Truck & Coverage

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.