Paper Money

I wasn't best happy with this review. It's all fine, but I'm not sure I captured the last band very well, and teetered too much between liking and disliking the opener. Still, it's Supernormal this weekend, and I have a review pass, so expect a very long review before too long!

DAILY TOLL/ MYSTERY BISCUIT/ FIVER, OMS, Library, 11/7/25 

It’s like a game you might play after Christmas dinner, describe Fiver without using the word “Nirvana”. The solution, saying “”Mudhoney, might be considered gamesmanship and cause Granny to stomp off to the sherry decanter in a huff, but it’s actually a smart move, because Fiver’s take on US grunge has a rootsier, warmer heart that aligns them with the second in command in Seattle’s 90s army. There are even a couple of needling atonal moments which recall Dinosaur Jr, though in fairness, there are also times when Fiver remind us what side of the Atlantic they’re from, delivering bouncy rock somewhere between Wildhearts with a healthier lifestyle and Therapy? without the library cards. Inverting the adage, Fiver tonight suggest that the destination is more important than the journey, and to get to pleasingly chunky climaxes and rousing choruses we have to start each song with slightly clunky, chugging rhythms.  

Mind you there’s chugging and there’s chugging. Forget sub-Oasis pedestrian rockers, think of the steady heartbeat of John Lee Hooker, the relentless greasy grooves of ZZ Top, and the sleek kraut repetition of Can. Mystery Biscuit chug like a sleek silver machine rather than a rumbling old banger, painting bright Edgar Froese synth lines over modern psych tunes. They are experts at knowing when to build, and whenever it feels as though the rhythms couldn’t get more intense Marc Burgess switches from keys to second guitar and the music soars even higher. Perhaps the best track tonight is a slower burn, featuring a long recording of poet e e cummings, which is great with a capital G (somewhat ironically). 

Australia’s Daily Toll seem like the sort of band who’d appreciate a gag about the orthographical preferences of Modernist writers, they have a bookish indie air which makes one think of hand-illustrated C90s of Peel sessions and annotated paperbacks. Although their opening number swims into view from a miasma of bowed bass, their vintage introspective indie isn’t aggressively lofi, but neither is it prettily twee and toothless. Perhaps the best reference point is Yo La Tengo at their subtlest, with a touch of Mazzy Star around the glistening guitar, in handmade Sebadoh wrapping. Despite harking back to a very specific era, there’s plenty of variation, from a surprisingly insistent Jah Wobble bassline in one number to a bit of Dry Cleaning recitation in another, and even a studiously rocking cousin of ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’. Their name evokes enrvating chores, but this inventive band is quietly invigorating. 

Ganja Crew

The last of the latest batch of LFTWY pieces. I rather like this one, though it does very slightly poke fun at other contributors to the zine.

LADYTRON – 604 (Invicta Hi-Fi)

We probably all have a phonobiography, a list of music that is intrinsically tied to certain eras in our lives. We read a lot of that in this very zine, records that spun as writers met their spouse, recovered from measles, or finished Manic Miner, discs dropped like markers on the Google Maps of their own history. Well, the past is a foreign county, LP Hartley reckoned (in between fly fishing and making jam, probably, I’ve done no research), so why not a country I’ve never visited? One where I don’t even know the currency or the approximate average rainfall: an Azerbaijan of times past, let’s say. 

So, the other day I went into the charity shop where one could get 10 CDs for a fiver - which is really too many for a deal, but I can rarely walk away from them - including 604, Ladytron’s debut album released in February 2001. I have never heard this record before, and have only the vaguest memories of hearing a track or two by them in the past, and I’ll type this review live as I listen for the first time.  Warning: may not include full sentences. Or full sense. What we're gonna do right here is go Baku, way Baku, Baku into time. 

mu-tron: Stomping descending motif.  Wiggly pre-wub bass tones.  Layers of treacly synth, a bit like a Add N To (X). Atonal elements.  An almost melancholic stately melody line on top, hints of Aphex. This is great, actually. 

discotraxx: What language was that?  It would be cool if it were Azerbaijani, but It was probably Bulgarian, judging by the fact the vocalist, Mira Aroyo is from there, as Wikiedia tells me.  Must stop checking Wikipedia, this temporal foreign country doesn’t have Ordnance Survey. Anyway, adding Marilyn Monroe-as-a-girl vocals changes the vibe, not yet sure whether I like that as much. Cantering bassline with a Bangelis vibe (that’s Vangelis that slaps harder, FYI).  

another breakfast with you: Telephone type noises, reminding me of that B12 track ‘Telefone 529’ (I’m allowed to look that up, don’t write in). Thin organ.  you can hear the live playing in the topline, it’s not quantised. Sort of like half a Madonna song. 

CSKA sofia: I guess I’m not allowed to look up what those letters mean, but I guess Sofia is the Bulgarian capital, not some girl. Kitsch instrumental with Farfisa-like tones and non-dance drum machine parts.   

the way that I found you: Simple uninflected but slightly breathy vocals make this like Broadcast, without the VHS horror and art archivism.  Simple romance for consumers. 

paco!: Clearly an homage to Are You being Served: “4th floor, electronica, fake antiques, and lingerie”, which is a rum mix. Nice thin bongo rhythm, glides mechanically but smoothly, like a long shopping centre escalator. 

commodore rock: The title makes me thing of ‘Computer Club’ by Datarock, though perhaps Commodore Rock is in the navy (the capitalisation is pretty random on the sleeve, so I have no idea). Proto-techno gyrations, the first time this LP has made me feel like dancing. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes advertising jingle by Model 500. French-accented spoken vocals remind me of Dr Calculus (see previous LFTWY article, if you know what’s good for you). 

ZMEYKA: Violin scrapes, and interesting background noises. Not in tune, or even noticeably related to what’s happening up front. Reminds me of MES methods, and it makes what might be a slightly generic eletro plod more interesting. 

playgirl: Tapping into that sort of Barbarella wide-eyed innocent sexiness. Bit dated, to be honest, but still no harm done. The chords cycle comfortably, it’s decent, but a bit static and thin on ideas – compare this with Stereolab’s take on 60s chintz, and it loses. 

I’m with the pilots: Shimmying sassy little bassline.  Sounds like it could be a Christine Aguilera track. Sprechgesang vocals, wry and aloof, like Black Box Recorder, though this doesn’t have the supercilious humour. 

this is our sound: Title is valid, they do sound like this (I mean, there’s a paradox there, but you get the gist) – perambulatory paced synth bass, simple drums, airy ditty vox. 

he took her to a movie: Unashamedly ‘The Model’. Like, not even trying to hide it at all. Title is most of the lyrics. Warhol faux-simplicity. 

laughing cavalier: Abstract and moody, like something from a Czech art film. Only a minute long, so no time to type any mo- 

lady bird: It’s two words, so maybe it’s about the old US first lady, not the insect. Quite close to a chart pop song, if the buzz and clunk were brightened and smoothed. Hints of Kylie. Nothing wrong with that, mind. Nice synth-glock outro. 

