The unarguable critical TRUTH!

The Acquitable Snowman?

2012-01-17T19:37:00.004Z

I just watched a whole episode of The Big Bang. It's actually relatively amusing.

Unrelated question: should one put lemons in the fruit bowl?

UNPUNISHED MONSTERS – UNPUNISHED MONSTERS EP (Download)

The electronic side project is becoming as much of a rock cliché as the garish wedding, the spell in rehab and the ill-advised clothing range, but there is some good material being made by rockers who find a freedom in front of the PC that they don’t get in the rehearsal studio. After five minutes of racking our brains to identify the vocalist on this EP, Google told us it was Gus Rogers from Dial F For Frankenstein and Kill Murray, and, along with George Hopcroft, he has created an interesting adjunct to the speed-indie intensity of those bands. Unpunished Monsters’ sound springs from the ersatz sleaze of Prince-influenced club music from the last gasps of the 1980s, adding some drunken dizziness, and it’s utterly beguiling, at least when it doesn’t get overly wry.

“Palace Guards” is a wonderful opener, ladling a robo-lothario vocal onto a tweaked Frankie Knuckles keyboard part until the whole gloriously fake cocktail has the rubbery whiff of post-human lovin’ best exhibited by Jamie Principle’s “Baby Wants To Ride”. There’s more android soul in the EP’s high point, “Moon Dance”, where a seditiously sexy croon rides a woozy, swingbeat rhythm, something like a new wave Jamie Lidell. Some Plone-like metallophone parts tumble in the background, underpinning a tale a tale of teenage boredom that may have come from a Dead Jerichos song:

We go down to the playground for somewhere to drink
And I will fight you like a caveman, too wired to think

It’s a fascinatingly immersive little song, imbued with the cheap tedium of a youth spent in the suburbs, and balances the more dance oriented tracks on the record, such as “Day Dreamer”, which sounds like a euphoric remix of some minor alternative hit, and could comfortably sit in many a contemporary DJ set.

The record isn’t all perfect. “Negative Capability” starts well as a post-Numan thump, but doesn’t have enough going on to fill three minutes (plus the link to Keats is unfathomable), whereas “Neon Lung” is too arch, a winking “The 80s are so, like, old” concoction of electro-funk keys, trashy guitar and treated vocals slapped between a tired vocal sample and some arbitrary drum ‘n’ bass. No sleep till Shoreditch. But these lowpoints are heavily outweighed by the brash tartiness of Unpunished Monsters’ best music, like a sonic version of heavily daubed mascara. We hope this collaboration isn’t a one off, and we won’t be surprised to find that “Moon Dance” ends up one of our favourite Oxford tunes of 2012. Download for free, and start mixing the pina coladas with ketamine today!

Annual Probe

2012-01-03T17:31:00.003Z

Here are my favourite 5 Oxford records of 2011. I wrote this for www.musicinoxford.co.uk, but they didn't appreciate they were in alphabetical order. Never mind. I also wrote a little precis of the year, whcih boiled down to "why can't anyone write as well as me?", so I'll leave that out for now.

Borderville – Metamorphosis: An octagonal package bursting with pretension, playfulness, performance and pop music. New developments in theatrical rock from the in sect.

Coloureds – Tom Hanks EP: A grubby confused no man’s land in the ongoing dance music war between the brain and the feet.

Duotone – Ropes: Perfectly turned studio folk knick-knacks that are as intriguingly mysterious as they are artfully decorative.

Fixers – Here Comes 2001 So Let’s All Head For The Sun EP: A paean to the Beach Boys and Ibiza house made from pastels, sherbert and reverb. It was even mixed by someone called Bryan Wilson, what are the chances?

Spring Offensive – A Stutter & A Start single: Suppliers, along with Fixers, of truck’s other great Oxford set this year, the ever-resourceful Spring Offensive offer us, not only a clipped piece of pop yearning, but a neat one-shot video and a colouring book

Ludwig Mies Van Death Rohe

2011-12-25T09:56:00.003Z

Christmas day today. I mean, obviously nobody's reading it today, but I'm posting it. I always get a lot done over the Christmas holidays, it's an advantage of not haviong children. Anyway, enjoy yourselves, and all that.

GREAT MEDICAL DISASTER – DIE, YOU BITCH, CRIED ARCHITECT (Pronoia Records)

Instrumental rock certainly splits opinion, so whilst some might not fancy Die, You Bitch, Cried Architect, we’re all for its widescreen, menacing music that we feel increasingly uncomfortable calling post-rock with every passing year in which rock itself fails to dematerialise (we suppose we’re stuck with it, at least until Hannah Barbera rebrands The All New Popeye Hour as Some Increasingly Outmoded Sub-Standard Animation).

“Lambs” may be a delightfully greasy rock track minus the hairy vocalist, but Great Medical Disaster’s best moments come when tracks are stretched and textural effects are liberally slathered: “Man United Killed Rod Hull” is Mogwai with sickly synth washes, taking us to a cluttered office in which an 80s detective fingers blinds to watch a steamy neon night (warning: individual hallucinations may differ). “The Beatification Of Cardinal Newman” reminds us of Oxford favourites Flies Are Spies From Hell with its tumbling piano climax, and it’s only when the tunes don’t seem to earn their dynamic flurries that things are unsatisfying – “Jesus Loved The Nun-Chucks” has lovely glistening guitars, but the bursts of noise are safe and unthreatening. Think log flume, not rollercoaster. Sometimes Great Medical Disaster are too happy within the confines of their genre, then, but when a Badalamenti eeriness is injected, and the evocative atmospheres come together, this is a great little record. Hell, the track titles have more imagination than some whole bands’ careers.

Bob's Yer Ungulate

2011-11-30T13:52:00.003Z

I recently edited footage of myself naked with film of two ladies. It was my first montage a trois.

HOT HOOVES – AVOID BEING FILMED (Rivet Gun LP)

Indulge in cults, embrace hegemonies:
Amuse your friends! Enrage your enemies!

Sounds a bit like a Hot Hooves lyric. Not equal to the sterling opening couplet to “Help Shape The Future” (“Your overactive thyroid gland/ Is pumping like a silver band”), but close enough. And it’s fitting, when you consider how many young, excitable or simply paranoid people believe some shadowy clique controls Oxford music. With a band like Hot Hooves, bringing together veterans from cult local bands like ATL and Talulah Gosh, you almost want to see a bad review to dispel any fears of back room favouritism.

Well, tough luck, chum, because this is a cracking little album (and little it is, ten tracks that never reach the heady prog heights of three minutes). Any gin-soaked old hack who has heard of YouTube and got a deadline looming will tell you that our culture is an embodiment of Warhol’s prediction that “in the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”; Avoid Being Filmed seems to ask what happens for the rest of their lives. This brief spasm of an LP could be read as the memories and opinions of someone who was briefly feted by the music scene some unspecified time ago, an unstable mixture of bile, supercilious amusement and nostalgic fondness for an awkward, illogical industry. A sort of cross between John Osborne’s Archie Rice, and Creme Brulee’s Les McQueen, perhaps. Indeed, the LP draws a line from the clarion call of “This Is It, This Is The Scene” to tales of fights, breakdowns and post-gig boozing on “The Plot”, euphoria to “artistic differences” in ten short tracks.

But, whilst we aren’t sure if Hot Hooves are saddened, tickled or frustrated by rock music, we know they have a bloody good crack at making it. Each tiny nugget of a tune is a tough alloy of dirt simple rock rhythms and cheekily catchy melodies that is immediately accessible but sculpted with enough pop nouse to remain memorable. “This Is It, This Is The Scene” is a bit like “Something Else” swimming at half speed through a vat of custard, and our favourite “The Sparks Up Agenda” barrels along like a schoolyard winger hurtling towards an open goal, unaware that the bell has rung. Occasionally the feel is new wave in inverted commas, and can seem somewhat third hand – “The Plot” veers rather close to Elastica, and the album’s only real misstep “Hot Hooves” sounds like a mildewed old Family Cat record that has been gathering dust under the bed for twenty years – but in general it’s impressive how visceral and sweatily enjoyable this album is. The tunes Pete Momtchiloff sings are perhaps the best examples of Hot Hooves’ space between the nihilistic romanticism of Guided By Voices and Half Man Half Biscuit’s pub carpet cabaret.

To say that this record sounds like the vibrant work of musicians half Hot Hooves’ age would be patronising. To say you’d be hard pressed to find rock music in Oxford that packs a good old fashioned punch whilst peppering the lyrics with archly acidic little witticisms seems redundantly self-evident. Let’s just say this is a lovely little collection of high quality, scuffed tunes that anyone with an interest in Oxford pop should listen to...fuck’s sake, it only takes about twenty minutes, what have you got to lose?

Nothing Gonna Stop The Floe

2011-11-27T10:18:00.002Z

I have to write a "best of 2011" for one person and a "ones to watch for 2012" for another. I hate that kind of stuff.

I also hate it when adverts say "Terms & Conditions apply". Of course they do, otherwise there would be chaos; there's no way I could make you an offer without delineating it in some fashion. "Buy one bottle of Head & Shoulders and get...whatever your mind can conceive of absolutely free - the accepted parameters of scientific governance notwithstanding". Idiotic.

TERJE ISUNGSET, OCM, The Northwall, 5/11/11

We don’t normally care about a musician’s equipment - start talking like that and before you know it you think Stevie Vai is better than John Lee Hooker – but we watched Terje Isungset’s Ice Music desperate to know what gear they had backstage. What sort of refrigeration rig is required to bring instruments carved from Norwegian glaciers around the UK?

The instruments not only look gorgeous in subdued theatre lighting, but they sound phenomenal: an ice marimba is somewhere between a balafon and a tabla, and a pair of glistening ice horns sound like Jan Garbarek mournfully morphing into an elephant seal. But, once you’ve marvelled at the logistics and the concept and the beauty of ice instruments, you’re unfortunately left with something aimlessly pretty. Take Lena Nymark’s breathy vocals: she may be adept enough with her effects pedals to build a wash of Cocteau Twins ambience, but her voice is rather thin when what the show needs is a steely soprano or a gutsy folk chorus to raise it from the morass of politeness.

To be honest, we far preferred the first half of the concert. Tribute To Nature is a piece for drumkit augmented by elemental wood and granite percussion, but the rough-hewn instruments offer more than earthy novelty. The click of stone on stone is a Neanderthal telex, and a Jew’s harp passage sounds like a Tuvan version of Aphex Twin’s “Didgeridoo”; at times the windswept stillness is Biosphere unplugged, at others the frenetic crackling rhythms are bebop played by a huge insect. A Max Roach, maybe? No, no, you’re right, we’re sorry.

Tribute To Nature may be too long, and the shamanistic groove is too Howard Moon (“Coming at you like a jazz narwhal!”), but the piece is hypnotic and evocative, and Isungset is modest enough to break the sonic spell and make people giggle by creaking his drum stool: ice is nice, but sometimes a musician finds their best material in jokes and accidents.

Alter Boys

2011-11-04T15:35:00.002Z

One of the few times I've ever written a review at 20.00 on deadline day...and I think it shows. Not bad, as such, but disjointed. I wanted to put bits in about the keyboard playing, the relationship between The Marshall Suite and The Mayor Of Casterbridge ("It just goes down and down, that book" - MES) and why Hollywood never latched on to The Metamorphosis ("Right, so you got this cool giant bug and all he does is moan about the office?!")

BORDERVILLE – METAMORPHOSIS (Own release)

Sadly, we don’t get sent records any more, just links to downloads and audio streams. That’s OK, we understand the advantages in terms of ecology, energy and economics. Borderville, however, eagerly sent a hard copy of their latest, perhaps indicating their love of a holistic artwork, and their pride in a deeply considered package, rather than a string of ditties. Of course, anyone with cash can create lavish CD artwork to detract attention from drab music, but the mandibular folds of Borderville’s CD box fit the insect theme perfectly, and the flea image echoes Joe Swarbrick’s assertion that the German “ungeziefer” doesn’t necessarily imply the giant roach most publishing illustrators leap on for editions of The Metamorphosis.

Because, yes, this album is a musical retelling of Kafka’s novella. If you think that sounds pretentious, do yourself a favour and turn the page now. Go on, there’s plenty for you later: there might be some big pictures, or ads for gigs by tribute bands like Saxon & On, or Junior Doctor Feelgood. Anyone who isn’t put off by theatre or erudition will happily discover how approachable Metamorphosis is. In fact, you don’t need to know anything about the book, because what’s great is that the album has the shape of a story, the taut arc of ineluctable tragedy, the encroaching claustrophobia of macabre fiction. It’s fantastic that Metamorphosis sounds like a tale being told, rather than a band noting how clever they all are.

It’s perhaps inevitable that Metamorphosis shall be labelled as Prog. That’s fine, but inaccurate. Most of the music is built on material from the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, be it the Rocky Horror cod-jiving of “Open The Door”, or “Anchor”, where a soda hop ballad is suspended in - sonic zeitgeist alert! - cold reverb. Rather than ELP trickery, Borderville take scraps of everyman rock, like Richie Valens or Queen, and cover them with black dramatics and queasy dissonance – from the infected cicada swoon of the opening moments, the record is held together by synthetic hums and electroacoustic dizziness. Perhaps, because of this, “Capitalypso” doesn’t quite fit. Sure, it’s got a portmanteau title, funky guitar and a clever link between insectile chitin and workplace relationships in the line “toughen up my skin, sir”, but it almost derails the record by being too good a rock song: we need soliloquies not melodies, Greek chorus not pop chorus. Forget tunes, it’s the rhythm section’s album anyway: check out the Rolling-Stones-play-Aphrodite’s-Child stomp of “I Am The Winter”.

Add some balletic keys and a thespian vocal that can convince in both the dark bombast of “The Human Way” and the resigned resolution of the closing track, and you have an album of the year. If some will turn away in the opening minutes, everyone else will adore it till the final curtain.

The Hemp Brothers

2011-09-30T17:11:00.004+01:00

When I was younger I used to get angry about people discussing the weather. Now I disagree, all I can think today is "Fuck me, it's hot for September". You can scoff, but you're thinking it too (unless you're one of the people from other continents who visits this blog: hello, foreigners! Youre not real, of course, are you? Just web-bot type things I suspect).

DUOTONE – ROPES (ECC Records)

There’s a sense of retreating into safety about Duotone. Not only are the band named after an old printing technique, but their promotional material is steeped in sepia Edwardiana, and despite copious use of loop pedals their music nods towards well-behaved salon folk. Add a few lyrics about the hermetic safety of an old-fashioned middle class childhood, all bedtime stories and warm nurseries, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Duotone are a soppy panacea for delicate wallflowers who think the world is moving too fast and who wish they were back at prep school.

But you’d be wrong. Comforting and hushed the music might be, all deep in the womb of Barney Morse-Brown’s impeccable cello, but this is far more than insipid ambience. Not only are there moments of chilling eeriness throughout the album, but the music is restlessly inventive. When it might have been easy for Duotone to stick with some whispered melodies and a few pretty James Garrett guitar parts, they slip some eclectic elements into the album: “Walking To The Shore” starts with a stately promenade that owes something to British minimalism, before introducing a spikily elegant vocal line that reminds us of The High Llamas. Later, “Alphabet” leaps halfway through from bucolic lullaby to something that isn’t far from a Knight Rider chase theme. “Broken Earth” is a high point, a “Hansel & Gretel” referencing chunk of goth folk that reminds us of an urbane take on 60s experimental folk, a clean-shaven Comus if you will.

There are a couple of mis-steps on Ropes, from the fluffy Disney refrain of “’Till It’s Over” to the directionless doodle of “Powder House”, wordless female vocals flitting politely about like “The Great Gig In The Sky” repackaged for Habitat, but these are minor blemishes. Ropes is a gorgeous record that is immaculately performed and recorded, but which still retains an enticing air of melancholic mystery: for all their abilities, this is the important element most Sunday supplement boutique folk acts seem to be missing.

Enemy Brats

2011-09-19T11:02:00.002+01:00

I enjoyed writing this review, because Secret Rivals, two scant years ago, were an awful, clunky band who spent most of their time being idiots online - and now they're really good. Nice work.

SECRET RIVALS – MAKE DO & MEND (Has Legs)

Roger Scruton and Brian Sewell probably disagree, but pop music can explore pretty much any concept or sonic vista, and attracts composers as original and adventurous as, say, opera. Having said that, as much as we like to lock ourselves away for a weekend to wrestle with Scott Walker’s Tilt whilst making notes in the margins of Dylan’s Tarantula, there’s something to be said for pop that simply offers bags of barely controlled energy and a bloody big tune. That’s where Secret Rivals come in, having knocked up a collection of bubbling pop mini-riots that should charm anyone with even a fractional propensity towards having a good time.

“Ghosting” ushers us in with a light, summery indie-funk beat and some ramshackle, chirruping Byker Grove vocals. This is pretty much the blueprint for the record: bouncy rhythms rushing hell for leather towards the end of the song, with occasional stately keyboard lines watching over them like an indulgent parent, topped off with a battle between Clouds’ smilingly tuneful female vocals and atonal Dickensian scamp interjections from Jay. If there is a fault with the record, it’s that Jay’s yelping can become wearing. On “Tonight Matthew...” the contrast between an affable melody on one side and a punky little anti-rap on the other works well, reminding us of the interplay between Bjork and Einar on The Sugarcubes’ “Hit”, but on “Blisters” you just want the squawking little urchin to shut up and leave the song alone. He’s like the annoying chumps waving signs saying “Hi Mum!” behind news reporters on location. But then he sings the mournful closing title track, and reveals an unexpected delicacy and all is forgiven.

Anyway, for the most part the unpolished exuberance of the music whisks the listener along in its wake so powerfully, that there’s simply no time to consider stylistic infelicities: it’s like asking a child to critique the label on their supermarket brand Sunny Delight rip off, when they’re too busy having a tartrazine meltdown. “These Are Only Obstacles” is the one that really grasps us, a scrappily charming little snatch of melodic positivity that makes us teary eyed for the loss of John Peel – it’s enormous fun, but has a quiet, emotional undertow, and there are also some effective touches of melancholy on “Me Vs Melodrama” and “Make Do And Mend”.

We do wonder whether Secret Rivals, who seem to be garnering some impressive attention recently, have got quite enough about them to forge a whole career, but for now this album comes highly recommended, especially for anyone who can’t bear to admit that the summer is over...and, perhaps, looking to the future and worrying about artistic longevity is for people who don’t fully understand the joyous fizz of Secret Rivals’ music. If you’re looking for sensible, grown up stuff, we hear Roger Scruton has a website.

Truck 2011 Sunday Pt 2

2011-09-04T20:13:00.001+01:00

The Go! Team’s performance, on the other hand, would be invigorating at any time, but after the staid afternoon we’ve had, it’s like the second bloody coming, a vast ball of energy rolling from the main stage. Ninja may not be the greatest vocalist nor gymnast in the country, but she can put them together better than anyone we’ve seen in many a year, and the band leap into the music as if it were a swimming pool of chilled champagne. Aside from a moment or two like “Security Song”, which is like Stereolab without the Marxism or the krautrock collection, their tunes all have an old school hip hop joie de vivre performed with irrepressible positivity: Sugar Hill played by Grange Hill, if you will. We are also reminded of The Cookie Crew, Polysics and Rip, Rig & Panic at various points, but primarily the Go! Team are idiosyncratic and original, and we salute them for it.

This year we decide to take up the offer of a lift before the annual snooze through The Dreaming Spires’ set, and it seems wise to leave the festival on a high. The conclusion is that this larger, longer Truck has been a resounding success. There are inevitable criticisms. Firstly there’s still too much toothless country for our liking – some of this strumming could have been swapped for just one or two metal bands, surely – but we suppose that’s part of the deal. Secondly, as this is now a three day concern, there could have been more musical options on Saturday and Sunday afternoon; plenty of local acts would have been happy to fill the empty space on that lovely Wood stage free of charge, we’re sure. But, in effect, Truck has made itself bigger to keep itself small. This year was the biggest turnout ever, and yet for the first time in a long while we found that there were rarely queues for anything, and one could nearly always get close enough to a stage to enjoy it. Naturally, there were some Truck veterans who had a moan – it’s kind of a hobby for music fans of a certain age – but conversely we met many Truck virgins who couldn’t believe how great it was. In an era when most music festivals are horrible drinks advertising gulags or thinly disguised food fairs, it’s easy to see what makes Truck special, and no matter what small mistakes they might have made, we still believe they provide a uniquely excellent service.

Just don’t mention Groupon.

Truck 2011 Sunday

2011-09-04T20:03:00.008+01:00

Tate's Vorticism show today - just snuck in on the last day of the exhibition. Wonderful to see some of the stuff, but the show was a little thin for £12.70 - not their fault lots of it has been lost, but there was a lot of archival material amongst the actual artwork. Perhaps a little bit of Epstein & Lewis post-Vorticism would have filled things out.

Blasts & Blesses still one of the greatest pieces of writing/page design in the English language, and beuatiful to see wall-sized.

The bonuses were Nike Nelson's amazing The Coral Reef and a pleasant surprise in walking past Selfridge's on the way to the Oxford tuvge and discovering a new show from the fantastic Museum Of Everything. No, I don't have links. You heard of Google?

We’d be lying if we told you that Mat Gibson was an amazing, ground-breaking artist, but laying on our back, listening to his plangent, pedal steel drenched songs, watching the white clouds form and disperse as if we were submersed in a giant, freshly poured Guinness is a pretty great way to start Sunday. Cashier No 9 play comfy rootsy pop on the Clash stage, like a Northern Irish La’s, and they’re followed by Lanterns On The Lake, who make grown up indie folk with Sigur Ros crescendos, which isn’t seismic, but is actually better than Mew’s set at last year’s festival. And that’s the gist of Sunday: lots of good stuff, very little bad, but very little great.

Take Maybeshewill, for example. They have a dense, muscular sound, and we enjoy their set a lot, but there are only so many times one can get truly excited about this Mogwai tumescent guitar trick. Alessi’s Ark are also listenable, but help us to work out what Americana actually means. It means “leftovers”. It’s not folk, blues, country, rock, bluegrass or anything else that’s actually good, it’s just the offcuts you get when you’re making any of those. Ho hum.

As the music isn’t sparking any synapses, we drop in on the Free Beers Show’s comedy stage, who are quick to announce they can’t give out free beer because of licensing restrictions. Lucky it’s a well behaved crowd at Truck, they could have been lynched in other festivals. As a sort of object lesson in the value of delivery, we see Alex Clissold Jones, a man who strikes us as being potentially very funny, die on his arse, before being followed by Chris Turner, a comedian with inferior material, who is connecting with the crowd. In actual fact, the bays should go to compere Matt Richardson, who manages to keep coming back with funny, mostly improvised stand-up between every set.

Much as we respect it as an addition to Cowley Road, we have to say that the Truck Store’s selection for the Last.FM stage is noticeably the weakest of the three days. Tribes, for example, play a sort of CITV grunge, big-boned, melodic punky tunes lobbed skywards, as if to see where they land. It’s all pretty good, but doesn’t quicken any pulses. Islet should be the ones to turn things upsidedown, but they can’t capture the magic of their Barn set last year. The show is still a beguiling mixture of howls, whoops and keyboard washes, all held together by occasional dub basslines and percussion that sounds like an autistic class day out in a cowbell factory, but it is fun rather than mystifying. Last year we felt as though we were caught in a harrowing Branch Davidian ritual, this year it’s more like being in a training camp for a Chuckle Brothers franchise.

The main stage has been a bit of a parade of worthy solo and duo sets all day, so Tunng liven the soundscape somewhat, with Casio African rhythms, and well placed layers of sound a la vintage Four Tet. If we’re honest, we found the songs to be a bit less interesting than the soundscpaes underneath them, but it’s still a very strong performance.

Phil Selway also puts in a strong performance, but it leaves us entirely ambivalent. His voice is decent, which is a nice surprise, and he plays some well-structured, but slightly twee semi-acoustic numbers, one of which reminds us strongly of “Little Drummer Boy”. As befits a member of Radiohead, there are some subtly evocative touches in the arrangements, such as the “O Superman” backing vocals on the second number, but overall the conclusion is that this is music that would work better on midnight headphones, not in a tent on a sunny afternoon.

Truck 2011 Saturday Pt 3

2011-09-02T18:05:00.000+01:00

Back at the Blessing Force love-in, Chad Valley is showing us round the dessicated remains of a freeze dried Ibiza night from 1989. By putting sweaty, nightclub music of the past into an amniotic reverb womb, Chad Valley’s set is a little like what the staff of Ghost Box records might play if they were cruising for a shag. It’s actually remarkably good music, although we often worry that Hugo Manuel’s voice isn’t strong enough to carry the material, but as with all the Blessing Force endeavours, we feel as though we’d need to be Mahakali to make air quotes sufficient to capture the levels of reference and irony. Which is why the collaboration between ODC Drumline and Coloureds is a pleasant surprise. Far from being a smug game for BF buddies, as feared, the drumline is actually four very well drilled players, who have rehearsed some decent arrangements to complement Coloureds’ jittering techno. It’s highly enjoyable, although in a twist of inverse logic, a collection of crisp, clattering martial snares actually detracts from the rhythmic power of Coloureds’ material, and we can’t help feeling that, despite the evident skill and effort involved, it would be more satisfying to just hear Coloureds. Oh, and twice as loud, too, thank you.

Plus, no matter how hard they tried, they could never actually be more of a noisy party conclusion to the night than The Rabbit’s Foot Spasm Band, who turn the cabaret tent into a jazz apocalypse. Limbs stick at random from the beyond capacity tent, mikes are used and discarded to the confusion of the engineer, dancers leap onstage and are summarily booted off, and all to the sound of solid gold brutal jump jazz. Everyone who doesn’t like jazz should be made to watch the Rabbit’s Foot...and many people who do like jazz should too, because they like the wrong bit. Sheer carnage, there’s no better sound to turn in to bed to.

Truck 2011 Saturday Pt 2

2011-09-02T18:01:00.011+01:00

The Rockingbirds, over on the Clash Stage, prove you don’t need to have a spurious movement and ugly stage sets to be exciting, they simply bash out vintage rock with country flourishes with self-effacing charm and leave everyone happy. See, sometimes that’s all you need, kids: some good music.

Anyone missing the surprising absence of Luke Smith from the lineup this year could have done worse than dropping in on wry pianist Matt Winkworth. Like Smith he has a relaxed sense of humour and a deft way with the ivories, but there is a glitzy, cabaret heart at the centre of Winkworth’s music, every tune leaving a waft of greasepaint and mildewed curtain velvet. Standout is “Elixir Of Youth”, a song about wanting to die that is made impossibly tragic by the jaunty old Joanna underneath it.

Wild Swim open their set with a proto-drum ‘n’ bass rhythm topped with a light operatic tenor. It could be the lost theme for Italia 90. Later they sound like Spandau Ballet might have, if they’d discovered a copy of Amnesiac in a time portal. All of which sounds slightly demeaning, but we are impressed with this young band, who may have grasped more than they can quite deal with as yet, but who look as though they have the potential to develop along exciting lines.

We choose to listen to Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou from outside the Clash tent. We’re quite partial to their winsome folk music, but can’t stand the sight of them gazing longingly into each other’s eyes, like a mixture between A Mighty Wind’s Mitch & Mickey and an 80’s Love Is... cartoon. Something tells us that if this act breaks up, it won’t be because of “artistic differences”...

We return to the Blessing Force hootenanny to hear a keyboard line that sounds like a medieval recorder part, putting us immediately in mind of Danish genius/madman Goodiepal. It turns out that this is the pinnacle of Jonquil’s set, but it’s all still good, taking ersatz 80 pop soul and creating new shapes form it in a way that must make Solid Gold Dragons weep with envy.

The fugu fish is apparently delicious, but in all but the most skilled hands it is a deadly poison. Sounds like the bagpipes and the djembe to us. We only hear small amount of The Geees’ pedestrian world-fusion jamming, but it’s a hideously painful experience.

There are only two ways to experience Thomas Truax’ home made instruments. Either watch him after a full 90 minute soundcheck in a high-end venue, where the subtleties of his Tom Waits songwriting can win out, or see him after no soundcheck, in a sweaty flurry of feedback and confusion that seems to capture part of his wired triple espresso New York charm. Today we have unexpected noises, guitar coming in at random levels, and songs lost in an Eno-ish dub. Wonderful.

You know that horrible Innocent Smoothies type trend, where packaging for allegedly healthy foods says “Look at me, I’m 100% natural, aren’t I lovely?”, so that now products can be as smug and enraging as their consumers? Well, Fixers should carry a label stating “this band is made entirely artificial components, and is bloody great”. Their set is mixture of fake Beach Boys keyboards, Ronettes vocals and Meatloaf tom flams, all tied to together with a catering sized delivery of delay. The effect is some of the most euphoric music we’ve ever witnessed, a whirlwind of sugary melody and psychedelic treatments, all of which is as inauthentic as Jack Goldstein’s California-Eynsham accent. Outstanding - and we’ve not even mentioned Jack’s vast tentacular beard, making him look like a Captain Birdseye from the Cthulhu mythos, or the endearingly over-excited exclamations between songs. A set for the annals, and vindication for a band some see as trendy Animal Collective copyists.

