Common Peeople was actually pretty good. The fact I only paid for one of the two days made the food and drink prices just about bearable. That Chas & Dave are more interesting than Primal Scream I had always suspected, but am now certain.
There is no reason for the multiple Blade Runner refs in this review, so don't try to crack the code.
PUNT, 11/5/16, PT/ Cellar/ Sheaf/ Turl St Kitchen/ White
Rabbit
The mark of a vintage Punt is not the great acts you see,
but the great acts you don’t. We can’t
remember a year where we’re forced to miss so many top notch performers, and
the fact that what we did see ranges from entertaining to outstanding brands
this one of the very best Punts in the event’s long and sometimes wobbly
history.
Someone with vivid memories of being wobbly is engineer
James Serjeant, who was electrocuted whilst setting up last year’s Punt, and so
wisely elected not to load in the Purple Turtle PA during a Ragnarok rehearsal rainstorm. Although it means he makes it to the end of
the night unfrazzled, it does mean that the PT runs late, and therefore we
don’t get to see as much of Moogieman
& The Masochists as we’d like.
We do, however, see enough to know they look like the PTA impersonating
Kraftwerk, they sound like Devo playing Tom Lehrer and they posit reusing
disposable cameras as a metaphor of minor civil disobedience.
The Cellar is only next door, but The Great Western Tears make it feel as though we’d ridden a transmit beam direct to Nashville. Theirs is unreconstructed country, easy on
the ear and impeccably performed. If the
tendency towards cliché puts you off, the syrupy beauty of the pedal steel soon
wins you back round.
Discovery of the night occurs at The Wheatsheaf and the
torrent of literate punk pop unleashed by The
Beckoning Fair Ones. Their dour,
snarky twitch rock reminds us of barely remembered Peel favourites Badgewearer
(look them up, it’ll be worth it) whilst the walls of synth vying with the
guitar point towards Future Of The Left.
Niall, from much-missed indie mongrels Dalls Don’t is on vocals and
guitar...and he seems to have found his
bandmates by entering the terms “low-slung female bassist” and “self-conscious
keyboard player” into some sort of auto-generative muso software. Amazing what they can do nowadays.
Continuing what is a rather noisy Punt, Slate Hearts impress with their unashamed
grunge: unashamed in that they sound like Mudhoney at their scuzziest, and that
one of them wears the least cool dungarees witnessed in public since 1991. If the dirty fluff from under the beds of a
ten storey flophouse were squeezed together into the form of riffs, it would
sound like this, ie fantastic.
The White Rabbit is the venue least used to hosting live
music at this year’s Punt, a fact attested by the fact the pub has left the
house stereo on as the bands play. Not
that you’d hear it with Kancho! in
full flow, mind. There’s not much to it,
drums are pummelled relentlessly and improbably overdriven bass strings
twanged, with the occasional snatch of shouting, but it sounds pretty superb. In filthy rock terms, they may be outfrizzed
by Slate Hearts and Too Many Poets, and Cherokee might be a more original
twopiece, but at their best Kancho!’s music is a shocking as their name’s
original meaning (don’t Google it at work; Google Badgewearer instead).
Coldredlight
is a name not well-known to Oxford’s gig-goers, and the Turl Street Kitchen’s
small room is crammed with people who have come along to find out who this new
act is. What we find is Gaby-Elise and
her guitar, playing some mesmeric, chiming songs. She has a strong and strident voice, which
oddly reminds us of Avril Lavigne, although an Avril Lavigne who’d swapped
skateboards, ripped jeans and hours at the mercy of her publicist’s thinktank
for evenings spent staring at misty moonlit hinterlands with nothing for
company but a Mazzy Star record and the ghost of Robert Johnson. We look forward to a less hectic visit to see
this act before too long.
Kanadia aren’t
necessarily noisy, but they are BIG.
Stadium big. Epic reverb on the
reverb big. They sound a bit like
pre-definite article Verve tackling some ’95 vintage PJ Harvey, and at one
point they go so far as to sound like U2 half-inching Roxy Music’s “Love Is The
Drug”. BIG, in other words. Cellar
engineer Jimmy is vaping some strange concoction that smells like candy floss,
and being caught up in a gust of this is not a trillion miles away from
experiencing Kanadia’s billowing confections.
Did we call Slate Hearts shameless? Well, that’s nothing compared to Crystallite, who are playing the sort
of mid-80s rock that can only be performed with one’s head in front of giant
fan and one’s foot on a monitor. By all
that is rational and reasonable this should be unbearable, but there’s so much
gusto and infectious energy onstage, nobody with any ounce of human decency
could dislike them. The singer is a
whirlwind, looking a lot like P!nk with everything exaggerated to the limit
(!ncarnad!ne, anyone?), and the band is having more fun than any single person
inside the ring road right now, with those in the frost two rows coming a close
second: in the face of exuberance like this, all our music journo, record
collector notions of what is acceptable get lost, like tears in rain.
You go see a band featuring 50% of Undersmile, you better
go prepared. A stiff drink in hand, we return to the PT for
Drore, who have taken the ‘Smile’s
sludge and given it a wee D-beat kick up the fundament. This is half rock and half silt, and
experiencing it feels like having a sore throat in your ears. In 1919, a man named Anthony di Stasio surfed
through Boston on a black sticky wave during the Great Molasses Flood, and we
now know what he must have felt like.
Yet another excellent band, then.
Lucy Leave
have steadily become one of our favourite local acts in the past year,
peppering their spiky pop with psychedelic curlicues and punk floyd
textures. They’re not always the
tidiest band in history - drummer Pete Smith often sounds as though he’s
working out which of his hands can move faster than the other – but all that
proper grown-up stuff is irrelevant when songs are weird, wonky and wonderfully
inviting.
We look up the word “crandle” on Urban Dictionary, and
are completely bemused by the various definitions. We see a couple of songs by the band Crandle and the result is much the same. The opening number is a pretty tune, for
which the female singer has pitch-shifted her voice down to a fruity baritone,
so that it sounds like a melange of Antony & The Johnsons, and Crash Test
Dummies. Then they do a Leonard Cohen
cover with cheap Casio backing. This may
or may not be any good, but it certainly won’t be forgotten.
Brown Glove
take to the stage dressed as distressed pierrots, and proceed to play a piece
of clockwork goth cabaret like JF Sebastian’s automata trapped in some Weimar of
the damned. With lots of harpsichord
canters, twisted diva soprano and tiny bursts of super-compressed thrash guitar
underpinning some very naughty lyrics, it’s a bit like The Tigerlillies
appearing in the Flesh World readers’
waves forum. Singer Gemma Moss has been
known to come up with some pretty spicy stage shows in the past, but with Brown
Glove, a duo with her partner David Kahl, she’s found a more subdued sense of
theatre that lets the songs take centre-stage.
And, that’s it.
The last pint is downed, and we murmur our goodbyes before stumbling
towards bed with our feet aching and our ears ringing. Time to die.
