of The Big Bang. It's actually relatively amusing.

Unrelated question: should one put lemons in the fruit bowl?


UNPUNISHED MONSTERS – UNPUNISHED MONSTERS EP (Download)


The electronic side project is becoming as much of a rock cliché as the garish wedding, the spell in rehab and the ill-advised clothing range, but there is some good material being made by rockers who find a freedom in front of the PC that they don’t get in the rehearsal studio. After five minutes of racking our brains to identify the vocalist on this EP, Google told us it was Gus Rogers from Dial F For Frankenstein and Kill Murray, and, along with George Hopcroft, he has created an interesting adjunct to the speed-indie intensity of those bands. Unpunished Monsters’ sound springs from the ersatz sleaze of Prince-influenced club music from the last gasps of the 1980s, adding some drunken dizziness, and it’s utterly beguiling, at least when it doesn’t get overly wry.

“Palace Guards” is a wonderful opener, ladling a robo-lothario vocal onto a tweaked Frankie Knuckles keyboard part until the whole gloriously fake cocktail has the rubbery whiff of post-human lovin’ best exhibited by Jamie Principle’s “Baby Wants To Ride”. There’s more android soul in the EP’s high point, “Moon Dance”, where a seditiously sexy croon rides a woozy, swingbeat rhythm, something like a new wave Jamie Lidell. Some Plone-like metallophone parts tumble in the background, underpinning a tale a tale of teenage boredom that may have come from a Dead Jerichos song:

We go down to the playground for somewhere to drink
And I will fight you like a caveman, too wired to think

It’s a fascinatingly immersive little song, imbued with the cheap tedium of a youth spent in the suburbs, and balances the more dance oriented tracks on the record, such as “Day Dreamer”, which sounds like a euphoric remix of some minor alternative hit, and could comfortably sit in many a contemporary DJ set.

The record isn’t all perfect. “Negative Capability” starts well as a post-Numan thump, but doesn’t have enough going on to fill three minutes (plus the link to Keats is unfathomable), whereas “Neon Lung” is too arch, a winking “The 80s are so, like, old” concoction of electro-funk keys, trashy guitar and treated vocals slapped between a tired vocal sample and some arbitrary drum ‘n’ bass. No sleep till Shoreditch. But these lowpoints are heavily outweighed by the brash tartiness of Unpunished Monsters’ best music, like a sonic version of heavily daubed mascara. We hope this collaboration isn’t a one off, and we won’t be surprised to find that “Moon Dance” ends up one of our favourite Oxford tunes of 2012. Download for free, and start mixing the pina coladas with ketamine today!

Annual Probe

Here are my favourite 5 Oxford records of 2011. I wrote this for www.musicinoxford.co.uk, but they didn't appreciate they were in alphabetical order. Never mind. I also wrote a little precis of the year, whcih boiled down to "why can't anyone write as well as me?", so I'll leave that out for now.

Borderville – Metamorphosis: An octagonal package bursting with pretension, playfulness, performance and pop music. New developments in theatrical rock from the in sect.

Coloureds – Tom Hanks EP: A grubby confused no man’s land in the ongoing dance music war between the brain and the feet.

Duotone – Ropes: Perfectly turned studio folk knick-knacks that are as intriguingly mysterious as they are artfully decorative.

Fixers – Here Comes 2001 So Let’s All Head For The Sun EP: A paean to the Beach Boys and Ibiza house made from pastels, sherbert and reverb. It was even mixed by someone called Bryan Wilson, what are the chances?

Spring Offensive – A Stutter & A Start single: Suppliers, along with Fixers, of truck’s other great Oxford set this year, the ever-resourceful Spring Offensive offer us, not only a clipped piece of pop yearning, but a neat one-shot video and a colouring book