Slightly more refined local heroes, next, in the shape of Young Knives. And it’s a warm welcome back, as the set is far more enticing than last time we saw them live. They may not have got the wired maniacal electricity of their early sets, but they’ve moved through the safe, foursquare indie sound that typified gigs at the height of their fame. In fact, we swiftly remember all the things that we loved about them – although the sight of a middle aged mother, carrying her weeping toddler away from the stage, whilst singing along to “The Decision” says a lot about how time can cruelly catch up with you in this game. The House Of Lords, however, seems to be trying to cheat time, with a horrendous grebo haircut: is he living his life backwards, from chartered surveyor to petulant teenager? Any Carter USM covers likely on the next album?

Having missed Kris Drever earlier, it was pleasant to see him accompany Kildare singer, Heidi Talbot. Like delta blues, early minimalism and acid house, you don’t have to do much with Irish folk song to make us feel warm and fuzzy, but Heidi has a gorgeous papery whisper of a voice, that sounds as though it’s offering each song to you as personal indulgence, and when we open our eyes, thirty minutes has gone blissfully by.

The Long Insiders have turned the cabaret tent into a 50s burlesque show for the evening, which we mostly steer clear of, primarily because we don’t think we have the critical vocabulary to adequately review boobies, but we do catch some of the hosts’ opening set. Very good they are too, knocking out a fizzy rockabilly with stridently melodic female vocals...but you do suspect they go home every night and stick pins into an Imelda May voodoo doll.

Truck 2011 Saturday

2011-09-02T17:57:00.002+01:00

Here we go, part 2. Saturday at Truck. I'm going to eat a pizza soon, and I'm going to have it with spinach leaves and hummus, and just maybe a pint of beer. Then tomorrow I'm going to see the glorious Stornoway (it does mean I'll have to see the rubbish Dreaming Spires, whom I avoided at Truck), and Sunday I'm going to see the Vorticist show at the tate befopre it closes. I can't see why you'd want to knwo this, but I've told been told this site isn't strictly a blog, so I thought I'd add some meaningless eprsonal info. I'm currently wearing dark blue briefs.

Were we slightly critical of the gentrification of Truck’s catering earlier? Opinions change on Saturday morning when we find we can get a proper coffee and some orange juice a few feet from the tent, which balances out the burger we had for dinner. Chav for supper and middle class for breakfast, that’s our motto! What’s that? Lunch? No time for it, we’d rather visit the Butts ale stall, still the non-musical highlight of Truck. Great service, great beer and it costs £2.80 a pint. Two pounds bastard eighty! It’s akin to a miracle. We’re also told by parents that it would be worth our while to borrow a child just to experience Roustabout Theatre’s My Secret Garden, a weird mixture of improvised theatre and archaeology. Well, maybe not, but we do drop in on Nick Cope, who is entertaining some pre-schoolers with his chirpy activity songs. “Stand on one leg”, “Let’s pretend we’re moles”. Not so much later we find ourselves in the presence of Alphabet Backwards, whose music is really the same thing, for those slightly older. “Imagine you’ve just passed your driving test”, “Pretend you just got off with another sixth former”. Unashamedly perky pop, delivered with unashamed chops, it’s pity you don’t see this mix more often. A 21st century Squeeze.

The more spacious Truck layout has enticed us to spend more time away from the main stages, and we are very impressed with some of the Cabaret Clandestino bookings. Ex-Oxonian Face0meter delivers his wordy alt folk with some charm. The obvious reference point is Jeffrey Lewis, though we prefer to think of him as a cross between Richard Stillgoe and Jasper Carrott. Musically it’s beyond sloppy, but as entertainment it’s gold. Hyper-folk performer James Bell doesn’t have the gig of his life, but has energy enough to get away with it. Storyteller Paul Askew also stumbles a few times, but has material to hide the cracks, a long piece about taking a gaggle of words to the botanical gardens before kidnapping a pronoun reminding us of a punk Richard Brautigan; poet George Chopping eclipses him, though, with a perfectly balanced mixture of sweet natured observation and steel-melting bile. And yes, just so the cosmic balance is restored, there’s some absolute rubbish too: The Oxford Imps do fourth rate Whose Line Is It Anyway? guff whilst acting like a punchably upbeat genetically engineered Partridge Family. The festival programme has a typo of “improve” for “improv” – we couldn’t think of better advice for them. Oh, and Mark Niel is just skin-crawlingly awful. He laments the fact that his hometown of Milton Keynes is a bad comic’s punchline – funny, without that comment we’d have no idea he had any notion of what a punchline was.

The main stage bookings are strangely underwhelming in the afternoon, but Two Fingers Of Firewater add some spice to proceedings, their widescreen country rock and well-groomed boogie harking back to Truck history. They make the transition from Charlbury to Truck without losing any punch.

Blessing Force is brilliant: not only is a lot of the music very good, but what is not good is hilarious. In the Last.FM tent on Saturday, we enjoyed being alternately entertained by the music and entertained by the sheer hideous hipster spectacle of things. Sealings fell into the former category. In the past, we’ve been unconvinced by this noisy drum machine backed duo: they weren’t doing much wrong, but it was more a souvenir of good music, than good music in its own right. This time, however, everything fell into place, as the intensity rose from a Jesus & Mary Chain drone to a Swans-inspired squall. Solid Gold Dragons, on the other hand, were possibly the worst thing to happen to us over the weekend – and that includes getting nearly vomited on by a toddler. Their plastic, stadium pop with light reggae inflections might be just about acceptable if the vocals weren’t so clod-hoppingly oafish, even whilst they tried to plumb cosmic realms of imagery. Imagine Big Audio Dynamite on an off night fronted by Bernard Matthews. No, wait, sometimes the trumpet made it more like a tired James lead by Derek Nimmo taking the piss out of Morrissey. No, wait, can we please stop thinking about this, forever?

Holy Truck

2011-08-31T17:08:00.010+01:00

Of course, since I wrote this review Truck festrival (or rather, Steventon Events, who run it) has gone bust. I decided to leave the review as it was writtena day or two after the event, rather than go into hysterical eulogies. I'll miss it, though, for all its faults.

Sat & Sun copming very soon.

Yes, there are a lot of words here. Don't read them if you don't weant to, I don't mind. There are plenty of blogs out there that average 10 words a post, go and find them, if you don't like reading. You deserve each other.

TRUCK FESITVAL, Hill Farm, Steventon, 22-4/7/11

FRIDAY

Oh, there’ll be letters. Pints will be mumbled into. The internet may be utilised. Truck has done the unthinkable, and redesigned the festival site. Not only is the main stage in a different place, it’s in a different damned field. And the barn is gone. Everyone loved the barn. Everyone loved the atrocious acoustics, awkward bottleneck entrance and lingering smell of cow faeces. Who wants this new Clash stage, with its high-quality PA and easy access?

Well, we do. We feel that, for the most part, Truck’s new, more spacious layout is a success, and if they have co-opted some of the trappings of the well-heeled boutique festivals they helped to create – posh sit-down dining, stalls selling over-priced nick-nacks made from old Penguin paperbacks – the old, unpretentious, home-made atmosphere still survives. And, yes, you can still buy doughnuts from the vicar and grub from the Round Tablers (quote of the weekend: “I got a lovely burger, but it was weird to buy it from the masons”).

Our weekend starts in the new Clash tent, with Gaggle, a large bunch of vibrantly bedecked young ladies doing a line in big tribal pop chants. It’s something like a school nativity play version of Bow Wow Wow, and is good honest fun. There are about 35 of them, which we suppose might look impressive if we hadn’t just spent 20 minutes as part of a large and twitchy crowd at the Steventon level crossing, as some sort of ovine emergency meltdown caused by sheep on the line a few miles away meant that the barriers had to be kept inexplicably closed.

The Wood stage is a cosy, intimate tent that is sadly a little underused over the weekend, but it’s a the perfect place to watch Water Pageant, a likable folk-pop trio, whose delicate sound might get lost in larger spaces. At another corner of the site, the Last.FM stage is curated on the Friday night by BBC Oxford Introducing, and we’re tempted to say this was the lineup of the weekend. The Braindead Collective swap their free improv racket for an exploration of open-ended pop, and it works beautifully, Chris Beard’s lucid, careening voice sailing high above a mixture of dub touches and Fripp-like effects.

Mr Shaodow follows them admirably, with a crowd pleasingly boisterous set that may have hidden some of his clever lyrics, but highlights his way with an eager audience. Shadow is one of an odd breed of Oxford-connected artists who always get a rave reception at Truck, but who generally play to small, indifferent audiences in the city (cf testpilot, nervous), and with this in mind we can hardly blame Shaodow for keeping things accessible. One question though: are we missing something or is DJ Watchcase the worst hip hop moniker in a fifty mile radius?

You Are Wolf aren’t mentioned in the programme, but we stumble across her making complex loops of vocals and keyboard, to deliver a lilting traditional folk song over the top. She then announces it was actually a Dolly Parton cover! Did we imagine this?

Back at the Wood stage, London’s Non-Classical club have taken over for the evening, and we have the pleasure of being amongst the small attendance for one of the sets of the weekend, from Consortium 5, a recorder quintet. In previous years a recorder only ensemble at Truck might have meant Piney Gir and chums arsing about and playing smugly dire Steely Dan covers, but Consortium 5 is a highly drilled, professional group of musicians, offering us a little Purcell and a lot of contemporary composition. The sonic range is astounding, from the sound of a baroque traffic jam through a Ligeti-like cloud of chirrups to the final number, a mass of breathy percussive bursts and gasping trills, like Thomas the Tank Engine and friends playing Takemitsu. It’s random discoveries like this that make Truck special.

There are lot of people on the Truck bill this year who Used To Be In Bands, which is fine, but there are also a lot Whose Dads Used To Be In Bands: Truck wants to watch that it doesn’t become some sort of indie Cornbury. An example for the prosecution would be Liam Finn, offspring of him out of Crowded House, who is decent enough but pretty dull, going for a wall of sound pop effect, but losing us swiftly.

Perhaps feeling guilty for giving up on Finn so quickly, we decide to give Africa Junction more of a chance, and are amply rewarded for doing so. At first, they sound too studied to make anything from their polite African percussion – Jesus, we left East Oxford for the weekend to get away from this stuff – but as the tempo drops, and the balafon starts to lead the music, it wafts out of the Cabaret tent like a warm sirocco.

Johnny Flynn reminds us happily of childhood TV, and Rolf Harris painting vast wall-sized pictures with house paints. Flynn’s band similarly takes simple, bold strokes and throws them together to create something impressive. There’s nothing here we’ve not heard before, just chunky folky choruses, lively trumpet lines, bluesy guitar licks, and a bit of ‘cello to underpin things, but the whole is rather lovely.

James Surowiecki wrote a book called The Wisdom Of Crowds, claiming that large groups of people are effectively cleverer than individuals. Our problem with this theory has always been that vast crowds of people are generally seen assembled to watch adequate but unexciting things like Coldplay or Michael McIntyre – just how fucking clever can they be? Still, we get a little buzz of pleasure in seeing hundreds of Truckers swaying along to Bellowhead’s outstanding version of “Amsterdam”, squeezing every drop of tawdry voyeurism and tragic celebration from Brel’s composition. In truth, this is the outstanding moment of set that is very good, but doesn’t reach the heights of their 2010 performance. Uncharacteristically, it’s the slower tracks that are more successful this time round, although the wah-wah mandolin does lend a funky edge to the more upbeat songs (images of Starsky & Hutch driving through Cecil Sharp House in a flurry of madrigal manuscripts). Not up to their own high standards, perhaps, but still probably the best festival band on the circuit.

Nipping out to catch some of Spring Offensive’s set turns out to be an excellent decision. We’ve always admired their music, but tonight the Introducing stage witnesses a band coming of age. Not only do they perform with an acidic intensity we’ve never seen before, but new track “52 Miles” takes the melancholic triumphalism of their best songs, but replaces the Youth Movies guitar twiddles with a slow-burning haze that eventually erupts into a bloom of furry beauty. A very good band just got better.

And we follow that be revisiting a good local band whom we had somewhat forgotten. Dive Dive remind us that they can produce bitter little nuggets of pop excellence, and send us off happily into the night, or at least towards the beer tent.

Trevor Trove

2011-08-08T18:53:00.002+01:00

"Blackbird singing in the dark/ Falling like a star/ But singing like a lark"

I allude to these lines later in the review, but thoughtthey were worth quoting here. C'mon, Trev, don't you know that a simile is supposed to find unexpected relationships between two things for poetic effect, not to liken something to something pretty similar in such a way as to emphasise their differences?

"The dog was barking as loud as another dog - quite a loud one", is not a great simile.

If Robbie Burns had been Trev he'd not have written "My love is like a red, red rose," but "My love is like fondness. You know, an emotion that expresses amorous feelings. Yeah, that's about right".

I personally think Trev wanted to write about blackbirds because he likes Paul McCartney...

TREV WILLIAMS – KEEP SINGING EP (Self release)

Trev Williams is one of the good guys. One of Oxford music’s nice blokes, he always has a smile and a positive lyric for any passer by. Except when he gets a bit angry and moans about everything, but even the he tends to apologise afterwards. Top man. But still, we’ve never really got a grasp on his music, which we’ve always found pleasant, harmless and – let’s be frank – trite. His trio The Follys, despite an infuriating approach to pluralisation, made a tight enough noise we’ll admit, but we still couldn’t find much in the songwriting to get excited about.

Then, about 18 months ago, we were watching Trev play at the arse end of some bill somewhere, and suddenly realised that we were enjoying it. The new songs wormed their way into our consciousness in a way the older ones never had, and a Labi Siffre cover proved that Trev had polished his singing voice. This new EP proves conclusively that the best thing a musician can have is not perfect pitch, posh equipment or a Dad who works for EMI, but determination and dedication. It’s a great little listen, and welcomes Trev into the upper echelons of Oxford’s singer-songwriters.

“Happy Song” might be the sort of platitudinous pop that Trev is wont to indulge in, but it does sound pretty great, with a delayed toy piano complementing an approachable vocal melody. Its optimistic bonhomie can be a little wearing, like having some Phil Daniels impersonator slap you on the back gurning “Cheer up, might never ‘appen” every 8 bars, but it’s undeniably well put together. “In The Dark” is similar fare. The song doesn’t set us alight – in fact, the only memorable bit is snaffled from “My Girl” – but it’s probably the best vocal performance Trev has ever put onto wax, and the crisp production is built around a supply dark keyboard part that puts us in mind of Red Snapper.

This pair are all very well and good, but it’s the other two tracks that really show how Williams has developed. Nightshift Demo Of The Month winner “You Cut, We Bleed” still sounds wonderful, a burst of rage and reverb that blossoms into a life-affirming piano jaunt when the pressure threatens to break the song apart. It was composed in response to recent public spending cuts, but frankly the lyrics are so opaque that it could easily have been about sloppy management at Trev’s favourite football club, or the time his housemate drank all the milk. No problems there, the simplicity and directness of the lyrics makes the song feel universal, and suggests it may have a shelf life beyond the current administration.

It’s a great tune, but it’s eclipsed by the title track. We’ll skim over the opening couplet, which has one of the clumsier similes we’ve ever heard, and jump straight into the meat of the song, a gorgeous cyclical, floating melody that wafts over the top of delicately plucked guitar. Live versions have often drifted away into loop pedal heaven, and our only real criticism of the piece is that we could have done with more of it. Anyone who thinks this review sounds a bit patronising or distant might like to know that the last time we found ourselves inadvertently humming an Oxford tune this much, it was “Zorbing”, which is high praise indeed. Keep singing? If there’s one thing we can conclude about this release, it’s that we hope Trev takes his own advice, and that there’s lots more like this to come.

Automatic For The Pupil

2011-08-02T17:28:00.005+01:00

Been ages, hasn't it? Fear not, there shall be a mammoth Truck review coming next time we meet. In fact, it'll be so long you won't actually read it. Even if you mean to, you'll get bored or sidetracked. I don't mind, I'm relatively phlegmatic about it all.

THE SCHOLARS/ DEAD JERICHOS/ PEERS/ VON BRAUN/ MANACLES OF ACID, Upstairs/BBC Introducing, Academy, 16/7/11

“Not from round here, are you, boy?”. Some of you may be cynical about this statement, but the worst band by far at the latest in the Academy's showcases are the one from outside Oxford. Reading’s Peers make a clumpy sort of epic indie, that’s a bit like Echo & The Bunnymen meets Simple Minds, but is more like a Runrig tribute made by flustered heifers whilst nearby a maudlin drunk honks out indecipherable paeans to a shop dummy that his addled brain thinks is his Mum. Dead Jerichos have an easy job reinvigorating us after that, their music still a flurry of skittering hi-hats and beery bonhomie, like The Jam on a weekend long stag do with Suggs. We could do with a more restrained use of the delay pedal, but otherwise familiarity has not spoilt this young band.

Much earlier The Manacles Of Acid reprised their Charlbury set by playing to almost nobody – in fact, even one of the band wasn’t there this time. Like the coelacanth in 1938, many have just discovered that acid house is far from extinct, and that it laughs in the face of evolution. The Manacles have a great sound, half-inching bits from Bam Bam and Model 500 to make a sleek yet squelchy ride. One noodling Sven Vath wrong turn is swiftly forgiven.

Sadly “Black Saxon” isn’t a NWOBHM retelling of Shaft, but in it and other tracks, Von Braun present a honed rock sound that balances light Sonic Youth guitar chug with Allman Brothers vocal harmonies. The set starts shakily, but builds to great head, complete with wired Frank Black declamations. The Scholars, conversely, play a balanced set of evocative pop, honed and studied (as the name suggests), all forlorn, dewy eyed vocal lines bolstered by keyboard washes and well placed crescendos. We consider The Scholars to be an impressive band with full control over their material, and the ability and focus to present it convincingly, even whilst our heart is screaming “Stop making these boring noises at us, and do something worthwhile”. Call it a draw?

Raving Private Cyan

2011-07-07T19:47:00.003+01:00

Thank you for reading this. I don't say that as often as I should, but I mean it. Ooh, my downloads have just boiled, best be off.

COLOUREDS – TOM HANKS EP (Download)

“Don’t it always seem to go,” mused Joni Mitchell, “that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”. Quite possibly, you querulous folk activist, you, but to balance this we find that sometimes we have no idea we needed something until it turns up. For example, a year or so ago we were all living our lives quite oblivious to the fact that what Oxford music really required was a masked duo that sound like a cross between Felix Da Housecat and Autechre. But then we discovered Coloureds.

This record follows on from where their last left off, taking shiny, flexy club music and folding it in on itself like intricate dancefloor origami. The title track sounds like it could once have been a perky, approachable piece of contemporary house, replete with a near pornographic video of cheerleaders working out and getting caught in a thunderstorm, that Coloureds have stuck through a shredder and stuck back together in any old order. There’s a fascinating balance in the title track between an enticingly simple bounce in the drums, and a jittering, fractal collection of keyboard snatches and vocal fragments that is just too swift for the ear to comfortably accommodate.

“Monocle” is really more of the same, although it has a slightly more coherent lead keyboard line, bringing it closer to the more abrasive strains of funky. “Do You Want To Come Back To My Room And Listen To SebastiAn?” uses the same recipe, but stirs in some distorted and sliced guitar from This Town Needs Guns’ Tom Collis, and has a clumsy euphoria that’s refreshing: like the best of Coloured’s music, it’s neither the all-consuming Nuremberg glitter thump of High Street club music, nor the academic prissiness of the current micro-generation of IDM, but manages to find a space where the feet want to dance even as the mind gets lost in a hall of sonic mirrors. Oh, and it sounds like that little Pixar anglepoise all growed up, and out of its tiny bulb on its first E.

To be brutally frank, listening to all five tracks of this EP consecutively becomes a trifle wearing, especially as two are remixes of "Tom Hanks" (although one is mixed by SHHH! THE DEAF HAVE AIDS, which may or may not be the greatest arrangement of five words in the English language), and brilliant as Coloureds’ skitterstep tricks are, after a while you just yearn for a simple melody, or a vocal that can stay in one place for two beats together. But, whilst it’s possible to sit and marvel at the ingenious construction of the EP, it’s not made to be digested at leisure, and as a live act, or as creators of music to be heard punishingly loud in a damp cellar, Coloureds are far and away the best in Oxford. If life is just a box of chocolates, on the Tom Hanks EP Coloureds have smooshed them all up into one giant confectionary ball. And filled it with tequila. Dig in.

Playing Flat

2011-06-27T17:04:00.003+01:00

This one was cut very slightly for this month's Nightshift. Firstly a couple of words were trimmed to squeeze it into the page, and secondly the rape image was toned down. Can't argue with that, really, but I must say that Harpo raping a swan, like some sort of inverse carnival Zeus, tickles me enormously.

That's all.

APARTMENT HOUSE, PLAYHOUSE, OCM/Sound & Music, 15/6/11

“The trouble with state arts funding,” runs the common argument, “is that it only supports things most people don’t like”. Funny that. It’s like asking why Baron Sugar doesn’t get any housing benefit. Tonight’s show, four pieces performed by the excellent Apartment House, selected and introduced by composer Jennifer Walshe, is exactly what Arts Council funding is for: niche interest music that simply wouldn’t work in The Wheatsheaf. The Playhouse is inhabited by a sparse knot of listeners, but the performers make full use of the excellent onstage facilities.

Amnon Wolman’s “Dead End” pits a clarinettist against four noisy toy vehicles that bumble around his feet, as if he were an unfeeling deity surrounded by excitable mortals. At first their constant buzz is annoying, but as the ear calibrates itself the noise makes sense with the clarinet lines. We start thinking about tape hiss, vinyl crackle and all extraneous noises we unconsciously experience alongside music.

Zachary Seldess attempts to evoke the sound of a cranky old New York shower in “124 Milton Street Extract”, using marimba, drums, radio static and rubbed wine glasses (played by five solemn middle aged performers at a table, like a glum seance convened by Jilly Goolden). The two drummers are superb, teetering on the edge of a cohesive rhythm, and the music is more like a photofit of the sound of plumbing, than a snapshot. It’s fascinating and immersive, if a touch too long.

In Peter Capaldi’s film Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful Life, the Czech writer is trying to stay miserable enough to finish Metamorphosis, but has trouble as parties rage around him. “Plateaux Pour Deux” by Pelle Gudmondsen-Holmgreen is pretty similar: a cellist plays parodically dour notes, trying hard to ignore the fact he’s on a small motorised platform nipping across the stage, and that someone is smacking cowbells and honking vintage car horns making noises like Harpo Marx raping a swan. The solo cello coda is pointless, but for sheer spectacle, this is truly unique.

Finally, Jonathon Marmou’s “Dog Star” is composed from randomly selected snippets of melody, but this is unimportant because it sounds like Parisian salon music created by Brian Wilson. At another time it might seem too prissily pretty, but it concludes the night gorgeously, with a fragmented chamber elegance that might just entice fans of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

The next in OCM and Sound & Music’s Listen To This series is at the same venue on 8th September. Should minority interest arts be funded by the tax-paying majority? Take the odd risk on new experiences, and they wouldn’t have to be.

Charlbury 2011 Sunday Pt 2

2011-06-23T17:20:00.001+01:00

Our love of louche Gallic troubadours Les Clochards is well documented, so we shan’t dwell on it here. One thing that leaps out at us is the quality of the lyrics in their set (thankfully for this shamefaced monoglot, pretty much all in English today). “Some things were never made clear/ Behind the surface, another veneer” is a lovely couplet in “Lavinia”, and the line “I stood on the fire escape and watched the sunrise” still raises the hairs on the back of the neck in “Tango Borracho”. Songwriting: some of you bands reading this really should try it one day.

Remember Banjo Boy from a few years back? Well, he’s here today, playing with The Headington Hillbillies, and we forget to watch. Very poor. We do see some of The Fenns, a family affair featuring different generations of Charlbury locals who get the best response of the weekend. Proficient covers isn’t really our bag – and having to listen to “Magic Carpet Ride” twice in one day is really testing us – but The Fenns boast plenty of charm, and there’s evident pleasure being had on and off stage, so we just sneak away quietly.

So, congratulations are in order to the Riverside organisors once again for another wonderful festival. A lovely weekend, and entirely for free: an obvious point, perhaps, but one worth repeating. If you doubt the effort that goes into running Riverside, take a look at the film of the site being set up on their website, embedded from Twitney, which we suppose is a Witney version of Twitter (of course, they’ve had social networking in West Oxfordshire for millennia, it’s called in-breeding). Riverside should be supported, cherished and celebrated by anyone who appreciates live music, especially today, when so many festivals have all the character and charm of a gulag in a Welcome Break motorway services. Same time next year, then?

Charlbury 2011 Sunday

2011-06-23T17:14:00.011+01:00

Hello, good people of the internet. And wankers; a big "hi" to the evil wankers. To be honest, you're relative moral merits are irrelevant to me, just read the reviews and enjoy them. If it turns out you steal nuts from squirrels immediately afterwards, it's no concern of mine.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, CHARLBURY, 19/6/11

As much fun as Saturday was, Sunday packed in a few more surprises for us, not least with Grey Children, the new project for Dave Griffiths, once of Eeebleee and Witches. As befits a first live performance of songs played by a scratch band, there are hesitant, uncertain moments in the set, but the material is very strong, with a muscular poeticism that’s something like a cross between Tindersticks and Sugar, with some excellent baroque curlicues from Benek Chylinski’s trumpet and Chris Fulton’s violin. Not a project we expect to see gracing the stage with great regularity, so it’s a real treat for those who turn up early.

After discovering him last year, we have to hang around to catch a bit of Sonny Black’s performance. You see so much hollow showboating in blues, it’s just great to see a relaxed, unhurried musician who lets his technique serve the music, and not the other way round. Hints of Davey Graham and John Renbourn abound, as well as the greats like Doc Watson. Sonny also plays some nice bottleneck national guitar, a gorgeous instrument which is only spoilt by the fact that just looking at the thing reminds us of Brothers In Arms.

A complete change of style at the other end of the festival, with thumping drum machines and squelching 303 basslines. We have an admission: we have no critical faculties in the face of acid house. None whatsoever. Honestly, just the sound of it immerses us in a wash of serotonin-drenched euphoria, taking us direct to cloud 909. So, for us to observe that Manacles Of Acid are very good indeed is probably meaningless, but they do a bang up job of reliving that wonderful space between Phuture and early Orbital. There’s a lovably ramshackle edge to the show, as lines come in at different volumes, and jack leads are swapped on the fly, but really if you do this music well, it always sounds good, you don’t have to rewrite the rulebook. So, not that dissimilar from Sonny Black after all.

Main stage engineer Jimmy Evil disappears at about this time, so we follow him over to the second stage to witness his progcore outfit Komrad. Since we last saw them, the tracks have been rearranged a little, and the music is less the unforgiving technical metal of old, and has a lighter, post-Zappa bounce: it’s not the all-out jape of Mike Patton’s more leftfield projects, but there is definite humour on display, not least in the genius song title “Parking Restrictions In Seaside Towns (Strongly Worded Letter To The Council)”. At moments the set is a little approximate – with intricate arrangements like these there’s nowhere to hide the odd fluff – but this is a band well worth watching.

People might look at Steamroller and call them dinosaurs. That would be forgetting, of course, that dinosaurs are COOL. An unreconstructed power blues trio will send some people into frothing excitement (especially those who remember the younger Steamroller from their Corn Dolly days), just as it will bore others to silent tears, but even the most vehement critic would have to admit that Steamroller have more than earned their place in Oxford music history, and that drummer Larry Reddington’s lyrics have a knowing humour: he could probably pen a witty lyric like “Back In Ten Minutes” whilst most of his peers were still trying to find a rhyme for “Cadillac”.

We’ve never quite managed to warm to Gunning For Tamar, for some reason. Their music is equidistant between Hretha and Spring Offensive, but for us they don’t have the rigorous elasticity of the former nor the emotive beauty of the latter. Solid, twitchy Oxford artpop, played very well, but not much else to our ears.

The Prohibition Smokers Club have developed in the past year from a random jam session to smooth, stadium soul party. Sort of a mixed blessing, as some of the set is too polite, but the highlights are excellent: “Graveyard Shift” is a smoky sketch of urban night owls, like a collaboration between Tom Waits and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, and the final track is a spicy open-ended funk workout. Really they’re the sort of groove revue that can only be judged after two 90 minute sets and a gallon of Long Island Iced Tea, it seems as though they’re just getting warmed up when the gig finishes.