JET AGE: These capitals are driving me mad, I’m spending more time checking these are right than reviewing. Is there a snippet of the percussion breakbeat from ‘Apache’ by Incredible Bongo Band? A more wintry tone than the rest of the album. 

skools out: Quiet and tinny music, with the vocals very loud (are my computer speakers a little broken?  Surely it can’t be as “AM radio on the other side of a sand dune” thin as this.  Oh wait, the bass and mids have come in, as you were). Bassline one is from classic grease rock – I guess because of the titular ref to Alice Cooper (though their music is more elegant, for the most part, this sounds like something Ten Benson would have swiped from some forgotten dumbass protoglam single). There is no hidden track, the 90s are over, fools. 

Well that was quite good fun. I honestly liked the album, but just inspiring this stupid idea for a zine article was worth my 50p - which at the current exchange rate is 1 manat and 14 gapiks (yes, I looked it up...but I kept the mean precipitation as a sweet mystery to uncover another day). 

Ha, Marsupial Star

As promised, here's another from a LFTWY annual round-up. I'm pretty happy with this piece, it makes a valid general observation, whilst still acting as a review of the record itself, and it's pretty concise (there are no word limits at LFTWY, but I still keep myself to a few hundred, I think it's better for all concerned).

KID KOALA – CARPAL TUNNEL SYNDROME (Ninja Tune) 

You all know what guitarists are like. These blokes – they're always blokes – spend countless hours arguing about technique, studying the minutest elements of their heroes’ performances and attempting to emulate them, giving ability primacy over invention, and being, you know, no fun at all to be with. But, true though this might be, it’s triply true of turntablism fans. I can think of no instrument that is so tied to a narrow clutch of stylistic tropes as DJing and no group of fans that are such a bro-centration of conservatives (listening to deckheads arguing about how vinyl scratching is better than the modern digital version for five minutes is enough to make you long for that sweaty guy in the blues jam lecturing about valve amps). Do a quick search online for great turntable performances and you won’t find sweet musical excerpt, like Eric B clinically exploring a vocal phrase whilst Rakim takes a break on the mic, you won’t find the foundational methods and creations of Grand Wizard Theodore, and you sure as hell won’t find experimenters like Christian Marclay or Otomo Yoshihide. What you’ll find is hundreds of extracts from DMC mixing championships over the years, and a slew of clips in which a DJ does exactly the same things, but just fractionally faster, slicker or, occasionally, whilst standing on their head. More than any other slice of musical life, DJing is intrinsically connected with competition. Scratching isn’t art, it’s athletics. 

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a great DJ record because Kid Koala has technique coming out of his tufty grey ears, and has a crate-digger's sense of a funky rhythm to loop in classic hip-hop style, but he also has exactly zero interest in showing off, and instead a huge desire to intrigue and entertain. You can definitely dance to some of this record – or, at least, nod along whilst slumped in a sofa in the early hours – and ‘Fender Bender’ and ‘Roboshuffle’ aren’t too far from the sort of grooves you might get from DJ Shadow or Cut Chemist, but a lot of the record explores abstraction in a way that’s as close to Martin Tétreault as it is to Grandmaster Flash: check the tiny insectile clicks and chitters of ‘Scurvy’ , or the tiny fludge sounds stacked up on ‘Nerdball’, which are fast as hell and doubtless mindblowingly difficult to pull off, but also a world from the clean cuts that accepted technique requires. Lots of spoken elements are sliced or sped up so intensely that they are disconnected from any meaning, untethered phonemes swarming like flying ants, and when statements are clear, they are normally comical, from the wry knowingness of a Foley artist discussing how to make different noises or a stand-up ridiculing DJs, to the outright gagginess of the two ‘Barhopper’ tracks, which act as surreal lessons in pick-up artistry by jamming together lines form a multitiude of sources.  

The funniest parts of the record require no words at all though. ‘Drunk Trumpet’ sounds exactly as you might imagine, a hilariously woozy attack on a horn sample over a stumbling double bass lope, and I can’t imagine anyone not laughing at the wonky poultry party that is ‘Like Irregular Chickens’. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is a brilliant album to play to someone who doesn’t like hip-hop DJing so they can find out what a thoughtful and witty artist can create, but it’s an even better record to play to somebody who likes it too much, just to remind them that creativity is always more important than dexterity. 

Pole Opinion

I have received a new batch of LFTWY issues, so expect 3 old album reviews in quick succession. This is from the 1999 issue. Small but crucial typo from the print version fixed, accuracy fans!

POLE – 2 (Kiff SM) 

The great paradox of dub is that it sounds simultaneously cosmically other-worldly, and entirely organic. For all the toms that sound like they’re being played inside Krakatoa, or the hi-hats that sound like they’re being beamed in from Venus, you can never forget the physical input required to make this music: fingers pushing faders, hands leaping between dials, tape spooling in a battered Echoplex. Although there were plenty of decent records produced in the early 90s’ European digidub micromovement, the slick computer effects lack this earthy ruggedness. A few years later, Stefan Betke, AKA Pole, managed to rough up the smooth digital sheen, not with analogue equipment, but by using a digital device that was lightly shafted (the act name comes from something called a Waldorf 4-pole filter which Betke dropped on the floor, and which started going all wobbly). 

Opener ‘Fahren’ sounds most like Pole's digidub predecessors, and the synth melodica line recalls early Zion Train, but although the music is spacious it is neither ominous nor groovy. You might rightly call this dispassionate clinical music “cavernous”, but it sounds like a surveyor mapping a Victorian culvert, rather than someone lost in a haunted cave. ‘Stadt’ opens with plenty of hisses and crackles, and is superficially similar to the glitch music found on Mille Plateaux records around the same time, but it still manages to retain the ghost of a reggae riddim. 

‘Streit’ opens with a squitty little rhythmic twitch, the sound of a salivatory gland wired up to a dot matrix printer. Theres a slithering two-note bassline worming through the track, but again, you’d be hard pressed to skank to this one. There are equally unrhythmic strands of percussive noises on ‘Huckepack’ (which apparently means piggyback in German, but in my mind it will always be the Teutonic variant of vintage dance craze the hucklebuck). Here a tiny recurrent strand of pips – not so much a motif, more a tic – sounds a lot like someone unzipping a tent. 

