Yucatan, You Can Jive...

Note: please do not put the words Christmas Special onto your gig poster, unless something special is actually going to happen.  And wearing a hat doesn't count.

MAIIANS/ KID KIN/ THE CRISIS PROJECT, Idiot King, MAO, 1/11/14

There are times when good sounds aren’t the same as good music.  The Crisis Project, a man from Bristol with a rack of tech, certainly knows which buttons to punch and which pots to twist to produce a tasty stutter, lurch or glitch, continually derailing what might just be warm house tracks with inventive treatments a la Funkstorung, but sometimes you just want him to stop and think about structure for a moment.  The second tune promises hints of early Black Dog, but soon gets swamped by the tricks and twiddles, until it’s more like watching a hardware tutorial than a gig.  Make us feel as though you’re gifting us art, not as though you’re selling us Kaos pads.

Kid Kin is almost the opposite, setting up surprisingly simple rhythms and spicing them with cleanly elegant keyboard lines and swathes of ultra-fuzz guitar crescendos.  The average Kid Kin track sounds like Mogwai jamming on the tension cues from a mid-afternoon game show, which might have ended up an overbalanced mess if he weren’t so adept at arrangement, constructing solid melodic edifices before swamping them with a deluge of warm reverbed strumming.  Some moments are overly nice, perhaps, but even then we’re reminded of Angelo Badalamenti’s knack for studied kitsch (ironically, as Twin Peaks was projected behind Crisis Project, whereas Kid Kin gets the first 30 minutes of Labyrinth, which rather shoots down the soaring sonic beauty).

Maiians, with their sleek yet bouncy double-drummer synth instrumentals at first seem like an Oxford music throwback, melding The Evening sand Sunnyvale with scrambled bits of The Egg.  Even bashing away in a dark basement there’s a seductive smoothness to their music, taking the kick of funk, but cosmetically covering the sweat and airbrushing out the solos, in a manner that recalls disco genius Arthur Russell.  Oxford has never been short of the arch, the articulate and the impeccably measured – and we’re not just talking about music – but it’s refreshing to see a band that takes controlled eloquence and adds dancefloor nous.  By the end of an impressive set, our reference points have morphed: Maiians are Tortoise at their warmest crossed with the sort of post-samba outfit you always see perking up the runners half way along the London Marathon...which is far more satisfying than pressing the machines that make the nice noises, as it turns out.

Croll Of Honour

Today's hangover cure: an extra hour in bed, and some Stravinksy.

DAN CROLL/ PANAMA WEDDING, Communion/ Transmission, Bully, 11/10/14

Going to see new bands at the moment is like one long pub quiz.  It’s not so much that the music is retro – pop’s been retro since the second minute of its existence – it’s just the current reference points are such odd mid-80s choices that we spend most of our time amongst trendy, bopping audiences with furrowed brow, trying to dredge up names that have lain dormant in the grey cells for 25 years.  New York’s Panama Wedding, for example, with their cleanly emotive, breathy vocals and bleached funk keyboard stabs, are essentially Huey Lewis crossed with Brother Beyond.  Two tracks in, presented with a riff redolent of “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”, we’re gearing up to abhor them, but it turns out that good pop music, played by a band that’s impeccably rehearsed without dropping into cynical posturing, will always melt the hardest heart.  “Uma” might be more suited to a rom com miniature golf montage than the Bully, but essentially these guys are Hot Chip with the irony replaced by gosh-darned American pluck and, frankly, they’re just as good.

When they’re not spinning Now 7 for inspiration, hip young things are copping some tricks from African music, although Dan Croll has recorded in Durban with the mighty Ladysmith Black Mambazo, so he has clearly taken his influences more seriously than most.  But, ignoring a few high life licks, tonight’s set owes far more to smooth, mildly euphoric pop, somewhere between Black’s Moss Bros sophistication and The Beloved’s cultured Ibiza comedowns.  Croll’s voice might be a little thin and falsetto-happy, but he has an articulacy that lifts the songs beyond mere fluff.  Whilst our favourite tonight  is “Can You Hear Me?”, an improbably huge bass drum making it sound like MOP’s take on “Cold As Ice” without the hip-hop, and whilst the odd guitar wail or gratuitous Meatloaf drum fill sticks in our craw, Croll, like his support, reminds us that well-made pop, with an ear for a ripe melody, will never go out of style, regardless of fashion’s whims.

Rooster or Riding Hood?

It's been so long, it feels weird not to be pasting an Ocelot piece in the introduction.  Not sure whether I'll be replaced yet.  Anyway...

LITTLE RED – STICKS & STONES (All Will Be Well Records)

Whilst it might be common practice to rely on first impressions in the arenas of job interviews, speed dating and general elections, we reviewers are supposed to look more closely, to sift the full evidence objectively before drawing a conclusion.  Pity, really, because it means that we judge this album by local trio Little Red to be a pleasant bundle of contemporary folk, when our hearts are still alight from the opening track, that made us sit up and take notice like nothing else on the record.