One great thing about Riverside is all the children in attendance who seem to actually love the music. We saw a lad of about four moshing away to Gunning For Tamar, and by the time Alphabet Backwards come on, he’s rounded up a whole bunch of chums, all right in front of the stage. “Oh God,” observes an audience member to us, “they’re flocking. It’s like The Birds”. But then, Alphabet Backwards are a band for the unabashed child inside us all, an improbably joyous froth of pop melodies and chirpy keyboards. The closing track, new to us, sounds like a mixture of The Streets and Supertramp. Brilliant.

We thought Every Hippie’s Dream was world peace, with perhaps the chance to smoke a joint and look at a lady’s boobs taking a close second, but apparently what they like is 60s and 70s rock covers. So, look, when the sun’s out and someone’s playing “Foxy Lady” and they’re not completely rubbish the world can never seem an entirely awful place, but someone’s clearly been bogarting the originality round at EHD’s commune, as there isn’t much character to speak of on stage. They also seem to run out of steam a couple of numbers before the end of the set: if getting from one end to the other of “Sunshine Of Your Love” is a terrible chore, perhaps the covers circuit isn’t for you, lads.

Death Of Hifi give us instrumental hip hop next, which is a tribute to Riverside’s diversity. There are some nice mid-90s beats and some cheeky samples, plus decent scratching and guitar playing, but none of the tracks go anywhere. A rapper hops up to freestyle over one of the tracks, and whilst he’s not quite got the flow of Half Decent, who guested with Prohibition Smokers Club, his presence lifts the music from a moraine of unconnected ideas. A blueprint for future developments, perhaps.

Bank Data

2011-06-21T17:14:00.013+01:00

The review of this year's Riverside is up at MIO. No arguments yet, but it's early days. Course, I like people moaning about my reviews, because it proves they're being read...yes, even idiots who don't understand what a review is are welcome to join the fun.

I did want to post the first paragraph and put the rest up 24 hours later, but the editor wasn't up for me fighting my petty battles on the front of his website. Pah.

I'll stick Sunday up in a day or two.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, CHARLBURY, 18-9/6/11

Riverside was brilliant because it was free and everyone had a good time and all the musicians were great and it was brilliant.

Right, is the coast clear, have they gone? You know, those people who can’t tell the difference between a review and a press release? That lot who don’t quite grasp that the best compliment you can pay a musician is actually to listen to them? The gaggle who do one of the absolute highlights of Oxfordshire’s music calendar a disservice by getting upset if someone dares admit that one of the performers was, perhaps, not that great?

Good, then we level headed people can get on with talking about the Charlbury Riverside festival 2011, always a beautifully run, welcoming event, and one that we organise our summer around because we’d hate to ever miss it. In some ways, it doesn’t spoil the event if the music is duff at Riverside but we must admit, this year the lineup was, pound for pound, the strongest it’s been for quite some years. And starting with Peerless Pirates certainly couldn’t dampen anybody’s spirits, even as the first of many showers blew across the festival. They play classic indie welded onto rugged, shanty-style basslines that justify the band’s name: think The Wedding Present with arrangements by Guybrush Threepwood. Not always painfully original – you don’t have to be Scott Bakula to make the quantum leap from their opening tune to “This Charming Man” – but they offer friendly, jolly music that inaugurates the festival almost as well as the near visible battle in compere Lee Christian not to say naughty words on the mike.

This year’s lineup on the second stage is definitely the strongest and most intriguing since the Beard Museum left the helm, and our first visit rewards us with one of the sets of the weekend. Last time we saw STEM, it was all acoustic guitars and bongos and it couldn’t have been more worthily earthy if the PA were powered by a tofu wind turbine. Now they’ve returned to their Neustar roots to give us fat, brooding trip hop in the vein of Portishead and Lamb. Emma Higgins has a richly soulful but mysteriously intimate voice, like Grace Jones whispering secrets in your ear over port and cigars, and John West’s electronics envelop her with dark wings of autumnal sound, that's often only a breakbeat away from early Moving Shadow material. Perhaps a tad too in thrall to their mid-90s influences, this is still a band that is worth investigating as soon as possible.

We cock a quick ear in the direction of Mundane Sands, whose expansive folk rock is played with relish and personality, before visiting the charmingly odd man selling the coffees. You want a tasty Americano and a string of confounding non-sequiturs, you won’t get a better option anywhere in England. Last year we began to wonder whether he was some sort of live theatre installation, so unexpected were his utterances. You wouldn’t get that at your corporate energy drink sponsored mega-fests, eh?

They ought to show videos of Samuel Zasada before every acoustic night and open mike session in the county, with a subtitle reading “This is what you’re aiming for; if all you’ve got are miserable sub-Blunt moans, go home and try again. Thank you”. There have been alterations and expansions to the Zasada lineup since our last meeting, but they can still imbue their tunes with a gravitas and texture that’s sadly lacking from nearly all of their peers.

The Black Hats have only really got one song. It’s a goodie, though, a slick new wave canter with an anthemic culture-yob chorus and the hint of some amphetamine ska lurking just below the surface. They play it a bunch of times today. We like it every time. Job done.

Like Samuel Zasada, Tamara Parsons-Baker has been showing up the paucity of talent in most acoustic performers with a powerful, dramatic voice and some bleakly imposing lyrics. The Martyrs is her new rhythm section, featuring colleagues form the recently disbanded Huck & The Handsome Fee (not to mention much-missed sludgehogs Sextodecimo). We like the fact that there is pain and bitterness evident in the songs, but the delivery is always melodically accessible; they sugar the pill like Oxford’s answer to The Beautiful South.

What’s that? No, we quite like The Beautiful South. No, honestly. Anyway, Tamara & The Martyrs don’t actually sound like them, they play a sort of gothic blues, it was just an analogy. Look, let’s make this easier, and move on to The Dirty Royals. No room for confusion here because they sound – and to a certain extent, look – like first album Blur. Not a band that has “develop sonically” at the top of the To Do list stuck to their fridge, maybe, but to dislike their mixture of upbeat indie and airy West coast psychedelia you’d need a cold, black heart and a suspicion of music in general. And we have both those, and we still enjoyed it.

We wander over the see Welcome To Peepworld, and are simply astonished by the first two songs we hear. Their semi-acoustic sound is cohesive and balanced, but like mid-period Dylan the songs are allusive and intriguing to keep you hooked as the music floats by. We’re just wondering how amazing it is that two vocalists as different yet as impressive as Tamara Parsons-Baker and Fi McFall could share a stage at a free provincial festival, and pulling out the thesaurus to look up “astounding”, when Welcome To Peepworld toss it all away. Why, why, why did they have to start the affected cod-Brazilian vocal trilling? What possessed them to do all the horrible, Morrisette trash with the lazy repetitive lyrics about bad relationships and the criminally uninteresting use of two good guitarists? We thought we’d found one of the best bands in Oxfordshire, but Peepworld broke out heart and we had to leave. No, no, it’s nothing, there’s just something in our eye...

Things are more reliable over on the main stage, with The Anydays. As the name suggests, they’re a band for all seasons. So long as that season is early summer. In North London. In 1964 or 1994. Again, this is a good band, but not one who are interested in pushing the envelope. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even open the envelope unless they knew it contained loads of lager and Chelsea boots and old Pye seven inches. But if ever there’s a place for well-made moddish rocking, that place has got to be a big field at a free festival. Even as we’re nodding along, we imagine somehow merging The Anydays, The Dirty Royals and The Black Hats, to turn three solid local bands into one world-beating Friday night behemoth.

Smilex are playing on the second stage, uncredited in the programme. If you don’t like Smilex, you should get a bit tired and a little damp, and walk over to find them playing a set just when you weren’t expecting it, and we reckon you’ll come out loving them. Days like this is what Smilex are for - well, this and Your Song - rousing flagging crowds with their irrepressible energy and remarkably well-made sleaze-punk. Each of their songs is like the quick, sharp tingle of pulling gaffer tape from your chest; can’t think where we got that image from, Lee.

Borderville are sort of the opposite of Smilex. They are a truly excellent band, but one whose music, for all the bow ties and bombast, works better on record, where the sensitive playing is evident and where it’s possible to relish the subtle melancholy beneath every epic composition. An evening in a field just doesn’t do them justice, the environment seems to demand more immediate gratification than they offer. It’s like putting P G Wodehouse on Mock The Week. A favourite act of ours, but not a set that we really got much out of.

And then it was home, because that’s what the transport dictated - the countryside’s all very well, but it’s nowhere near our bed. There was still Charly Coombes, The Rock Of Travolta and Leburn to go, all of whom we know to be highly reliable options. A very strong day of music, in a delightful setting, it’s pretty hard to find fault with that.

The War On Pteradactyl

2011-05-29T10:49:00.003+01:00

Do you know what I'm not doing tonight? Going to The Wheatsheaf. Great place, of course, but if I did it three nights in a row it wouldn't do me the world of good, I suspect. You can't live on a diet of Oxford Gold and tinitus, can you?

V/A – WE DO NOT HAVE A DINOSAUR (download)

People doing things for charity, we like that. People doing bleepy things, we like that. So, let’s be honest, we’re well disposed towards this Japan tsunami fundraising LP from promoters The Psychotechnic League and The Modernist Disco, featuring various flavours of Oxfordshire electronica. As is the way with this sort of thing, the record feels more like a grab bag than a carefully cohered entity, but anybody with a passing interest in digital dance music should find something to make the fiver tag acceptable, not least the efforts from the curators of the project: We Are Ugly (But We Have The Music) offers a simple little chugger that sounds like it could have been made by a schoolchild on their Amga (not necessarily a bad thing), and Space Heroes Of The People’s “Kosmoceratops”, an insistent spiral of buzzing synths that’s like being harangued by Jean-Michel Jarre at a political rally.

There’s a fair variety of styles on offer, from Left Outer Join’s crusty trance that brings back king Rizla memories of Astralasia, to icy Biosphere tones from The Keyboard Choir, and Sikorski’s chest-thumping synth rock (which we don’t really like, because it sounds like Big Country doing Eurovision, but it makes a change). “Winter Sounds 4” by King Of Beggars isn’t the arctic techno we were expecting, but rather a portentous grid of synthesised harp with a bleak vocal direct from early OMD, and it’s rather great. Meanwhile, The Manacles Of Acid live up to their name by producing straightforward acid house with samples about, err, acid house; it’s almost criminally unoriginal, but if like us, you find any vestige of critical opinion evaporating in the face of a 303, you’ll agree it’s bloody brilliant. Tiger Mendoza and Cez can also hold their heads high.

But we end with the best. Coloureds have made a track called “Tennis”, which is logical, because listening to its relentless chopped vocal fragments feels like spending four minutes as the ball in a game of Pong. It also sounds like it’s going to break into Orbital’s “Chime”, which is obviously fantastic. Perhaps not a perfect LP, but one well worth getting hold of...unless you’re one of those people who thinks that electronic isn’t real music, in which case just go stick your head in a bucket of elephant dung. I bet even the bucket is plastic. Can’t even get a proper tin bucket nowadays. Poor you. Yes, yes, we know: hell in a handcart.

THE SHAODOW KNWS

2011-05-23T17:21:00.002+01:00

I'm listening to Public Enemy at the moment, they popped up on a compilation I have on. I always forget just how great they are. Fittingly, here's a hip hop review, albeit one that doesn't sound like "Don't Believe The Hype".

See you later, silly rabbits.

MR SHAODOW FEAT. GHETTS – GET STRONGER (Download single)

He may not be the most prolific of Oxford-connected musicians, but Mr ShaoDow has got to be up there with the hardest working. On any given weekend you’ll most likely find him playing a gig in some small provincial town, or traversing the length and breadth of the nation to sell his CDs on the streets. Perhaps our image of the dedicated performer in the 21st century isn’t of somebody practising six hours a day, or playing three hour marathon sets, but of someone spending huge chunks of their day online, updating statuses and emailing the frighteningly diasporic contemporary music media. Depressing? Maybe, but then again ShaoDow is getting his work heard all over the show, and what’s more, it’s being done 100% on his own terms.

Fittingly, this new single is a paean to positivity and effort: “Knock me down, I get stronger”, warns ShaoDow, painting himself as a sort of hip hop cross between Obi Wan Kenobi and a weeble. Can’t argue with that philosophy. Musically “Get Stronger” is a satisfyingly heavy, juddering whirr of a track, a dubstep version of an aging VW trying to start on a cold morning, and ShaoDow’s delivery is his most rugged yet to appear on record, which is fitting as his style has been slowly morphing from the cabaret one liners of old to a fast, intense, head down chaingun delivery that’s something akin to Twista raised on British club music (ShaoDow may have criticised the culture in the past, but the B side here, “Stay Away” owes a fair bit to grime) . We might miss the incisive humour of “Watch Out” or “R U Stoopid?!”, or the joyous madness of “Cockney Thug” in this record, but these are definitely ShaoDow’s most mature and well-honed bars, there’s not an ounce of spare flesh on the lyrics, and we’re suitably impressed by a sequence that rhymes “calibre”, “Africa”, “mafia” and the excellently ballsy “I grab fear by the trachea”. Ghetts offers a little respite with a more relaxed, thoughtful style that recalls previous ShaoDow collaborator LeeN, albeit with a slightly straighter face.

This is an excellent release, and one that may well propel ShaoDow on to the next step in his career. What we hope to see next is some recordings that marry this sleek professionalism with his irrepressible character and originality, but until then this single comes highly recommended. We must admit, however, that we don’t care for “Stay Away”, which not only has an annoyingly nasal sub-Albarn refrain, but also appears to boast some unreconstructed “my Dad’s bigger than your Dad” lyrics, which is the sort of thing ShaoDow normally avoids.

What’s that? We shouldn’t end the review on a negative point? That’s OK, ShaoDow doesn’t mind: whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger.

Daisy Bones (Of Dead Saints, Presumably)

2011-05-09T18:47:00.003+01:00

I was looking over the posts yesterday, and the number of times I introduce a piece by noting how ill I feel is concerning. Today, just so you know, I feel fine. This gig did its best to alter that, of course...

RELIK/ COWBOY RACER/ BREATHING LIGHT/ BROWNIAN MOTION, Daisy Rodgers, Jericho, 7/5/11

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it”.

Groucho’s words ring true as we leave the Jericho after as much of Relik as we can handle. Daisy Rodgers promotions have been an excellent addition to the Oxford scene for the past couple of years, running well thought out, friendly nights, with lots of character (consider the dubiously named Rodd Of Hotness game, which allows advance ticket buyers to vote for a cover version to be performed on the night). The nights are also incredible successes – whilst many promoters of unsigned bands are found hoping for a turnout in double figures, the only trouble Daisy Rodgers’ door staff has is working out whether they have time to nip to the loo at some point in the steady stream of customers. But, whilst we have only support for the Daisy experience, this particular gig was something of a damp squib.

The depressing thing for us about the last election was not necessarily that the result wasn’t what we had hoped for, but the fact that so many people didn’t bother to vote (let’s not even start discussions on the referendum). Staffordshire duo Brownian Motion evoke a similar feeling: their dramatic, rootsy flurries, pitched somewhere between Counting Crows and Sheryl Crow aren’t really for us, but they truly deserve a better reception than 95% of the Jericho gives them, not so much talking through their set, as howling and whooping like chimps on a rollercoaster. The odd, wistful Cowboy Junkies moment in Brownian Motion’s set are immediately lost in the sea of babble, which is a pity as this is their strongest element.

Breathing Light’s first number has a turn of the 90s, polished goth feel to it, the unhurried, melodic female vocals and lightly scuffed guitar and keyboards instantly bringing to mind Curve, Lush, or even the first Cranberries LP. They’re pretty good at it, but the second number reveals a stronger influence: Portishead. “I Remember” is pretty much “Sour Times” without the chorus, and their Hotness vote-winning cover is “Roads”. They do a decent enough job of aping the introspective Bristolians, and it certainly suits the pellucid vocals, but they don’t really have the gravitas in the rhythm section to pull it off, and the set works best when they bring in a brighter, neo-shoegaze sound that reminds us a little of Tsunami (the US ethereal pop band, not Mark Cobb’s local rockers). It’s a highly promising set from a band who could do with working out what their own voice sounds like.

Cowboy Racer is the new project of Salad’s Marijne Van Der Vlugt. There are some other, session muso types onstage, but it’s Marijne most people have come to see, and it is she whom we find endlessly infuriating. Why does she drop into husky whispers and kooky chirrups mid-song, whilst gesticulating oddly, is it supposed to be sexily kittenish? Why does she suddenly leap on the spot, wild-eyed like TV-AM’s Mad Lizzie, are we supposed to feel swept up in euphoria?

Van Der Vlugt has a pleasant voice, but it’s a bit too thin to keep the interest alive in songs that sound like a toned down Transvision Vamp with electronics from the Byker Grove incidental music library. “R U Receiving Me?” is the best track, with unabashed Tomorrow’s World keyboards and some robotic disco-Kraftrwerk vocals, but even this melding of Yello and Goldfrapp isn’t as convincing as it should be: like the rest of the set, it feels undercooked and presented with a whiff of desperation. It takes them three tries to get through set-closer “Yellow Horse”, even though it sounds like a seven year old improvising over a Megadrive game – again, how can that end up sounding boring? Of course, there are middle-aged men around the stage staring intently throughout and filming the gig for their archives – one guy even has a smart phone in either hand. The technology has changed since they used to watch Salad, but sadly the music is equally slight and unsatisfying.

Relik don’t do much for us, but they are at least generic, not enraging. Their big-boned songs seem designed for fists in the air rock solidarity, taking a blueprint from The Foo Fighters and adding a little bit of Placebo, and we suppose they manage it well enough, keeping the sizable crowd entertained. If you like blocky, unsubtle clomps that sound like The Stereophonics strained through a giant tissue, then Relik will probably do the trick. Also a good choice if you like the idea of gigs (you know, drinking lots of expensive beer, talking through the supports and then standing in a big huddle feeling the same uncomplex pleasure of togetherness), but tend to find concerts in Oxford a bit frightening or confusing. Actually, Relik are good band for people who find the Daily Star crossword frightening and confusing. As Groucho nearly said: A child of five could understand Relik; send someone to fetch a child of five.

Beatific International

2011-05-01T13:39:00.003+01:00

I'm listening to a full length CD of radio jingles from Coldseal Windows. I should stay out of charity shops.

THE KILL CITY SAINTS/ HOT HOOVES/ ZEM/ RAISING HARLEY, It’s All About The Music, The Bully, 14/4/11

The difference between most US sit coms and their British counterparts is the writers. In this country we have shows penned by a single author, probably in a four week blast in some provincial town, fuelled by tinned soup and Cash In The Attic, whereas American shows are thrashed out by huge rosters of writers, sat round a big glass table somewhere vastly important. It’s why an episode of Friends may have rafts of clever lines, but can feel distant, disconnected and arid. We’re reminded of this by Raising Harley, not only because he plays the theme to Scrubs (turns out after those eight bars it gets quite dull, and you really miss the theremin), but because his amiable busking is promising, but needs a little more character to snag our attention.

Similarly, new trio Zem have a lovely chunky rhythm section – despite injuries – but the chap strumming and moaning at the front is drabness personified. Seriously, it’s like someone won a competition. The arrangement of Paul Simon’s “Richard Cory” is a strong start, but again anonymity is their worst crime. Still, it all pales compared to crass Southern fried rockers Kill City Saints, a band so generically dire it looks like they’ve been created by committee to supply “Blues Rock Solutions”. The truly hideous renegade skull backdrop, lyrics about midnight trains, and adept but charmless guitar solos indicate a band with a huge taste deficit; the fact the singer is swigging vodka and Dr Pepper only confirms suspicions.

And somewhere in this sea of Not Quite Finished and Hideously Ill Conceived fall Hot Hooves, a band featuring members of Oxford favourites ATL and Talulah Gosh, bursting with approachable character and short on self-consciousness or pretension. Their melodic new wave thrives on taut concise structures, but if that suggests Wire they’re as much Eddie & The Hot Rods. The music’s thumping economy comes balanced by an wry airiness (Sample lyric: “My telekinesis/ Is falling to pieces”) whether it’s delivered in Pete Momtchiloff’s spasmodic mumble or with Bash Street cheekiness by Mac. At points Hot Hooves remind us of bands as disparate as The Auteurs and Ten Benson, but they doubtless have better, more obscure bands influencing them. Hell, they were probably in them.

The Sharron Nights

2011-03-27T11:45:00.002+01:00

Morning, morning, Jameson here.

No, it's not, it's me. And it's lunchtime. Sorry, as soon as I started typing, Derek Jameson popped into my head, how unpleasant.

Anyway, here's a review. To be honest, this is a deadline day review, and I think it reads like it. Sorry about that, Nightshift and Kraus deserve more, to be frank. But I'm a busy and/or lazy man, what are you going to do?

SHARRON KRAUS – THE WOODY NIGHTSHADE (Strange Attractors Audio House)

The sleevenotes to this new CD are a paean to the album format, eroded and endangered in our MP3 playlist era. We couldn’t agree more, but, like those scientists who try to explain how miniscule a fraction of the universe’s lifespan human beings have existed in, we would expect a folk singer to be unconcerned with a format that has been around for only fifty odd years, a tiny fragment of the history of song.

But this is definitely an LP, not a random selection of songs, and it’s a record with a constant, misty atmosphere. Kraus’ voice high and delightfully reedy, but it lends itself more to ghostly melody than cracking out a rousing folk narrative: her allusive singing and vaguely evocative lyrics are more Bert Jansch than Norma Waterson. There are even hints of PJ Harvey’s recent recordings. Musically it’s ethereal and unsettling too, from the keening feedback that opens the album to the woozily plucked strings on “Two Brothers” that sound like a weary traveller pushing through a dense forest: it’s like the sound a night at the Twin Peaks Folk Club. All drums on the record are reverbed and stately like the faded memory of percussion, the washed out toms of the title track a resigned, slow walk to the gallows (roll over, Berlioz).

Individually these songs may not be startling, and it’s certain that Kraus couldn’t challenge Spiers & Boden for the Oxford oral tradition trophy, but The Woody Nightshade is a gorgeous, immersive listen, that you want to start again as soon as it’s finished...which is about the best definition of a good album we can think of.

Dawn An Hour Later

2011-03-11T18:19:00.002Z

Been enjoying a lot of 2nd hand classical vinyl recently. Especially good are multi-disc sets, Karajan doing Brahms' German Requiem is going on the deck later. One thing troubles me, though. Why - why in the name of fucking bastard hell - do so many classical boxsets split the sides between discs? I mean, you might get two records, the first fo which has side 1 & 4, and the other side 2 & 3. Seriously, how does that make even the tiniest whiff of sense to anybody?

Sometimes I think that, if I ever invented a time machine, I'd never use it, because people in the past were STUPID.

DAWN PENN/ JAMATONE, Skylarkin’ Soundsystem, Cellar, 3/3/11

The night is running just shy of an hour late. “But that’s all the better, you get to see the support”, says our host Aidan “Sky-” Larkin. Yeah, brilliant, hooray – less exciting for those of us who actually turned up on time, of course. And doubly depressing when the support aren’t actually that good. Their chunky, approachable roots sound is solid and melodic, something like a supermarket brand Black Uhuru, but Jamatone don’t ever quite achieve the cohesion of a good reggae band. They spend most of the gig standing on the edge of the groove, peering in. The vocalist keeps our interest, with a warm, unhurried style and a stage presence with plenty of character - which is good as the hackneyed lyrics can’t be said to have any – which is all good until half way through the set when he cedes the mike to a younger model. The new singer has a staccato style that is an interesting contrast, but it grates awkwardly against the band’s rhythms, which is ironic as the band actually improve noticeably for the last couple of tracks; perhaps adding a little dancehall phrasing to a straight pop reggae style might work, but as it is he just sounds like a clumsy version of Eagle Eye Cherry.

Compare Dawn Penn’s delivery. Within seconds of climbing on stage, she reveals a mastery of phrasing that makes every line matter, and gives every word weight. Each tiny portamento at the start of a phrase, every subtle vibrato at the end make the songs sound natural and conversational, as so many great pop songs should be. Penn’s voice, as befits a woman nearing 60, doesn’t have the sweet clarity of her early rocksteady recordings, but it has a deeper timbre and air of experience that is, if anything superior, reminding us oddly of Johnny Cash. The Man In Black is also a good reference point for Penn’s ability to recreate a song, and give a trite ditty an air of gravitas and richness you’d never expect was there. It took us a good few bars to realise that one naggingly familiar tune wasn’t a soul classic, but All Saints’ “Never Ever”! Of course, a healthy attitude to found material is one of the pillars of Jamaican music, from the endless and inventive versioning of rhythms to the unpretentious approach to melody that says that any track is worth covering if it has a tune that can be used, but Penn is a master of the art.

In case this sounds impressive, but somewhat honed, like a seasoned cabaret performer, we must also note the wonderful spontaneity of the gig. Second to Penn’s easy melodic sense is her understanding of musical space. She twists and elongates lines as the whim takes her, but is also content to drop the vocal for bars at a time, remixing the songs from the inside. If you thought that late Johnny Cash was a weird reference point, then you’d better sit down before we tell you that technique somewhat recalls latter day Mark E Smith (although we are certain that Dawn would be a better person to have a drink with). When she does “You Don’t Love Me” as the inevitable closing track, we are stunned by the liberties she takes with it, improvising lines and melodies, giggling and narrating ad hoc sections, as if it’s the first time she’s ever sung the song. Pretty audacious when you consider that it’s the one piece half the audience has specifically come to hear. We’ve seen some of Jamaican music’s greats play live – most, it must be said, at Skylarkin’ events – but this is the best, an effect heightened by the intimate atmosphere, which stops the music slipping into empty gestures (although the guitarist does smuggler in some overwrought Dire Straits solos whenever Penn’s back is turned). Why wasn’t this gig sold out ten times over? Has nobody heard of Dawn Penn? Wake the town and tell the people!

Interesting Developments

2011-03-01T19:35:00.002Z

Vaughan Williams is ace. That is all I have to say today. Ace.

FIXERS – IRON DEER DREAM 7” (Young & Lost)

Jack Goldstein from Fixers claims that he found the title “Iron Deer Dream” in a book about Sylvia Plath, was unable to discover what it might mean, and subsequently found he couldn’t locate the passage again. It’s not essential, but it helps to suspend your disbelief and imagine that a suicidal poet’s biog sent an esoteric message to the band, it chimes well with their self-professed spirituality, and it certainly goes with the single’s cover, a tye-die fractal Masonic mystery that inhabits that wonderful space between beautiful and truly hideous.

It’s also useful if you manage some other mental dislocations. It’s handy to forget Fixers’ clumsy involvement with Blessing Force, a movement nobody can actually define, except to the extent that Fixers think they’re not in it anymore, and it sort of helps to try not to think about the extent to which the single sounds like latter day Animal Collective. Because it does. A lot. Which is fine, because not only have the Collective made some wonderful records, but their sound was only a rough collage of borrowed tricks anyway. In actual fact, “Iron Deer Dream” is better than Animal Collective’s recent recordings, although probably not quite on a par with their best work. Finally, in your Fixers reception yoga meditation, endeavour to ignore the way the track fits in with the already stumbling Hypnagogic Pop movement. Because if you start thinking about any of these things, you’ll dismiss Fixers as a zeitgeist scavenging trend parasite, and fail to notice just how brilliant a band they are.

From the nagging organ that sounds like Steve Reich arranging “California Girls”, “Iron Deer Dream” is a lovely little song, and may be Oxford’s first glimpse of summer. In truth, it’s barely song at all, it’s a cycling fade-out from a half-recalled childhood radio broadcast (as the references to the Berlin Wall seem to confirm). Over and over the melodic fragments turn, and immersing yourself in the song feels simultaneously like riding a powerful swell of sound, and drifting safely in amniotic fluid. If you could surf in a hammock, “Iron Deer Dram” would be your soundtrack.

Ironically, the song actually has its own little outro, and to be frank it bows somewhat overly deferentially at the altar of the Beach Boys (and we say this as proper Wilson worshippers ourselves). Our other issue is that the vocals are slightly too yearning, and there seems to be too much energy going into expressing barely decipherable lyrics that don’t appear to mean much. Perhaps they’re casting a spell. We wouldn’t put it past them.

“Iron Deer Dream” is Fixers’ calling card, and a fine one it makes. However, glorious listening experience though it is, it actually adheres slightly too much to their own template, a template that live sets indicate they may already be growing out of. If absolutely pushed we shall admit that we prefer the B side, “Egyptn Aberration CULT”, a tip of the hat to Detroit techno legends Drexciya, who don’t get nearly enough recognition (slightly confusing tributes from Turner Prize nominees notwithstanding), that also reminds us of the wonderful Model 500. The crisp handclaps are just as hypnotic as “Iron Deer Dream”’s reverby melodies, and less woozily dizzying. It reminds us of that bit in The Bell Jar that says “went batshit at a rave to ‘Strings Of Life’”...or did we imagine that?

Bayou Chemistry

2011-02-27T13:14:00.003Z

Here's my review from the latest Nightshift, which is fresh on the shelves this weekend. I'm keeping my reviews pretty much down to 2 or so a month at the moment, as I have another writing project on the go. Probably not something for these pages, but it's shaping up quite well so far. Nice to be kept busy. Pissing it down out there, think I'll stay in my cosy study for a while.

