Gubernator Ramble

 I wrote a pub quiz last night.  It mentioned Mark E Smith and Fighting Fantasy.  None of yer longest rivers and FA cup winners shite for me.  Anyway, here's the last Ocelot waffle.

Technical musical ability is a wonderful thing. Mastery of an instrument gives an artist such a wide tonal palette, and allows a performer to translate inspiration into music reality instantaneously.  But whilst I welcome the maestros and the divas, and shake the virtuosi by their delicate tapered hands, I cannot abide Proper Musicians.  PMs think that the ability to play a flat generic blues riff outweighs coming up with anything new; PMs spend more time buying equipment than thinking of things to do with it; PMs imagine they’re the gatekeepers of musical acceptability and the esoteric order keeping a holy flame alive, when really they’re more like sonic carpet layers.  Same safe thing, every time.  Union rates apply.

Recently, I slumbered through some sub-Zep PM porridge, which shall remain nameless.  Later, Walt Frisbee took to the stage.  Half the audience started to go mental, because what they did was actually fun, whilst the other PM-friendly half left...presumably for the same reason.  Walt Frisbee don’t care if you find their partydown hip hop collages, sequenced Gameboy bleeps and one-gear live drumming is stupuid, or that they’re committing the cardinal PM crime of pre-recording stuff, because they’re too busy leaping round the venue like loons, enjoying the experience alongside the audience.  Dumbass, maybe.  Copyright infringing,  doubtless.  But fun?  Damn right.  Go see them; but if you suspect that 8-bit tapestries and borrowed rap verses will enrage your PM sensibilities, best have some soothing camomile tea and a Stevie Ray Vaughan LP ready for when you get home.

MAYORS OF MIYAZAGI/ PUNCHING SWANS/ MASIRO/ JUMPSTART THE JUNGLE, Sheaf, 16/8/13

Punching Swans are good at endings.  Does that sound snide?  It’s not meant to.  They have a knack of knowing precisely when enough of their tannoy-blaring repetitive pop scuzz is enough, never dragging a riff beyond its use-by date, and often stopping with precision just when you think the music is running hotfoot down a giddy hill of disco hi-hats, beyond control.   Their sound adds an elastic twang to thick, grungy ratchetting, like Duane Eddy pitching in with The Jesus Lizard, and if it can occasionally fall back on easy sloganeering yelps, the effect is powerful.

Earlier we saw the debut set from Jumpstart The Jungle, a bass and drums duo who transcend the clichés of the lineup, and at their best are deeply intriguing, playing heavily distorted chintzy basslines that repeat headlong like the music from some trigger-happy Megadrive game, and throwing big, simple vocal lines over the top, like bullet point summaries of full songs.  By the end of the set, however, they drift into meandering, wistful melodies that don’t suit the vocalist, and leave the drummer with little to do.

Promoters Masiro are next up, and whilst they might be  intricate math-rockers, they never forget how great it sounds when rock bands make a noise like machine guns.  No matter how complex their writing gets, they always bring the music back to the sound of heavy field artillery, which is fine by us.  There are odd melancholic guitar moments, that aren’t too far from Metheny territory, but soon pummel any poncy thoughts of false harmonics or modal declensions out of your mind with jackhammer intensity.  This may be math rock, but it’s likely to beat you round the face with Fermat’s last theorem and stick an abacus up your rectum.

Mayors Of Miyazagi have made friends in Oxford, and it’s easy to see the fit: they play sprightly Johnny Foreigner songs, with just enough twists to avoid begin called “indie chug”, and they have that blasted romantic vibe that seems to go down a treat in the town.  Trouble is, although the music is an enjoyably tuneful clatter, the vocals have a geeky chortling tone that drags the songs down: be honest, “we drank sunshine through the haze of your cigarette” is not a line that gets any more profound by sounding like it’s sung by Moss from The IT Crowd.  Sometimes, there’s a fizzing boy-girl exchange that reminds us of Secret Rivals but the Mayors don’t quite capture the sneering vitriol, although they’re a better act.  And yet, the set is enjoyable, the band are suffused with energy, and there are hooks enough to snare the ears.  Mayors Of Miyazagi are a decent little live band.  Does that sounds snide?  Well, you know…  