Other ersatz sounds are the highly treated drum noise on ‘Hafen’ whcih sounds like a piece of cardboard coughing, and the pseudo-organ stabs that hang in off-beat clouds on ‘Weit’ so that listening feels like pushing one’s way through a forest of sere, dead bullrushes that crumble at the touch, whilst higher-pitched notes hang like zombie mosquitoes just out of reach. Except, you know, pleasant. Although the four albums Pole made in this style sound like a dead end now, an evolutionary avenue that died out whilst a more dominant strain mutated into dubstep a few years later and eclipsed its cousins, there’s still more than enough to intrigue on this record, arguably the pick of the four. This is music that doesn’t sound human, but equally doesn’t sound cold and regimented like most music that celebrates its lack of humanity. Warm yet impersonal, flawed yet robotic, there’s nothing else that sounds quite like this on my shelves. 

Axis Of Dawson

Why doesn't hurt Siobhan Fahey if you throw fruit at her?

Banana Armour

NB The word "readers" was inadvertently omitted form the printed version of this review - my error, I fear - so now you can read it in fully idiomatic English for the first time.

RICHARD DAWSON/ ONE LEG ONE EYE, Divine Schism, Cowley Workers Club, 12/6/25  

Anyone who relishes the expansive bleakness of Lankum should immediately seek out Ian Lynch’s side-project One Leg One Eye, a duo focusing on drone, texture, and oppressive sonic fugs. Tonight's excellent set opens with metaphysical observations about the nature of God from sampled Irish voices atop thick, dark tones in a way that recalls the haunting atmospherics of From The Bogs Of Aughiska. Later a cortège-paced folk song is joined by buzzsaw drones and massed organ notes until it sounds like a spectral Luke Kelly guesting on Scott Walker’s Tilt with Charlemagne Palestine on keys. The track – in as much as elements can be extracted from the sonic blanket that overlays us for forty minutes – ends with what might be a bucket of cutlery emptied in a chapel. Both hurdy-gurdy and uillean pipes are played, but anyone expecting Séamus Ennis sprightliness or bouncy jigs will be confused – mind you, with the venue’s mobile disco LEDs twinkling behind the stage giving Phoenix Nights flavours, the whole set feels like a twisted dream. 

If One Leg sketch landscapes with sound, Richard Dawson captures characters with words. His songs are impeccably economical vignettes in the vein of Hemingway stories or the cool illustrations of Joyce’s Dubliners, except they’re almost impossibly English, with opener ‘Polytunnel’ asking “Could you manage a slice of toast/ Or a little bit of soup, my flower?”. Into this celebration of turnip-pulling a tiny line is almost hidden, “It's Karen who was always the green-fingered one”, offering a glimpse into a deep history for the narrator, and so many of tonight’s songs are about hobbyists – allotment diggers, YouTube ufologists, sponsored runners – undertaking tiny activities as if in defiance of a vast, and often unfriendly, world.  

This isn’t a poetry recital, though, and Dawson’s guitar playing is as fascinating as it is adept, swapping between elegant picking and crunchy abstraction like a hybrid of Davey Graham and Gary Lucas. Those who have trouble with his voice would find that the Dawson mannerisms – argue amongst yourselves whether they’re unconscious tics or a stylistic signature – even more pronounced tonight, especially the octave-leaping swoops to strangled falsetto or husky chest voice. But, like Dylan, he swaps melodic fluency for dramatic power, with ‘Jogging’ tonight being especially visceral, somehow a howl of rage and a clarion call for being alive simultaneously. In a way Dawson is Richard Thompson for socially awkward literature students; in another, he’s Chris Wood for Wire readers; but perhaps he’s simply unique. 

Thrust Never Sleeps

This is one of those gigs performed by old friends, which you go to out of loyalty, but which actually turn out to be excellent.

ANTON BARBEAU & THRUST/ CHARMS AGAINST THE EVIL EYE, Common Ground, 16/5/25 

Charms Against The Evil Eye inhabit that sweet spot characterised by free festivals at the turn of the 80s, in which laidback hippies rubbed against nascent new-wavers, mellowing proggers started to think about adding more tunes, and rock took on jazz influences without the self-conscious fusion fanfare. Many of Charms’ songs sound as though they may have started as bucolic John Martyn reveries before being sharpened and sped up with amphetamine intensity, all rubbery bass and hyperstrummed guitar. Set closer ‘Terry Walpole’s Camera’ chucks 60s psych-pop at us with punk energy, like Buzzcocks in kaftans, and more whimsical numbers still come with a caffeine jolt, putting extra canter into the Canterbury sound; even ‘Green’, the set’s most stoned and wide-eyed track is Caravan with go-faster stripes. It’s a delightful set, the band having quietly become a great proposition whilst you weren’t looking. 

Charms become THRUST to back Anton Barbeau, a prolific Californian songwriter who resided in Oxford for a few years in the noughties. Although he is keen to stress that it has been 7 years since he and the band have been in the same country, let alone room, concerns  on- and offstage about rustiness evaporate as they fly into live favourite ‘This Is Why They Call Me Guru 7’, a sort of bubblegum kraut-rock mantra. Barbeau’s best material balances literate surrealist troubadouring with drug-pumped spaciness and pure pop hooks - think Robyn Hitchcock Presents Popol Vuh Vs ABBA – and tonight is a glistening string of classics, from the compact chug of ‘Dust Beneath My Wings’ to the Eurovision–inspired sex-romp that is ‘Milk Churn In The Morning’, via the abstract collapse of ‘Banana Song’ (which might be the only moment the set veers towards egregiously wacky). Local folker Susanna Starling joins for a couple of excellent numbers, including ‘Leave It With Me, I’m Always Gentle’, one of Barbeau’s most elliptically lovely lyrics. It may have been years since he played in Oxford, but tonight may be the best set we've seen. To apply twisted Ant-logic, he should definitely visit less frequently more often. 

REMinders

The last of the latest batch of LFTWY annually-themed reviews, this time partying like it wee still 1999.

R.E.M. - UP (Warner Bros) 

I like Bill Berry, and it always feels a little bit like betrayal that one of my favourite R.E.M. albums is the one they made right after he left. Still, they had the decency to make it with hardly any live drums. Come to think of it, even the programmed drums and are so far back in a fuzzy mix that they feel less like percussion and more like a sort of misty backdrop to a German Romantic painting of a bloke on a craggy mountain. Up is a big major label album by a superstar band, but it’s really a demo writ large, a quiet album of sketches with a tape-hum atmosphere; “hauntology” was a still a few years away in the pop-critical lexicon but this album shares some of that microgenre’s lofi sonic memory-triggers, and in retrospect seems to be an indie bedfellow to the electronic blurriness of Boards Of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children, also released in this year.  

