Olksf!

It's a pity I had to cut a few choice lines from this review to fall inside the wordcount threshold.  Probably my favourite was George Chopping describing the punters taking their seats being like One Man & His Dog in reverse.


Speaking of seats, people were up and about throughout this gig, going to the loo, buying a drink, having a constitutional stroll.  Sometimes people in posh, hushed Observer Magazine type gigs are just as annoying as those in sticky-floored dives, it seems.

YORKSTON/THORNE/KHAN, LAURA MOODY, Irregular Folks, St Barnabas, 19/2/16

It’s a cliché to observe that a good cellist makes their instrument sound like the human voice.  As an unarguably good cellist Laura Moody definitely does this, but as if to counterbalance, she makes her voice sound like an operatic space gerbil.  Or a battrachian brekekekex.  Or a jazz ballad cousin of Joan La Barbara.  Her opening song is a flurry of gasps and scrapes that sounds like a torch singer drowning in an offcut from Scott Walker’s Tilt, and before the second number is out she is taking the bow to her own throat to elicit a percussive wail.  Moody’s technique, vocally and instrumentally, is superb, but her compositions are more than just canvases for experimentation, and as the set closes with a brittle, reverby love paean, we are entranced.

Judging from the poster, top promoters Irregular Folk have added an S to the end of their name, presumably to make clear that their nights are as likely to feature electronic ambience and modern classical as anything traditional music related.  However, if you want one of Oxford’s most irregular folks, try well-lubricated MC George Chopping, who spends minutes commentating on those retaking their seats after the interval, before knocking over a drink, mopping it up with his shirt, admitting he’s never heard the last act, and swearing a lot in a church.

As is fitting for a (semi-)improvised show, Yorkston/Thorne/Khan’s set is a handful of sublime moments, rather than a gallop of glory.  There are times when the guitar, double bass and sarangi intertwine to create gorgeous sonic blossoms, and times when they merely politely eddy around a chord.  Unexpectedly, it’s the vocals that captivate, all three singing well especially Suhail Yusuf Khan, whose papery whisper can arc powerfully at unexpected moments.  The last number, James Yorkston’s “Broken Wave (A Blues For Doogie)”, a tribute to a dead friend, tugs with the emotional simplicity of vintage Christie Moore, with limpid accompaniment from Thorne and Khan: surprisingly, this lambent piece of very regular folk is what will live in our memory.

 

Grade A Maracas

This is not a band I've liked at all before, so really pleasant to discover their new record is really rather good indeed.  The opening libe about releases turned out to be wrong, and was edited for the mag, but I've left it here to show my (ahem) humility.

THE SHAKER HEIGHTS – BRUNSKI (Skag Harry Records)

It’s almost exactly four years since The Shaker Heights released anything.  You remember them, right?  You’ll know you’re remembering them correctly if you can barely remember anything at all, such was the harmlessness of their light rock, filling gaps in midweek line-ups anonymously and efficiently like packing crate polystyrene nuggets.  And after all this time, has anything changed? Bloody right it has!  This single is pretty damned great.  Apparently, “Brunski” was inspired by Kafka and explores “the pressure of non-arrival”, which sounds like nonsense and justifies a certain piece of Wheatsheaf gents’ graffiti we shan’t reproduce here, but this is the only negative thing we can say.  “Brunski” opens with a coldly insistent drum machine goosestep, which is soon joined by skeletal fret-buzzing bass whilst some snide cyborg synth lines look askance from the shadows.  Into this freeze-dried goth diorama drift Robyn Cooper’s sad-eyed vocals, before the whole thing is lifted to a warmer place by a chorus recalling Tears For Fears.  It lasts brief seconds though, before we’re back in step with the melancholy march.  This is chilly music to turn a collar up against, bleak pop to make you blow onto your hands.   

The B side, “Sick And Weird” is a simpler acoustic ditty made special by the gaunt hollowness of the keyboards, sickly sonic mistrals blowing through the melody.  It’s like they took the sparsest track on Prefab Sprout’s Protest Songs and made it five times more miserable, without losing the prettiness of Cooper’s voice.  Nightshift spends a lot of time telling grown-up bands to stop being so sensible, get blitzed and try to capture some childish magic, but if The Shaker heights are anything to go by, take time out.  Have kids.  Get a mortgage.  Become a quantity surveyor.  Do anything, basically, if it improves your music this much.  

Sunn Tzu)))

Happy everything.

TEN FE/ THE AUREATE ACT/ JOHNNY PAYNE, Tigmus/United Talent, Jericho, 4/12/15

Johnny Payne is strumming a hollow-bodied guitar whilst wearing one of those country shirts with breast pockets that look like smiley mouths. The melancholic rocking tunes are good, and Johnny’s voice is excellent (as anyone who remembers Deer Chicago will attest), but he is perhaps rather too in awe of all things American.  It’s fine to write songs about travelling the States or walking the Brooklyn bridge, but slipping in US terms when there are decent English ones lying around (tail-lights, gas stations, diner checks) just seems like trying too hard.  This is a minor anglophile niggle, though, and we look forward to catching Johnny soon with his backing band...hopefully they’ll play “Cilantro Faucet Recess Thumbtacks”.