THE BAYOU BROTHERS, The Famous Monday Blues, Bullingdon Arms, 7/2/11

We’ve seen some outstanding performances at The Famous Monday Blues over the years, along with some of the worst gigs ever. In the former category, some spotless musicians have treated the blues form as a lingua franca, using it to communicate ideas and emotions of great subtlety with a deft touch and original variations; in the latter, we find hordes of denim zombies ploughing through the same clunky rhythms, the same threadbare lyrics and the same crass wailing axe solos. With bad blues guitarists, a few simple things are repeated over and over, and quality is judged solely on how swiftly they do so. Is this art, or a game of bloody Tetris?

Thankfully, tonight these po-faced pentatonic widdlers are far away, as a righteous zydeco party is whipped up by The Bayou Brothers, a Louisiana Cajun band from San Diego (which is a little like a band from County Armagh called The Bleedin’ Bow Bell Cockneys, but never mind). Cajun music is a rough melange of black blues and French song, typified by fluent accordion passages and clattering rhythms played on metal washboards, and is one of those genres that always works so long as it’s played with enough conviction. And despite this being a Monday night with an average crowd that’s slow to thaw, the Bayou Brothers certainly can’t be criticised for a lack of energy, grinning their way through two invigorating sets, and regularly doling out spare washboards to audience members of varying rhythmic ability.

At their best the band’s evident enjoyment of the music is infectious, and their openness to random punters’ interventions reveals a relaxed unpretentiousness that makes us feel like we’re at a gig in some deep South commune. On the reverse, the band sadly has a taste in cheesy ersatz gestures, from the so-called “squeezebox” which is really a disguised Roland keyboard that needs nary a squeeze (basically the much maligned keytar resurrected for folkies), to the percussionist in the golden blouse who smiles manically throughout in a way that nobody does outside Disneyland without severe medication. Her “name our cute ‘gator” competition just about tips us over the edge. Do they have Butlins in California?

A straight cover of Ray Charles’ “Hallelujah I Love Her So” is generic, and perhaps without the zydeco sprit the band is no great shakes. But then again, who cares? For tonight, all too rarely at a blues gig, we’re not here to polish the traditions or venerate technical musos, we’re here to dance, drink and get lost in the clockwork hoedown of washboard blues...and on a cold Monday within the Bully’s ugly breezeblocks, a little escapism is no bad thing.

I Can DJ Shit

2011-02-22T14:12:00.004Z

There's something quite wonderful about a week off work, when you don't have any other plans. Yes, at first I was going to go away, but that fell through, and I was disappointed, but I'm getting loads done and seriously relaxing. Plus, it gives me time to write unplanned little reviews like this one. A fun night, and I hope Audiograft returns next year, but it did run the gamut from atrocious to sublime.

RHODRI DAVIES & MAX EASTLEY/ AUTOMATED NOISE ENSEMBLE/ STEPHEN CORNFORD & PAUL WHITTY/ JAMES KELLY/ SHIT! I CAN DJ, Audiograft, Modern Art Oxford, 19/2/11

Opening the final night of Oxford Brookes University’s Audiograft festival of sound art, the Shit! I Can DJ collective promise an experimental blind DJ set, in which nobody involved knows what the next segue is going to be. Hey, it’s aleatory! Anything could happen! Although, inevitably, all that does happen is that five self-satisfied hipsters chuckle smugly to each other as the Sylvanian Families theme plays infuriatingly over Archie Shepp, whilst the audience grows visibly restless.

By contrast, James Kelly’s problem is that his sounds are too consonant. Pressing your own themes, motives and textures onto vinyl and mixing them live is a neat idea, but if the sounds are too prettily open-ended there’s no challenge. Biosphere drones, Garbarek sax and Liz Fraser glossolalia sound pleasant together, but they’d sound equally pleasant in any configuration, and the long set soon becomes an unstructured stream of sugary, soporific segments: nice enough for a brief visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s “...it pays my way and it corrodes my soul...”, on the other hand, is conceptually strong and sonically captivating. Cornford places a vintage reel to reel machine onto a table, attaches two contact mikes, picks up a screwdriver, and proceeds to methodically dismantle it, whilst Whitty turns the whirrs, scrapes and bumps into powerful noise with a selection of FX and treatments, galvanic screeches and angry buzzing sounding like Merzbow eating a plate of bees. The arresting piece could be read as a satire on the fetishisation of vintage hardware, and it’s amusing to see people staring intently at a pair of pliers and some 50s technology, whilst rows of shiny Boss pedals across the table create the actual sounds. The conclusion is witty too, as Cornford tries desperately to cram all components back into the casing, like someone with an overstuffed holiday suitcase.

After this theatrical spectacle, the Automated Noise Ensemble’s lightly modified turntables seem unadventurous. Two decks are adorned with pieces of string that hit a contact strip every rotation, whilst another pair play scored vinyl to create a skein of clicks and skitters. It’s rhythmically enticing, occasionally evoking trains or horses’ hooves, but there’s not much that can be done once the rhythms have been built up, so perhaps the brief set duration was advisable.

Veteran instrument builder Max Eastley brings along a hinged plank of wood with a single bowed metal string, which allows him to bend notes to an extreme degree, even as they decay. The range of sounds he can create is truly astonishing, alternately aping a ‘cello, a clarinet and a swanee whistle and in one harrowing sequence, a wailing voice with ultra-portamento, the lament of the Hawaiian damned. Rhodri Davies takes an accompanist’s role, seemingly pathologically averse to plucking his harp. Instead he rubs it, tickles it with e-bows, taps it with soft mallets, and spends a while shaking it at different angles, like a man trying to retrieve a plectrum from an acoustic guitar. It’s a brilliantly intense, oppressive set of eerie Lynchian hums and ghostly glissandi, and even Eastley seems a little shocked by the unsettling atmosphere at the conclusion. Perhaps they were trying to eradicate the memory of the ill-conceived wackiness at the start of the evening.

The Musician's A Prentice

2011-02-15T18:56:00.002Z

The Doctor Who Decide Your Destiny series is atrocious. God, how hard can it be to do a Choose Your Own Adventure riff on the Dr? Who ever heard of a solo role play book where you can't bloody die? Rubbish.

I know, I should spend less time in charity shops.

BUG PRENTICE – Demo

“Ceilidh Dancer”, the opening track on this new set of demos tells of a man who “gave away the punchline” to a joke. To us that’s solid gold proof that Ally Craig doesn’t write autobiographically: if there’s one man we can’t imagine giving away the punchline to a joke, it’s Ally. Even when he’d got to the end of the joke, he’d keep the pay off secret, we imagine. So this is another selection of the mysterious, deeply intriguing little songs we’ve come to expect from Craig, with the addition of a rhythm section. Lyrically they’re as obtuse as his last batch, and musically they totter about always at the edge of over-balancing, like a girl trying out her Mum’s stilettos.

It takes a short while to get used to Ally with a noisy band, as we’re so used to his solo acoustic performances, but what we lose in intimacy we gain in intricacy, Ally’s wonderfully frail yet powerful voice flitting across “Ceilidh Dancer” like an injured insect, awkward yet still soaring. On “Nebraska Admiral” the vocals are even better, finding a space in the husky delivery between a dinky nursery rhyme and a yearning Broadway ballad – although he does rhyme “asking” with “Nebraskan”, which should probably be illegal.

If the band doesn’t add a huge amount to “Nebraska Admiral”, they sound fantastic on “Lovitz Vs Dick”, leaping up from a sedate intro to huge crunchy blocks of guitar that remind us unexpectedly of They Might Be Giants’ “Ana Ng”, then drifting back into a hazy lope, before the second half in which Ally’s chicken peck guitar strumming is underpinned by bouncy toms. Aside from sounding like a bad restaurant chain that specialises in kid’s parties and runny carbonara, “Chicago Baxters” is the only track that doesn’t wholly convince us as a composition, although we love the image it brings to mind of Sonic Youth playing a lounge ballad. If this were a random demo that had popped into the in box, we’d be pretty excited. As it is, judging from past experience, we can comfortably expect some more fantastic, elastic misshaped rock music from this outfit. The prentice work has been done, we’re waiting for the masterpiece, now.

Yeth, Monkey, What Ith It?

2011-02-02T18:21:00.004Z

Bit busy tonight, so no time to chat, I'm off out soon. I'm listening to the Royal Phil plays funk. It's great!

PIGTHE – WELCOME BACK TO VIRIDIAN (download)

Pigthe’s website contains little micro-stories about things like awkward conversations and trying to chat up women by asking what their favourite Pavement LP is. They’re well-written, but seem almost pathologically obsessed with not revealing anything. It must be hard to write prose when you’ve got all your fingers crossed behind your back.

And the music isn’t dissimilar. There’s a lot of quirky potential on this album, some dinky little tunes and a sense of fun encapsulated in antediluvian drum machine patterns, but Pigthe has gone as far as they can to obscure this fact, with wilfully lofi sound and aggressively unfinished arrangements. Oh, and lest we forget, there’s quite probably the worst use of auto-tune we’ve heard from a local act on this CD, opener “Carrion (Live)” – which is potentially a pleasing little Passenger-a-like ditty – turning each vocal cadence into the sound of the farmer leaping off a ladder in Chuckie Egg.

There are a whole raft of great things about this record – the melancholic guitar on “Fill In The Gaps”, the tiny guitar tickles on “Mephistopheles” that sound like Foals in a matchbox, the title “Hip Hop Saved My Life But Now It’s Killing Itself” – but overall the air is of an act that seems hellbent on hiding any quality behind fuzzy bedroom four track recording, perhaps in the paralysing fear that anybody might actually think they meant it. A track like “Any Other Name” is a perky nugget of pop somewhere between The Housemartins and The Wedding Present, and we truly wish that more of the record captured this sense of indie pop pleasure. Go on, Pigthe: you’ve got some talent here, stand up and go for it. Try to make something great, stop using whimsy and distance as a defence machanism. We think we could love this music, but only if Pigthe can learn to love it first.

Oh, and Pavement are shit, too.

Spires Like Us

2011-01-30T14:19:00.003Z

If you think this review is interesting, you may as well go and download the record. Free, innit?

V/A – SPIRES (download compilation)

For the most part, twenty-first century culture leaves us enraged or mordantly amused, provoking spittle-flecked rants that paint us as some unholy cross between David Mitchell and Travis Bickle. But, when Aaron Delgado from Phantom Theory decides to get some of his favourite local acts together for a free download compilation celebrating Oxford music you’d have to say that this is what the internet age is all about: the record is free, effortless, and was all round the world in the time it must have taken the curators of the old OXCD album to cost the cover art. And what’s more, it’s actually damned good too.

From the opening trio of tracks that could be subtitled “the riff in Oxford”, there’s a pleasing variety to the selections, and there are even a few eyebrow raisers for jaded Oxford cognoscenti – we were pleasantly surprised that The Winchell Riots could ease off the bombast with the affecting “My Young Arms”, and gratified that Spring Offensive’s sprawling epic “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters” works in bijou edited segments. Also, Secret Rivals’ “It Would Be Colder Here Without You” is a lovely chirpy ditty with fluffy vocals which is like being on a bouncy castle made of cappuccino forth, and goes some way towards eradicating the effect of some woefully slipshod live sets. Every listener will have their own favourites, but our highspots are Alphabet Backwards’ “Collide”, whose dual vocals and tinny guitar sounds like two siblings singing along to their favourite pop song, recorded by holding a tape player up to Top Of The Pops, and “Filofax” by Coloureds, a stutterjack dance track which is like a fax machine raping a ZX Spectrum to the sound of Korean synth pop.

Only Vixens, with their clunking off-the-peg indie rock and stodgily portentous TK Maxx goth vocals, let the side down. “The Hearts, They Cannot Love”? Nor these ears, son. It’s also a pity that Dial F For Frankenstein’s demise means that the record is already one step away from being a scene sampler, but “Thought Police” is a decent valediction, like a Mudhoney dirge retooled for maximum amphetamine effect by The Only Ones. In some ways, the greatest tribute we could give Oxford music in 2011 is that we love this LP, but it’s not the compilation we’d put together, which only goes to show how many good musicians are currently working in the city. And if you don’t like it? Well, it’s the twenty-first century, there are lots and lots of other things you could be doing. Pity they’re all shit, really.

Dis Figures

2011-01-17T18:06:00.003Z

This was supposed ot be a double super review that carried on with the four acts at The Cellar. Well, I only only managed 2 and a half before I went to bed, because I've got the old winter chill, and I don't like gigs that go on till two in the bleeding morning.

For the record, The Cellar broke down like this: Coloureds, wonderful as ever; P-45 had nice varied ideas but it was a long an uneven set; Shitmat just seemed to be DJing some old Aphex tracks and things, not making his excellent breakcore live, which was fine but not what I hoped for; bed, very nice indeed.

WE ARE UGLY BUT WE HAVE THE MUSIC/ SPACE HEROES OF THE PEOPLE/ KINETIC WARDROBE, Psychotechnic League, Wheatsheaf 15/1/11

OK, it’s not snowing. But the other two major disasters that can hit a small time promoter have befallen the Psychotechnic League’s inaugural gig, namely the loss of two thirds of the lineup a few days before the event, and the presence of a similar, but more upscale event within jacking distance of the venue, in the shape of Audioscope’s Andrea Parker and Shitmat booking at The Cellar. It’s a tribute to promoting virgin Fred Toon that he not only managed to keep his gig afloat , but managed to draw in a decent, if not earth-shattering huddle of punters who were clearly enjoying the evening.

And as such, it would be harsh to be too critical of Kinetic Wardrobe, one of the stand in acts, left playing unusually early to encourage an attendance at both the Wheatsheaf and the Cellar, and certainly his late 90s, post-Orbient down-tempo techno set is full of well-turned moments, but some of the sampled gobbets (as The History Boys’ Mr Irwin might have put it, were he an aging raver) that stitch the set together are beyond hackneyed. What’s that? Fear & Loathing? Be still my beating heart. But in fairness, it’s a solid set, with some surprisingly approachable grooves, a couple of tracks with scratchy guitar parts sounding like lost De La Soul remixes.

Whatever you might expect from a band called Space Heroes Of The People, you probably don’t expect poise and delicacy, but this is exactly what the superlative duo delivers. Yes, the music is built on an insistent club thump, and Tim looks like he’s dressed as a day-glo swimming instructor, but the music is crisp, intricately thought out, and delivered with a surprising lightness of touch. That the fascinating Soviet animations projected behind the band are often perfectly in sync shows that the bad have thought carefully about the onstage presentation, but they still manage to retain a whiff of that old live magic, peppering the music with realtime drumfills, double bass and Wii remote waggles. Neither brainlessly retro nor obsessed by dance sub-genre novelty, neither gimcrack cabaret performers nor wheyfaced techno dullards, Space Heroes are purveyors of a polished, elegant electro you never knew you craved, an oasis between endless torrents of bedroom boredom low rate MP3s and Dadstep dance revivalists. Weirdly, with their tight quality control and the nouse to make classically simple music feel new with subtle arrangements, the local band Space Heroes most resemble is Little Fish. But Space Heroes are better.

We Are Ugly But We Have The Music, the promoter’s laptop acid project, in some ways retreads the drawbacks of Kinetic Wardrobe (such as a fucking stupid name, for starters), offering solid, but unsurprising dance throwbacks delivered by an awkward looking man with a laptop. But, whether it’s because the set is slightly more uptempo, whether it’s because Fred’s drum sounds are that little bit crunchier, or whether it’s because he has a smiley T-shirt and a big old strobe, the We Are Ugly set is more satisfying. It’s true that he hasn’t really worked out a reason to hear this rave-robbing music live, rather than on record, but somebody shamelessly reliving their youth is rarely this entertaining. Having made some strong music, and salvaged a gig that looked likely to collapse, Fred must have finished the evening with a self-congratulatory grin, even if most of the assembled finished their evening at The Cellar.

2010s - Thousands Of 'Em!

2011-01-03T16:24:00.008Z

As is traditional at this time of year, I selected my favourite local releases from 2010, for the MIO roundup. It's all pretty exciting this year, with a special podcast, a roundup of selections from a handful of contributors, and a public vote, which makes interesting reading. Essentially, it all goes to show how much MIO has changed this year - and I don't just mean the URL. It's now a truly fantastic resource if you like Oxon music...and if you don't, then what are you doing reading this? No kittens or nudity on this corner of the 'net, you must have got lost.

Anyway, it transpires that I was rather more obtuse/poetic/inane/lateral/smug in my descriptions of the best releases, but there you go. I still think the Morse-Hebrides joint allusion is pretty sweet in the Stornoway summary, and I think I'm the first person to go public with a Cursing Force gag. Happy new year, and so on.

By the way, I have a few plans for 2011, which will intrigue me, but will probably eat up time and put to bed once and for all the concept of running this as an actual blog where things are, like, blogged? Oh my God, my internal monologue has gone, like, totally Californian? So, you can expect just a few updates here every month? Rest assured they shall be awesome, and in no way groody?

I have an odd desire to listen to "Valley Girl" about now?

Alphabet Backwards - Primark

Sherbet-fuelled melodic nugget about the death of the High Street. As unashamed pure pop lovers, the Alphabets wear their hearts on their sleeves (shirts: £1.35)

Borderville - Joy Through Work

Only Richard Ramage can come close to Borderville in terms of literate lyrics that sneak up on strong emotions whilst you're not looking. If The Relationships are a mythical village school fete, Borderville are a baroque Hallowe'en masque at the end of time.

D Gwalia - In Puget Sound

Like a creaky harmonium making a drunken hour long phone call to the Port Talbot Samaritans.

Samuel Zasada - Nielsen

Rich, full-bodied and peppery with unexpected subtleties. Or am I thinking of shiraz?

Space Heroes Of The People - Dancing About Architecture

More totalitarian techpop from the now drummerless duo. One day there'll be none of them left in the band, just an autonomous laptop. And it'll be great.

Spring Offensive - Pull Us Apart

The cowbell rehabilitation starts here!

Stornoway - Beachcomber's Windowsill

There's been a murder, Lewis: Stornoway have destroyed the opposition for best Oxford LP.

V/A - Round The Bends

Surprisingly coherent grab bag of 'head covers raises dosh for needy nippers. Therefore if you don't like it you're evil as well as stupid.

Vileswarm - The Shaman's Last Waltz

Frampton comes undead! Euhedral reads the rites.

Xmas Lights - Treading The Fine Line

Posthumous release by much missed emperors of isolationist metal, a great ear-scouring sign off for Oxford's original Cursing Force.

Hiss And Hearse

2010-12-27T20:42:00.006Z

I know, I know, it's been ages since I posted anything. And you won't get much out of mwe now, either, I'm afraid. I have to unpack my bags from the obligatory family visit, and then go and watch the Only Connect final. I wonder if the other 7 regular viewers will be tuning in...

WHITE NOISE SOUND/ THE BRAINDEAD COLLECTIVE – Pindrop, Bully, 12/12/10

By all that’s rational and reasonable, The Braindead Collective should an embarrassment. Imagine it, Seb Reynolds, ex-Sexy Breakfast and Evenings keyboard player, being smug enough to convene a loose improvised collective based around whichever of his old scenester chums is around on a given night. Imagine the self-serving tiresomeness, imagine the sickening in-joke winks. But, imagine is all we’re able to do if we want this band to be bad, because in actuality they’re excellent, not only a surprisingly well-controlled unit, but also one that can balance awkward noise with alluring melody better than many bands that have practised twice a week since the fourth form. They start with an eerie, reverby pulse of a piece that sounds like “Astronomy Domine” left out in the rain for six months, and develop a balance between Chris Beard’s chiming, ingenuous vocals and some oscillating keys. Over all this Seb spills reverby sax trills and Jimmy Evil throws in some ornery guitar figures that were left over from Suitable Case For Treatment. The reading from William Burroughs might be somewhat sophomoric, but in other ways the band is highly original, at one point sounding like exotic sonic mould growing on a forgotten Chris Isaak ballad. Irrational, unreasonable, and frankly wonderful.

White Noise Sound’s drone rock owes a fair amount to Spacemen 3, although the unexpected synth chugs also recall Add N To (X). Although the simple music might sound as though it just fell out of bed into a bigger bed, the material is actually carefully thought out, and it’s rare to find a band with three guitarists that can so effortlessly control the texture of a piece, especially when none of them go within a mile of soloing. The emphasis on song structure makes the band come off a little like Black Rebel Spaceship Club, and this is what lets them down a little. Nothing wrong with any of the vocals, but tracks stop because the song has finished , when it sounds like the music is just warming up. The final two pieces are comfortably the best, a pair of longer instrumentals that use the humming guitars as a launchpad for hypnotic repetition, rather than a peg on which to hang three verses. It’s not often you see a band, and wish they’d done half as many tracks in twice as much time, but if this is space rock, it helps to give it some space.

'S'All Bellow

2010-11-28T18:36:00.004Z

I just had to choose my favourite local records of 2010. I hate doing that every year. Firstly, because I hardly have the time and cash to listen to every local release so I'm sure there are some great records I could vote for (for example I suspect the new Bellowhead and the Colours CD are both brilloiant, but I haven't bought them), but I have to leave them out; and secondly because it's not the end of bloody 2010 yet.

And speaking of Bellowhead, here you go. Question: are they an Oxford band or not? The debate rages on...

BELLOWHEAD – Oxford Folk Festival, Regal, 18/11/10

It’s clear and light with a surprising fruity afterbite and – what’s that? We’re not supposed to review the beer? OK, but it’s damned unusual for a touring band to bring their bespoke ale along, especially in the gutted grandeur of The Regal, a gorgeous art deco hangar held together by a lick of emulsion and a few coats of Carling and party foam. Whilst we’re not naive enough to believe Bellowhead themselves nurtured the brew, any more than Christina Aguilera slaved long nights in a lab perfecting her perfume, in some ways a thousand pints of real ale on trestle stands is the perfect symbol of Bellowhead: it clearly communes with craft and tradition, but also says unequivocably, “we are here to party”.

And party we do. It’s unfair to judge any musicians by their fans – we’d have to throw out those Wagner CDs if so – but the Bellowhead massive are so infectious, swaying like a vast choppy sea to Jacque Brel’s “Amsterdam”, and leaping like randy crickets to “New York Girls” (not bad when the room’s average age is double that of many events), until it’s physically impossible to leave having had a bad time. But then again, the music would do that if the gig were in an empty undertakers.

Spiers and Boden’s folk cabaret juggernaut has been rumbling for six years now, but we’ve only just realised the genius twist that makes them unbeatable. Yes, the vocals are seedily dramatic, yes the rhythms are thumping and carnivalistic, but it’s the four brass players who add the secret spice, pitched somewhere between Oktoberfest oompah, jazz abandon and Stax horn stabs: they turn folk standard “A-Begging I Will Go” into a taut blaxploitation theme, a stakeout outside Cecil Sharp House. At moments like this, Bellowhead remind us oddly of Blood, Sweat & Tears (owners of the greatest funk tuba solo ever recorded), being as they are a huddle of kickass musicians who don’t let their chops obscure their sense of fun, but who don’t let the craic prohibit intricate arrangements and sensitive playing. It’s a week where Oxford’s self-styled Blessing Force movement dandles the London media like a Machiavellian puppeteer; best of luck to them, but how many of the thousands of people reading encomiums of bands barely out of the bedroom stage know that one of the best acts to come from Oxford this millennium is currently touring the nation? If they gave Bellowhead a chance, they’d never look back: trad, bad, and euphoric to know.

The Slip Case

2010-11-05T17:47:00.003Z

I'm going to Klub Kak tonight and Audioscope tomorrow, and I saw local heroes Stornoway and old chums Foxes! last night. Some other people shall be watching explosions in the drizzle, but I think I've got the better deal.

BELOW THE FALL – COMMISSIONER (Witch Hunter Records)

Tinkering with Google in an attempt to find out who Below The Fall are, and how they’ve got a professional CD single with a really lovely inksplodge raven illustration when we’re sure they’ve never played a gig inside the county boundaries, we stumble across their record label’s website. There we discover that this record is one of five releases, two of which are by acts with the brilliant/atrocious (toss a coin if, like us, you’re not sure) names Trippy Wicked & The Cosmic Children Of The Knight and Bumsnogger; the other two releases are both by Year Of The Flood, a sludge metal act “based on the books of Margaret Atwood”, one of whom used to be in a band called – wait for it - Jesus Of Spazzareth.

Call us jaded, and enticed by the merest novelty, frippery or bagatelle, but all of these records sound as though they’re more interesting than the one we’ve ended up with. However, Below The Fall are clearly a decent act, especially considering they’d never played a gig together at the time of recording this pair of tunes, who have created a beautifully recorded and solidly played rock record with a strong melodic sense, and the tiniest hint of a goth billow to proceedings to keep the music atmospheric and on the right side of tedious emo bluster. Rhythmically it’s pretty spotless, if also somewhat earthbound, and Alex Breadmore’s drums exhibit precision without ever quite capturing the head-nodding power of great heavy rock. If the A side is an arching effort that loosely recalls locals Days Of Grace, the accompanying track “Just Run Away” is probably the better of the two, Dan Hunter’s airy voice surfing some crashing guitar on a preposterously catchy melody. He manages a convincing delivery, despite the fact that an odd Thames Valley Scandiwegian accent means he pronounces “change” as “chiynge”, and “memories” as (hyuck hyuck) “mammaries”.

If you like your rock music approachable, well structured and sounding a lot like it came from about 2001, then this could well be the band for you. This record is a great effort but, if there’s a choice between listening to an impeccably made piece of High Street rock, and just sitting back and imagining what Bumsnogger might sound like, then I’m afraid we’d choose the Eject button every time.

Gamelan Ding Dong

2010-11-01T17:14:00.003Z

I have a brutal headache, so I'm not going to write anything, just paste the review and have a little rest.

PLAID & THE SOUTH BANK GAMELAN – OCM, Oxford Playhouse, 1/10/10

Promotion can really matter. We recall a Swiss Concrete gig starring ultra-twee poppets You And Me, with backing vocals from actor Ewen Macintosh. Had the promoters swapped their tasteful A4 posters for a banner across Cowley Road reading “See Keith off The Office: Fiver!” a sparse turnout could have become a sell-out crowd. With that in mind, this event advertised as Plaid with the South Bank Gamelan may have enticed the mid-30s Artificial Intelligentsia who grew up on Warp, but if anything the billing should have been reversed. The gamelan made by far the bigger impression, not only in the quality of their playing, but with the arresting sight of their exquisitely turned Javanese metalophones, xylophones and assorted percussive devices.

The physical presence of the gamelan sound is incredible, whether it’s playing with piercing volume, or with a limpid, elegant stateliness. A fascinating contrast between complexity and simplicity arises when repeated iterations of brief melodies are made on many instruments simultaneously – not only is the sound miasmic and mysterious (one piece is like the bleached bones of a 60s spy theme deep underwater), but the sight of five sets of ornate mallets being dropped in unison looks like eerie alien choreography. Plaid’s dinky electro doesn’t really mix. The duo has spent many years taking the 808 boom out of Detroit techno, and replacing it with a the twinkle and patter of a perpetual motion toybox – Rest Proof Clockwork, as their third LP would have it – so their sound hovers oddly above the surface of the gamelan’s resonant overtones. Plus, for the most part, despite the programme’s bombastic trumpeting about new vistas, the gamelan and Plaid alternate their playing. Joint composition with gamelan master Rahayu Supanggah is more a patchwork of ideas than a collaborative creation, more a musical Exquisite Corpse than a fresh stylistic alloy.

All very pleasant indeed, in short, but not a touch on the inscrutable architecture of the centuries old music that opened the evening. However, two moments showed that this young collaboration could still blossom into something wonderful. A subtle arrangement of Aphex Twin’s “Actium” revealed not only how dynasties and continents could be brought together, but also Richard James’ knack with a killer melody, no matter how fragmentary. The encore was apparently played for the first time the preceding night, and yet it was the highlight of the concert, a melding of an old Plaid track with a traditional Javanese song. The synthesised clicks and the warm percussion tones truly meld together for the first time, and suddenly we saw performers working on the same wavelength as well as the same stage, musicians who shared an exciting vision and not just a publicist.

Cowley The Beast

2010-10-30T10:38:00.005+01:00

A review of a pretty bad day out. Mind you, they're all bad days out now aren't they?

OX4, various venues, 9/10/10

Throughout the afternoon, passersby are enticed up to the doorway of Cafe Tarifa by the music the Oxford Folk Festival has booked, only to turn away after discovering the £5 entry fee, yet the vast majority of those who have spent twenty quid on an OX4 wristband don’t venture out to see anything until the sun has set. Somewhere in this paradox is the promoter’s eternal frustration, and the problem couched at the heart of OX4. You can go on all you like about “Oxford’s Creative Quarter” and musical diversity, but whilst this festival may superficially resemble The Punt, OX4 is more like a touring gig writ large: there are a handful of big acts (all from outside the county, if not the country), and the rest of the multifaceted day is like one long local support act that nobody goes to see. We visit the open mike at the new INevents space, to find the host begging for participants – it seems a musical community, like music itself, just can’t be forced.