The band knew they were going to lose a few fans of their stadium bangers with this record, and so decided to put ‘Airportman’ at the top of the tracklist, like a dragon guarding the entrance. It has a hypnagogic Eno feel which pre-empts a lot of what Radiohead would be doing a couple of years later. Still, it’s easy to forget that there is plenty of precedent for this sort of introspective, lightly experimental music in the R.E.M. catalogue, and many people who like to holler along to ‘Man On The Moon’ on Greatest Hits Radio might be nonplussed by the precedents here: the unpretentious ‘New Orleans Instrumentals’, the wraithlike mumble of ‘Star Me Kitten’, and the improvised ambient drama of ‘Country Feedback’ (which is the best song R.E.M. ever wrote, in case you were wondering). There’s more Frippy guitar on ‘Why Not Smile’, though there it’s joined by baroque gamelan doo-wop loops. 

The not-very-single-like-at-all-really single ‘Daysleeper’ is barely more solid, doused in radio static and quiet keys which are the aural equivalent of the beige office walls in yellow electric-light at which the narrator presumably stares. The lines “I cried the other night, I can’t even say why” are still improbably beautiful, even all these years later. It’s followed by ‘Diminished’, the sun-drowsy Sunday afternoon snooze balancing the wintry midweek worknight. It has a stoned loping bass and percussion boasting some of the untroubled drawl of The Folk Implosion around the time of the Kids soundtrack. It also has a hidden track at the end, even though the album still has two more tracks, which is pretty unusual. ‘Suspicion’ has some of the weltschmerz boogie of Paul Simon’s masterpiece Still Crazy After All These Years, with a surprisingly lovely vocal line which harks back to the soft mumble of the band’s first two albums. 

There are also a few songs a little closer to the rock template. ‘Lotus’ is a simple electric piano vamp, like a looped fraction of a Supertramp or Gilbert O’Sullivan rhythm, with lovely late-60s guitar (though there are still no histrionics). ‘Walk Unafraid’ is a rocker that dare not squeal its name, inspired by Patti Smith, who of course previously guested on ‘E-bow The Letter’. (Random aside:  when ‘E-bow The Letter’ got its first play on The Evening Session they claimed that the title meant that the letter L had been elbowed from the word elbow, which is a misunderstanding of cryptic genius.)  

A lot was made at the time of the Brian Wilson influence on the record, but it’s only really ‘At My Most Beautiful’ which brings his great songs to mind (though ‘Parakeet’ has a whiff of the sandbox as well). It’s more Bleach Boys than Beach Boys, though, fuzzy and scraped thin. Leonard Cohen was given a co-credit on ‘Hope’ which has saved me 20-odd years of racking my brains to work out what the vocal reminds me of - ‘Suzanne’, if you’re wondering – and has the most timid, wooly drum machine sound ever, like the opposite of Mantronix. 

At just over an hour, this is only about half of the album, and it’s all strong, except perhaps ‘Sad Professor’, which is shapeless in an awkward way that drags a little. Back in 1988 Mudhoney released a foundation stone of grunge with Superfuzz Bigmuff, but Up could have been called Hyperfluff Softscuzz, such is the warm C90 burr wrapping all of these songs. Once ‘Fails To Climb’ has concluded the album, sounding like Tangerine Dream scoring an old Anglican hymn, you might just feel like sitting silently for 5 minutes, preferably in a dim crepuscular light.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

Stigmata Catch-up

Here's your bonus minireview. The editor of Nigthshift couldn't turn up in time to this gig, so I reviewed the first act.  You can find their review of the other acts, Traidora and Distraxi, at nightshiftmag.co.uk/2025/may.pdf.

HOLY WOUNDS, Whiplash, The Bully, 9/4/25 

It might just be suggestion because Holy Wounds feature Taz Corona from the mighty Undersmile, but we seem to detect a doom underpinning to their ritualistic abstract noise - even the most untethered section of screech and drone seems to come with an unspoken trudging beat. Taz plays guitar, growls and does that ghost-of-an-evil-child-monk voice she's so adept at, whilst Kieran Wakeman crawls on the floor doing...indefinable noise things. At one point he plays a horrific rusty scythe with a violin bow, and if it makes no discernible sound, we aren't about to dare tell him. 

Mothers of Inventory

This is my main review for Nightshift this month, but there's actually a tiny uncredited review in there as well.  Think of it as a secret track. I'll post soon. How exciting, eh.

INDEX FOR WORKING MUSIK/ BEDD/ MYSTERY BISCUIT, Divine Schism, FPCC, 6/4/25 

Mystery Biscuit’s cosy kosmische sound melds disco-kraut drums, spacy synths, and subdued indie vocals. ‘Balthasar’ is a thoroughly pleasing chug which inhabits a zone labelled “Pink Floyd funk” but perhaps the best encapsulation of the band is new track ‘Someone Killed My Dog’ - we hear youth culture is helping the police with their enquiries – which is 50% Lou Reed, 40% Hawkwind, and 30% Wooden Shjips...and if you think the maths don’t work, you might not be in the right dimension. 

We steer clear of talking too much about technique, there are vast, dusty swathes of the internet for that sort of thing, where every fourth word is “tone” (and the other three are Stevie, Ray, and Vaughan). But still, we must point out the incredible control of sextet Bedd, playing on a cramped stage through a relatively elementary PA, and yet always sounding beautifully tempered and effortlessly airy. Tonight’s set takes in sweet jangle pop, lofi trip-hop, epic surges of spangly post-shoegaze guitar noise, and even something like Animal Collective without the goofy stoned FX, but the songs are balanced and organic, even when the end feels a hundred miles from where they started. Jamie Hyatt’s vocals come from the unhurried 90s indie school, though there’s enough vulnerability to avoid Britpop smugness, and some of the harmonies bolstering the lead lines are quite gorgeous. The last song even has a keyboard line that recalls Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’, of all things. 

We hear someone describe London’s Index For Working Musik as “dark surf”, which isn’t a bad shot. Whilst they unfortunately don’t sound like a vampiric goth band doing twangy instrumentals (a concept that gives What We Do In The Shadows a new meaning), they do add a Nick Cave austerity to scuzzy hypnotic rock, whilst the prominent cello parts sometimes turn them into a chamber-music Cramps. There’s an apparently unintended, but pretty enjoyable hot mix on said cello, which either has the scraping intensity of John Cale’s viola, or hangs a Jesus & Mary Chain noise curtain in front of the band. In contrast to this, the best pieces are actually the most refined, with warm twinned vocals recalling country laments or even Pentangle. This slightly muddy set might be the one on which they’d like to be judged, but it’s still enticing, and perfect dour entertainment for some of Oxford’s dark serfs.   