The Aureate Act’s opening number mixes the proggy poise of vintage Genesis, the bucolic coolness of Talk Talk, and snatches of King Crimson’s abstract blow-outs.  It is, frankly, a vast mess, as is the rest of the set, with tempo changes grinding gears, random guitar notes bubbling up unpredictably like swamp gas, and rippling piano jarring against hyperactive basslines: perhaps they’ve taken the advice of some gig-hardened Sun Tzu who counsels “if you enemy can’t work out what you’re supposed to be playing, and they can’t tell when you’ve done it wrong”.   Despite being a huge indigestible curate’s omelette, the set leaves us fascinated, and intrigued to revisit a band with more ideas and references than they seem to be able to marshal.  Perhaps they will win this war, after all.

After a fifth column in the audience has closed the curtains that bisect the Jericho, thus forcing us all into a dark space before the stage, and London’s Ten Fe start their grinning bouncy pop, the night suddenly has the feeling of an event.  Or possibly a cult recruitment exercise.  Like a never-ending strip-lit airport travelator, their bright songs just chug on relentlessly, repeating tiny catchy motifs above elementary basslines. At their best, they are like a krautrock cross between The Stone Roses and Boney M, at their worst they’re like a squeaky clean mixture of Flowered Up and Climie Fisher.  We honestly aren’t sure whether a closer shoving the melody from “I’m A Believer” over bits of “Where The Streets Have No Name” is wonderful or imbecilic, but the trio has such presence and self-belief it’s hard to argue.  Perhaps Sun Tzu told them, “play every venue like it’s a sold-out stadium”.  Sun Tzu, by the way, was nicking the takings whilst those curtains were closed and changing his phone number.

Cuppa Class

"Nicaragua."
"Talk us through your asnwer."
"Nicaragua is what it is."
"OK."

THE BREW, Haven Club, Bully, 2/11/15

Led Zeppelin were one of the greatest groups that rock music has ever seen, exhibiting levels of intuitive ensemble playing generally only found in the very best classical and jazz outfits, whilst retaining an air of unhurried looseness and still sounding like Satan’s convoy delivering juggernaut-loads of haunted pig iron direct to your eardrums.  Trouble is, they were also not that bright, and so many classic rock acts get the good mixed up with the bad, proffering chunky riffs and elegant licks alongside all that shit about hobbits and big willies and sex with schoolgirls.

Grimsby trio The Brew are clearly heavily influenced by vintage Zep and Cream, and for the most part are outstanding, but they do come with a side salad of cliché.  There are little things like the drummer’s obsession with holding one stick in the air, like he’s acting out the poster for Star Wars IV, or the singer and guitarist’s loose neckerchief, which is probably supposed to conjure Jimi or Jimmy but mostly resembles Fred from Scooby-Doo, and some more serious niggles, like a singing  voice that is too thin to last 90 minutes of chest-beating rock action.  Amusingly, the vocals are in such a “cummawn airboddih!” panto drawl, than when asked to sing along to one tune nobody can make out the words (we alternated between “I’ve seen your face” and “1, Semen Place”).

But, that’s the bad side, and as we say, this comes with the territory to a certain extent, like greed in hip hop, homophobia in reggae, and horrible bloody hairclips in indie.  The fact is that The Brew is a hugely enjoyable band, with gallons of talent and a fair few ideas bubbling through.  And energy.  Blimey, you don’t see a band, grown-up classic rock or otherwise, having this much fun onstage too often, leaping about like loons and infectiously buoying up the quiet Monday crowd: we wouldn’t be surprised if there was a reverse phantom power set-up, and the band were actually powering the venue.  Plus there are addictive grooves, from double-ply Deep Purple stomps to elastic mid-era Floyd landscapes, in which you can easily lose ten minutes.  The Brew might be too frivolous for some dessicated old Mojo readers, and too traditional for cutting edge kids, but if you relish old-fashioned rock music, volume and fun, then you could hardly do better.

Indoctrinating In Sects

This is a great record, go out and buy it.

BUG PRENTICE – THE WAY IT CRUMBLES (Self-released)

“I wish that we could live in a library”, dream Bug Prentice on the woozy, melancholic “Spoons”, summing up an album that likes to sneak up on life from the far side, from a point of thoughtful academia or fanboy geekery.  Over 38 minutes, we pick up lyrical references to a drunk Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray’s films, Cole Porter and Kurt Vonnegut.  “Angular Spirals” doesn’t seem to be riffing on anything specific, but sounds more like a Vorticist lonely hearts column than your average pop song: the narrators of these songs seem more comfortable away from the action, immersed in scholarly footnotes, DVD extras and bottomless YouTube rabbit holes.

So it’s astonishing how emotionally direct this record is.  Ally Craig might be delivering lyrics consisting of compact, absurd vignettes (“Ceilidh Dancer”) or just dicking about (hipster grunge parody “Moustache”), but his gorgeous, dry, delicate voice, like the smoked out ghost of Jeff Buckley, makes it seem like he’s whispering soul-drenched secrets.  The music also gives the songs visceral immediacy: the guitar plays elastic mandelbrot blues that’s somewhere between John Renbourne, Thurston Moore and James Blood Ulmer, whilst the rhythm section hide subtly in the background for long periods, before erupting into hefty Slint-shaped blasts.  If one song sums the record up, it’s “Nebraska Admiral”, a beautiful brooding lament that teeters on the edge of atonality but which has the cornballiest, music-halliest opening couplet you’ll hear all year, sounding like mid-90s Kristin Hersh with lyrics by Ian Dury.   If you’ve seen Ally live, you’ll know he can wrench the sentimental core from an Ivor Cutler piece and reveal the unsuspected profundity in a song from The Muppets, so this mixture of cabaret schmaltz and surreal sincerity should come as no surprise.  This is one of the best Oxford albums in recent times, but be prepared to put some work in, The Way It Crumbles is one tough cookie.