But good music there is, and it’s OX4’s secret victory that all the best acts we see are homegrown. The Folk Festival stage is strong, with highlights from Bellowhead’s John Spiers, and Huffenpuff, a duo of accordion and soprano sax/flute, which blithely skips through the glade of musical history grabbing fragments of Breton, klezmer and jazz like so many falling blossoms. Hretha build intricate yet reserved instrumentals that are full of delicate mystery, and construct their arrangements with clockwork precision when most post-rockers rely on sketchy dynamics. Despite taking far longer to set up than one man with a keyboard has any right, Chad Valley make a quietly euphoric music that isn’t far from late 80s Scritti Politti or a sun-bleached Beloved, and once you’ve forgiven the fact that the vocal sounds like Tony Hadley with hiccoughs the set is strong.

Some days it feels as though every band in the world can be defined with reference to The Beach Boys. In that sense Fixers fall somewhere between the approaches of Animal Collective and The High Llamas, but more importantly they play the set of the day. The smooth, AM sound beneath the soaring falsetto serenades is as much Dennis Wilson as it is Brian, and intrigues those of us who feel that Surf’s Up is at least as good as Pet Sounds. The pastel-tinted songs are also dusted with mid-80s synth tones and Phil Spector drum patterns, yet manage to retain a cohesive and individual air.

Fixers are proof that music can be retro and still feel fresh, but the lesson has been lost on most of the larger acts. Everything Everything offer a stilted ersatz funk that could make Arthur Russell spin in his tragically early grave, and Glitches are the same but worse, a Wanky Goes To Hollywood melange of syn drums, stupid hair and ineffectual yelping. Jesus, we love the 80s and these two acts are making us sound like we write for Proper Music Pub Rock Weekly by their sheer lack of vision. Dog Is Dead are a tight band with some decent tunes, if you can battle past the fact they sound like Level 42, and Willy Mason is impressive in holding a large audience with just an acoustic and some slow paeans, but does remind us queasily of an unhoned Springsteen. More reference grabbing from Abe Vigoda, who make a passable swipe at Talking Heads artfunk and Devo japery without having the character to equal either.

The hipster homogeneity of the name acts, with influences stretching from Now 5 to Now 8, takes the edge off the event, but as with all art, the gems are there for the dedicated. Our final act is the excellent Mr Shaodow, for whom half the room sadly leaves within minutes, but who energises the remainder with pure expertise, originality and intelligence. As someone who has lived in London, China and Oxford, he could tell you that good musicians are united by hard graft and talent, not their postcode.

The Song Remains The Sam

2010-10-28T17:18:00.004+01:00

Not been much going on here, has there? Well, that should all be changing, as I wrote two (2) reviews for MIO on Sunday, the first of which is below, and there are no fewer than two (2) reviews in this month's Nightshift too, so expect plenty more coruscating opinion to come.

SAMUEL ZASADA – NIESEN EP

Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly what it is that makes an artist. Michael McIntyre, for example. Come on, his material’s not that terrible. It’s hardly comedy gold, but if other stand ups were delivering it you might give a half smile or a light chuckle, before wandering off to make a cup of tea. But something about McIntyre’s repulsive comedy style makes you want to destroy your telly. In fact, he’s so mind-meltingly infuriating, you want to throw out your flat screen and climb up to the attic to find your old cathode ray beast, just so you can have the pleasure of sticking your foot through the screen and watching as the exploding sparks shower your living room; snapping a McIntyre DVD just isn’t satisfying enough, so you have to slog back up to the attic to lug down the old VCR, record all his Comedy Roadshow routines onto VHS, solely so you can enjoy the thrill of ripping every inch of tape from the cassette and tossing it into the air whilst naked and daubed with woad.

And Samuel Zasada are the same in reverse. It’s easy to point out impressive elements of this record – the slinky bass, the warm chocolatey voice, the winning melodies – but it’s hard to work out why it’s quite so wonderful, and why it’s so enormously likely to end up on Oxford best of year lists when December rolls around. Like so much great pop music, this EP is far more than the sum of its parts, meaning that it cuts right to the heart without leaving the listener dissecting the construction as they might with classical, prog or jazz.

Despite a jarring, wistful note in the arpeggiating guitar figure in “Omit”, this EP is a little less dark than previous Zasada offerings, and the incisive rhythmic accordion stabs give the track a buoyancy that would not have been feasible in the dense introspection of Samuel Zasada, 2009 vintage. Similarly, the jaunty banjo on “Of Late” adds a wry smile to the gothic folk misery we’re used to.

Perhaps the real development on this record is in the vocals. David Ashbourne has always boasted a rich, resonant voice, but on previous recordings we’ve always been concerned that he was foregrounding his vocal ability at the expense of the song. Take a listen to “Losts & Founds”, our favourite on this EP, and you’ll hear how far he’s come. There’s passion here, but whereas once we’d suspect that he would have groaned and sweated his way through proceedings like an over-egged 80s rocker, now he uses his impressive pipes to further the song: listen to the delivery of the line “You crazy people”, it has just the mixture of despair and incredulous amusement that the words demand. The fact that the tune is a funky little acoustic strut built on a sassy hi-hat rhythm, like an open mic twist on blaxploitation soundtracks, doesn’t do any harm either.

We could go on, but as we said the songs here work best on their own terms, and it doesn’t add much to pick them apart looking for secrets, or to cast our net around looking for musical analogues. This is an immersive collection of quality melodies that should entice even the weariest acoustic critic: hell, it’s making us smile, and we have minor burns, a broken toe and several feet of knotted video tape cutting off our circulation.

I Don't Recall Writing This, But I Mastodon!

2010-10-05T16:57:00.003+01:00

I'm just plotting a pub quiz I intend to write soon. Last time I did it the music round got booed, because I expected people to name not only the act who had a dance hit from the 80s or 90s, but also who they were "featuring" in the offical act name. I called it Late Twentieth Century Chart Dance Crediting Minutiae, and I thought it was a great round, but hardly anyone got any of them. And I never even used any of the three Jellybean tracks I had up my sleeve, just to make it easy!

Anyway, I've thought of something even more horrible, so I shall report back if it ever transpires.

MAMMOTH & THE DRUM – Demo

Mammoth & The Drum’s Myspace comments on their experiences in the studio recording this album, “we've felt like big kids in a sweet shop...'what about if we tried this?'”. Well, what did the tracks sound like before these additions? This record may be a lot of things, but a blueprint for sonic experimentation it is not: somehow we can’t imagine Brians Wilson and Eno sitting up all night with their furrowed brows resting on the mixing desk before one of them leaps up with dawn inspiration, shrieking “Eureka! Synthesised strings!” To be honest, before getting all wild-eyed and putting fake vinyl crackle on the intro to “Johnny Lightening [sic] and his Blue Ray Gun”, should Mammoth & The Drum perhaps have gone back to make the drums less clunkily elementary? Should they have checked that the vocals didn’t sound like Harry Enfield’s DJ Dave “Nicey” Nice? Not ‘alf!

The thing is, M&TD are not a bad band at all, but in recording a full length CD they may have bitten off more than they can chew, when a four-tracker and a bit of gigging experience might have been the best step. We hate to penalise musicians for stretching themselves, we despise artists playing safe, but in challenging themselves to create a big, varied LP, M&TD have ended up challenging the listener to sit through it all without throwing the stereo into a bloody tarpit or the middle of a glacier, with the other mammoths. Whole tracks could happily have been excised from this recording: “Back to Zero” is nasal, clodhopping, constipated folk rock that makes the ears itch for something better, and “It’s Now or Never” is a charmless trudge through a blasted pub blues wasteland: ironically, with its cheeky jibes at rockers who think they’re cool and Russell Brand’s coiffure, there’s an ironic distance between target and effect that can be filed with Chad Kroeger’s “Rock Star”. “Dawning of the New Dark Age” also has stupid lyrics, which goes off like a 50s editorial by likening the Far East to a sleeping giant, before claiming it will “consume everything in its wake”...surely “in its path”, not “its wake”, right? Or is it just those snoozy Orientals being damned inscrutable again?

This is all a pity, as there’s evidence that M&TD are a decent proposition. “Who says you shouldn’t surf in Jimmy Choo shoes?” is a perky slice of pub rock (in its best sense of music to experience with a full pint and a few mates), with a chorus lifted wholesale form The Rolling Stones, which is fine because they filched most of their early tunes anyway. “No Ordinary Day” has a nicely phased 60s guitar and lyrics about naughty drugs that nods politely to Oxford’s hippy roadshow Redox, whilst “Extracts from my Brain - Part 3 (Do Replicants cry?)” is the pick of the bunch, introspective like Wish You Were Here era Pink Floyd, with an interesting arrangement and some more restrained and affecting vocals. The duo seem to treat music as a bit of fun, and we salute that, as rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Oxford, can sometimes lose sight of the value of a good night out, but sad to say listening to the whole of the LP isn’t much fun. In fact, it’s a bit of a chore. Most of the music sort of happens unconvincingly, and it feels as though somebody is desperately trying to divert your attention. Hang on, whilst we’re typing this, is somebody downstairs nicking the telly?

Like a panda shuffling listlessly round its cage in Colchester Zoo, we feel that judging M&TD on the back of a full length recording isn’t the same as seeing them in their natural habitat: get them on in some cheery boozer on a Friday night, or stick them in the middle of next year’s Hanneyfest lineup, and we can imagine having a grand old time, but for now we’ll pass. The band may have felt like kids in a sweet shop recording this CD, but we feel like diabetics in a sweet shop listening to it: there’s lots and lots here, but it’s not for us.

Chat Lines

2010-09-22T12:51:00.004+01:00

Today's entry is dedicated to Oxford music photographer Johnny Moto. Not that he's dead. Or, I guess he might be, he doesn't check in with me every hour, so how would I know? God, I hope he's OK. No, hang on, let's assume he is.

Anyway, Mr Moto gave me a pen when I was writing my first review of this year and the venue was so damned cold the ink froze solid in my ballpoint. I never gave it back. Anyway, whilst writing this review I dropped said pen and said Johnny trod on it. He was so apologetic he bought me two new pens! So, now I'm in his debt to the tune of three pens (and each pen rather niftily had four differently coloured nibs, so perhaps it's more like twelve pens - although they were short pens, so let's call it six on aggregate). Still, he's dead now, so I suppose I'm off the hook...

CATS IN PARIS/ UTE/ COLOUREDS, Pindrop, Cellar, 16/9/10

The surprising thing about electro duo Coloureds – aside from the hand-crafted face masks that make them look like Ray Harryhausen’s Michael Myers maquettes – is how much contemporary club music seeps through their distorted, jittery IDM. Just as Funkstorung a decade ago took hip hop rhythms and twisted them into Wire pleasing glitchfests, so Coloureds seem to have taken garage and funky as their base metals, to be experimented upon ruthlessly. The music is all about texture, and there isn’t much in the way of theme or melody (although the odd arpeggio recalls Orbital, and a scuzzy three note organ breakdown sounds as though Philip Glass tried to create one of his scores on an Etch-a-sketch), but the rhythmic intensities, the subtle twists and the theatrical performance make this set musically captivating as well as pummellingly excoriating.

We’ve vacillated in our opinion of local trio Ute, and tonight we find ourselves doing so mid-set. The first half is all keening vocal lines and twitchy semi-acoustic rock, and it’s fine, but apart from the excellently regimental drumming, doesn’t truly excite us: at its best it’s Radiohead enveloping Robert Wyatt, but at its worst it sounds like a generic copy of any lightly groovy artrockers (and does the refrain “Psycho killer” suggest anyone, hmmm?). But then, suddenly they win us over again, with loud and well thought out rock songs, one boasting a bass that impersonates a truck burping, and one which is a manic grunge thrash, like a skiffle Mudhoney. Most importantly, the vocals switch from annoying self-conscious wheedle, to an effective growl that drops into unexpected valleys of delicate harmonising. If this gig were a football match, you’d assume the half time talk had been ruthlessly galvanising.

Manchester’s Cats In Paris also rise in our estimations, but this is probably because it took us two songs to calibrate ourselves. What does one make of their maximalist maelstroms, where jazz funk bass meets keyboards from a budget ELP and vocals from a literary EMF? But, once the fluent violin came in, the power of the rhythm section became apparent, and the joyful refrain “This is modern British cooking” had invaded our mind, we decided their Zappa child grab bag of pop oddity was something to be cherished, and in retrospect the fact that opener “Chopchopchopchopchop” sounded like a mixture between “O Superman”, the theme from Let’s Pretend and Flaming Lips made perfect sense. They didn’t fulfil the promoter’s description of their sound as “electro spazz swing”. They surpassed it.

Brook Shields Required?

2010-09-17T11:38:00.003+01:00

Here's the game: 1) choose a composer 2) imagine what their most incongruously named offspring might be, eg Wayne Tchaikovsky. Playing this led me to the realisation that "Terence Trent Wagner" is the funniest group of five syllables I've ever heard.

Warning: preposterous PJ Harvey/prefix pun contained below.

SPRING OFFENSIVE – THE FIRST OF MANY DREAMS ABOUT MONSTERS

Unlike some drunken old colonels, we don’t lose any sleep over the way the word “gay” has changed its meaning. Unlike one of our old English teachers, we aren’t upset by current usage of the word “nice”. She used to get riled because the word was supposed to mean fastidious. Yeah, in the seventeenth century, when lest we forget, “healthcare” meant “being bled by your hairdresser”. In English, words mean pretty much whatever we want them to mean; unlike in France, the British government does not officially control the language (Jesus, can you imagine if it did? Three year waiting lists for the subjunctive, datasticks full of pronouns left in bars, creeping privatisation of the irregular verbs).

And yet, we still get miffed at the way “pretentious” is used. To us, it will always imply someone simply making a pretence. Therefore, in rock terms, it would be pretentious to hide your Eton accent with ersatz glottal stops whilst preaching revolutionary punk politics, and it would be pretentious to dress up in flimsy scraps of leather and prance round the stage looking like you want to fellate any passing roadie in a paddling pool of Jim Beam, when you actually prefer an early night with a mug of Horlicks, but it would not be pretentious to make a 14 minute single based on Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stage Grief Cycle.

It might be a bit bloody silly, but it wouldn’t be pretentious.

Yet, this is precisely what Spring Offensive have done, with their free download track “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters”, and whilst it might be easy to dismiss behaviour like this as sophomoric, or needlessly ostentatious, but we feel that we can defend them. First up, there’s nothing wrong with shooting high, because you just might make it – we’re surely glad that Brian Wilson tried to make “teenage symphonies to God” and not “a couple of catchy tunes to net me some pussy” – and secondly, the conceptual elements of this song may have been useful for the band in its composition, but really we’d defy anyone in the world to work it out in a blind test. In fact, the handwritten notes that are supplied with the track conclude “we sing about the act of writing about grief”, which shows how far they are from producing Grief! The Kubler-Ross Story On Ice, although we do feel the distancing is a little meaningless, as if their intent was to present us with a concept and then immediately hide it behind layers of obfuscation (“Don’t you wish you’d never, never meta-“).

Add to this the fact that the lyrics are, as ever, wonderfully vague and allusive, having more in common with the imagistic snapshots of William Carlos Williams than your average pop song. “Beware the intruder/ I have scissors in my hand [...] He says he’s an artist” doesn’t give us enough data to construct any real picture, but does make a truly evocative yet unspecified image with a powerful economy of words...which is perhaps what all good pop songs do, after all. And it’s especially effective when delivered with a mixture of reticence and declamation by Lucas Whitworth, whose voice is sounding better than ever on this recording. There are other fantastic elements to this single, especially the guitars’ undulating shimmer in the quieter sections, the wonderful percussive loop at the start that sounds like an old typewriter being pecked at by a fledgling reporter, and the fact that the mammoth song hangs together without ever feeling stretched.

But this impressive release isn’t perfect. The seems a little too much in awe of local heroes Youth Movies in the crescendos, and we can’t help feeling that the rubbery Foals guitar lines and massed choruses are the least exciting part of Spring Offensive, even when they do them incredibly well. So, we urge everyone to download the record, it’s incredibly impressive, and hugely enjoyable, and yes, it’s a bit bloody silly, but the weird part is that Spring Offensive have released what might look like a magnum opus, a career summation, but have in fact revealed how swiftly they are outgrowing the old sound. There’s lots to get excited about here away from the obvious moments, and it could be the first glimpse of enticing new paths and alleys for the band to follow. The first of many, doubtless.

Comboverdose

2010-09-06T17:34:00.001+01:00

I was going to write you something fascinating, and then settle down to submit another CD review to MIO, but I feel like cack, so I may just take a Night Nurse and go to bed with the Prom. You'll survive.

JUNKIE BRUSH – WHAT YOU SEE, WHAT YOU HEAR (Rivet Gun)

Why does nobody talk about the huge volte face in the history of punk?

How come no one comments on the fact that punks seem to spend most of their time in the company of hippies nowadays? We know that not all punks bought into the swastika-badged, vomit-flecked attempt to bring down civilisation by slightly scaring old ladies, but surely all original punks saw their movement as a tabula rasa for music and culture: no more hippies, no more well-heeled prog indulgences. And yet, sometime around 1985, when the rest of the punks had given themselves up to electronics, black eyeliner or proper jobs, the hardline of believers found themselves in the company of their old enemies, fraternising with hippies, playing free festivals, supporting left wing causes. Of course, by the time the 90s rolled round, with the advent of crusty folk rock and Megadog trance, punks and hippies had lived together for a few years, and already it was impossible to say which was which.

And so it is with Junkie Brush. Despite sounding a lot like the clinical autopsy hardcore of Black Flag at times, you’re more likely to find them playing for genial dopeheads Klub Kakofanney than anyone else, and you’ve a greater chance of finding them on a bill with acoustic strummers and Gong-a-likes at some oddball West Oxfordshire all-dayer than playing to moshing revolutionary youths in some Friday night sweatbox. None of which detracts one iota form the high quality of this new EP, which balances brutality with beery japing perfectly, and may well be the best set of tracks Junkie Brush has put on record, but it is intriguing nonetheless.

There is a picture of a protester winding up to hurl a projectile at a wall of riot police on the cover of the record, but in reality, the politics have no more depth than the inlay card. The title “Problem-Reaction-Solution” seems to hint at revolutionary activity, but doesn’t go so far as to specify anything in particular that’s good or bad about society, and elsewhere phrases like “Don’t you want to destroy the other?” and “You are the enemy” are vague enough to be essentially meaningless. Also, throwing such dumb-ass yelpalongs like “Fucked In The Mind” and “Monkey Boy” onto the EP could be said to detract from any cogent political message that might be lurking somewhere.

The music, on the other hand, is simple, direct and uncontentiously excellent. Marxist - and, like Big Tim from Junkie Brush, Zappa fanatic - critic Ben Watson once postulated that all great rock bands were essentially drum circles, and that all rock instruments should be counted as percussion. If that’s the case, then in “Problem-Reaction-Solution”, Junkie Brush have gone one better, turning a three piece band into one giant bass drum, bashing steadily away as if haranguing some Phoenicians slaves to row a Roman galley. Nowhere on the record does the musical construction get far beyond the rule of “riff, refrain, and slight dynamics”, and is all the better for it. “Sickening” has a sprightly bounce that caries tiny hints of Rage Against The Machine, “Fucked In The Mind” is scuzzier and more leaden footed, and “Monkey Boy” might be paying homage to local punk daddies Headcount, but whatever slight alterations the band makes to their recipe, they don’t diverge too far from insistent, declamatory, hugely enjoyable chants (although “You Are A Target”’s nods towards The Prodigy’s “Poison” are unexpected).

But none of this musical dissection can actually capture the sense of barely controlled rage that Junkie Brush embody. The vocals have a reedy, Dead Kennedys intensity, which is offset by the roiling sea of guitar noise, and drums that sound like deep-fried cannonballs being dropped onto your ears from an Olympic diving board; Jim, formerly of mildly convincing artrockers City Lights Just Burn seems to have found his spiritual home hitting things in Junkie Brush. Come to think of it, there’s another difficult truth about punk that doesn’t get aired often enough – when it’s done as well as it is here, it still sounds miles better than most of the turgid guff that passes for rock and roll. This EP made us want to smash the nearest radio and jump up and down on every half-arsed Myspace band in existence, which can only possibly be an enormous mark in its favour.

Truck 2010 Sunday Pt 2

2010-08-31T18:17:00.005+01:00

One thing we noticed at Truck is how many photographers there are nowadays. Impressed audience members come up to ask what lens a snapper is using, when once they would have been checking amp manufacturers or DJ set lists. Luckily, Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou have framed the pictures for them, by standing in the very centre of the main stage and singing into one microphone, which cleverly gives the impression that we’re all in some poky, cosy folk club. We only really love a couple of their songs, but you simply only see a duo whose voices complement each other like this once in blue moon: he is querulous and melancholy, whilst her voice is lucid and liquid, and when they harmonise it sounds like one astonishing folk organism. Joe Bennett turns up once again to play some rather nifty trumpet, proving their music is even better to share.

Nedry usher in the return of the epic reverb pedal, offering us icy clicks and cuts glitch ambience surrounding girl-lost-in-fog vocal mantras. The songs are something like the forlorn ghosts of Donna Summer tracks in some laptop purgatory, except the one that sounds like a dubstep Stina Nordenstam. Another wonderful Truck discovery a long way from the main action.

Unfortunately, lightning doesn’t strike twice and our next off-piste venture brings us to Summer Camp, who play something like late period OMD, which would be passable, if it weren’t for their horribly plastic wedding singer vocalist, who ruins any small chance their songs have of winning us over. The crass lyrics mostly boil down to “Ooh ooh, nice things are nice”. If you think it would be good if all towns were like Milton Keynes, this is the band for you; if you’re fully functioning adult, steer well clear.

No adults in Egyptian Hip Hop, they’re a band who are very young to have received the plaudits they have, but we shan’t let that affect our judgement. And it turns out they’re...alright. There are plenty of ideas in their songs, and they can chug through a slack riff like Dinosaur Jr before flipping out some cheesy Huey Lewis keyboards and throwing in some hi-life inflected jerky guitars that remind us of – oh, you know – FUCKING EVERYBODY! They sound more like a promising band than a good one, but that’s no crime; also, they’re less than half our age and we think they look bloody ridiculous, so they must be doing something right. Misleading name, however; someone should book them with Non-Stop Tango and try to start a riot.

We’re much more excited by the sounds of young Britain when we visit Unicorn Kid, and his hyper-active Nintendo toybox rave, in a style we christen “Arpeggi8”. “Where Is Your Child” and “Tricky Disco” would have come out a few years before he was born, which intriguingly means that he saw them the same way we saw The White Album. And, let’s be honest, they’re better. His music is also better than most on offer this weekend, and whilst it has its florescent charms, the material is strong because a lot of care has clearly gone into the construction, there are lots of interesting ideas in his Wonky Kong palette. Despite being one of the oldest people watching, we love it as much as the teenagers; although when there’s a stage invasion of day-glo youths, we do feel as though we’ve stumbled into the Byker Grove wrap party. Gigs are rarely this much fun.

We get our final Bennett-spotter points with Common Prayer, as they’re both present and correct, as is a French horn which would be brilliant if it were only audible. This is neo-country Truck mulch to a great extent, but the singer does have a lovely unhurried voice, so we end up in favour, even if we can’t sincerely say, “we’re loving it”.

Watching Blood Red Shoes we remember why we like Little Fish. Their guitar and drums business is all very well, and they have some decent rock tunes, but we can’t really get a grip on any of it. They do, however, have far superior stage banter to Little Juju, whose nervous ramblings can get pretty tiresome. There’s exactly nothing wrong with this set, but after two days of music we want something memorable nearly as much as we want a nice sit down.

We are a smidgen disappointed when we realise nervous_testpilot is going to play a straight trance set with none of the madness of previous Trucks (although we’re sure he sampled the Crystal Maze theme at one point), but then we decide that hearing truly exquisitely crafted music is enough, and begin to appreciate the subtly melancholic melodies hidden amongst the snare rushes and thumping vorsprung durch techno. It may be the end of the weekend, but the crowd are still eager to dance, one of whom has discovered some discarded fragments of the Keyboard Choir’s costumes, which brings The Beathive’s day nicely full circle. The set turns out to be an understated triumph, and Testpilot’s loving ridicule of the dancing crowd is fun to watch.

We finish our festival away from headliners Teenage Fanclub, with The Epstein, stars of many a bygone Truck. They play a beautiful set, the jewel in the crown being a glistening “Leave Your Light On”, and we realise that whilst Truck may have got bigger, louder and – let’s not skim over it – more expensive, it still feels very much like it used to a decade ago. As ever there have been surprises, charming atmospheres and far too much rubbish country, and we relish the fact that Truck can hold on to this frail ability to welcome everyone, yet not blandly smooth itself out to try to please them all. The programme’s editorial might be written as an embarrassing cross between Mr Motivator and Jack Kerouac – “this movement that says no homogenous same-old phoney crap but new real expression” – but there is something in it, and Truck realises that being professional is great, but treating people like profit units isn’t. There’s still a natural, unforced wonder about Truck, and no glib corporate slogan is ever likely to encapsulate that feeling.

Inside Truck

2010-08-31T18:12:00.010+01:00

And here's Sunday from Truck. Nothing more to add, I feel wierd today & I'm going to lie down.

Truck, Hill Farm, Steventon, 2010 Sunday

The Holy Orders are almost beyond criticism, because they came all the way from Leeds and they’re playing at 10.30 in the morning in a Barn that has a forceful smell of bovine faeces that even the Bisto kids couldn’t convincingly pretend to like, when they’d probably like to be lolling on the grass like most of the Truckers. Luckily they aren’t half bad, melding Mudhoney’s rock slur with something altogether less acceptable that’s more like Wyld Stallyns. It’s all rough hewn and unrefined, but undoubtedly enjoyable, especially “Paper, Scissors, Stone”, which is a budget At The Drive-In blast.

Some people have complained that there aren’t enough slots for local musicians at Truck, which is odd, because it’s never claimed to be primarily a local festival. It’s like criticising Kind Hearts & Coronets for not having enough car chases. As it is we enjoy stumbling across the odd smattering of Oxfordshire acts, and Sunday continues with a hat trick of strong scenesters. Minor Coles impress with some spicy indie, and are followed by an excellent offering from Phantom Theory, who play a drum and guitar set that hasn’t got an ounce of fat on it, and who marry spotless arrangements with full tilt rocking to cut directly to even the most leaden Sunday morning brains, and who live in a world made entirely of RIFF. Like Truck alumni Winnebago Deal shaved and spruced for a job interview, Phantom Theory have clearly spent long hard hours honing their music, but waste no time in cracking it out onstage. Mosh and go.

But even they are eclipsed in the Beathive where The Keyboard Choir are making music hand built by robots. It’s a simple proposition: a bunch of synths, music that is pitched roughly between Klaus Schulze and Luke Slater, and a fifth column of dancers dressed in woefully poor android costumes. Not only is it musically one of the best things we see all weekend, but Seb Reynolds alternately doing a gangly newborn foal dance and trying to fix broken machinery is officially funnier than anything in the cabaret tent, ever.

After a quick trip to the Butt’s ale stall (great beer, no queues, Truck 7 prices – why go anywhere else?), we drop in on The Horizontal Instrument. There’s a fair amount of electronic music on today, and some people would say that it isn’t proper music. Well this is. And it’s properly awful. What we see is like Motley Crue with all the fun excised and surgically replaced by disco. Yes, that unpleasant. We only lasted two songs, so maybe it got better; maybe the end credits of Eldorado were a psychedelic funk explosion, but you can forgive us for never having found out. Sucked like an Electrolux.

We cock half an ear to Dead Jerichos as we pass, who seem to be today’s Shaodow, retaining local fans and winning over newcomers in equal measure, but the temperature in the Market Stage is about 4000 degrees, so we walk on by to the Beat Hive again. There’s also some “proper music paranoia” about Miaoux Miaoux. There he is plucking a guitar, playing Korg and programming in drum machine beats live. It’s decent electro, but it would be better if we didn’t have to watch each track being painstakingly put together. All very commendable, but it’s a bit like watching a glass blowing demonstration when all you want is a pint.

Sometimes we wonder at the logic of which acts play the main stage, as it’s so much bigger than any of the others, but with a band like Flowers Of Hell there must never have been any question. Their music is vast in scale, torrents of miserablist strings tumbling over humming guitars to form a whirlpool where Mogwai meets Morricone. They even do a Plastic People Of The Universe cover, which has got to be worth points. Every little helps.