The Ups And Downs

It's finally time for me to write about The Fall for LFTY! I've been holding off picking one since the year-themed specials began, and this is the one that got up and waved to me.

THE FALL – LEVITATE (Artful) 

“There is no culture is my brag,” declaimed Mark E Smith in 1982, but he might equally have stated, “There is no consensus concerning my oeuvre”. There are many noteworthy things about The Fall, but one that rarely gets mentioned is how little agreement there is amongst admirers about what constitutes the best material. Beatles fans might argue at length about minutiae of the fab output, but as close to none of them as makes no difference think With The Beatles is better than Revolver, whereas no randomly selected bunch of Fallophiles would get close to honing in what are the best and worst records. Perhaps this is because all Fall albums contain gold cushioned in straw, a mixture of incredible music and perplexing old nonsense, sometimes in consecutive bars (and perhaps this is what makes them so constantly mystifying and exciting). But even so, 1997’s Levitate is an album that is rarely top of anyone’s pantheon, as it’s an awkward, uneven album, where jokes fall flat and smiles turn sinister, where euphoria comes with a hint of wintry regret, where musical inspiration comes with a scribbled Post-It note saying “Will this do?”. 

And I’m here to claim that this is what makes it essential to the story of The Fall. 

First up, let’s dismiss the historical context. Yes, this is the last album to feature the great Steve Hanley on bass, The Fall’s longest-serving non-ranting member, and it was released not long before the Brownies incident, in which the group collapsed on a NYC stage and after which MES was arrested. People claim you can hear the tension on this record, but I’m not sure it is any more true here than in many other places. Nope, the reason this record sounds so odd is that it has the credit “produced by Mark E Smith”, and may be the closest we’ll get to the inexplicable sound that hummed in his head. 

First up, there’s undeniably good music here. ‘Ten Houses Of Eve’ is built using a Fisher Price My First Breakbeat TM with a tarmac-thick vocal trill/hook borrowed from The Seeds’ ‘Evil Hoodoo’.  The breakdown - or do I mean stumbling halt? – which laments “If only the shards could relocate” over eerie piano is lovely. ‘Hurricane Edward’ oozes melancholy and you can almost feel a cutting wind blowing across stubbly autumnal fields even as you have no idea what the lyric about a farmhand might mean. ‘4 ½ Inch’ is an industrial car-crusher trying to do big beat, and is glorious. ‘The Quartet Of Doc Shanley’ has an amazing sludgy bassline, which said S Hanley later admitted to nicking off The Osmonds, of all people. The Wire’s reviewer noted that ‘Jungle Rock’ best encapsulates the Fall sound, even though it’s a cover; certainly the tuning and wonky antidub space in the mix would not pass muster in the majority of bands.  

‘Spencer Must Die’ is hypnotic and chilly with whispered lyrics, and is forgettable, but only in the sense that it’s a wonderful discovery every spin. It ends pretty much in the middle of a phrase, which brings us on to the strange portion of the record. ‘I’m A Mummy’ is a tossed-off 50s novelty song with some toxic trebly guitar, and it’s hard to work out why it’s here, or indeed, anywhere. ‘Masquerade’ sounds as though 40% of the track is missing, a messily syncopated inscrutable little song.  ‘I Come And Stand At Your [sic] Door’ is a plodding cover of the famous song-poem about a young Hiroshima victim, which almost sounds touching, though this effect is minimised by the redundant instrumental version’s unsavoury, dismissive name, ‘Jap Kid’ (I mean, come on). ‘Ol’ Gang’ is a good scuzzy kraut groove, utterly marred by the quarter-arsed vocals which seem to have been dubbed (daubed) on at the last minute and which feature almost the same hackneyed opening couplet as THE PREVIOUS TRACK. The title track is a simple little tune with the drums mixed as loud as the rest of the band put together, and it’s likable but, again, feels overbalanced. 

Add to this the fuzzy disco-pop of ‘Everybody But Myself’ which sounds as though it was mastered from a fourth-generation C90, and ‘Tragic Days’, a pointless 90 seconds of tape noise, and that’s the album. Levitate falls almost exactly in the middle of The Fall’s recording career, 18 years after their debut album and 18 years before their swan song. It sounded wrong and illogical on release, and still has the power to confuse and enrage. It’s a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a shit mix. It is great because it has no desire to be great, and doesn’t know or care when it’s awful. It captures the purest essence of The Fall. 

I have literally this second realised that the album’s title basically means the opposite of the band’s name. That contradiction is the album in a nutshell. It’s essential. You probably shouldn’t buy it.  

Memoir! Heat

I just came across this. I used to hold over my last review for MusicOMH until the next one was published, so their site always had the latest, but I dropped out of the habit of writing for them a little over a year ago. Nothing against them, I hasten to add, I just found that it wasn't exciting me too much to write these reviews, so I sort of sidled away. Might go back to it one day.

MY LIFE STORY – LOVING YOU IS KILLING ME (Exilophone/ Republic of Music) 

The Smiths and Oasis are often celebrated as bands whose B-sides were as strong as their A-sides, but My Life Story deserve to be added to that list. Megaphone Theology, their compilation of flip-sides – or, more accurately, CD single bonus tracks - in some ways showcases a more relaxed and exploratory band than the singles or albums. Nowhere else in the catalogue can you find anything resembling the strangely moving stream of consciousness of 'I Love You Like Gala', the restless inventiveness of the string of 'Emerald Green' songs, which set the same words in myriad styles, nor the torch song glory of 'Silently Screaming', which is roughly “What if R.E.M.’s 'Nightswimming' were written by Disney theme era Elton John?”. Even their wonderful Edwardian drawing room take on Wire’s 'Outdoor Miner' is squirreled away on an obscure EP, whilst their somewhat corpulent cover of The Stranglers’ 'Duchess' got wheeled out as a single. 

