Sunday 4 May 2014

Shift Key Personnel

Here's the latest Nightshift review and the latest Ocelot piece.  Might stop doing these soon - have to write another one later today, and I'm running out of ideas.  Also, not convinced anybody whatsoever reads it...in Oxford, anyhow.  Perhap they do in Salisbury, but that's not much use...although it does allow them to read music crit written in sentences.



Search enough charity shops and record fairs and sooner or later you’ll come across one of the LPs that John Betjeman made setting his music to lightly funky session jams.  They’re a lot of fun, and you certainly can’t imagine any poet laureate since following suit (although we’d be prepared to hand over good money for a soundclash between Carol Ann Duffy and Stephen “Tintin” Duffy), but in Oxford we don’t really need them, because we have The Relationships.  This quartet, that has just released their 4th album, Phase, is centred round the clipped, poetic lyrics of East Oxford bard Richard Ramage, who could easily give Sir John a run for his (pre-decimal) money.

The words are not only masterfully controlled, they’re also fascinated by a Betjemanian period in Britain’s history; whilst most rockers see the mid-50s as the birth of cultural validity, Ramage sees it differently, wishing to retire to the decade in question if “Mullioned Sunshine Windows” is to believed.  If you want to understand contemporary culture, the band seem to say, you have to appreciate that complex moment where Victorian constructs met the post-war social contract, where domestic art struggled to find a character in that lacuna between Vorticism and The Beatles’ first LP.  Find me a lyricist who can drop references to antimacassars and Brian Jones with such elegance, and I’ll buy you a season pass for the Clapham omnibus.

But the band isn’t just about the librettist, the airy, summery indie music is played by some of the most technically adept, yet tastefully restrained players in the whole shire, and will please anyone with a penchant for Postcard Records, the Canterbury scene  and early R.E.M.  The Relationships: cheaper than a time machine, rockinger than a History BA.
  




NIGHTWORKERS/ THE GRACEFUL SLICKS, The Cellar, 12/4/14

The only bad thing about The Graceful Slicks' first number is that it has to finish.  Because, you see, not only does their work have an ahistorical simplicity and atavistic two chord punch that is less a collection of music, more a glimpse into the universal anima mundi, but they tend to fluff the endings up.  To some ears tonight’s set will be a generic string of psychedelic grooves and garage buzz that never seems to quite get as far as an actual song, whereas to others it will be a whirlwind of wordless howls and mysterious murmurs, a primitive Lascaux painting in sonic form, an ochre mammoth sketched in sludgy blues changes.   We fall in the latter camp, and especially love “Bulbul Tarang”, not so much a composition as a peaty aroma of sound, cut through with sheet aluminium slashes from the bowed guitar.  It’s timeless, transcendent and hypnotic.  But, you know, they could still do with fluffing up the endings a bit less.

A tune or two into their set, the headliners announce, “We’re not wankers from Brighton”.  Yes, we can see how you’d wish to clarify that, seeing as it can appear as like Nathan-Barley-On-Sea.  A few bars later, the tired mind decodes the stage drawl:  “We’re Nightworkers, from Brighton”.  And work they do, throwing themselves wildly into a set composed primarily of sweat and wildly waggled outdated haircuts.   The music leans towards classic rock with a laddish swagger and a lightly narcotic haze – think Black Rebel Motorcycle Club meets Cast – and is highly entertaining, even if it never reaches the ignition point the songs crave.  The vocals are strong, yet malleable enough to offer some variation, and the keys are excellent, finding unexpected space in the songs to fill with cheeky synth lines or vintage thriller Rhodes.  In fact, the whole band are very good, but we still find our attention wandering before the gig is over.  Nightworkers: they’re not wankers, not by any means, but they’re not our new favourite band, either.