At points all of Islet play drums, and yet theirs is not an aggressive sound – it’s more Stomp than Shit & Shine, and the music is built more on a cheeky bounce than a pummelling thud. With slinky basslines and plenty of barely controlled yelping the set comes off like Stump quirking out at Notting Hill Carnival, and is almost obscenely enjoyable. Highlights are a ritualistic dub number, in which the band chants and clatters over chubby Jah Wobble bass, and the almost poppy moments when they become a special needs Foals. Plenty of acts try to marry experimental showboating with a cohesive rock sound, but most fail; this is the real thing.

In the wake of Fuck Buttons there’s a new breed of leftfield musicians who aren’t afraid of offering tribute to simple, hedonistic musical pleasures. Take Masks, who may have the Vivian Girls t-shirt and Explosions In The Sky guitar hazes, but who also aren’t wary of throwing a huge 808 bass drum pulse behind one of their spidery numbers. In truth, the show is slightly hesitant, and the two guitar lineup can’t quite make enough noise to complement the backing tracks: they play a piece that’s supposed to sound like Godspeed, but it’s more like an old walk-on tape for Saxon. Near the end of the set things come together, and suddenly they make a sombre yet insistent post-goth groove that could soundtrack some hip torture dungeon. This isn’t just music, this is S & M music.

Dog Is Dead exist at the other end of the spectrum, completely unashamed about their away day pop with its sunny sax breaks and bleached funk guitars that put them equidistant between Pigbag and Vampire Weekend. We hate to admit it, but we rather like this uptight, grinning mess of Haircut 100 and Steely Dan, and find ourselves singing the line, “this is a zoo, could you not feed the animals?” all afternoon. Pop music: it’s not just there for the nasty things in life.

Truck 2010 Saturday Pt 2

2010-08-29T19:37:00.001+01:00

We decide to watch Thomas Truax in the Rapture tent instead of the main stage, as there’s a something wonderfully intimate about his music, behind all the carny Meccano band schtick, and it’s nice to sit close enough to see the manic madness in his craggy eyes. A young lad of about eight leaps up to take a photo of mechanical drum machine Mother Superior with the same excitement most boys would reserve for David Beckham, so we conclude that the nation’s future is safe. The music is wonkily great as ever (clunk click, every trip), but his cover of the Eraserhead theme is like an ice cream van in Hades, which is just about perfect.

The name Man Without Country sounds like a Truck billing rebellion, and they also sound great on paper, but they’re running late and Bellowhead are starting early, so we never find out what they actually sound like. Bellowhead don’t get mentioned often when people compile their top local acts, but they should: find an act that can mix musicianship, melody, arrangement and danceability together anything like as well, we dare you. Everything about their big band folk concoction is amazing, and if our notes are illegible it’s because we were trying to write them whilst dancing like a stevedore on annual leave in a Threshers warehouse. Bellowhead have thrown so many ideas at the wall they’ve had to build another wall, but what’s astounding is how well it all works, and how much fun it manages to be underneath all the musical cleverness. Reassuringly extensive.

After that Lau are a let down, which is harsh because they’re clearly a superbly virtuosic folk act, but we’ve had our folk bones reset in funny shapes by Bellowhead. Next time, maybe.

“This is the future” chant Phantogram, because they’ve got some synths, see. Not really the future, is it, more a refracted present, seeing as they sound like The XX mixed with Crystal Castles. Bloody good, though, as only glacial synth pop drenched in reverb (splash it all over) can be. Ah, the reverb, surely it’s the sound of 2010. If you want to taste the zeitgeist buy an Ariel Pink album. Or sit at the bottom of an empty culvert with a broken radio playing Heart FM, there’s not much in it.

Mew sound alright, but their gate reverb stadium drum sound reminds us of Simple Minds so we sneak off to see Ms Dynamite. Us and the rest of Oxfordshire, as we don’t get in, but it does let us watch the headliner we should have been watching all along, The Original Rabbit’s Foot Spasm Band. Most trad jazz and blues comes to us pickled and dried with all the life leached out of it by some dead-eyed sense of heritage; The Rabbit’s Feet let the music live, but this time it’s the band that are pickled. Seriously, half of them seem to be drunk. And the other half paralytic. But they can still play fast, loud, funny and with as much passion as anyone on the bill. They’re grrrreat.

Truck Or Treat

2010-08-29T18:23:00.012+01:00

Hello.

It's been a while, sorry about that. I'm as busy as can be over here. I shall get this blog back on track hopefully in the enar future. Anway, here's the 1st part of my Truck review, elements of which appear in the current Nightshift.

TRUCK, Hill Farm, Steventon, 24-5/7/10

SATURDAY
In recent years Truck has been all over the national press, popping up in The Independent Magazine or The Guardian’s guide to festivals, but whilst this may be deserved none of these culture jamborees seem to capture what we think is good about Truck. Forget your indie cred and girls in fifty quid wellies, we adore the vicar frying donuts, the Round Tablers serving reasonably priced tea, the slightly makeshift feel of most of the stages, and – in short – the fact that it doesn’t look like something that’s ever likely to excite the staff at The Guardian. The other great thing about Truck, which is perhaps true of all good festivals, is that it always surprises you with great unknown acts. Openers Meursault aren’t a bad little group to stumble upon, volleying melodic laptop rock into the balmy afternoon. Their inherent drama reminds us of Witches, and our only criticism is that they come across as desperately earnest, as if they were pleading before a medieval ducking stool.

Something Beginning With L are a new name to us as well, and if their woozy cover of Whitney Houton’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” marks them out as hypnagogic trendies, the majority of the set is just good old guitar and keyboard rock music, finished off with a gorgeous plangent voice. At times they remind us of Texas – even down to the cowboy hat – but not in a way that is infuriating. “Lovely” begins with L.

It’s the same every year, we want to like the cabaret tent but never find anything good. We’re desperate to enjoy Jim Davies, who seems like he’d be a great man to share a few pints with, and who has a natural humour about him, but who must have left his punchlines behind in the rush to get packed. Sadly his tales of working as an advertising copywriter are good, but don’t really connect; it does, however, give us an excuse to pepper this review with idiotic promotional slogans.

In a swirl of NASA suits, bubble machines, theremin and stylophone Spaceships Are Cool prepare for takeoff. Their wonderfully tuneful music is akin to something on the Duophonic label minus the furrowed brows, and at least three tracks sound like White Town’s bedroom wonder “Your Woman” covered by a cheery Glaswegian indie band. They’re one of the best acts of the weekend, but if they have a Smile-Off with members of Alphabet Backwards stand well back, you might get caught in some hideous chirpiness crossfire. Put the freshness back.

They also give out tiny origami space shuttles to the crowd, which we find scattered around throughout the day; is subliminal craft merch a new sales concept? God knows Atlantic Pacific could do with some of that subtlety, they play a very dull yet not upsetting set, which is only interesting because it provides the first glimpse of a Bennett brother onstage. What do we win?

We were fervently hoping Thomas Tantrum in The Barn would be Thomas Truax going ape because all his machines had gone wrong, but sadly not. Nothing else about them is a let down, though. Get past the ultra-contemporary pared guitar sounds, and you find pop gold something like The Cardigans, or perhaps even The Cowboy Junkies, if they were cooked in a cutely effervescent pixie pie. It’s musically spotless and hugely enjoyable, at times reminding us of pretty 90s popstrels Tsunami (not the later Oxford band of the same name). Swiss Concrete don’t make shit smelling barns, but if they did...

The programme tells us “Luke Smith hasn’t missed a Truck Festival since he first played ten (??? citation needed) years ago”. How sweet, he’s so much a part of the scenery, they don’t even bother proof reading his write up. And as such criticising him would be like visiting Wiltshire and giving Stonehenge a bad review, but luckily we adore him anyway. We could ramble on about his intelligent lyrics and adept piano, the excellent growling John Harle tone of the soprano sax or the warm comic humanity of his delivery, but all you really need to know is that throughout the set the sound engineers were grinning like loons, and they’re a notoriously surly bunch. Smith is somewhere between Betjeman and Stillgoe, and is an English eccentric to be valued...and he does make exceedingly good tunes.

Active Child plays some lovely harp, but spoils it by covering the music with horrible Eurhythmics drum programming. The he stops playing the harp. Then we leave.

Boat To Row are likened in the programme to Stornoway and Bert Jansch, which is phenomenally generous and puts us off their folky pop at first, but eventually we warm to them, and we mentally file them alongside Sonny Liston as pleasing acoustic troubadours. Still, nothing here to get the pulse racing, so we let our fingers do the walking and pick something at random from the programme.

Fucking fingers. We’re back at the Cabaret tent, where two men (who may be Bishop & Douche, but we’re not certain) are playing the introductions to cheesy records to inexplicable applause. God, how we hate the Nathan Barley world we live in, sometimes, that equates recognising something with understanding it, and thinks quoting something is the same as criticising it. This is desperately unfunny and makes Boat To Row seem like a halcyon age, so we leave ASAP. Because we’re worth it.

Luckily it means we catch some of Mr Shaodow’s set from the door of a packed Beathive. Only a few years ago he was fumbling his way through a Punt set whereas now he (and battle brother LeeN, amongst others) has the crowd by the scruff of the neck, and is sending it, frankly, loopy. The only down point is the overlong freestyle section, where Shaodow starts asking for suggestions from the audience like a hip hop Josie Lawrence. The improv raps are good, but why try to impress on the fly when you’ve already written such astounding rhymes?

We think that Y was on our bus, trying to impress some 15 years olds and telling a dizzy girl she was psychic; on Sunday he’s refusing to leave the tiny Rapture Records stage whilst he slurs non-sequiturs and plays fudged arpeggios on a weeny keyboard, like a horrific cross between Suicide and John Shuttleworth. Somewhere in the middle of this embarrassment, though, he put a tiger in his tank and churned out a steaming wall of psych rock noise, along with an ace jamming band (double Bennett score!). Imagine all the great sounds that influenced Spacemen 3, and then put them together replacing the narcotic mope with a Watney’s Party 7 barrel of fun, and you get a set that might not be complex, but is exactly what is needed as the afternoon tails away. Some toddlers are also going nuts for it, alternately dancing crazy and running their fingers through the pebbles in the Village Pub tent like people on their first acid trip. “Dude, my hands are so big. For a three year old”.

Mage To Make Your Mouth Water

2010-08-10T18:37:00.003+01:00

It's still all a bit frantic over here, but I've found time to sling up this review for Music In Oxford (hereinafter to be known as MIO). It's an interesting example of how to pitch reviews for a site like this. I could have reviewed this in the style of The Wire, but it seemed to me that whilst some of the readers would know a lot more than me about drone based improv, lots of others would have no experience whatsoever, so something more open-ended seemed to be required. It's sort of interesting to have a readership and peer group that's defined, not by social or musical similarities, but by simple geography. So, was I too chummy, or too obtuse here, for the random reader? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

And why not talk to each other in the comments, as it seems as though my not posting anything does very little to affect the number of views the site has - in fact, if anything the last fortnight has seen more visitors than usual. As curious as Alice Lidell with a curious orange that kills cats.

VILESWARM – THE SHAMAN’S LAST WALTZ (Eyeless)

They call it “doom drone”.

Leftfield musicians – or at the very least their admirers – are madmen for creating genres. We’re all familiar with electronica’s offshoots spliced into ever narrower branches, with sub-genres breeding deformed offspring like so many rampant Chernobyl rabbits, but keeping tabs on the myriad diffractions of noise, improve, alt rock and out metal can induce dizziness, nausea, and a strong yearning for some nice simple pop music. Despite all this, Vileswarm’s coinage is a useful addition to the lexicon. This CD might be a collection of gestural, amelodic drone music, but it has a density and sense of sludgy ritual that it shares with the more evocative, leaden shades of metal. This music may well be improvised (although there could easily be an over-arching structure, we’re not entirely sure) but it’s a long way from Derek Bailey’s “non-idiomatic improv”. The Shaman’s Last Waltz is, in many ways, unmusical. It generally avoids motifs or rhythms, and “incidental” noises are foregrounded as much as recognised musical sounds – we can hear guitar strings being brushed as much as we hear them being plucked, and the sound of sitting at a drum kit is given the same space as hitting it. We hear Vileswarm “playing” in the way that children, not musicians, play; we hear performers exploring their instruments as much as we hear them mastering them.

“The Shaman’s Last Waltz Pt I” is a long track, but it feels more like a series of sonic tableaux than a single piece. There are sublimely eerie moments, the sound of a creaking dead cart in a toxic fog bank vying with a recording of someone raping a harmonium in a medieval microwave for our affections. Drums are brushed in scuttling clusters and guitar tones waver. At the end a knob-twiddling electronic sound lets the side down, as it isn’t inherently mysterious, coming straight from a Tom Baker Dr Who soundtrack. “Pt II” is less eventful, and has an oppressive, pressurised atmosphere. An oscillating synth near the conclusion has the overbearing power of very early Tangerine Dream, and envelops us with a slow amniotic presence. This isn’t so much music you listen to, it’s more music you live in.

Ironically, despite the fact that it’s separate from the “Shaman” sequence, closing track “Lotus Prayer” is the most ritualistic track, sounding like a recording of Gyoto monks at their devotions (or, at times, like some old janitors clearing up trestle tables after a village craft exhibition). The track even obliquely approaches musical structure, being a set of variations on a non-theme (two notes and a rhythmic rustle). It’s certainly the most cohesive piece here, but in a way the least intriguing.

This record may not be as good as some work by the two collaborators: it doesn’t have the stark organic beauty of Euhedral’s best music, nor the wired Manga velocity of a great David K. Frampton gig, but it’s an enjoyable listen. Most of all we like the way the LP feels exploratory. So much music that calls itself “experimental” or “leftfield” is drawing on a whole raft of ossified, time-honoured tricks and traits, with a standard sonic template as predictable as any 12 bar blues. Vileswarm conversely sound as though they’re truly trying to find new ways of working together, and attempting to conjure up - the record’s title and cover art imply this is the right term – new experiences. In an odd way, it sounds like the work of alien musicians, who are fully trained in traditional musical forms, but who have never seen human instruments before, and aren’t sure whether the rub them, blow them, or stick a spare tentacle into one of the holes. And if that doesn’t give you a clear idea of whether to investigate this act or run a mile, nothing will.

Update rape

2010-08-05T17:43:00.004+01:00

Afternoon

Everything's a bit busy at the mo, so I'm just checking in with an update. The Truck review is done, but I shan't post it till Nightshift is out. I have sent a review to Music In Oxford, and you can have that once I return from madness next week. I also have another demo to review for them, so I'll try to do that soon. Thereafter, I'll decide what to do with the site. Now the archive is strip mined I'll have to look in to whether I'll make this into a real blog, to allow you the three posts a week average you've been used to, as there shan't be ebnough proper reviews to keep up this frenetic, whirlwind pace (ahem).

What was that? Music In Oxford? Yes, www.oxfordbands.com has changed its name, so go to www.musicinoxford.co.uk for your local music news, reviews and poorly typed rage.

In the meantime, read the old posts, I bet you missed some. Or go outside and do something less boring instead.

Cornbury 2010 Sunday Pt 2

2010-07-31T11:24:00.001+01:00

The infamous Cornbury rain kept off for the festival, and the feeble little drizzle that did start evaporated in the face of Raghu Dixit’s whirlwind of bouncy positivity. T shirts describe it as “Indo-World folk rock”, and whilst we’re not sure “Indo-World” makes any more sense than “Anglo-Oxonian”, the “folk” bit is fair enough, and the “rock” bit is beyond discussion. Dixit’s voice is keening and powerful enough to knock you back on your seat even as the funky fusion rhythms make you want to get up and dance as though David Gray were a distant memory. The band is fantastic, varying the tone with fizzing violin, snaky bass and Dire Straits guitar. At one point they sound like a carnatic Levellers, and at another they build up a chunky rhythm like a Bollywood Los Lobos, but at the heart of the music is a warmth and exuberance you won’t often find. Normally when we describe an act as “a good festival band” it’s a back-handed compliment, for Raghu Dixit it’s a golden commendation. Simply joyous.

Were we implying earlier that sound engineers are childish? Well, here’s Flash Harry PA mainman and outstanding engineer Tony Jezzard with Reservoir Cats who definitely aren’t children: they play proper grown up blues with big boys’ growly-wowly vocals, clever twiddly-widdly guitar solos and sophisticated lyrics about women with whom they might have had sexy-wexy. Genre assassination aside, they’re actually a good group, having plenty of fun onstage, boasting a reliably sturdy rhythm section and, God help us, some of those wailing guitar solos sound pretty decent. Plus we know that nothing we say will change this band one fraction, and that in itself is worthy of respect.

Folk: is it music by the people, music about the people, or music for the people? For Oxford Folk Festival star booking Seth Lakeman you have to feel it’s the latter two definitions that count, as he is keen to ground each song in real events in his introductions, often celebrating people otherwise off history’s radar, and because his music has a simple, easily apprehended structure. Forthcoming album title track “Hearts And Minds” is a crowd rousing song, but in the sense of “Let’s all believe the same thing”, rather than “Let’s get some cudgels and duff up the ruling classes”. It’s a performance of egalitarian, humanitarian music, spiced with his fluid fiddle playing and outstanding double bass. It wasn’t our favourite show of the weekend, but it did demonstrate that there is plenty of excitement to be found in mainstream music, and that Cornbury’s conservative roster can provide all the elation, surprise and fun as experimental or obscure music. It also reminded us that no music is more boring and enraging as music that is professionally boring and unadventurously enraging, so we’re not complete converts to the Cornbury ethos just yet.

Last Of The Summary Whines

2010-07-31T10:36:00.009+01:00

And with this I have no more reviews to post. Maybe it will spur me on to finish the Vileswarm review I've had on my pile for about a month. Review of last week's Truck is looking good (or long, which is the same thing nowadays), but you'll have to wait till Nightshift is out before I post that. However, you can buy this week's Oxford Times and read their scintillating review, which mentions all of four acts, and very nearly comes close to making a critical judgement on one of them; plus they've got a huge snap of Marc West from BBC Oxford grinning like a village idiot disguised as Rusell Brand, which is so much better than a well framed portrait of one of the performers. I aspire to reach that journalistic level one day, once my prentice work is through.

CORNBURY, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

Sonny Liston (FKA Dear Landlord, which was a much better name) won the BBC Oxford Introducing competition to open the Second Stage on Sunday, and worthy winners they were. Their songs are uber-perky folk-indie strums, with lots of vibrant trumpet and literate lyrics about Charles de Gualle, generally sounding a bit like Belle & Sebastian rewrites of “Summer Holiday”, which is a lovely way to start the day. With two great vocalists who can deliver even wordy lyrics convincingly whilst keeping the summery pop melodies afloat, we could be hearing from Sonny Liston again before too long.

Jon Allen maintains our relaxed bouyant mood. He may come from Devon, but his songs all have a laidback pseudo-country singer songwriter waft that we like. To be frank, his songs all sound like Bob Dylan circa Desire, but that will do for now.

The Lucinda Belle Orchestra entice us at first, because they have a harp in a leading role, which is especially welcome as Sonny Liston left theirs behind, but you strictly need more than five people for an orchestra, right? Belle has an excellent voice, but one can ruin the effect by milking it, right? “My Voice & My 45 Strings” is a top tune, but a standard harp actually has 47 strings, right? AOR cafe jazz with a contemporary radio sound is very nice, but we’ve heard it all before, right? So how was the set? Alright.

The Blockheads were always an odd proposition, pub rock passion mixed with punk sneers and funk chops, topped off by a tone deaf romantic/cynical poet obsessed by sex, ethics and Essex. Dury has of course sadly passed on now, but we’re glad the band have chosen to keep the unique vision alive, and if the set was a bit of a chicken-in-a-basket cabaret turn, you can bet that if Ian is looking down on us, he’d hate his memory to be enshrined too formally. Now, getting an impressionist to replace your lost vocalist is a dangerous ploy. It can work – as anyone who saw The Magic Band at The Zodiac can testify – but the cartoon character on the mike for The Blockheads just goes to show how much more there was to Dury’s performance than swearing and glottal stops. It’s a slightly 2D show, that sounds like the aging cast of Grange Hill jamming with Redox, or perhaps the Mighty Boosh hitcher joining Hall & Oates.

That’s the criticisms out of the way. On the plus side every musician on stage is simply astonishing and, what’s more, is still clearly having the time of their life. The band delivers a hits selection, but don’t shy away from original arrangements to keep things fresh, the sax solo on “Clever Trevor” being the greatest musical moment of the festival. Plus, they have a vault of cracking tunes so deep, they make Squeeze look like Milli Vanilli.

We dropped off during Danny & The Champions Of The World, which had more to do with our exhaustion than their music, though it’s still probably not a press cutting for the rehearsal room wall. In fact, we thank them for it, as our impromptu nap meant we missed Reef. We wake to the sounds of the last track by Harper Simon (another from the Taylor Dayne reject list?) on the Nero’s stage, and it sounds like nice jovial shiny drivetime pop, so good luck to her, but Fisherman’s Freinds are the real deal.

They are late middle aged men from Port Isaac who sing a capella shanties. They have some intelligent harmonies, but they aren’t precious about the performance, honking out the songs like nine Cornish vuvuzelas filled with navy rum. This is folk music with big balls and simple melodies (Middle eight? Never heard of one, chum) that cut straight to the heart and force even the most reticent tongues to shout along like eighteenth century street vendors. All this, plus oodles of camp innuendo between songs, what a simply brilliant band. They get a huge response from the healthy crowd, which does the soul good to witness. The surprise find of the festival.

And we had to bloody follow that with Brainchild, whose charmless, brash rock is like a cross between The Towers Of London and Evanescence at a greasy bike rally. There’s a girl singing in a disinfected raunchy style, some “Baker Street” saxophone, and a raddled looking specimen done up like a drunken cross between Alice Cooper and Screaming Lord Sutch at the front. All of them look and sound like they’re from different bands, each of which is equally atrocious. We last two numbers. Later, we return to find the sax player signing autographs for kids, and the front of house mixer telling us they were the best band of the weekend: either this tells us that they got better very quickly, or that you can’t trust engineers and children to choose your music for you.

But our revolt against Brainchild meant we got unexpectedly to see Newton Faulkner, who turns out to be a surprisingly decent showman. He quickly builds up a conversational rapport with the crowd, which is no mean feat on a big stage after a day and half of music, so that the set flashes by. He also has an agile voice, and an impressive array of extended guitar techniques. Pity that we didn’t care for his songs much - we could have sat and listened to him telling jokes and playing covers all afternoon, but his own tunes didn’t grab us. It’s a masterclass for boring acoustic strummers the world around, however: gig is a doing word, after all...

Cornbury 2010 - Saturday Pt 2

2010-07-29T17:47:00.001+01:00

The employees at the adjacent Nero’s coffee tent seem to have been getting high off their own supply, dancing manically behind the counter to Staton’s set, so we stay to see what their tiny stage can offer. Edinburgh boy Alex Cornish has some Damien Rice style tunes and is backed by a useful trio. He’s just as good as some of the people on the big stages. Obviously there are two ways you could take that...

At a festival with a slightly more mature demographic, over 50% of those watching Ben Montague are under 20. Poshstock is all very well, but a festival’s not complete under you’ve seen some drunk kids (though we were less forgiving when they kept us awake all night). Anyway, what drew the youngsters to his rather likable Radio 2 pop, has he been on Hollyoaks or something? Whatever the story, he has a warm voice, and the band make a decent fist of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” alongside their own sprightly tunes. As the girls swoon over his tasty looks and the adults tap along to his decent acoustic everyman rock, it’s like the second coming of Craig McLachlan & Check 1-2.

After Montague has put a spring in our step, Imelda May knocks us off our feet. Her band play a turbo-rockabilly, all slapped double bass, Duane Eddy guitar, scorching trumpet and battered tambourine, over which May’s feisty Dublin voice wails with a sassy, gospel passion. The songs are relatively generic, but played with firy conviction, and even “I’m a creepy, sneaky freak” can sound like Byron if you sing it as viscerally as Imelda May does.

After these two, all Riverside have to do is keep the party going. And they give us David Gray. That’s like having ten minutes to score a hat trick, and bringing on Heskey. His set is just as tedious as you’d expect, and he doesn’t even interest us by being particularly awful. He does that “Babylon” one. He does that one that sounds like that other one. He does some we know and some we wish we didn’t. Then he does several million more. Everybody at Cornbury is watching this, or has had the sense to get out of the arena, so we have the odd experience of visiting a deserted toilet block at a crowded festival. Turns out that taking an echoey piss in an empty trailer housing 22 well used urinals is just like watching a David Gray gig.

Park Live

2010-07-29T17:24:00.014+01:00

Say you were going to Pizza Express or something. I know you have more class than that, but just imagine. Say you went over the corner to look at their little touchscreen tills they create your bill on. At that point you'd notice how crappy the graphics on the tills are, how lame the marble effect on the individual "buttons" is and how unconvincing and unecessary the depth shadows are. You'd notice it looks like something from an Amiga game, like Bloodbowl. Why the hell do these till software designers make thier product look like the team selection screen from Kick Off 2? Why why why?

Some of this review featured in Nightshift recently, but a lot of it is "previously unreleased".

Cornbury, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10

SATURDAY

The shelves of WH Smith reveal that true confessions are big business nowadays, so here’s our addition to this literary slagpile: we’ve never liked the look of Cornbury. Probably this is because its mixture of safe tunefulness and fading stars make it look as though it was booked by the customers at the Waitrose deli counter after ten minutes looking at The Sunday Express Magazine and a copy of Q from 1991. But, although it’s easy to be dismissive of folding chairs, Pimms and falafel wraps, we’ve decided we actually prefer these to unpalatable energy drinks, bad hash and vomiting poi jugglers as our festival accoutrements. Yes, we admit it, we like Cornbury very much, and if the lineup isn’t our idea of musical nirvana, the best acts truly shine in a relaxed, well organised setting with excellent sound engineering on every stage.

What’s bad about Cornbury (aside from David Gray)? Apart from being kept awake till half past give a shit on Saturday morning by drunken revellers, which we thought Poshstock might be immune to, the towering ineptitude of the bar staff drives us to enforced sobriety: we’re sadly unsurprised that there are sixteen Carlsberg pumps to one tapped barrel of ale, but we’re more shocked that someone’s designed a bar where there’s not enough room for the legion of easily confused employees to pass when one of them is pouring a pint. Our other black mark is the assumption that everybody onsite wants to watch the main stage. There are long periods when there’s nothing on except the big acts, while at other times we’re torn between two enticing prospects happening simultaneously on the smaller stages. As if to reflect this the official programme not only offers no information about performers lower down the bill on the two central stages, but doesn’t even give any listings for the Riverside stage: essentially, we spent three quid on a little book to tell us who The Feeling are, when it’s the one fucking thing we’re trying to forget.

So, our weekend starts with pot luck, as we stumble across Dave Oates (who looks like a Riverside organisor, but is apparently not) introducing Volcanic Dash, who turn out to be pretty decent at playing Dad’s day off R ‘n’ B, spiced by good sax and a soulful female vocal. They end with a rattle through “Honky Tonk Women”, and seeing the singer shout “one more time” a bar before the song ends is rather heartwarming in a festival that can get too slick at times.

Taylor Dayne, an American minor popstrel in the late 80s, apparently chose her stage name because she thought it sounded British. Presumably Tiffany Page was one of the discarded options. She plays harmlessly perky pop, a little like P!nk without the brattish trailerpark attitude, and a little like Rachel Stevens without the dance routines, synths and glossy production. Her’s is a well-filleted version of guitar pop, a sort of musical chicken nugget – a guilty pleasure on occasion, but no replacement for the real thing.

Some festivalgoers don’t turn up to Cornbury until the big names start coming out, whilst others arrive for the day, but only shift from their little wagon circle in front of the main stage for toilet visits or emergency rosé replenishment. It means that some obscure acts get unfairly ignored, and there are fewer people evident at the start of an excellent set by Les Clochards than there were last time they played The Wheatsheaf. It doesn’t faze them any, and they deliver their trademark brand of lush Gallic cafe indie with the same stately grace as usual, a gorgeous “Démodé” being the highlight. Light airy music, but their background in vintage punk and indie bands gives the music a classically French stubborn defiance (in the sense of getting whipped on absinthe and inventing new art forms, not overpricing croques madames to tourists and bombing Greenpeace). Sad that their subtler moments lose out in a sound war with the nearby fun fair rides; “Criez si vous voulez aller plus vite!”

We catch the end of The New Forbidden who play a bluesy approachable rock that’s essentially Dr. Feel-Passable-Mustn’t-Grumble-Bit-Of-Gyp-From-The-Old-Back-And-The-Waterworks-Aren’t-What-They-Were-But-Worse-Things-Happen-At-Sea, and then it’s back to Riverside for Dead Jerichos, whom we love because they play every single gig as if it’s the last Friday night before the Pandorica opens. Rock energy so improbably infectious that it isn’t even punctured when a snare drum breaks and there’s a brief gap whilst another is located. Their music isn’t a startlingly original confection, being a rough mix of Jam basslines, The Edge’s guitar, Jimmy Pursey vocals and Buzzcocks drums, but each short invigorating shot of espresso pop is a joy to witness. Later, we couldn’t resist breaking the itinerary for a song and a half from Borderville, a band with the same passion and intensity as Dead Jerichos, but who have filtered it through Broadway excess rather than laddish euphoria.