Truck 2013 Saturday Pt 2

Luke Smith can be found in our record collection between Jimmy Smith and Mark E. Smith, which seems pretty fair as a) he’s pretty useful on the old keys, and b) he’s resolutely English, a deeply acquired taste, and has changed a band member every time we see him.  His lovable Stillgoe meets Betjeman schtick is much as it always was, even after a few Trucks away from the bill, although the addition of young female vocalist has turned set stalwart “Please Be My Girlfriend” into a sort of tea room version of The Smiths’ “Girl Afraid”.

Crash Of Rhinos are epic and wired and excited, but like lots of angular emotional rock there doesn’t seem to be much underneath it all worth being epic, wired or excited about.  They’re like getting Gielgud all dressed up in his Richard III costume, then making him recite excerpts from Teen Wolf.

Now, LA duo The Bots on the other hand are properly gigantic, a vicious mess of feral guitar and pummelled drums that takes in Sabbath riffs, Hendrix via Last Exit solos, punk vocals and more pummelled drums.  It’s irreverently witty, too, and our favourite moment is when one of them breaks off from caustic guitar screeches to stop and play three notes on a farty synth repeatedly for about two minutes.  The other one, in case you’re wondering, was pummelling the drums at the time.

And So I Watch You From Afar are on the main stage.  It’s almost too easy.  They might as well be called, And So I Nip Off To The Bar.  Which isn’t to say they’re rubbish, but their twiddly posty-rocky thingy is not as interesting as watching kids climb over the giant CD sculpture, or trying to explain cryptic crosswords to a Swede (partial success).  Fight Like Apes are better, not least because their singer is dressed like Siouxsie and if they are overly fond of a repeated singalong vocal line, they know when to kick in enough energy to take a song home.

The timetable says the Jamalot stage should host The Fridge & Bungle Experience now, but it looks a lot like Ilodica to us.  You have to love the way that he just plays his relaxed roots whilst members of the organisation set up the stage around him, laying down airy melodic lines and singing in a style equidistant between Max Romeo and Horace Andy as if he is lost in his own musical world.  He’s a proper ragamuffin too – we mean that in the original sense, his scruffy martial jacket makes him look like a disciple of The Libertines gone dread.  He jams out a track with Pieman, who is next on the bill, which is rather a sweet way to treat set changeovers.  Pieman is not, as you might expect, a Headcount tribute act, but a beatboxer of some frightening ability, who is incredibly adept at replicating dubstep wubs and scratchadelic curlicues as well as the traditional drum sounds.  And he can rap, it turns out.  The bastard.  Our only criticism is that his show is a crowd-pleasing diversion, we’d like to see him doing something more substantial one day, or perhaps a set of collaborations.

When The Subways run onstage, fists aloft, like second rate telethon presenters, or clueless youth workers, we fear for our teeth, which can only take so much grinding of a weekend.  But they’re actually  - whisper it – good fun.  They know their way from one end of a tune to another, they look as though they are sincerely having a ball onstage, and their set does actually make us a smile, even whilst we fail to recall any of their music mere seconds after it has finished.  Plus, it’s endearing that their stage moves are a vindication for clumsy wedding dad dancing the world over.

The only thing that annoys us about Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip is the “Vs”.  Considering they’re a laptop twiddler with a taste for 8 bit squiggles and late 90s breakbeat wrangling, and a beardy spoken word artist with a love for classic hip hop and Detroit hardcore, their music is a surprisingly cohesive collaboration.  We can, on the other hand, talk at great length about why we admire them, from the impossibly infectious music to the erudite lyrics to the fact that they’re politically engaged musicians who don’t resort to rabble-rousing simplifications.  This 45 minute show is inevitably a bit of a greatest hits workout, and we would have liked more time to explore their more esoteric work – not to mention a clearer vocal mix – but seeing a packed tent leap manically to a track we first saw Scroobius play solo to fewer than 20 people in The Zodiac, before the P.I.P. was a V.I.P., is pleasing.  In fact, whilst this set is going on, other stages were being headlined by ShaoDow and Rolo Tomassi, two more acts Nightshift first discovered playing blinding gigs  to q tiny smattering of listeners, and it’s truly heartwarming.  Or depressing, of course, depending on how you look at it.

