Daft Punt

Here is my thorough review of this year's Punt festival.  I thought it was a strong night out, I saw nothing bad, and nothing phenomenal.  Mutagenocide were unoriginal and a wee bit sloppy (by the incredibly high standards of classic metal, anyway, where you have to be spotlessly good in a crowded field), but they were still worth a listen, and Manacles Of Acid were my favourite act.  It didn't feel as though there were enough surprises for me to call it a top rank Punt, but I guess that skipping last year  contributed to that somewhat.  It's a wonderful insitution, anyway, I'm looking forward to 2013 already!  


Elements of this review are to be found in Nightshift's Punt mega-article.

THE PUNT, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Duke’s Cut/ Junction/ Wheatsheaf, 16/5/12

Ostensibly, The Punt is a showcase for Oxford music, but secretly might not be.  Sounds like an idiotic observation, but in fact the annual night-long, multi-venue event isn’t a glossy advert for local sounds, or an aural taster menu to invite putative new listeners, it’s more like an initiation test for potential recruits to the scene.  In its duration and complexity The Punt is a challenge, not a night out – the musical equivalent of Atomic Burger’s Godzilla meal, the sonic sister to an episode of Takeshi’s Castle.  And if proof were needed curator,  Nightshift’s Ronan Munroe is a puckish trickster as much as a promotional ambassador, we need look no further the presence of Tamara Parsons-Baker as the opening act.  She is a performer of some talent, with a powerful voice, but her dark vignettes of wispy intensity are a deliberately perverse introduction to the night, barbed lines left hanging portentously in the room, wintry guitars providing the lovelorn backdrop .  It’s a strong set, but she’s at her best when she comes over as a more animated Leonard Cohen, and at her worst when she just sounds like someone bitterly sniping at their ex-partner.

Secret Rivals are a perfect foil to this opening gambit, with their melodic, 6 Music friendly pop nuggets.  On record we just keep on finding more to love in their scrappy indie pop flurries, but live they’re still a smidgen sloppy.  In a way that doesn’t matter, the joy of the band is that they toss the Mentos of pop into the Diet Coke of indie with gay abandon, and let the sugary mess explode across the venue.

Undersmile are a geologically-paced sludge metal band fronted by two atonally chanting ladies who look as if the creepy twins from The Shining have grown up listening to Babes In Toyland.  It all sounds horrifyingly like half-orc mating calls played at quarter speed, and is absolutely brilliant.  And also pretty rubbish.  But mostly brilliant.

The Duke’s Cut is a new Punt venue, and one where the fact that the performers are completely invisible to all but about ten of the audience is balanced by the decent ale and the cosy camaraderie.  Toliesel sound at first like The Band with some pub rock elements, and are perfectly pleasant, though they seem to be pushing too hard, turning sweet vocals into rough hollers.  But, we decide to stay for their whole set, and soon the music makes perfect sense, revealing winning melodies under the murk.  Even the crackles from a slightly overstretched PA add to the natural warmth of the music.  In a reversal of Punt logic, Toliesel win us over with slow increments of quality songwriting, rather than flashy bandstanding, making us glad we stayed the distance.  Although it was mostly because it was too much effort to push our way back out of the crowd.  We sincerely hope there was one random person sitting at one of the pub tables in the early evening, who was hemmed in and forced to listen for the entire night.

Simple probability dictates that there’s always one Punt act that gets an underservedly small audience, and this year it’s Band Of Hope.  Mind you, the fact that they’re playing in the cavernous Junction club compounds the problem.  Incidentally, the venue turns out to be a pretty good addition to the night, although we’re not sure a pile of rocks and road signs is a great decor choice, it makes the room look like a student’s back garden.  The band is a lush ensemble playing relaxing country and folk, with excellent flourishes from fiddle and pedal steel. At times they have a lackadaisical Sunday jam session air that erases some of the character form the songs, but “Baby You’re A Mess” is a solid gold winner.

We catch the end of Deer Chicago, and their sound, which can often seem unnecessarily bombastic and forcedly epic, works far better in a cramped sweaty Duke’s Cut.  Sadly, as things are running late we only catch a fragment of The Old grinding Young.  They sound a little like parent band Ute, but with Radiohead twitches replaced by expansive rootsiness.  Too early to tell whether this will prove a good move.

In contrast to the sludge avalanche of Undersmile, and the doomy prog of Caravan Of Whores, Mutagenocide proffer a far more traditional brand of metal.  There are elements of the post-Pantera stylings of previous Punt stars Desert Storm, but most of the set consists of resolutely old school chugging rhythms, twiddly guitar solos and growled vocals that are probably all about large-breasted elf duchesses in the Hades branch of Games Workshop. There’s very little to set Mutagenocide apart from a vast roster of metal acts up and down the count(r)y, but they’re enjoyable enough, the penultimate track pulling off some good aural pummelling.

When you see LeftOuterJoin expending vast amounts of energy playing live syn drums along with some pounding trance, you have to ask what the point of it is.  It would sound just the same (and fractionally more in time) if the rhythms were programmed.  But, artists don’t have to dwell in a world of cold logic, and in many ways the victory of this act is its very redundancy.  The set veers from excellent techno to cruddy Euro cheese pretty haphazardly, but the sheer spectacle is a euphoric joy.  The fact that he’s also brought trippy projections and two lasers into the Wheatsheaf, Oxford’s least rave-friendly venue, is worth as many extra points as you can tally. Plus there are some over-sized smoke machines, that trip the pub’s fire alarm, and cause the venue’s windows to be opened for the first time this millennium.  A set to remember.

