Of course, the sudden discovery of a previously
cloistered genius would be lovely, but it’s more likely watching local
musicians that you’ll see talent slowly bloom: when I first saw them even
Stornoway were promising and intriguing rather than, err, that good. And so we come to Tamara Parsons-Baker. The first time I came across her, I was
struck by a clear voice and some decent tunes, but the only thing that really stuck
in the memory was her name, that couldmake Ray Winstone sound like Noel Coward just
by enunciating the syllables. A year or
so later, she was releasing some stronger music, although it was hard to truly
love because of the keening stridency of her vocals and with the general
pet-boiling air of a bitter jilted lover.
(Dear sub-editor: there is almost certainly a Bunny Wailer joke in here,
if you can be bothered).
But then she teamed up with The Martyrs, a rhythm section
with a serious background in Sextodecimo (one of the best and most brutal bands
in Oxford’s musical history) and Smilex, and started producing some truly
excellent wired blues rants and moans.
Her latest single, “Get Him Out” is a wonderful piece, expanding from
breathy intimacy to galvanising emotional outburst, with a surreally barbed
attack on millinery along the way. The backing
is controlled and expansive, a sort of blues-rock spaghetti western muscle-flex
featuring members of the Brasenose Chapel Choir, which is inventive yet subtle
enough to make all the woebegone strummers of Oxford’s acoustic scene disgusted
at their own lack of originality. This is exciting, individual music – seek it
out.
RAWZ & NEMROT – LIVE
FROM THE PANTHEON (Bandcamp)
Bandcamp tells us that
Rawz is sponsored by the Oxford Duplication Centre. For a great number of urban artists, this
would be fuel for an easy joke about unoriginal identikit tunes and hastily
xeroxed hip hop generica. Fortunately
this duo, with connections to Flooded Hallways and roots in East oxford’s G
Block, have more than enough ideas to make that jibe redundant; the only
downside is that this record is more exciting lyrically than musically. Our favourite hip hop productions pull off
the paradox of sounding raw yet lush, whereas most of these cuts are the
opposite – thin but busy. Perhaps it
makes sense over smartphone speakers on the nightbus. “Game Of You” is the only track to give us a
proper headnodding heavy beat, and the dirty trumpet smeared over the
rinky-dink Spanish twiddles of “Always There” is an all too rare bit of grit in
the sound.
The words, though, edge
towards excellence. With the exception
of one trouble/bubble platitude and flagrant use of the word “badness” (it’s
sounds clumsy no matter how handily it might rhyme with “madness”, people),
there are some excellent bars here, all delivered with evident verbal relish:
some lines are chewed over like Tangfastics, and some are rattled out like
sticks across corrugated tin, and all in natural, unaffected tones. Not only do the lines flow, but they are
intriguing: we spotted references to 70s sitcom The Good Life and celluloid classic Citizen Kane, and there are doubtless further depths. The cultural riffing has an MF Doom air, but
the delivery is more melancholically thoughtful, as encapsulated on the album’s
bleak, mortality-themed closer, which is more Godot than ghetto. At the moment, the synthesised loops lag
behind the lyrics in invention, and their pen is mightier than their Korg, but
get these boys in with a killer producer and something very special could
happen.
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