A smidgen of the Jericho energy wouldn’t go amiss in Joshua Radin’s rootsy set. Like a Happy Shopper muesli bar, you feel as if it ought to be good for you to experience, but turns out to be dry and tasteless.

“Have you got soul, Cornbury?” shouts the MC. Well, look at us, and what do you think? A pasty, paunchy heartland morass whose idea of a sex machine is probably sitting on the lawnmower whilst it idles and who most likely probably phone Neighbourhood Watch if Bootsy Collins ever strolled down the street. So, Staxs is possibly the ideal act, a busman’s holiday affair wherein seasoned session players kick back with a bit of a soul revue. That’s soul as lingua franca for a good time night out rather than a narrative urban folk music, and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” has had all the melancholy and impotent anger squeezed out along the way. But they do make great music all the same, with a powerful vocal, and some fantastic brass players, who alternate between molten solos and horn stabs that punch like a rivet gun. This goes on for forty lovely minutes, until Kiki Dee comes on. She’s still in good voice but her songs are simply drab by comparison.

Relaxing with some homemade mint lemonade – you don’t get that at The Cellar – we catch Buddy Guy and his alligator blues; it hasn’t evolved since forever, but it has a deadly bite. The band is good, and play a solid big stage blues set, but when Buddy steps up the others just fade into the background, which is impressive as he’s about 800. His guitar sound is amazing, each acid-etched note drawing a line back to BB King, sideways to Albert Collins and forward to Jimi Hendrix. He plays “Hoochie Coochie Man” with such a perfect mix of soul baring emotion and carny roustabout repartee that we feel as if we’d never heard the song before, and if that ain’t a definition of raw innate talent, we don’t know what is.

We were hoping to get the same experience from Dr John, and at first it was promising: he has a battered organ and a baby grand, each topped with a human skull; he ambles onstage with the confident air of a mafia don who knows he owns us all; he wears a superbly sharp voodoo suit and looks like a child’s drawing of Orson Welles disguised as Bryan Ferry; he can sit at a keyboard better than most people can play it; he drawls raps drenched in the cartoon skullduggery that was so influential on Tom Waits. But for the first half of the set the music doesn’t really gel, and simply sounds like a competent bar band, an effect possibly not helped by the fact that an insufficiently audible trombone took the place of a stomping horn section. Things are just getting going when the band slips into a dirty funk chug and it’s suddenly all over. The conclusion is that whilst Buddy is happy with the elder statesman’s showcase on a festival stage, Dr John probably still only gets on top of his awesome game with a few hours in a dark sweaty room, not sixty polite minutes in the Cotswolds sun.

Squeeze, on the other hand, are so happy to trot their greatest hits out to the punters they probably have wristband blisters. Before the first track is even out they’re pointing the mike at the audience for a singalong, and, in fairness, a large percentage of the crowd are eager to take them up on the offer. All around us tipsy parents are reliving their 5th form disco whilst their kids cause havoc with bubble machines, and Squeeze get a grand reception, which is fully deserved. As with Crowded House, also on the heritage trail, it’s amazing that Glenn Tillbrook’s voice hasn’t aged at all, and still has the tuneful chumminess of their old hits. And what hits they are. Squeeze have got so many top notch pop songs in their arsenal you forget how great they are. Admittedly, we’re not sure this competent set adds anything to the tracks, but it’s never a bad time to hear them again.

Candi Staton knows her audience too, and you can’t blame her for giving them what they want. Impressively, her rich voice is just as strong as it was when we saw her a decade ago, and her set is a super-slick ball of fun, with a cantering romp through “Suspicious Minds” standing out, but most of the audience don’t get to their feet until “Young Hearts Run Free”, so she cleverly makes it last about fifteen minutes. With her sparkling dress and ballsy soul delivery Staton is a bit like an alternate universe Tina Turner who hadn’t erased all her character in post-production somewhere in the early 80s. Good solid entertainment.

Shrub Be Good To Me

2010-07-27T17:28:00.003+01:00

I was told last night that most of the old OHMs are online, so you never know I may find an old review that slipped through the cracks. Imagine the joy. Sadly, the one I wrote where Alastair Tervit wrote a paragraph in the middle whilst I was in the loo was never used, and resides on a discarded hard drive. It's crazy what you could have had.

SEABUCKTHORN – A MANTRA PULLED APART

Seabuckthorn looks a bit like one of those posh old English names that have had all their syllables blanched out of them over the years, like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondely. You can imagine an old monocled gent filling in the hotel reception book, wheezing, “It’s pronounced Seddon”. However, it turns out to be a sort of shrub, and this seems fitting because, although your actual seabuckthorn is found in Europe and Asia, this CD brings up images of empty American mesas, dusty scrub and hazy sundowns.

This is less a collection of compositions more a series of flourishes and echoes. There are plenty of Spanish guitar trills, but they arrive and drift away like farmsteads on the horizon on a Midwest train ride, instead of sitting in dramatic flamenco centre stage. If The Omega Man were remade on the set of The Good, The Bad & the Ugly this record could be the soundtrack, in which empty Western saloons reverberate to the tread of gunslinging ghosts, and louvre doors hang by one hinge. All of which means it’s a gorgeous listen, and Seabuckthorn (AKA Andy Cartwright) has created the record with precisely the right balance between the eerily spacious and the structured, the ambient and the encapsulating.

Which means that picking favourite tracks is academic, your best bet is to let the record wash over you whilst staring out of the window into the evening. (No, scrub that, we just tried it, and saw a hatchback, a courier’s van and a whippet, so it probably depends on where you live). Still, we like the plucked strings on “Illumination” that are swirling and mysterious like a Nazca earthwork, and “Strange Dreams In The Wilderness Again” in which stalking wolves of static warily eye guitars plucked on the edge of oblivion. Elsewhere we get little flavours of Slint, Fushitsusha, Seefeel and locals Hretha, one of whom guests on the CD.

Perhaps “Abyss Eyes” could be excised, but there isn’t a moment from this record that is a let down, and there are some gorgeous fragments of song hidden in the bleak expanses of the album. Our choicest moment is on “Painted Wolf Howl”, where a forcefully plucked guitar with a vast delay is suddenly shadowed by a glockenspiel to play a lopsided motif that sounds like a mix between “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the theme from Crossroads. It’s a sparse and perhaps forbidding album, maybe, but certainly not an empty or ill thought out one.

Heart Of Gloss

2010-07-24T09:05:00.002+01:00

No time to chat, crit. kittens, I have to leave for Truck in 20 minutes.

THE GRACEFUL SLICKS – Demo

The Graceful Slicks amused a few people recently by asking Nightshift’s online community for an experienced tambourine player. You had to assume this was either a collective of such intricate musical complexity they had crafted challenging parts for hand percussion, or a bunch of skunked monkeys who had no idea. In truth, the demo is neither of these, it’s not the work of musicians striking out for new and adventurous sonic territories, but it does show a band with a strong vision, and a laudable control of their elementary resources.

The opener ushers us in quietly at a nice unhurried lope, all strummed guitar, shrugged drums and submerged vocals. The track has an untroubled, smiling demeanour and immediately brings to mind slackerdelic ne’er-do-wells The Brian Jonestown Massacre, without the paranoia or internecine warfare. It’s a simple but attractive ditty that could have been busked from the back of a VW van by a teenaged Evan Dando. It goes on for weeks, but never gets boring.

Track two is arguably even simpler and less dramatic, a sing-song seesaw of a tune that brings to mind Syd Barrett’s nursery rhyme efforts, such as “Terrapin”. Aside from a very slow build at the start, and an unnecessary guitar solo at the end, the song does nothing. It’s not hypnotic in a trance or kraut fashion, mind, just sort of static. Cryogenic rock, maybe. The lyrics are sheer guff, but are luckily barely audible, so we can hope fervently that the song doesn’t actually mostly consist of “water’s always cold”. The eerie lead guitar line ambles back and forth across the whole song like the harmonica in Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West soundtrack, much beloved of Fields Of The Nephilim and, of course, The Orb.

The last track (no titles provided – they’d probably rather name their tracks after different joss stick aromas) is the slowest yet, a Spiritualized indie hymnal effort that dribbles along as slowly as stewed prunes strained through a colander. Bafflingly, it’s very dull, where the other two tracks were immersive and endearing, even though they didn’t appear to do anything too different. Suddenly a pleasing miasma becomes a dreary pall.

We can’t solve the mystery, but it does show that The Graceful Slicks – do we adore or abhor that ridiculous pun? – are a band doesn’t quite have control of its palette yet, which is what you’d expect from a first, budget demo (and one without a dedicated tambourine operative at that), and yet they clearly have a strong idea of where they want to go, and the evidence suggests it’ll a pleasant place to follow them into. A good start, in short.

Apologies if this review isn’t up to scratch: we’ve tried everywhere to find a pencil sharpening technician to complete the team...

Charlbury Switchblade

2010-07-22T17:18:00.009+01:00

And here's part 2. Nothing much more to say tonight, I'm tired; winning the pub quiz by a record margin was nice, but I shoudln't have had that victory pint. In bed with the prom, I suspect.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 20/6/10

“Please welcome Slantay,” yelps the main stage MC as Sunday kicks off. Well, it’s written Slainte, but pronounced “slawncheh”, meaning “health” or, colloquially, “cheers”; a tough word for an Anglophone, perhaps, but surely if your job basically boiled down to saying the names of bands before they played, you might make the effort to work out what the words sounded like, no? Not as bad as the announcer later on who introduced Redox by telling us they played “one of” his weddings (classy), and yet still laboured under the misapprehension they were called Reedox.

After a slightly scratchy opening Slainte, who are a Gaelic folk act (get away), build to a great head of steam, leavening the predicted foot tapping reels with “La Partida”, a luminescent harp showcase.

Apparently, gents think of the Alphabet Backwards if they’re trying to stave off, shall we say, a particular moment of intimacy. Funny, then, that the band is a huge explosion of pure energetic release. The beauty of the band is that they balance their Sunny Delight exuberance with some excellent song writing, not to mention the fantastically ornate and playful synth lines, that are like being wined and dined by a sexually predatory Ms PacMan. My God, Sunday has started well.

And it doesn’t stop there. Sonny Black is a white haired chap playing acoustic blues, and although we sometimes feel we’ve heard enough white haired chaps playing acoustic blues in provincial music events to last us until the day the lost chord is unearthed, Black really is worth a listen. Not only does he have some effortless bottleneck technique and a great little bucolic melody in the lovely “North Of The Border”, but he can also celebrate Mississippi John Hurt’s “easy-kickin’ fingerpickin’” in an English accent without sounding like a dick. There’s a quiet grace about him and his music, and he should have been higher up the bill with a few more train loads of listeners to greet him.

Lee Christian’s Prohibition Smokers Club are a loose-limbed latin pop jam band, looking like a mushroom ingesting cult pretending to be Kid Creole & The Coconuts. The horns are punchy, and the set is pitched as a little interlude of fun, but still we felt it didn’t quite come together, and a cover of The Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” drove us to the bar. Everybody else in the whole of Charlbury seemed to love it, though, so what do we know?

“Think Maroon 5 meets Beverley Knight combined creatively with early Red Hot Chili Peppers,” says the programme’s write up of Alyse In Wonderband. Jesus, if we had thoughts like that we’d turn ourselves in to the nearest police station for the good of the nation. Actually, they’re not bad at all, a youngish band who have a natural control of their pop-funk, and perform it with plenty of vim, Alyse Kimsey’s voice working well above fluent keys. “Creep” in particular (no, not that one) has a groove that even cuts through our professional cynicism.

As is the case every year, billypure make like The Levellers to cheer up the revellers, and if it isn’t a revolutionary leap from their previous sets, they do a good job, as ever, and the James cover is an interesting arrangement. The violin sounds horribly scratchy though – get a new pickup!

The Shakellers make a big-boned chirpy rock racket, something like The Bluetones pepped up on MSG and barndance cider, but The Black Hats do the perky guitar bit far better, their new wave ditties as excitable as a friendly puppy – and, oh look, there’s Lee Christina on guest vocals, with some of that sneering chutzpah we missed from the PSC set. However, it’s Von Braun that really win us over, making a good grungy early Muhhoney noise with drums, two guitars and a frankly buggered mike lead. At times the songs lift off into surreally wired mantras approaching The Pixies at their effervescent best. A great discovery.

You have to wonder how some of the acts find themselves on the Riverside bill, and what they think of it when they get there. Take Dead Like Harry, who have travelled all the way from Sheffield and who have recently toured with Scouting For Girls, do they think “finally, back to the roots”, or “disembowel the agent” when they roll up onto Mill Field? Not to mention all the stall holders selling dayglo dope leaf hoodies and all that crud, who look as though they make about three sales all weekend, do they feel swizzed? Well, fuck ‘em, the Riverside crowd is too sensible for that rubbish – the wacky hats are left to wilt in the sun whilst the home made cakes stall does a justifiably roaring trade.

Dead Like Harry are, of course, awful, but they don’t enrage us as much as we expected, even though they sound like Keane played by Hothouse Flowers. In fact, they come across as a likable bunch, and their piano-flecked pop is easy to tune out whilst finishing the crossword.

Phyal have been warmly welcomed back for a few reunion gigs, and Riverside is exactly the sort of place their approachable rock romps make sense. “Crude” doesn’t quite hit the spot, but after some drumkit surgery and a few swigs of lemon squash – oh, Kevin Eldon, if only you’d been there – “Daisy” flies out of the traps, setting the clattering tone for the next thirty minutes. A superb set but, it must be said, after three reunion gigs Phyal need to stop with the nostalgia and make some new recordings, or shut up!

Nah, only joking, they’re always good value, as are The Mighty Redox. They are a truly under-rated band outside of the furry fraternity in which they move. Nick Clack and Graham Barlow, aside from looking like shiftless dropouts from some Restart scheme for unemployed wizards, are an outstanding rhythm section, but they certainly know their place, leaving the lion’s share of the stage to Phil Freizinger’s fuzzy guitar and the frankly loopy Sue Smith’s acid-sauteed vocal wailing. Set highlight “Eternity” sounds like Gong freaking out in a banshee wife swapping party, until the world is fed through Freizinger’s giant phase pedal, which probably has its own generator backstage.

The weekend finished with The Quiet Men, who aren’t the band aging scenesters will remember, but an Irish folk rock band, with a big line in Pogues songs. Well, that’s OK, we all like The Pogues, right? Crowdpleasing, we suppose, but a disappointingly unadventurous end to the weekend. But then again, the beauty of Riverside is that it can entertain old West Oxfordshire boozers, sun-drenched children, well-heeled salmon sandwich picnickers as well as miserable musical zealots like ourselves. And, the real miracle is not that they’ve managed to put on a festival for free that aims to please so many people, but that they actually succeed. We’ll definitely be back for more next year.

Slantay.

Riverside 2010 Saturday Pt 2

2010-07-20T18:23:00.002+01:00

Huck & The Handsome Fee are very good, if a little one-paced, and Tamara Parsons-Baker vocals really shine in this unabashed ‘50s throwback. The Roundheels’ trad rocking is less intense, a bit of a light, fluffy country meringue, but is pleasant enough. The Delta Frequency make out that they’re all about the aggressive, subversive rock, but what we hear is like The Foo Fighters playing over a tinny old Front 242 LP. Ho hum.

Undersmile amuse us, not least because their name sounds like coy slang for a fanny. They supply a thick, dense grunge sound that just trudges on slowly forever, like a man ploughing treacle. The twin vocals detract from the Babes In Toyland effect a little, sounding like two girls who don’t want to eat their sprouts, but that aside they’re a fun new band.

Far more fun than Charlie Coombes & The New Breed, despite the fact they’re several squillion times more experienced. Actually, he’s not that bad, and has a very smooth voice, like a 70s sit com vicar having a crack at Nik Heyward, but the songs just aren’t there. He only needs one great Crowded House style pop hit and we’d love him, but for now we’re bored enough to consider going for a quick game of chess with the guy from the Mexican food stand.

With flagging energy levels, Riverside keep back three excellent acts to round off the day. The Family Machine still have the chirpiest pop songs in Oxford concealing sharpest barbs, but they feel distant on the big stage. Beard Of Zeuss make a sort of bang bang bang noise for a while and it sounds bloody great; by the end we’re not only unsure whether it is wrong to spell Zeus with two esses, but we’re wondering whether a few more might not go amiss.

Borderville synthesise the twin poles of the sometimes mystifying Riverside booking policy. They play “proper” music, with choruses and schoolroom keyboard technique and a respect for rock classics, yet they also throw it together with such calculatedly wild abandon and desperate drama that the gig becomes almost aggressively experimental. They start with a string quartet, which is over-amped and out of tune, but sets the tone of faded glamour from which the set springs in all its camp glory. This is what Glee would be like if Roxy Music sat on Mount Olympus and Pete Townshend carried amps down Mount Sinai. Improbably excellent music.

Riverside Babylon

2010-07-20T18:16:00.006+01:00

The giant monkey fun of Truck is coming this weekend, and I shall be there with a biro, some ripped notepaper and a rucksack filled with cheap bitter. To get you in the festival mood, today and Friday I'll post my review of the smaller, freer and, let's be honest, not really as good but bloody great fun all the same, Riverside festival. Lots of people thought this review was too harsh, because the event was free, but I - naturally - disagree. What's the value of giving a band a good review at a free event and a stinker a week later when the gig costs a fiver? And is there a sliding scale in the middle? "£3.50? Hmmm, let's pretend the bass was in time, even though we'll admit the guitar was out of tune". Poppy, and indeed, cock.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 19-20/6/10

A work colleague has a mug reading “A bad day fishing beats a good day working”. Hardly Kierkegaard, but bear it in mind when reading this review: although we saw very few acts that really inspired us (on Saturday at least), we’d rather spend a weekend watching disappointing music at Riverside than a night with decent bands at The Academy. It’s something to do with the delightful landscape, the excellent Marsh Gibbon ales, the friendly atmosphere and the knowledge that some people have gone to a lot of effort to create a weekend out for us all, and not asked for a penny.

Deer Chicago are a decent opener to the festival, constructing large scale edifices of ever-so-slightly angular rock with a sturdy, emotional voice spread over the top. All very Fell City Girl, though Jonny Payne’s voice doesn’t have the natural power of Phil McMinn’s. The odd Jam interlude works surprisingly well.

At first Alan Fraser & The Resignation Orchestra offer flat jazz with Tom Waits Gruffalo growling from festival organisor Dave Oates. Diverting, but not much else. However, after a minute or two they start to warm up, and Fraser’s soprano sax solos become more interesting and contrast with some excellent honks and bubbles from Tony Bevan’s bass baritone, which is roughly the size of a hatchback.

Music For Pleasure entertain us as ever. Their mixture of spicy mid-reign R.E.M. melody and pre-leyline Julian Cope energy is always fun, even if it lacks the character of their day job bands (Harry Angel and The Unbelievable Truth). It’s like many of long term local trier Mark Cobb’s bands, but with bigger balls.

The Black Dog Emporium sadly sound nothing like techno trailblazers The Black Dog, nor much like Black Sabbath, despite the programme’s allegations. Instead they play a tedious brand of lightly funky 70s rock. The word “Reef” came to mind, and not least because it felt as though we were grounded inextricably in musical shallows. The drummer made things mildly interesting with some carbonated fills, but the vocals were honked out as if by a bingo caller trying to communicate across a Swiss valley.

More foghorn vocal subtlety from Crackerdummy. They’re a capable post-grunge trio who remind us of average Irish act Mundy. They playing is good, and it’s all well put together, but only in the way a small brick wall is. A small wall where you were hoping to find a bouncy castle and bourbon jacuzzi.

Remember David Oates’ functional blues growling? It starts to feel like a halcyon era once Stuart Turner starts his rubbish gravelly groaning. It sounds as though he’s trying to scare an errant toddler, not entertain adults. Pity, as The Flat Earth Society are a good band, spinning a nice sticky rockabilly web, and capable of a John Lee Hooker style boogie chug. We live in a frustrating world in which most post-rock instrumental bands sound half finished, but where most blues bands are ruined by duff singers.

Last year Diplomat’s Coffee kept us awake for the weekend. Sadly, this year we’re forced to buy our brew from a drunk man selling Mexican food, who was frankly fortunate not to have burnt his fingers off or inadvertently stabbed himself with a potato wedge at any point over the weekend. On one visit he mumbled something impenetrable about Mary Whitehouse and pronounced “hot chocolate” with one syllable, and at the next he blessed our coffee, even though we doubt he’s taken holy orders.

If Music For Pleasure hark back to R.E.M.’s Green, David Celia immediately reminds us of Around The Sun. Wrong choice, Dave. But we give him a chance and although the music is a little grown up for us, he has some a warm voice with decent Neil Young flourishes and some nice delicate keyboard parts, so we’ll give him the thumbs up.

4AD A1 CD

2010-07-17T21:50:00.003+01:00

Oh dear. I've listened to too much music today, and eaten too many cruisps and Haribos, so I've gone a bit funny. Still, I'm druinking mint tea and spinning some Szymanowski in an attempt to calm my jangly mind.

Anwyay, chilli con carne, that's a funny one, eh? It means "chilli with meat", I'd imagine, yet most chilli has meat, and in my experiecne what it really means is "chilli with kidney beans". Babelfish tells me this would be chilli con las habas de riñón, but I suspect that's not idiomatic. Ho hum.

STORNOWAY – BEACHCOMBER’S WINDOWSILL (4AD)

Always, the guilt comes. Nibbling the conscience, a small internal voice insidiously queries our sense of proportion: are the local acts we love fully deserving of praise, or is our shelf lined with rose tinted CD cases? In short, do we hope for greatness so hard, we begin to imagine it?

Well, we’ve listened to this new Stornoway LP repeatedly, and although we want them to succeed because they’re local heroes and delightful boys to boot, the fact is that this record is astonishing, doubtlessly the most exciting collection of cerebral English joy-pop since The Divine Comedy’s Promenade. Take that, paranoid interior monologue! Most of the songs will be familiar to locals, but the recordings are perfect, beautifully constructed, yet never overegged, making Stornoway superior to Mumford & Sons, the act with whom they’re most often compared. Like some of the best pop, Beachcomber’s Windowsill is epic and intimate simultaneously.

And with that the review can only become a list of favourite moments. The melancholic life story of “Fuel Up”; the lush porch song ambience of “We Are The Battery Human”, like Charlie Poole rewritten by The Daintees; the opening of “On The Rocks”, in which Simon & Garfunkel get lost in a strawberry mist before being lifted away on God’s own cymbals; “Long-Distance Lullaby”’s ultra-clean horn section that make us think of Tanita Tikaram for no reason we can fathom.

This is a world class collection of songs deliciously presented. Of course there are tiny imperfections. Despite the high esteem in which it’s held, we’ve never really been excited by “The End Of The Movie”, at least until the wistful conclusion. Also, the lyrics to “The Coldharbour Road” are somewhat clunky – can you really defend the schoolboy clumsiness of “I am a seabird, you are the Arctic Ocean”? Oh, and we’re not convinced you can really have an exclamation mark after an ellipsis, which counts against “Here Comes The Blackout...!”. Can you tell we’re grasping at straws here? We bloody love this record, and to balance these minor peccadilloes we have wonderfully subtle touches in the arrangements, especially the mournful pier end organ on “Fuel Up” or “Zorbing”’s Red Army Choir backing vocals.

The tagline on Stornoway’s Myspace has been “A living breathing Mark Twain novel” for quite some time, but we don’t hear the blustery, satirical, knockabout carnival of Samuel Clemens on this album, we prefer to think of the band as a hushed yet hopeful British poem, the introspective halfsmile of Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop”, perhaps. The record ends with a tale of waking up someone just for a tipsily emotional phone call, and the chance to say “Goodnight, soulmate”. Companionship, honesty, pop music: Stornoway certainly know what the good things in life are.

Lavitate

2010-07-14T17:14:00.004+01:00

Hmm, I fear I may have over sold the Cowley Lavatory Story, so please bear in mind that after you've read this, there's a really dumb pun I thought of at the end. No peeking ahead, now.

Recently I had one of those experiences that everybody has, no matter how urbane and sophisticated they feel they are. My bowels rebelled, and half way through a thirty minute walk, I realised strange things were afoot. It's a terrible feeling, packing a turtle's head when you know you have another ten minutes of walking until you reach your destination, all you can do is hope you've got the stamina. Sadly, my destination was a bus stop, at which I'd catch a bus for a 15 minute or so journey. So, I reached my port, and had there been a bus arriving I would have got on. I would probably have survived. But there was no bus, and the little electronic screen that looks like the one that provided the football scores on Saturday afternoons in the 80s claimed it would be eight minutes befoere the next one came. Eight minutes! Normally I wait about two. Oh my God, God, God, what to do. Right, I can't wait.

So, I hobbled a little further down the road and used a public toilet, adjacent to Manzil Way, in Oxford. I can't tell you how many hundreds, nay thousands of times I've walked past this little building without really paying it any mind, but stepping into it was an eye opener. Here was a building that clearly missed a meeting, a few square feet that must have mislaid the memo about the whole Dreaming Spires thing.

The urinal was aromatic, but I had no time to pay it any mind. I bundled into a cubicle and slammed the huge institution green reinforced door and slid home the cast iron bolt behind it. Hang on a mo, what? Am I in prison? Honestly, this huge bolt was like something from a nineteenth century remand house, not a convenience in a celebrated town in 2o1o. The cubicle walls didn't reach the ceiling, there was about a foot left for ventiliation, which was filled with serious looking bars.

The toilet itself was something I've never seen the like of. There was nothing so elegant as a separate cistern, and no sniff of anything as decadent as porcelain. What I got was a huge, aluminium block of a thing with no seat; a big old indominable, undamagable hunk of metal with a hole in it, in other words. There was, of course, no paper, but luckily I had some random packet of tissues in my bag. There was, however, more unpainted metal in the form of a box in which to put your used needles or, apparently, safety pins. How do you inject heroin with a safety pin, anyway? Do you just prick a vein and sort of drop the brown stuff over the tiny hole, like someone crumbling an Oxo cube into a pipette?

After the unpleasant business was done (and I don't recall ever having hovered above a toilet bowl like a prim dowager in a 50s theatre, but I did this time), I pressed the flush. "Flush" is right, the small unmarked metal button was set into the top of the giant metal lav-chunk, and I didn't see it for a few seconds. Presumably people would steal an actual flush and sell it for safety pin money. It was then that I realised that the toilet felt like something from an interstellar shuttle. Some sort of space jail for rogue asteroid miners, perhaps.

But, once the pressing issues of the afternoon had been dispensed with, I had a look at the grafitti. It was mostly pencil sketches of dark skinned lads getting intimate with one another, along with some times and dates one might meet the artist (not the day on which I was there, I'm happy to report). I suddenly realised how very long it had been since I had seen pictures like this; I think I came across some in public loos in my youth, but there was something improbably reassuring about them; yeah, of course there are any number of big willies and "call to suck me off" messages scrawled on pub bogs in Oxford, but nothing like this. There was almost a sort of melancholy about the whole thing. It was like coming across a traditional wheelwright, or one of those sweet shops with racks of old fashioned confectionary to be weighed into quarters for boys in school caps. It fucking stank, though, so I didn't linger to admire .

Guess whether there was any soap.

And that's the Cowley Lavatory Story; now here's a pun.

I just went to the bookshop for a beginner's guide to Japanese culture. It's called What Part Of Noh Don't You Understand?

BEAR IN THE AIR – BIPOLAR EP (demo)

Well, this is a pleasant surprise.

We’ve seen Bear In The Air live twice over the past few years, and been left resolutely uninspired both times, but this recording is a pretty enjoyable experience. “Put On Your Travelling Shoes” opens with tastefully reverby keyboard tinkles that aren’t a million miles away from something on the American Beauty soundtrack. A few seconds later the band comes in with a hazy fuzzy version of 60s rock recreated in the guise of 90s indie, and a frantically catchy, breathy vocal line about “drinking wine straight from the bottle” hooks its claws deep into that odd nodule of the brain that exists solely to hang onto fragments of pop melody and random lines from ancient adverts (“Clifford is quite the bon viveur”). Whilst the medulla hauntologica is being entranced, the conscious part of our mind is coming to a conclusion: that Stefan Archer’s keyboards get flattened and distorted through small PAs, and that Kane Chamberlain’s vocals can be charmingly tuneful, even though they’re clearly too weak to cut it on a noisy stage. There are definitely some very strong elements to this band that we’d entirely missed in concert.