So it’s fitting that 'B-Side Girl', a lightly ironic love song to both partner and pop music, is one of the best tracks on My Life Story’s fifth album. It’s a shimmering swoon, a languorous heat-haze of a song with a subtly muscular bassline that has flavours of vintage Ride, whilst also resembling a hungover Wannadies with a touch of the literary psych-pop of cult Californian songwriter and Stewart Lee favourite, Anton Barbeau. Roughly half of Loving You Is Killing Me fits this classic indie songsmith mould, with the upliftingly melodic 'Numb Numb Numb' recalling Duffy, the Britpop-era mononymic guise of under-rated pop penman Stephen Duffy, of Tin Tin and Lilac Time “fame”. It boasts a gorgeously misty outro, with a refined melancholy which is echoed by the closing track, 'Wasted', a sort of bare bones Erasure tune which leaps from emotional intimacy to West End melodrama in three and a half minutes. This is proceeded by 'The Urban Mountaineer', a slightly Beatlesy take on that small slice of British indie history that came between C86 and baggy, which gave us swagger without belligerence. 

For some, the idea of My Life Story without the fanfares and fringe flicks of their first two albums will seem wrong, like spotting James Bond eating Greggs in a tracksuit. For those diehards, there are plenty of brash and brassy tunes on offer, even if they don’t quite embody the Camden cabaret style of the 90s. 'Running Out Of Heartbeats' is a bedroom glam stomp, a trashy collision between early They Might Be Giants and late Bis with some wailing guitar which is just about ridiculous enough to be allowed, and 'I’m A God' is a synthpop bluster which betrays the influence Marc Almond has always held over Jake Shillingford. These more vibrant tracks aren’t always quite convincing though: 'Identity Crisis' is an acknowledged riff on Marc Bolan’s hip-swivelling doggerel and is perky but forgettable, whereas 'Naked', a song about nudists being, err, nude sounds like The Longpigs having a crack at The Banana Splits theme - intriguing, perhaps, but not something to which you might wish to return very often. 

Tracks like this make the album feel a little slight.  Whilst the Scott Walker cosplay baritone of 'Tits And Attitude' is memorable, and the sinister undertow of 'Bubblewrap', where romance meets stalkerism in a Depeche Mode style, is delightfully eerie, with just ten tracks over 36 minutes the record seems to be lacking one or two more corkers to flesh it out...maybe Jake’s saving those in case CD singles make a comeback. 

 

Sub Pub

I've just recently taken delivery of the last 3 Lunchtime For The Wild Youth annual-review editions, so expect to see some late-90s action here in the coming days.

dEUS – IN A BAR, UNDER THE SEA (Island) 

Having read a fair few of these zines now, I’m interested in how many people write about albums that seem to encapsulate a moment of their lives, or which got them through some difficult period. I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t really listen to music like that, even though listening to music is a huge part of my life. Firstly, I’ve never been one to cane a record, and I almost never listen to the same thing over and over – at least, not since I was about 13 and didn’t have many records to choose from. Music is tied to certain memories simply by ubiquity, rather than quality. For example, if I think of dance music from my university days, I don’t come up with the scattershot genius of Aphex’s I Care Because You Do, or the clinical precision of Photek’s Modus Operandi, but the cheeseball Clayderman trance of ‘Children’ by Robert Miles, or that Armand Van Helden remix of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos (although, listening again just now, this isn’t bad, even though the vocal samples sound like they’re saying “Honey, bring me toast to my lips, he’s got a big dick”...or is this an aural Rorschach test which is revealing something about my deepest thoughts?). 

So, for this issue I thought I’d review an album that, far from being a key milestone in my life or one of the greatest records ever heard, is one I can barely remember. dEUS – note to self, don’t start a sentence with the band name again, because the word processor doesn’t like the lower-case initial  – were a Belgian band who, in one of those odd quirks, had a minor hit in the music press with the lopsided Beefheartian indie of ‘Suds and Soda’ - it didn’t break the top 40, but go far more radio play and kudos than such a strange little European single would normally. I say “were a Belgian band”, but I now discover I should have typed “are a Belgian band”, as they’re still going, and the last five of their eight - eight! - albums have been number one in their home charts. Well, fair play. 

In A Bar, Under The Sea was their second album, and I bought it when it was released, although I’m not sure why: maybe HMV in Oxford had a big display for it, or something. I recall playing it a few times, liking it, but then basically putting it on the shelf and forgetting about it. So, here’s to the first spin in...who knows how long? What I discover is that it’s a very low-key album, from the tiny lofi scrap that is the opening track, to the mumbled lyrics, and after-hours jazz stylings of some of the numbers. The overall vibe is of busked ditties and organic hip-hop grooves, and good touchstones would be Beck’s music from the same period, Money Mark’s stoned organ doodles, or that brief era of low-slung beats on Folk Implosion songs. You’re far more likely to nod your head to this album than lose your mind to it. I have also decided that my lack of memory of the album is rather less about the quality of my memory than the understated nature of the music: ‘Serpentine’ is a sort of R.E.M. nursery rhyme with some nice pizzicato strings but it drifts by unobtrusively, ‘A Shocking Lack Thereof’ has lovely cheap metallophone elements sprinkled across it but underneath is a greyscale bluesy grumble, and ‘Disappointed In The Sun’ is a slightly wry piano tune sounding like a shy, awkward Ben Folds. 

Unusually, I find I like the singles the most. ‘Theme From Turnpike’ has some scuzzy jazz loops and comes off like a trip-hop Tom Waits, and this is followed on the LP by ‘Little Arithmetics’, a lovely tuneful little lope with a tiny hint of The Byrds, which is hugely catchy. ‘Roses’ starts off somnolently, as if it were a tentatively strummed demo of something designed to emulate Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’, but slowly builds a head of grungy steam until it begins to resemble Sonic Youth from a few years earlier. Only ‘Fell Off The Floor, Man’ doesn’t quite deliver, being a strange bit of disco at which different sonic elements have been tossed apparently without plan programme. Listening to this CD provides and important reminder: not every album needs to be earth-shattering. I enjoyed a lot of this, even if only a percentage of my attention was held at certain points. Not every record needs to be Rubber Soul, or Hex Enduction Hour, or The Goldberg Variations (Gould for me, thanks, if you’re offering), sometimes something lighter or slighter will work its own magic. Hell, I might even seek out dEUS’s 2023 album How To Replace It, stranger things have happened. 

Digs Your Own Whole

 This review went over the word count, but the editor kindly kept it all in. 

HOUSE OF ALL/ THE PLAN/ TOP SHORTAGE, Divine Schism, Florence Park Community Centre, 15/3/25 

When we first saw Top Shortage we tentatively labelled them “avant-grunge”, and although the set was spirited, we were equally tentative about calling them “any good”. A lot can happen in just over a year, however, and tonight they are excellently gnarled and weighty, the opening number dark, oppressive and grimy like an abandoned underground carpark, through which the ululating punk-yodel vocals drift like a suspicious wraith: think Metal Box with the dub extracted. At other times they resemble a twisted Francophone Television, and a new song sounds as though someone tried to reconstruct a fragmented Devo tune without looking at the pieces in a round on The Krypton Factor. The band is still sometimes scrappy, but this merely highlights the mocking sneers as they take aim at suburban bigotry. 