Into the home straight at The Junction with rapper Half Decent.  His delivery is truly excellent, and the backing tracks are chunky but he does share a fault with nearly all live hip hop: paradoxically, what should be a match of visceral rhythms and intimate poetry, generally drifts into empty gesturing.  Half Decent spends a lot of his set asking us to dance and sing along, when he would do better concentrating on delivering some very wry, insightful fast-paced lyrics (and dumb fun lines like “Making girls wetter than a washing machine”, for good measure).  He puts on a good show to a gaggle of exhausted music fans, but we’re sure the rapturous stadium gig happening in his head was even better.

Manacles Of Acid is watched by the hardcore, the shell-shocked and those unbeatable party people who may live to regret it.  We started the night with a harrowingly bleak preacher disguised as a nice acoustic singer, and we end it with unforgivably niche electronica dressed up as a bright clubber’s party.  Using only vintage hardware (including a TR606 worn round the neck) the man named Highscores produces a seemingly endless string of classic acid house and Detroit techno which thrill s the faithful, but is clearly a closed book to half the room.  We fall into the former camp, loving the beautifully crafted layers of mutated basslines and crisp drum patterns.  There are confetti cannons and some sort of cross between a fly and a character from Starlight Express running round the room, who may or may not officially be part of the show, and it’s an uncompromising conclusion to the night.

And so we leave The Junction, dazed and deafened, feeling as though we’ve split the past five and a half hours equally between enjoying, working and speed drinking.  The Punt feels even more like a twisted musical hazing ritual as we wait woozily for the late bus home.  Thank you, Sir, may we have another?

Cats Would Be Republicans, Of This I Am Certain

-Doctor, doctor, I think I'm a pair of curtains!

-Well, you managed to make this appointment, and express yourself quite concisely, so I suspect the delusion isn't too deep-seated.  I think you'll be fine.

KING OF CATS – AMERICA (Bandcamp download)

We always feel that a musician must be doing something right if they violently split opinion – by which we mean the opinions of dedicated listeners, not the predictable, shallow spats between reviewers and some teenage band’s friends and family.  We have seen King Of Cats provoke more anger and distress in audiences than is anywhere near common, and we have witnessed seasoned promoters, engineers and gig-goers in rapt attention, throwing around terms like “genius” with gay abandon.  We dare say it’s nice to be universally lauded as an artistic messiah, but when disinterested parties are prepared to spend time arguing about your worth, you know you’ve made a good start. 

Brighton (via Oxford) denizen King Of Cats has raised these post-gig debates by creating an onstage avant-troubadour persona that’s half wryly confessional anti-folk Woody Allen, and half punk noise ointment fly, a japing Loki creating harsh electronic bleeps and screeching atonally in the middle of quiet ballads.  And perhaps this download, billed as the debut LP, demonstrates a maturing of the Cats sound: the record might be wilfully lo-fi and amateurishly oblique, but it’s built around real songs, songs that the King seems to be intent on respectfully delivering, rather than puckishly destroying.  Perhaps, to be brutal, a man who can’t sing in any conventionally recognised manner has found a way to use his voice to serve his fascinating little songs.  So, only “Recorded at the gathering of the tribes galley, New York City” (like Brooklyn Beckham, all tracks are simply named after the US location in which they were created, and all apparent typos and random capitalisations are the artist’s own) is an ugly King Of Caterwauls screech, whereas “Recorded at Maggie’s house, San Francisico” is a grunge Dylan buzz, and “Recorded on a cherry picker in seattle” uses a querulous spider-strand of a vocal line to sketch out a lyric of melancholic resignation.  It’s as if King Of Cats has given up trying to use his flawed voice to sing, and has worked out how to use it to act. If it’s good enough for Lou Reed...

Most tracks start and end with the nostalgic click of a tape recorder, and musically the LP follows suit, being primarily a collection of sparse, rickety acoustic skeletons on the verge of collapsing into dust, but this awkward delicacy serves the fragmented intimacy of the lyrics perfectly.  There are some subtly lovely touches too, “Recorded on a plane, in the high desert and seattle” pitching an almost melodic croon against some thin, stately keys, like The Folk Implosion channelling Federico Mompou, and our favourite, “Recorded in the damp in New Orleans” coming off like some spectral, netherworld Paul Simon duetting with a chirruping digital canary.  The unexpected tinny electronic drums on the closing track also offer a pleasing palette change.

Lyrically, like most Cats tracks, America’s songs are emotional, diaristic outbursts refracted and atomised until they read like emo haikus, but at their best they can be surprising, funny and moving.  “Recorded Next to the traintracks inFlagstaff Arizona” is our pick, opening with the typically opaque, “I bet you six pounds you’ll get what you want to, by the end of October”.  There’s a defeated bohemian air to lines like this, like a beat poet who has thrown out the asocial boasting and outsider celebrations (we always felt that Ginsberg at least partly saw “Howl” part one as a checklist), and replaced them with distanced self-disgust.  “Let’s prove we’re men by lighting fires and pissing them out again”, as a repeated refrain sardonically advises.

We’re not going to claim this album is great – at times it’s not even any good – but it does feel like a worthwhile work of art, at once heartfelt and deliberately confounding.  A local reviewer can spend a lot of time listening to music designed to rock a chum’s VI form ball, or calculated to attract a Radio 2 playlister, and that’s fine, but it’s always wonderful to hear idiosyncratic music made solely for the tiny fraction of the world who will understand it, even if we don’t always feel ourselves to be part of that miniscule fraternity.  One glorious moment in “Recorded in golden gate park, San Francisco,at the end of a show” sums up King Of Cats’s relaxed artistry, as we hear his keening voice in the background, and some audience members jockishly high-fiving next to the recording mike: If you find something to love in King Of Cats, you’ll be welcomed with open arms, but if you don’t, there’s no pressure.  You might even find yourself on his next LP.