After that endorphin blast, The Horrors can’t compete.  We think they’re fairly good on record, but the show is an anonymous parade of plodding drums and synth washes, like karaoke backing for a mid-80s Simple Minds song everyone’s forgotten.  There are hints of an atmospheric tune here and there, but after seeing Toy this is cruelly thin broth to serve as the final course.

It has been a thoroughly enjoyable festival, with the Saturday especially rich in treats.  On one of our visits to see the ever-helpful Rapture Records stall, one of the staff announces, “It’s OK!  Truck is complete, the Thomas Truax records have arrived!”.  New York’s Meccano music maestro made a welcome return to the Veterans stage this year, and our only concern for coming events is how mavericks like him find a place on the bill, and get a chance to earn their place as future veterans.  Once you felt the curatorial sway over Truck, from the Bennetts themselves to Trailerpark’s PC, to Alan Day, and if this resulted in some mystifying decisions, it also gave the festival a stamp of identity that nowadays doesn’t seem to quite remain.  We saw some truly outstanding acts this weekend, but if you want to, you can go and see most of them sharing bills at other festivals all the way through the summer.  As we said at the outset, mix up the stages, and throw in some more adventurous act choices, and Truck could easily be better now than it ever has been, but if it becomes just one more identikit summer stop for the floral welly crew, then we’ll lose a vital part of what always made it special, and all the volleyball nets in the world will never buy that back.

Truck Festival 2013 Saturday

On Saturday, the Virgins stage becomes the Veterans stage, hosting old Truck regulars.  We wonder whether the presence of this and the Saloon was some clause in the contract when Y Not took over the Truck name, to give the Bennetts something to do, but it’s quite good fun, even if it does mean that at times on Saturday there’s polite Americana on two stages within feet of each other, which is rather beyond the call of duty.  Thankfully, The Holy Orders aren’t guilty of that, instead thrashing out some scrunchy rock with small grunge inflections, that just screams “Tuning is for losers!”.

Bob Dylan.  Nick Drake. Stevie Wonder.  It’s a favourite Nightshift game to list acts who are great, but who only inspire rubbish artists. In a similar vein, when we see that the programme likens Candice Gordon to Patti Smith and Nick Cave we know that she will actually be a decent, but ultimately generic lightly theatrical rock chick.  There are shades of Little Fish about this band, and some cleaned up Cramps rockabilly, but if they ever come up with anything that sounds remotely like “Tupelo” or “Free Money” we must have been buying coffee at the time.

We’re all for kids who can’t play making pop music, to a certain extent that’s what it’s for, but even we can’t get on with Bentcousin, a pair of twins jigging clumsily about, singing flatly about sibling rivalry and double Chemistry and Panini sticker albums (possibly) over some floppy pop. Plus they eviscerate “Boys Keep Swinging” and dance laughingly on its defiled cadaver.  One of them is wearing a Wham! T-shirt and the make-your-own-fun vibe is so cloying it really is uncannily like watching an 80s episode of Why Don’t You?  So, naturally, we go off and do something less boring instead.

Nairobi offer oddball pop of a more palatable nature.  As we enter the Jamalot tent, the band is laying down some refined white funk and someone is doing a strange yodelling vocal over the top.  It’s like Hall & Oates fronted by Emo Philips, which is obviously great.  Later they do some African jive, and throw in a few synth lines that sound like chase scenes from Knight Rider, and it’s all bloody good fun, and approximately four thousand times better than last time we saw them.

We’re told Interlocutor are an 11-piece band, so we go and see them just to repay their effort carrying all the gear across the field.  But, what’s this?  Tenor sax, yes, but baritone?  And a trombone?  Oh, man, this is going to kick jazz-ska-swing botty, let’s get a beer in, and go mental to the first number which...sounds like “Dancing In The Moonlight” at half speed coming down the phone whilst we’re on hold to British Gas.  Oh.  And the next track is a drab elevator waltz that sounds like Ian Brodie having a crack at being a crooner, but with the theory that Hasselhoff was a better role model than Sinatra.  And a cold. 