Southend’s The Plan have a warmer disposition. Their sprightly twin vocals and twangy little guitar parts make them a stick-man sketch of The B-52s, whilst a cute dinkiness in the keys gives them an air of Pram at their most ramshackle. A tendency towards 2/4 country rhythms is intriguing, but not as much as the lead vocalist’s rectangular Diddley-style guitar, which looks as though it was hewn from some ancient cellar door. Perhaps some of the songs are over too quickly, and the set never quite achieves full momentum, but it is nonetheless chirpy and likable. 

There are two reliable ways to make your post-punk band sound great. Firstly, have two drummers (some practical drawbacks here), and secondly, have Steve Hanley on bass (best of luck with that one). House Of All, a band formed entirely of ex-Fall musicians – plus a stand-in for guitarist Pete Greenway who cannot currently tour – actually have three drummers trading places on two stools, and there are a few old faces beaming happily at the sight of Paul Hanley and Karl Burns bashing away together for the first time since 1984, but even those not versed in Fall history will concede that the band sounds like a twitchy thunder god hot-wiring a juggernaut.  

Unless you’re one of Mark E Smith’s sisters, everyone agrees that the one person justified in making Fall-style music is Martin Bramah, founder member of the group and teenage friend of MES. Although there has been a Stalinist rewriting of history to claim that every element of The Fall was under Smith’s control, it is likely that Bramah was responsible for bringing many of the influences squashed together to birth the Fall sound. We hear a lot of those tonight, from the scuffed garage psych evident in opener ‘Aim Higher’ to the Lovecraftian grotesqueries in the lyrics to ‘Harlequin Duke’. Bramah’s declamatory vocals somewhat resemble those of Smith, but there’s a liturgical air to his gnomic utterances, and by the end the gig feels like one long fractal sermon. In a late-career inspiration burst, House Of All have released 3 albums, plus 2 full-length collections of live tracks and reworkings, in a mere two years. Tonight’s honed set has a strong sonic blueprint, but enough ideas and variations to make each track exciting and unique. Always the same, always different, might we say? No, actually, that sounds stupid... 

I'm sure it's not the intention, but this headline band's name just made me think of peanut butter

I felt more at home with this small gig - I even got to sit on an old sofa for a lot of it, which is certainly nicer than being crushed in the O2.

THE LAST WHOLE EARTH CATALOG/ SUNGLASZ VENDOR/ BIGHANDSANDALLGRISTLY, Divine Schism, Common Ground, 6/2/25 

You know a band will be ungainly with an awkward name like bighandsandallgristly, but at the outset their hesitant tinkly confections with timid violin and quavery vocals barely cohere at all. As the set progresses they shape up like a cross between Dirty Three and Penguin Cafe Orchestra, whilst still resembling very shy baby otters who have found some instruments (all except the drummer who is unusually busy and who brings a Broadcast bounce which is lovely but does tend to drown out the rest of the band). Their best track is like bossa nova in the shape of a lumpily crocheted cardigan, and we find the set ultimately unconvincing whilst being oddly fascinated to see them play again. 

Perhaps bighands... were invited onto the bill by The Last Whole Earth Catalog who were fed up with having the stupidest name within a three-mile radius. They share a low-key eclecticism although TLWEC’s music is far more cogent, often bringing Vanishing Twin vibes with 60s soundtrack keys, sugary boogaloo vocals and crisp, tidy rhythms. Despite it being a grimly cold evening, they warm the room with summery lilo pop that has enough intimacy to feel direct and honest, and enough textural savvy to hold the attention. Occasionally it feels like there are one too many people with one too many ideas on stage, and maybe a jazzoid instrumental sounding like a Kia-Ora-fueled Matt Bianco is a bad call, but overall this is a strong set. 

Bristol’s Sunglasz Vendor have a name that is only mildly infuriating and so let the side down, but are definitely the pick of the night sonically. Again, they bring different styles together, from the most spartan of slowcore minimalism to rasping Sonic Youth noise rock via some gnarly wired Pixies pop but it’s all so much more organic, partly due to the excellent bassist anchoring everything with unflashy lines whilst barely blinking, let alone rocking out. ‘Ice Cream Tubs’ switches gears again at the end of the set, with Cassels-like rant-rock disenchantment, but even this reduces to a strangely arid desert of tiny tones and tics half-way through. We might have had very little idea what was coming next for most of tonight, but with Sunglasz Vendor it was invariably a pleasant  discovery. 

I Like Big Mutts!

One of two reviews in the latest Nightshift, this is the review of the famous band (or famous enough to fill Oxford's largest venue, anyway...my mum's not heard of them).

FAT DOG/ ZIPLOCK, O2, 16/2/25 

With two sets of bright ravey keyboards, sprightly drums, and inscrutable, deadpan vocals Ziplock probably shouldn’t be funky, but they deliver a slice of Happy Meal electro bounce-pop which is part ESG, part EMF, and part whatever sounds good on an E. Halfway through the set they swap the Hoover synth lines for a thicker buzzing bass clomp and couple it with some surprisingly intricate and tricksy drum patterns until they sound rather wonderfully like Add N To (X) doused in cherry cola.  

They share members with Fat Dog, but in the thirty minutes between sets any desire for concepts like delicacy and elegance are presumably scoured out of them in some  backstage ritual, possibly involving dogs' heads and Tennent’s Extra. Their dance-punk attack is far more intense on stage than on record, Joe Love’s vocals rarely dropping below a nasal bellow, and the pounding gabber-adjacent electronic pulses often drowning out the live drums. The sound is elementary and elemental, not so much broad strokes as hard slaps. And it certainly galvanises the crowd to frenzied moshing within four bars flat. On the downside, the fiddle and sax are almost entirely inaudible for the whole gig, and a tendency to smother the vocals in unchanging delay turns the gig into a giant enveloping thump-hum, like being harangued by a totalitarian DustBuster. As non-stop pummelling goes, though, it’s all good clean (dirty) fun, and a larger stage than their last Oxford visit has not leeched the infectious energy from the band. 