“Unnatural” reinforces the feeling that this is a studio band – no shame in that – by washing us down with a tinny High Street shoegaze sound that might not excite the purists, but again tickles the ears of anyone with an interest in well made pop music. In fact, it reminds us an awful lot of “Dreams” by The Cranberries, and it might come as a shock to anyone who’s only come across the ugly punchdrunk politicising of “Zombie” that they were a decent band on their first album. Cloyingly sugary perhaps, but these two tracks are worth a listen.

“Have A Happy Life” is slightly less successful, but it’s still built around a jaunty little melody that takes us by the hand for a quick dance down a petal-strewn path; trouble is Archer keeps trying to trip us up into a fetid pool of schmaltzy mid-80s sax along the hourney. Get back on the keyboards, man! Something about the clean rock ‘n’ roll rhythms remind us of Aztec Camera just after they’d ceased to matter. It’s a decent enough song, but doesn’t really hit the heights.

There are some lovely icy little drum machine interjections on “Skywriting”, but for the most part it’s smothered beneath a thick blanket of pseudo-strings. The lyrics talk about being “underneath a landslide/ Swimming in the riptide”, but the music is so safe it’s more the sonic equivalent of sitting quietly on the little train at Blenheim Palace, with members of Keane riding the throttle making sure the journey doesn’t get too exciting.

We look forward to hearing the Bears’ next recording, as this one has honestly blown away our expectations. We hope that they can capitalise on the airy melodicism of the best music here, and leave the nods towards landfill indie behind. We’d like them to leave the sensibly cosy ground behind and start to sound a lot more bi-polar, but for now this is a CD we can fully support.

Bossa No, Ta

2010-07-10T16:36:00.002+01:00

I had to go to work today. On a Saturday, I ask you. Still, time and a half, eh? This, coupled with the fact I have to retype this review - which is the very last from the ancient archives - means I don't have time to tell the Cowley Lavatory Story. Remind me to do it Tuesday.

MOTIV, Bossaphonik, The Cellar 20/1/06

It's something of a truism that most rock bands are better live than on record, and that songs breathe a little more easily in the vibrant atmosphere of a performance than they do in the strict confines of the studio. Oddly, the new breed of hip hop influenced club jazz bands seem to crank out fluent, funky nuggets on record, but onstage they descend into stadium rock bombast and sluggish clumsiness. I'd heard an EP by London-based seven-piece Motiv, a few years ago, and been impressed. Firy horn solos were bounced on elastic basslines whilst jazzy keyboards rumbled in the middle distance and insistent rhythms punched the whole thing along. What was most intriguing about the recording was the way they kept hold of that dancefloor staple, a rich and constant groove, while allowing the saxophonist space to take his solos to far more exciting places than most club jazzers would dare.

Stuff them onstage in The Cellar, however, and this attention to detail goes out the window. They don't play too baldy, but it all feels hollow and unconvincing - they sound less like they're playing together, and more like they happen to be playing near each other. The drummer is frankly excellent, but nobody seems to be overly concerned with playing off his springy rhythms. Listen, in funk the beat has to be exact if you want it to work: the downbeat has got to be a singularity, not a quantum packet.

It's a tragedy that Motiv can't seem to fall in line, as there's so much individual talent on display. The saxophonist still boasts an impressive technical range, from angular Maceo lines to abstract Coltrane squiggles, whilst the trumpet and flugelhorn player has a neatly contrasting melancholic tone, something like Clifford Brown on occasion. But too often the brass are approximating the requirements of the music, sawing when they should be stabbing. Similarly, occasional rapper The Cheshire Cat and a female vocalist are pretty adept on the mike, if slightly too content to shout, "Are you alright, Oxford?" between every tune. As a friend of mine put it, "It's hard to see whatr this band is doing wrong...except the gig".

All in all Motiv seem to be coasting, content to let their musical funky footsoldiers turn into shambling zombies, content to shout "Power to the people!" instead of making any meaningful connection. Yes, the majority of the audience are very appreciative, but stick anything approaching dance music on at midnight on a Friday in a licensed venue and people are guaranteed to go ape. Motiv could still be a very good band, if they could just find a little passion and precision. James Brown once sang "Get up! Get into it! Get involved!". Well, there are worse mantras a band can adopt...

Manny 911

2010-07-08T17:11:00.003+01:00

I hardly ever play computer games, I'm not really best placed to judge this sort of thing, but why spoil a facile review intro? This is from way back in October 05.

Chinese Fingertrap - Grim Fandango

Drifting into Extreme Geek Mode for a moment, Grim Fandango is on of the wittiest computer games ever, right up there with Elite and Zelda:Ocarina Of Time. It concerns Manny Calavera and his noirish trawls through the dark underbelly of the Land of the Dead, discovering layer upon layer of dark intrigue. It's a strained link, I'll admit, but this Grim Fandango isn't dissimilar, as a few listens throws up more than is normally apparent in the staid realm of melodic metal.

In addition to the straight-up sing vs growl clusters that are "Time Gentlemen Please" and "Paint By Numbers", we find a more yearning tone in "If You Knew What Was Good For You" that recalls Day Of Grace and even a cavernouisly abstract hip hop sound on the brief title track (imagine the heavier corners of the Macro Dub Infection compilations or the silty bottom of a Cypress Hill tune). By keeping the tracks - and the cueing times between them - brief, Chinese Fingertrap manage to make the record varied and surprising, without losing any of the punch.

"Shake Your Moneymaker" might have resulted in numerous fines if CFT were James Brown's backing band, but what it lacks in funk action it gains in pure wallop. Only "Everyone's Going To The Party Baby!" fails to ignite, a stumpy teenage plod leaving an unpleasant Kid Rock aftertaste. It may not be the most original music released in Oxford this year, but Grim Fandango is well thought out, well recorded, well performed and should be played well loud,

Sleepy, Hollow

2010-07-06T17:24:00.003+01:00

I recently became the World Handjob Champion. I had to beat off stiff competition.

Sorry.

THE EMPTY VESSELS/ SAMUEL ZASADA/ NUMBERNINE – Moshka, Bully, 9/4/10

Numbernine have been away for a few years, but they still peddle a perky, carbonated britpop that is immensely enjoyable, if slightly hackneyed. In their time away from the stage, they’ve had a slight shuffle and Alex Horwill now plays drums (although it may be him on the somewhat superfluous samples and backing tracks), and he has a natural bounce that suits the songs even if a couple of golden clunkers tell of a lack of rehearsal. The bass is still the best thing about the band, supple and springy yet capable of building some pretty solid rock edifices on occasion. It s only the lead vocals that are mild let down: plenty of pep, but they do tend to shove falsetto in place of melodic invention.

The songs are of a high calibre, even if most of them sound as though they’re being beamed in from 1994. “My New Mantra” tries to stretch the envelope with a proggy Eastern flavour, but ends up feeling dyspeptically like Gene playing Zepellin, and the band are happiest with tracks like “London”, reeking of Camden market and redolent of NME inky fingers gripping pints in The Good Mixer. All in all, it’s good to have Numbernine back, they make a great unpretentious pop noise, and have a couple of cracking tunes, not least “Talk”, a melodic barnstormer that still reminds us happily of The Longpigs at their best, five years since we first heard it.

Samuel Zasada’s first number has fantastic folky intricacy and rectilinear motorik groove mashed together like Pentangle through the square window. Later, gorgeous three-part harmonies wash over a scuzzy tale of saying “’Fuck you’ to The Man”, as if Lou Barlow had started writing for Peter, Paul & Mary. Last time we saw Samuel, his voice knocked us back, but that was pretty much all there was to like; since then he has placed himself in the middle of an excellent trio and thought very intelligently about arrangements, concocting a dense sonic fug that truly suits his rich, gothic voice, but that doesn’t obscure some sprightly melodies. Samuel hasn’t been content to strum a few chords in flyblown open mics, letting his impressive voice do all the work, he’s clearly been honing his music into something a little bit special. The work is paying off.

Speaking of good singers, get an earful of Matt Greenham from The Empty Vessels, who has a cracking pair of lungs and a love of wide-straddling rawk howling that’s only a set of leather kecks and a three figure a day drug habit away from the glory days of MTV. The band is well-drilled, and unrepentantly retrospective, happy in the warm, yet shallow, pools of classic rock. This is refreshingly honest, and feels like coming back to homegrown veg after too long with the polished, perfectly shaped carrots in Tesco’s: you know, tasty and caked in mud and, quite possibly, shaped like a willy.

And that’s all great of course, but only for about fifteen minutes. By twenty not even a kickass flailing limb-o-matic drummer can stop the attention wandering (we realised, from staring vacuously at the guitarist’s T shirt, that the Os in The Doors’ logo look a lot like coffee beans, for example). An interesting noise like a rat gnawing a modem turned out to be a faulty pedal, and we began to realise, as another identical song started chugging along, that old school was rapidly becoming old hat. All of which feels pretty hard on The Empty Vessels, who are clearly having a blast and probably don’t want to change the musical world any, but this didn’t alter the fact that we weren’t really young enough, drunk enough, or from Wantage enough to fully enjoy these threadbare rock archaisms. This is a very good band, but one that doesn’t stand up to criticism very well; if you’re enjoying the music, it’s probably not because you’re thinking about it in any great detail, or thinking about anything whatsoever except the advisability of a ninth pint or whether you’ve got a chance with the one over there with the black jeans.

As their forebears Reef might have asked mid-song, “Alright now?”. Yes, we are alright, thanks. Alright, but not, you know, ecstatic.

May To Play

2010-07-02T16:24:00.015+01:00

Three sad facts. 1) KK don't run Bank Holiday weekenders any longer, or any big events for that matter 2) The X has been a curry house for a couple of years now - a tasty one, mind 3) Somehow I just don't have the time to watch snooker, or indeed any sport, anymore. I don't like most sport, as it happens, but don't let that stop a good bit of self-pity.

MAYDAY FESTIVAL, The X, 1/5/05

Jump off a bloody bridge if you want to, but for me the May Bank Holiday has two great traditions: one is the snooker final, and the other is the Kakofanney weekender. I found myself there for the whole of Sunday.

Glenda & Sam kick things off. She is better known as the hair-swinging leader of metallers Phyal and he is the drummer from oddball punks Fork, so it's unexpected to see them play some quiet folk songs, with plenty of bodhran and flute. Diverting, if lightweight.

Can you lot really not think of names for your acts? Mauro & David turns out to be Mauro and David from Inflatable Buddha (well, be honest, whcih Mauro did you think it would be?), playing hurdy-gurdy and percussion respectively. Some of you will already know that Mauro can make his odd screechy instrument song, and David turns out to be a dab hand (pardon the pun) as an accompanist, which almost excuses the fact that he's wearing some mangy old purple curtains.

I find the winning simplicity fo Jeremy Hughes' playing quite delightful, especially on a sunny day. However, if you find the idea of Gandalf's beard double wibbling out an instrumental called "Rainbow" a turn off, steer well clear.

Laima Bite proves once again that she has one of the best vocal deliveries in Oxford, with a relaxed set. If I don't think she's as outstanding a talent as some local writers, it's less a criticism of her, and more a celebration of our local acoustic musicians.

Frei Zinger (flute) & Chris Hills (tabla) are both superb musicians, but their set sadly made no impression on me whatsoever. Unlike the first beer of the day.

Trip hop without the hip hop? It's odd, but it's Stem. Emma's voice, backed by acoustic guitar, is wonderfully weary and emotive, recalling Portishead or early Lamb, but the percussion is a clunky beast and keeps the set from taking off. Pity.

Clearly, getting the fun-loving but less than vocally dextrous landlady of the pub to sing some cheesy show tunes should be an embarassment, but luckily Condom (yes, that's really the band's name) have such an unpretentious vivacity that it's almost impossible to dislike them; hardly a highlight, but a bit of Bank Holiday larking about never hurt anybody.

With their relaxed AOR songwriting and West Coast sax solos, Veda Park will never be one to make the heart beat faster. Still, they're such natural ensemble players and the whole show is so incredibly tight you have to go with them. Especially after another beer.

Trip hop without the - hang on, I've done that one. But, for different reasons, Drift deserve the description as much as Stem. The vocals have a similar torch song yearning to them, but whilst the drum machine and bass are laying down dubby grooves, the guitarist is on an entirely unrelated psychedelic mission. Every time the neat arrangements make some sonic space, it's filled with an FX-laden guitar part whcih defeats the point somewhat. The again, the ring modulation solo is scorching so maybe...

The night really starts with the arrival of Harry Angel in all their goth-punk glory. Taut, angular Bauhaus style rackets led by a great tall chap leaning over the mike like the speed freak son of the Twin Peaks giant: time for a celebratory beer.

A keening and forceful North African vocal suddenly fills the pub, covered in reverb and synth pads. It sounds pretty powerful, but when the drum and bass kicks in great things start to happen. That's live drums played with brushes and a double bass, by the way, but they still have the punch of a Moving Shadow classic. We've just witnesses the debut gig by Tunsi. I hope we witness many more.

I've seen The Epstein many times. I saw them at The Zodiac on Friday. Yet here I am again front and centre. That's all you need to know. Still the best of the (inexplicably large number of) country bands in Oxford.

There's alwasy a sneaking suspicion that I shouldn't like a sprawling ska punk band that calls itself The Druqsquad, singing songs about washing machines and fat fish. but when they play, I forget all that and just enjoy the volume, the exuberance and the extremely sily keyboard noises. A fitting end.

So, it was fun. So, it was Bank Holiday Sunday. So, I may have let my critical faculties off the leash for a bit (did I mention the beer?), but that seems to be the right approach to one of these big Exeter Hall events. We've just had over nine hours of music in a warm atmosphere for less than a fiver, and I can't really think of anything I'd rather be doing with myself, which is ultimately the only important thing.

One Fruit In The Rave

2010-07-01T17:44:00.002+01:00

In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king.

Rubbish. Monarchy isn't based upon specious opthalmic meritocracy, is it? If so, the Queen of England (a country that is, with a tiny percentage of exceptions, fully sighted), would have to have super x-ray vision, or something. Maybe she does, I wouldn't know.

Remind me never to play cards with the Windsors.

STRAWBERRY NIGHTMARES – CONFUSION/ILLUSION (demo)

Every artist makes a choice about their boundaries. Some classical performers confine themselves to period instruments. Some folkies insist on making their own fiddle bows or curing their own bodhran skins. Some beergutted provincial blues players decide at the outset to remove any trace of original thought, character or taste from their life’s work. Strawberry Nightmares, along with a fair clump of current musicians, have confined themselves to the stark flat palette of early computer game music and home synthesiser voices. It’s not quite the 8 Bit Gameboy sound of DJ Scotch Egg or the Chip Tune glitter of Unicorn Kid, but it exists in a world of cheap dynamics and 2D sounds with minimal attack and delay.

Some of which sounds are, let’s be honest, absolutely wonderful. The synthesised cuica at the opening of “hit” (it’s been played on 6 Music) “My Owl is Broken”, for example, is very pleasing, as is a whole gamut of electronic bleeps and tinkles that pop up throughout “Complex Gift”, or the Yello-a-like robot horn consort on “Stellar Soldier”. All very nice, but sadly the tracks display very few compositional merits: there are no interesting rhythms, no great melodies or motifs to latch on to, and certainly the concept of developing ideas seems to be anathema to the digital simplicity of the style. By far the best tracks are “Pipe Speed” (here in two versions), with its Mario references, and “Monster Milkshake”, with a crystalline synth line that loosely recalls Yellow Magic Orchestra, and some slightly more cohesive drum programming.

However, for the most part, this CD is unsatisfying. It goes out of its way to show us that it is based on the sounds of 1985, but gets nowhere near emulating the qualities of electronic music from this period that’s actually any good. It’s like a man recounting exactly how he laughed, without telling you the joke. There are memories from my childhood in this music, but it’s like Hauntology without being haunting. In fact, the whole LP feels like the musical equivalent of one of those terrible I Love 1983 shows that were all the rage a few years back, with some no mark like John Robb saying, “Oh, oh, I fell off my Chopper and spilt Vimto on my Etch-A-Sketch” for an audience of mindless inebriates whose lives are slipping away from them as they gaze mindlessly backwards. The 80s throwback tone of this LP might well function as a doorway back to a prelapsarian innocence for somebody frustrated by the contemporary technical world; it might be a good get out for composers who have no harmonic or rhythmic ideas; it might be a giggle for a band of Sugar Ape trendies, who think that recognising something is the same as understanding it; for us, it’s proof that music usually needs more than nice noises.

Ferrous Ruler's Off Day

2010-06-29T17:03:00.002+01:00

Rejected alternate titles for this piece were Reed It & Weep, Metal Mickey Take, and Velvet Underwhelmed.

METAL MACHINE TRIO, AMG, Academy 18/4/10

What with the O2 Academy, Cornbury, Cropredy and Brookes, Oxfordshire gets its fair share of big names, if that sort of thing matters to you, but it’s not often the area plays host to a musician as celebrated and influential as Lou Reed. Tonight his Metal Machine Trio is playing homage to his infamous Metal Machine Music LP, quite possibly the archetypal “difficult” album for rock fans. Theories abound that MMM was variously a joke, a stoned indulgence, a vicious contract breaker or a serious work of avant garde composition, but the fact that Reed has resurrected it as the inspiration for a live show so long after the furore has died away tends to edge us towards the latter suggestion…although with Reed’s scabrous prankster image, who really knows? The truth is that we weren’t sure what to expect from this concert, but the one word we didn’t expect to use about this single ninety minute piece was “average”.

The trio is a decent little unit. Self styled “electronic alchemist” Sarth Calhoun (did his parents’ decision to name him like an extra from a David Eddings novel inspire him to come up with such a ridiculous job title?) used two laptops and an array of electronics to sample and treat the sounds made by his colleagues, and he’s clearly a quick thinking musician, although his predilection for cacky drum pad sounds did make the opening twenty minutes sound like duff Pete Namlook. Ulrich Kreiger’s saxophone playing is meaty, and he came up with some surprisingly jazz-inflected lines later in the performance; to be brutally honest we would rather have listened to him playing solo for the duration, although the suspicion remains that someone like John Butcher could blow him off the stage.

And then we come to Reed. We’ll give him two pieces of advice for free: a) get a jacket that’s actually big enough so you don’t look like an aged kiddy-fiddler, and b) if you’re going to make music based upon sounds of feedback, why not try to arrange it so you sit where you can reach your fucking amp, so you don’t have to shout at some brow-beaten roadie to run on and make adjustments every few minutes? Are you trying to teach the concept of latency to pre-schoolers, or something? Beyond this, it’s tough to tell what the brittle little despot actually does. Now, we’re perfectly aware that this is Reed’s music, he doesn’t have to embody it onstage, and we’re wary of being the person who states “I went to see Otto Klemperer and all he did was wave his arms about”, or “What’s so great about that Hitchcock guy, he just walks about a bit in the background?”, but every time it became possible to pick out Reed’s contributions, he seemed to be playing some clumsy and facile guitar phrase, or giving a mike a desultory grunt.

The fascinating thing about MMM is precisely how much it enraged listeners, critics and, most importantly, bloated 70s record execs. The thing is, the music world has moved on, and whilst there may have been one or two unhappy Academy punters hoping for a trundle through “Perfect Day” – and we salute the unbounded optimism of two lads who started clapping along to a repeated guitar motif about an hour in – we suspect most of those at the Academy had a decent enough grounding in leftfield music to know that what they were witnessing was pleasant but (and here it comes) average.

So, we’re not iconoclastic enough to state that the gig was rubbish. It wasn’t. It was alright, and had a few searing moments - mostly when Krieger was on a roll - and a surprisingly satisfying conclusion; but, there are any number of Oxford improvisors who could cook up something equally interesting (we spotted the excellent Alex Ward in the crowd, for example), and we’re not overstating the case to say that our very own Euhedral can make far more immersive drone music with a guitar, a violin bow and a cheap amp. And for less than twenty five quid, too.

It wasn’t even that bloody loud.

You! Me! Lancet!

2010-06-26T10:08:00.003+01:00

This is only my second record review for Nightshift. Normally the editor does them all, but perhaps he just ran out of inspiration this month; or maybe he didn't want to give this record a bad review as Chima Anya lives down the road. Of course, now I've given him a lukewarm write up anyway, so Ronan had better hide - if Anya's a doctor he probably knows exactly where to hit to hurt the most.

CHIMA ANYA – NEW DAY (own release)

Rap is “CNN for black people”, claimed Chuck D. It’s a killer line, but too often listening to a bloated, second tier hip hop LP is like watching the endless, fumbling footage of a rolling news team stuck outside closed courtroom doors elaborating on nothing, or desperate commentators filling time during a scrappy no score draw. GTA member Chima Anya is a great example: he has a superb delivery and some decent lines, but this record could do with some focus, too many tracks drift off halfway through, or end up a smidgen trite.

Sonically the tracks are solid, and if Astrosnare’s production is rich it isn’t always astonishing, “Eye Choose You” being built on a bubbly electro swagger, and “Spell It Out” having cheery funk loops that wouldn’t have been out of place on some smiley faced Monie Love track from the Native Tongues era. The lyrics tend to reach the same level, often tidy and effective, but also clichéd. Things change vastly in the final two tracks, meditations on mortality and the complex role of the healer in society (Anya is a practising doctor, though some of his patients might be concerned by his playground talk of ho’s and people being “too gay”). We wish Anya could produce more music like this, fraught with honest emotion, shining his lyrical sensibility onto interesting subjects, rather than talking about women “eyeing on my tool”. Despite quality moments, this is just another talented local rapper who has produced an uneven album. And that ain’t news.

Like It Or Lamp It

2010-06-24T18:14:00.005+01:00

Hello again, and a special welcome to anyone who has found themselves here by clicking my link after getting embroiled in the somewhat inexplicable furore following my latest Riverside Fesitval review on Oxfordbands. Get involved and post messages here, why don't you? Love, hatred or stuff about arboreal nursery, I'm pretty easy.

This is a review I did with a reviewer named Sarah Morton. We wandered into a gig together and decided to write a review. She wrote most of it, I probably did 20%. I'll leave you to guess which parts were mine.

TREVOR MOSS & HANNAH-LOU/ THE LANTERN PLAYERS/ DUSTY/ THE SELENITES, The Lantern Society, Wytham Village Hall, 19/2/10

There's something perverse about a London folk club putting on a tour of countryside village halls, and it seems that if there were to be a natural exchange of folk music between rural and urban environments it probably wouldn't be passed in that direction. At tonight's show in the delightful bunting-decked Wytham Village Hall (seating 60 at a push) there is a slight feel of the Londoners coming down from the mountain and it's a more elaborate performance than seems appropriate for such a low-key environment where perhaps a more relaxed session would be the ideal. Though when The Lantern Players are playing they guest on-stage for each other's sets, all of which almost adds up to a strange display of formal informality, particularly when one musician's backstage practicing is audible from the stage. Nevertheless, it's a relaxed evening in a delightful environment and adds up to a show well worth making the effort out of town for.

The Lantern Players - Pepe Belmonte, Benjamin Folke Thomas and Jack Day - seem to be the in-house regulars of the Lantern Society, and each play a solo set which concludes with a sing-and-play-along from all three. Since the closing songs are the best in each set it would probably have made for a better gig if the three had played together from the outset, taking it in turns to play their solos and backing each other up, instead of spreading it all out to a six-band bill. Of the three Pepe Belmonte is probably the strongest, playing and singing blues in a Bert Jansch style with unobtrusive harmonica complementing a gentle voice. Jack Day has a striking blues-gospel sound with a put-on gravelly voice like a grizzled prospector which nevertheless doesn't feel out of place with the rolling freight-train blues style, and which lends him a Cat Stevens air in his slower songs. Benjamin Folke Thomas's reach slightly exceeds his grasp, with his aggressive guitar finger-picking not offsetting particularly well his muffled Swedish accented baritone, which is better suited to the slower, delicate songs where it has a weary sophistication redolent of Kris Kristofferson.

Of the two local supports the first, Half Moon regulars Alice Little and Danny Chapman as The Selenites, are by far the better act. Tonight they are a viola and concertina duo, and they give a strong performance of traditional folk tunes and songs in a reserved chamber style. The music is good, but the formality of the performance and the precision of the playing tends to make things a bit dry, and Little’s reticent voice, which makes her seem like a shy Edwardian spinster forced to do a turn at harvest festival, can suck some of the presence from thoughtful arrangements. It's admirable, but occasionally somewhat lifeless.

It would be kind to say as little about the second local support act - Goldrush's Robin Bennett as Dusty - as possible, as it was a truly awful performance of sub-Dylan clumsy guitar strumming, adenoidal busking and woefully clunky songwriting. The blues-style harmonica is often evocative of the freight train's whistle, but in Dusty's mouth it reminds us more of having got on the stopping train from Paddington by some horrible mistake; “42 Days” is a lamentable political ballad, but it makes us feel as if our train has been delayed by that long outside Reading. His last piece was apparently written for a “computer game about the environment”, but it would be more suited to Advanced Waiting Room Simulator or Catatonic The Hedgehog, such is its leaden dirge. Grand theft evening.

As can often be the case with bands who book their own supports, the top billing are head and shoulders above the rest. At the start of their set it's difficult to tell which of Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou is singing which parts as their voices blend beautifully in the high alto register, with Moss's voice standing out with a clear reedy tone which complements Hannah-Lou's softer timbre. It's clear they've been singing together for a long time, and the guitar playing from both of them is restrained and almost transparent to foreground the voices. For folk promoters it's perhaps surprising that they aren't playing traditional songs, but they are playing songs written to traditional themes, and the whole feels very English, evidenced by the facts that “Deptford Market” is about timeless London locales, and that Moss looks like an extra from Oliver! They’re clearly the standout act, though with tired ears it's not inspiring us enough to want to take their music home. The night was good honest entertainment, but it was a pleasant quiet night out rather than a musical epiphany…which is perhaps what acoustic nights in Wytham Village Hall ought to be.

Automatic For The Steeplechase

2010-06-22T17:21:00.007+01:00

I wrote this for a magazine called Oxfordshire Music Scene, which I'm told has just folded. Well, I shan't mourn too much, as they were too chirpy for my liking, and had too many pictures, and not enough naughty words. Ah well, they were harmless enough. I wasn't planning on writing much for them. Still, their loss is your gain.

Edit: Oh, apparently OMS is still going, but they're going to skip an issue whilst the management changes. OK, let's be positive and wish them luck.

WYCHWOOD FESTIVAL, Cheltenham Racecourse, 4/6/10

What, precisely, is a boutique festival? It’s not musical obscurity or even sponsorship by left-leaning broadsheets or overpriced music mags that defines things, but a self-imposed intimacy, the implication being that the organisors could have sold five times as many tickets, but have chosen charm over profit. Wychwood, in the handy but uninspiring environs of Cheltenham racecourse certainly has a family-friendly warmth, and falls somewhere between the village fete ambience of Truck and Cornbury’s sedentary wine-cooler and canapé air. We’ve always been uninterested in non-musical festival trappings, and whilst we’re cynical about children’s swings and Waitrose smoothie bars, they’re a nice change from the hemp weaving and pubescent drug-pushing we associate with festivals.

Wychwood’s music might not be pulse-quickening, but it is solid. The Leisure Society sprinkled their refined pop with ‘cello and flute, sounding at their best like The Divine Comedy when they were on the cusp of dispensing with the clever lyrics and intriguing arrangements (but that’s what you’re good at Neil!), whereas the BBC Introducing Stage, featuring acts from many counties - generosity of spirit, or tacit admission that there aren’t many good Gloucester musicians? – hosts a cheery set from spry fiddle-flecked folk trio Roving Crows.

At the other end of the spectrum, Justin Currie sounds drably like Elvis Costello & The Attractions without Elvis Costello. Or any of The Attractions. We’re later told he was in Del Amitri – do the math. The Tunnelmental Experimental Assembly are deeply disappointing, ruining harmless big-boned indie by giving some office joker in a hideous waistcoat a mike: it’s like mid-period R.E.M. gatecrashed by Pat Sharp. The Levellers’ folkstival headline set is popular and functional, but Jim Lockey & The Solemn Sun have more intriguing folk melodies to bash out.

We didn’t want Oxfordshire Music Scene’s visit to Gloucestershire to turn into a West Side Story turf war, but the fact is locals The Epstein are comfortably the best act we see. They open with a glacial waft recalling the Erased Tapes roster, and proceed with a more spectral, delicate version of country than in previous incarnations. Olly Wills’ voice is gorgeous and perfectly pitched emotionally, Jon Berry’s bottleneck interjections spice things up, and a new keyboardist dusts the songs with icy synths and reverbed Twin Peaks piano. They’re also the only band the omnipresent kids enjoy, a small group crawling frantically in front of the stage: call it toddlemosh.

A local couple explain their love of the festival with tales of returning laden with new CDs. Perhaps Wychwood is aimed at professionals and parents who don’t have time to follow trends, but who still want to broaden their horizons, which is nothing to be ashamed of. Oh, and a mad Mancunian rants about the toilets’ cleanliness, as he had mislaid his shoes and gone in barefoot; it’s a good weekend for the hygiene-conscious drug-addled loon too.