The Zee! The Zee!

Fascinating aside, I agreed with the editor to change "youth worker" to something more specific about The Oxford Young Woman's Music Project, because we weren't sure whether youth worker was an accredited position, like social worker.  I've left the original text here because it's less clunky.

If you don't already, you should support YWMP, they're ace.

DESPICABLE ZEE – ATIGHEH (Self release)

The latest release from local drummer, producer and youth worker Zahra Tehrani has an accompanying book, a rough-snipped 70s sepia collage of photographs of her father after his emigration from Iran to the UK.  The music has a similarly handmade feel, combining fuzzy loops and vocal snippets with the artful looseness of a Kurt Schwitters piece, and also a similar air of parallel pride and melancholy.  The EP feels wonderfully like a low key, dewy-eyed version all your favourite highbrow electro-pop: “We Won’t Stop” is late Bjork without the grandstanding and abstract frocks, “Counting Cars” is The Knife with verdigris tarnishing all the shiny cyborg surfaces, and when the drums kick in on “Sidhe” it’s like a timid, battle-weary Add N To (X). 

“There are holes in our children’s memories”, claims the opening track, and although Atigheh is allusive and mysterious, lyrically and sonically, it may be about what is lost and what is gained as cultures meet and merge.  Whilst the booklet tells of the marriage of an Iranian man and an Irish woman, the low-level police persecution and a hilarious British culinary baptism in a plate of beans on toast, it also tells of the beginning of a new family.  The conflicting statements in “Counting Cars” are that “no matter where we land we always feel alone” and “keep on going, keep on living, keep on striving”.  The booklet states simply “roses grow limes dry up”. Debit/credit.  Regardless of whether this is the message, the EP has a soft, wintry beauty we recommend to anyone who appreciates understated electronica and intelligent pop.  Like a blurred and washed out old family snap, Atigheh is life-affirming and achingly sad at the same time.

All You Can Art Dubuffet

The second consecutive review where I've referenced Stewart Lee.  Perhaps I secretly want to be a comedy reviewer.

ART BRUT/ CASSELS/ HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN & UNCLE PEANUT, Crosstown, Bully, 18/2/19

Here Are The Young Men & Uncle Peanut are very upset with an old review in this very periodical, and have written the song “The Day The Hipsters Stole Our Look”, to prove that they look stupid on their own merits.  In fact, they don’t really look like hipsters, they look like lorry drivers suffering PTSD from a particularly harrowing ghost train.  Sour grapes aside, they’re great fun, each track a garish punk-hop rant rarely breaching two minutes.  Fans of Oxford’s Restructure will find plenty to enjoy, especially in their tale of brash kids who think they’re pop stars cluttering up a perfectly good pub.  Far more amusing than a band with such an infuriating name has any right to be.

Fun not being something Cassels are supposed to be.  They’re all math-grunge settings of 5000 word essays on neoliberalism and voting habits in the Cotswolds, aren’t they?  Well, yes, but tonight, they find time for a few jokes and a surreal discussion on relative drum popularity (snare for the square, rack tom for the maverick).  Also, angular as the songs might be, they no longer seem to be played by the sort of hyperactively awkward kids who get holes in their blazer elbows before the first week of term is out, but by a couple of riff-sucking rock heavies with a taste for both Sabbath and Shellac.  This feels like a new version of Cassels.  We really like them both.

“Popular culture no longer applies to me”, intones Eddie Argos toward the end of Art Brut’s fascinating set, a return to touring after 7 years, and nearly twice that since they were famous.  The question is, what does someone clearly in love with the magic of pop do when then they lose track of it entirely, and what does an absurdist do when our media landscape is more absurd than any fantasy.  The answer is, just admit it, play everything twice as loud and for twice as long and see what happens.

With their spoken and barked narratives and chugging, minimal rock, Art Brut are The Nightingales without the Beefheart abstraction, The Blue Aeroplanes without the well-thumbed paperbacks, Ten Benson without the Wire write-ups, and a comedy band without any jokes.  In fact, the best parts of this set are two long wayward monologues that are purest Stewart Lee (“You think I’m improvising this, but you can buy a CD of me saying the whole thing...even that bit, about the CD”).  Let’s be honest, a lot of the songs are pretty crap, but the experience as a whole is irrepressibly gleeful, and, at the end of the last song, as we all raise our hands as one to a bit nicked from “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”, suddenly it’s all oddly moving.  How did that happen?  Wasn’t this all a joke?  Does it matter that Argos and Emily Kane are now Facebook friends?  When did the hipsters steal out look?  Where the hell did all those years go so quickly?