Here's the Friday from this year's Truck. Some of it has been in Nutshaft, and some of it hasn't. And here's the July Ocelot thingummy, whilst we're about it:
I was going to write about
Hot Hooves this month, but you all know about them already. You do, right? If you don’t know about Hot Hooves and Mac
and The Point and Talulah Gosh and Les Clochards then simply chuck this
magazine over your shoulder and go and find out.
Instead, I’m going to talk
about a band I know nothing about, just because I saw them last night and they
were good. All I know about Jeff Wode is
that they’re named after a scene in Withnail
& I, and that they’re from Oxford, and that I saw them last night, and
that they were good, but I still want to write about them because randomly walking
into a small venue to see a young trio playing raucous but witty music is what
makes me happy. Jeff Wode don’t take
themselves too seriously, but still put their backs into the music. Not enough bands do this. Jeff Wode are sloppy and untrained, but not
half-arsed. Wish I could say that more
often, too. Their abrasive, melodic,
angry, sensitive thrash pop reminded me a little of Sebadoh at their grimiest,
and even of The Lemonheads in their early punk days, but their real victory is
making stodgy, sticky grunge thumping sound sly and hypnotic, and not
brattishly petulant. A band like this is
a wonderful discovery at the bottom of the bill. People who turn up late wonder
why they never see the great new bands before anyone else: well, it’s free to
those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t.
TRUCK FESTIVAL, Hill Farm, Steventon,
19-20/7/13
This
year, it’s a sort of Omnitruck. There
are little bits of everything that has been popular in Trucks past (except
metal) all dotted around the site on special stages: there are big, slightly
backward looking indie names on the main stage, there’s a little metal shed
full of Americana, there are old characters and a smattering of new local
bands, some stoned East Oxonians spinning reggae, and a BSM/Alcopop! stage for
people who like math pop and dressing like Ferris Bueller. It’s a lovely lineup, and our only wish is
that it could be a little less ghettoised, and that styles could be mixed up on
different stages, as it was this that drew us to Truck in the first place. And there should be probably be some metal.
Our
weekend starts with Oxford’s Dallas
Don’t, who attack Postcard Records’ jangle with the snarl of Future Of The
Left, and who spark up rich, poetic indie tunes by throwing themselves at them
full pelt – the drummer especially plays like he’s trying to stab excitable
cockroaches with a skewer.
We
feel as though new stage The Great Western Whiskey Saloon And Blues Kitchen was
probably created by polling the residents of the Abingdon area about what
they’d want from a festival: proper pub stools, no stupid new-fangled pop music
and vintage Watneys beermats, please, squire.
Apart from the fact that the
doorway isn’t really big enough, and that moving on to spirits would be
ill-advised in this searing sunshine, this turns out to be a wonderful stage,
hosting quality performers, and warm-natured crowds. Opening act The Spare Room, for example, layer some wonderful West Coast three-part
harmonies over pretty little guitar and glock ditties, which proves that
novelty isn’t the only route to success.
Although
we could have done with more as we approached the Market Stage for Wildswim. Instead of the mixture of quirky electronica
and Victorian light opera we’ve got from them before, we hear something that
sounds worryingly like Tears For Fears, so we do a quick 180 and visit Truly Ford at the Virgins stage instead,
which seems to be the old BBC Introducing stage, give or take. She’s a young singer from Faringdon (although
her Twitter account proves she can’t spell it, so it may be some sort of
elaborate lie, probably connected with the moonlanding), and she shows some
real promise, dark cello tones enriching strong, approachably dramatic
compositions. Our only real complaint is
that she tends to over-emote vocally, which is the curse of current pop music:
schoolkids should be made to listen exclusively to Billie Holiday and Leonard
Cohen for at least two years before being allowed a sniff of Alicia Keys.
Same
story with Lillian Todd Jones, who
seems to be inflating some perfectly decent songs to bursting point, when they
might be better off left alone. Still,
the main stage is a poisoned chalice in the early afternoon when it’s too hot
even to muster the energy to throw rocks at the twat in the woodland onesie,so
she and her band are allowed to try anything to keep people’s attention. Plus she uses the word “meniscus” in a song,
which gets her bonus BBC4 points. She
should have been on at Cornbury, they would have flipped for her over
there...they’d probably think this was some of that punk rock they’d been
hearing so much about.
At
this point we take our second trip to the Barn.