We drop in on The Heavy Dexters just to burn this image from our mind, and get some proper sax action, as we know their skirling soprano playing is the cherry on their acid jazz cake.  Admittedly, the JTQ styled funk workouts fit the afternoon better than the open-ended muso jazz ballads, but there’s definitely a place at Truck for a locally-grown live dance act to wear out some shoe leather.  Some ropy jazz-sex faces on display from the keyboard player might be too much for those with weak stomachs, though.

Kimberly Anne is today’s Ady Suleiman, except she’s actually better.  Whilst she plays guitar a percussionist adds flourishes on a small stand-up drum kit (side on, we’re happy to report), and her outstanding muscular, low voice draws a line between the rich sincerity of Tracey Chapman and the sweet urban froth of TLC.  This set of young, slick pop sounds as though it was built to move the heart and the feet, and not shift mobile phones, which is sadly rare nowadays.  She must be good, because we’ve got this far into the review and not mentioned her amazing hair, which looks like a drunken guardsman’s wonky busby.

In a throwback to our Candice Gordon experience , the programme likens Pylo to Radiohead and Pink Floyd, but we are unsurprised to find that they sound more like Keane and U2.  They at least have the decency to sound like the very best bits of Keane and U2.  Passable.

Toy have been recommended to us by a big Meatloaf fan, which would normally be enough to send us striding in the opposite direction, but this Meatloaf fan also really likes Beefheart, so we thought we’d give them a try.  Very good choice.  Toy’s post-Velvets pop is a little like The Primitives, but with taut motorik drums driving everything relentlessly onwards, and some nifty McCartney guitar parts to hold the tunes together.  We’re not sure if it’s bubblegum kraut or amphetamine shoegaze, but it’s pretty damn intoxicating, and there always seems to be another plateau of guitar noise for the songs to leap up to: if you’ve ever listened to the first Psychedelic Furs LP and thought, “this could really do with fat layers of Korg in place of the goth”, you’re in luck.  They have horrible ratty bogan haircuts though, perhaps they could give Kimberly Anne’s mum a ring.

The Ramshackle Union Band are playing some pretty good country stuff in the Saloon, according to what we catch through the window.  Still, there won’t be a shortage of country in there for the rest of they day, so let’s not tarry.  Back in the Veterans tent, we realise that Katy Rose is actually KTB – we think we did know this, somewhere deep down – and that The Cavalry Parade is actually Joe Bennett on a lap steel, which we didn’t know but is still not causing any reels of shock, let’s be honest.  Katy has a very good voice  as we well know, and, if the material can be a touch refined for our tastes, “Bluebird” is still a lovely song.

Catching sight of a frisbee arcing across the sky as we leave the tent, we investigate the campsite to find out just how many people go to music festivals to play catch and sit on folding chairs a long longb way from any music.  Do they not know that you can do that in the park from free?  Still, better than the Barn on Saturday, which has been filled with sand and now has a tiki beach bar and a prominent volleyball set, so that people can ignore the musicians right in front of their faces.  Seems odd to us, and it looks as though Axes feel the same, judging by comments.  The band is good enough to get attention, throwing tricksy elements together with just enough gleeful abandon to stop them turning into annoying clever dick neo-proggers (the fact that they have track titles like “Jon Bon Jela” and “Fleetwood Math” probably puts paid to that danger).  They’re sort of Islet junior, and they’re fine by us, although the music tends to be all breaks and endings, corners and offcuts on offer when a prime fillet would be tasty once in a while.

We can’t really believe that Big Scary Monster and Alopop! have bothered to lug all this sand into the Barn, but then again we don’t quite see the attraction of CDs in the shape of Megatron or compilation download codes hidden inside taxidermied squirrels, or whatever else it is they come up with.  We do, however, like the idea of small acts playing in front of the stage between the main bands, such as Thrill Collins, a busking trio who knock out some energetic, slightly ironic medleys.  Nothing revolutionary, but as a little sorbet between courses, we think they’re pretty great.