CAT MATADOR/ DALLAS DON’T/ PUMP SHARK/
ROBOTS WITH SOULS, Port Mahon, 20/4/12
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to be
new. Live looping stopped being
surprising some time ago, and bass and drums duos litter hipster house parties
like half smoked Camels, yet we’ve never seen anyone put them together. Robots With Souls’ Steve Wilson balances a
two string bass on a sparse drum kit, and samples up some big, dense rhythms
over which he delivers fragmented lyrics with melodic intensity. Somewhere in this marriage of indie crooning
and dumbass mall sludge, a truly excellent new act has been created. It’s a fantastic show, that in the sweaty
crucible of the Port Mahon feels more a shared ritual than a gig.
Wycombe’s Pump Shark offer a twitchier
take on rock intensity, jerky rhythms continually pulling the rug beneath
soul-baring vocal howls. There’s a
little of the sensitive brutality of Fugazi in their mixture of choppy guitars
and lopsided sincerity, but somehow the set never quite gets off the
leash. If Pump Shark could get over a
certain studied restraint they could be powerful, but as it is the initial buzz
dwindles before their half hour is up.
There’s something we adore about Dallas
Don’t, but let’s be frank, it ain’t their playing. The rhythms are sloppy and they’re rarely
entirely in tune, but it doesn’t matter because their music tells stories, and
each slurred vocal line conjures up images that massed ranks of well-drilled
musos could never achieve. The sound is
a fascinating battle between erudite, melancholic indie and scruffy US rock –
The Delgados morphing into Mudhoney, perhaps – and you get the feeling that if
one side ever won the fight, the magic would dissipate, but for now this
tuneful whirlwind of rage and romanticism is one of the best things in Oxford
music.
A Cat Matador is a funny idea. Wave a cape at your average moggy and you’ll
get bemused disdain, not an enraged stampede.
And we feel roughly the same: Cat Matador play well enough, doing all
the right things with violin-flecked indie, putting intricate snare patterns
behind introspective Tindersticks laments, but we just can’t dredge up any
excitement. There are some mournful
fiddle lines and clattering bursts of energy to snag our ears, but generally
the feeling is that whilst Cat Matador and Pump Shark are decent enough bands, real
character will always win out.
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