Now, are you reading this, Truck festival? Because, let us just mention something at
this juncture, that we end up saying every year: the Barn is awful. It could have been purposely designed as the
worst acoustic environment in which to listen to music by an evil sonic
scientist – a sort of anti-matter Lee Perry, perhaps – and yet the logic seems
to have been to throw all the loudest acts in there. When each strike of the snare takes 12 bars
to decay, actually hearing a band takes a heroic effort of concentration and
deduction, and even the very best act’s set is like watching 2001 through the bottom of a pint pot. The
Physics House Band are not the very best act, although they’re certainly
not hateworthy, doling out complex jazz rock objets d’art. They loosely resemble Battles, although
they’re really just Skirmishes, and beneath all the math slapping crescendos
their hermetic muso style reminds us ultimately of Weather Report. And speaking of weather report, it’s glorious
summer, so why are we in a boomy cattle shed listening to this?
Liverpool’s
Ady Suleiman provides one of a couple
of examples this weekend of an act that is shamelessly commercial, yet not
hideously calculated (NB: we steered well clear of Lewis Watson). He has a fine vocal style, with plenty of
contempo-chops and smooth jazzy phrasing, existing in a strange but comfortable
space between Sheeran and Sade, and he can pen an ear-catching lyric too. Good luck to him.
We’re
sitting back at the main stage, trying to think of a way to describe Milo Greene, so we ask the man next to
us for an adjective. “Benign”, he
says. Yeah, that’ll do. Their Fleet Foxes style music seems to want
to be anthemically big and subtly intimate simultaneously, and so ends up
middlingly harmless. Benign. Good like a tumour is good: not exactly
desirable in and of itself, but you suppose things could have turned out a lot
worse.
Max Raptor make some popcore
shapes, mixing wiry, lean energy with friendly old new wave chorus lines,
something in the manner of early Biffy Clyro covering The Skids at a screamo
night, but we’re in a sitting down mood so we return to the Virgins stage. Generally, pretention is the worst crime a
singer songwriter can commit – in the literal sense of pretending to be what
they’re not, we quite like it when songs are about gryphons and particle
physics and Mallarme, it at least fills the review word count nicely – but Ags Connolly is the exception. Despite being a rural Oxfordshire boy who can
almost certainly spell Faringdon and who has a speaking voice like a turnip
salesman, when he sings it’s in a deep, western croon that sounds as though it’s
being broadcast direct from Nashville (to us, that is – to Americans it
probably sounds like Dick Van Dyke in Mary
Poppins). And that should mean that
we walk away without giving him a second listen, but something about his songs
keep us enrapt. It’s probably the lazily
lachrymose melodies, and the sleepy-eyed resignation, that hits the spot in the
soul where songs don’t need to be complex or original, they just need to be
right. That whiskey bar suddenly seems
like a much better idea.
We
love the members of the local Round Table and clergy who have supplied food at
Truck for so many years, but we’re not complaining that there’s a nice a
separate enclave for other culinary options this year, including fresh bread,
pizzas, smoothies and real coffee, which is particularly welcome on Saturday
morning, even though the organisation behind the counter makes the Jamalot crew
look like NASA. There are also stalls
from charities, instrument builders, second-hand clothes sellers: it’s like a
cheery little market place, which is only let down by the fact that it’s in a
different field from the, err, Market stage.
The History Of Apple Pie are
on there. But The Masterclass On Mic
Technique certainly ain’t. Despite the
fact that the vocals are pretty much inaudible, the music sounds like Weezer
played by fifth-formers, which wouldn’t be so bad, if the gloriously useless
programme hadn’t claimed they sound like Galaxie 500 and Smashing Pumpkins.
Tony
Jezzard, who sadly passed away recently, provided sound for most of the events
in Truck’s history, so we go to see one of his old bands, The Shapes, in the Saloon to raise a glass in his memory. Whether the band find it as emotionally
charged as we do, we’re not sure, but they play fantastically, and with more a
touch more gusto than we’ve witnessed previously, adding a tang to their
accessible mixture of Van Morrison, The Rembrandts and Squeeze.
If
you find Ten Benson a bit too baroque, then you might appreciate guitar and
drums duo Wet Nuns, who bash away at
their huge stoner punk tracks like a cross between Winnebago Deal and Status
Quo. They do one song that just sounds
like the riff from “Foxy Lady” made out of concrete over and over again. Then they do another that sounds exactly the
same. Cracking stuff.