There’s a clear line to be drawn back to the sleaze rock of Fat White Family – or more accurately, their chunkier sick-sequin spin-off Moonlandingz – but in some ways Fat Dog are more like a diseased glam version of Laibach, all joke jackboots and coked-up EBM, spiced with the controlled chaos antics of Gogol Bordello. What they lose in depth tonight they gain in potency, and if we long for some of the Ziplock quirkiness to vary the tone a little, the majority of a teeming Academy clearly couldn’t disagree more, howling along with every word, leaping like loons and hollering appreciation at every possible juncture: fair play, nothing wrong with a night of hedonistic noise (but do stop doing that woof-woof chant, you sound like the audience on The Word, and that runny dollop of lad culture is best left in the 90s).   

Outstanding In Afield

Here's my second review for this month's Nightshift. The editor reviewed the In A Different Place all-dayer, but as he was one of the organisers and had shifts on the door and so on, I wrote some copy. You'll find the text below interpolated into the review at feb.pdf.

IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, 1512/24 

Whilst one might expect the front bar to host acoustic acts, there’s a surprising array of styles and genres on display throughout the afternoon. However, opening act Aphra Taylor is a textbook example of a guitar-wielding singer-songwriter. This is definitely not to say that her set is generic, though, her voice full of smoke and sweetness, and her delivery enlivened by tiny trills and ornaments that make the performance unique. 

The merch table is surprisingly sparsely utilised during the day, but Sinews are selling a  “horseface T-shirt". Considering their set is like having your face trampled by rabid stampeding stallions, this seems fitting. Their post-hardcore flagellation draws obvious comparisons to Fugazi or Drive Like Jehu, but there’s a sensitive heart beating somewhere within the maelstrom. 

Baby Maker’s songs are like the flayed and brittle skeletons of new wave pop, with bouncy tunes reduced to chugging drum machines, cheeky guitar twangs, and wry vocals, offering hints of Arab Strap’s laconic lofi story-telling. The set is sometimes more intriguing than successful, but the character shines through. 

The most intense set of the day is possibly delivered by Pet Twin, whose music has morphed over the last year from sparse confessional pop to huge theatrical workouts, which seem to be cathartic rituals for Gallagher as much they are spectacles for the audience. A typical track merges thick treacly bass, heart-wrenching vocals, and euphoric keys, so that you’re not sure whether to dance, weep, or collapse in the corner. One or two tracks have slightly messy endings, but really who cares about the landing once you’ve soared in flight? And, just at the point we think things couldn’t get any better, The Bobo comes onstage for the subaquatic ghost rave that is ‘No To Dread’. 

Like Baby Maker, Lord Bug’s songs are sparse and idiosyncratic, more like half-remembered dreams than pop tunes, and like Aphra Taylor, Libby Peet’s vocals lift them to spellbinding new places, her voice warm and jazzy yet introspective and mysterious, and her delivery full of wonderful slurs and rubati, so that she comes off like a strange melding of Amy Winehouse and Lou Barlow. For an act with a track called ‘Dog’s Dinner’ this is a beautiful and balanced set. 

The sound levels for GIGSY are perhaps a little low, but Khloë’s explosive stage energy would be enough for a gig to sound epic if the PA were rolled up newspaper attached to a dictaphone. Her music is a crunchy electronica take on dark-minded 80s synth – EDM meets EBM? - but the melodically aggressive vocal lines are built from club pop fun and burning rage, in equal measure  

Two of the themes running through today’s event are vocalists with wired stage presence, and music with a stoned psych groove. Both of these come together for local favourites Flights Of Helios, whose set is an eclectic melange of post-punk wiriness and expansive folky textures. Chris Beard is an imposing frontman, swaying at the front of the stage, screaming, crooning, cajoling and entreating by turns like a cross between a fundamentalist preacher, a Dickensian villain, and a praying mantis. There are touches of adventurous acts such as Spiritualized or Ultrasound in their set, but as a nod to Christmas, they turn ‘Good King Wenceslas’ into a psych-punk mantra, perfect for anyone whose Christmas dinner is composed solely of brandy butter and brown acid. 

The Subtheory bring back the classic trip hop sound, with low-slung beats, slinky bass,  and hazy late-night vocals (plus, unexpectedly, some excellent restrained guitar solos). Whilst it might be fair to accuse them of cosy 90s revivalism, they do it so incredibly well, and this set has the greatest spaciousness and poise of any on the bill. Cate Debu’s vocals are cool and clear, sitting unhurried at the centre of the chunky grooves, and with James from Pet Twin joining in the singers supply a softly spoken personality to the songs, so that they’re as much Portisheart and they are Portishead (sorry). 

As with Mandrake Handshake at last year’s festival, In A Different Place is headlined by a band who have moved from Oxford to London and found great success. Pecq might play their biggest gigs as part of touring bands for Barry Can’t Swim and Arlo Parks, but they more than own the stage as a trio, coming on to near darkness and launching into some understated tech-pop tunes that might convince you that “crepuscular bangers” is a genre. They take us on a slick, sleek ride through well tooled dreamy electro, but actually it i  the subtlest moments that they truly bewitch, and a hushed bleepy cover of ‘Wichita Linesman’ morphs into one of their own songs in a bubbling pool of squelchy synthtones. 

To Say Nothing Of The Newt

One of two reviews in the latest Nightshift. This one is a pretty typical record of a not hugely exciting release.

MONTMORENCY – LIVE AT NEWT STUDIOS (self-release) 

Young children always like to be told stories they already know, and certain roots music fans are the same, ever eager to hear jazz standards or trad classics one more time. Sometimes familiarity allows an artist space to dig into a song (there’s a reason Ella Fitzgerald’s greatest recordings are all American songbook chestnuts, rather than new compositions), and sometimes it can be used as a springboard for new and radical ideas (Albert Ayler’s honking attack on Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ sounds as though it's from a different universe to Ella’s). Montmorency – who get points for being named after the dog in Three Men In A Boat – have addressed four folk club warhorses on this EP, originally recorded in 2022. Do they bring anything new to the barn dance party? 

Most noteworthy are the vocals, with a simple unadorned tone at odds with the Mummerset aural cosplay of most folk singers, and the lightly quavering conversational tenor of ‘John Paul Jones’ almost reminds us of the literate angst of Hefner’s Darren Hayman. The other standout element is the lead guitar, which has a refined twang on ‘Shady Grove’ recalling the understated urbanity of The Shadows or even Bert Weedon, whereas the solo on ‘Sugar in the Hold’ comes with a whiff of Dave Gilmour. These moments of character catch the interest, but the upbeat countryish hoedown ‘The Fox’ falls woefully flat, and despite being a tale of carnivorous nature at its bloodiest has all the vim and vigour of a PTA meeting. There’s stuff to like about Montmorency, but these recordings are unlikely to become anyone’s go-to versions.