Said tune, “What Say You” is just charming.  From a clean finger-picked guitar figure, that has a whiff of the cosy, unflurried ‘70s library music style that Trunk Records christened Fuzzy Felt Folk, closely entwined male and female vocals bob on a charming little melody, like a toy boat on a choppy duckpond.   It sounds limpidly lovely, but like so many great folk tunes, the jaunty music hides a black heart, the lyrics telling of betrayal, disappointment and visceral knife crime.  There is a wonderful moment where the guitar drops out to let the vocals declaim the chorus unaccompanied, that structurally seems to owe more to club bangers than any folk tradition, and in all, the song is a micro-epic, hinting at a full and macabre tale in its 1’48” running time.

It would be unfair to criticise the remaining 8 tracks too harshly, but none of them can challenge this jewel of an opener.  There are plenty of sweet, sugary harmonies in the vein of Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, and songs like “The Garden” recall our very own August List, albeit lacking in the bite that they would bring.  “Bonnie And Clyde” typifies the record, a beautifully put together little tune, right enough, but perhaps a touch too smooth, and with a “you and me against the world, babe” theme that is hackneyed and shopworn. 

In the future, we’d like them to either build on the wide-angled sounds of “Petal” or “Bonnie & Clyde” and make a giant, unashamed Clannad meets Fleetwood Mac studio confection, or alternatively to strip things down, get some dirt in the gears, and grind out something deeper and darker.  For now, this is an assured debut, with plenty to recommend it, but prettiness and poise might not bring out the best in Little Red – we’d like them to be rather less Little, and a much richer, bloodier Red.

Yellow Jack Swing

I just bought a ticket to this year's Audioscope festival in Oxford.  You should too.  Anyway, here's the last ever Ocelot article (from me, I mean, I presume it will carry on without me...although perhaps the pain will prove too much).

There are 6 members of Francis Pugh and the Whisky Singers.  None of them is called Francis Pugh, but they have been in various Oxfordshire bands of quite surprisingly varied styles over the years – you’ll quite probably have heard of some of them, but we won’t waste any time on the past, because the Whisky Singers don’t belong in the past...they belong in an eternal present where rousing folk tunes are sung in warm snugs, effortlessly emotional melodies are projected into the darkness outside, in defiance of bad times, misery and, you know, not being in an inn singing at the top of your lungs.

I’ve seen them play The Jericho Tavern, starting up acoustically in the downstairs bar, and leading listeners up the stairs.  In similarly inventive fashion, they’ve arranged folk pub crawls, where trundles down the roads of East Oxford are interspersed with waystations promising shots and shanties, pints and ballads.  There are some hints of early 70s Dylan about the band’s music, although they shy away from his more esoteric lyrical tangles, but any number of reference points can be drawn up...drawn up, and tossed away again, because any band that takes the best of train whistlin’ American song and melds it with unpretentious British folk traditions will always only be important in the moment, the precise second that the smoky tendrils of song drift out and surround you, the second your voice rises to sing along with songs you never heard before, yet somehow know.

Plus, they’ve got a cornet, that’s pretty cool.

YELLOW FEVER/ BIG TROPICS/ BE GOOD, Daisy Rodgers, Wheatsheaf 12/9/14

In a world that’s increasingly market-tested one of the great pleasures of small gigs is not knowing what to expect.  When Be Good take to the Daisy Rodgers stage, most often frequented by well-kempt indie poppers, we hadn’t predicted reverby late ‘50s balladry that sounds as if it should be about milkshake and eroticised motorbike crashes.  They deliver this post-doo wop very well, throwing in a little surf tremolo, some brash 80s colours and even a droplet of grunge slackness, and if it sometimes feels as though Marty McFly put the band together by nipping into his high school prom at ten year intervals, the effect is surprisingly cohesive: a few more gigs to settle the nerves, and another couple of tunes as strong as “I’d Have Told You Anything” and we could have a real contender.

A few years ago Big Tropics’ sound would have been an eyebrow-raiser too, but inexplicably in recent years the default setting for young bands in this town seems to have become sterilised, wipe-clean soul-pop in the vein of 5 Star and New Edition.  Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – we’ll take Debbie Gibson over Stevie Ray Vaughan any day – matters aren’t helped by bands like this who churn through up-beat tunes with dead-eyed resignation in place of gay abandon.   Whilst the gratuitous synth parts, straight from the 12” disco mix of the theme from CHiPs, go some way towards excusing the limply anonymous vocals, Big Tropics seem to have forgotten the golden rule of pop performance: always get high off your own supply.  We see a punter at the bar wearing white socks with trousers that are too short, which just about sums them up: it’s fun, it’s retro, but it doesn’t really fit together.

There are no shocks in Yellow Fever’s set.  They’ve become just as excellent a band as we knew they would be when we first saw them a few years ago, finding their teenage feet.  Again their sound, melding chiming hi-life guitar parts to A Certain Ratio style introspective indie-funk, has become more prevalent in the intervening years, but they manage to make the mixture smoother than many, by building it around a core of well-written tunes (indeed, a one-off cover of “Rip It Up And Start Again” fits snugly amongst their best tracks).  The sound has got heavier and denser in recent times, every jam block break counterbalanced by a crushing crescendo, but it’s an unforced charm, a sort of polite insouciance emanating from the stage that really proves how this band has grown in stature.  Like we say, character: it could be the most important thing your band will ever have.