Truckadero

Here's the Saturday review from this year's Truck festival.  I've since discovered that Haula is a local artist, persumably from Wantage, but her website still claims she comes from London so I've left that bit in.  

Musically, Sunday starts slowly, but then perhaps Sundays always should.  Wallflower are a sonically muscular emoid bunch, let down by some kidney-rippingly bad vocals; Fox Chapel make pleasant enough pop, that might have forgettably inaugurated some T4 all-dayer a few years ago; Safe To Swim are rhythmically very strong, all rubbery goth indie that closely resembles Placebo, which is fine so long as you don’t mind things that sound like Placebo.  To stave off boredom we invent the game Gaffer Tape Vs. Jaffa Cake, the rules to which we sadly can’t tell you until you get a special tattoo and give us your house.

So, it’s back to the reliable Gorwelion Horizons stage, who keep delivering strong acts on Saturday, although they seem to have cheated and sneaked a few non-Welsh musicians in, such as London-based Ugandan Haula. She has an outstanding contemporary soul voice and a commanding but not over-egged stage presence, which makes her set a pleasure.  Musically she leans on R ‘n’ B, both in its contemporary sense, and the original coinage: there’s a tasty moment when the band drop into a Chickenshack type blues glide that really suits her delivery.  Sometimes the backing gets sterile and sessiony, and the lyrics tend towards the platitudinous, but it’s a strong showing all the same.  Closing song “Freedom” gets a glorious main stage singalong reaction from the crowd (apparently she has a following in Wantage, somewhat oddly).

According to our notebook we listen to Decovo at this point, but it clearly makes no impact on us.  Allusondrugs, however, are a different proposition.  Their messy potage of Mudhoney riffs, twitchy Biffy Clyro vocals, windswept guitar lines and half-inched Blur tunes is fun, but we love the fact that at any one point one of them is going off on a freakout, but at no point all of them are.  They’re simply intriguing.  “I like herpes more than I like Irn Bru”, they announce unexpectedly, which is a thousand times more worth saying than, “Truck fest, how ya doing?”, you have to admit.

Walking past the Veterans stage (no Virgins left after the first day, which is how all good festivals should be), we intend to skip The Shapes, but are drawn in by the magnetic power of their classic pop, which is grown up without being washed out.  We then go and see The Magic Gang just in case they sound like The Magic Band, which is the sort of logic you end up with having decided to skip lunch due to queues and fall back on beer.  They don’t.  In fact, they sound like The Housemartins, Weezer and very, very well-behaved young men.  We rather enjoy it, but they’re hardly kicking out the jams; in fact, they’d probably be considered limp by the WI who made the jams.

Veterans Flowers Of Hell endear themselves to us immediately by being notably relaxed and sounding like The Velvet Underground with extra fiddle and trumpet, and then they prove us right by playing a really great cover of “Heroin” with extra fiddle and trumpet.  And then they honour Czech dissident freaks Plastic People Of The Universe, which should happen more often.  And, all this whilst the engineer has left a vintage soul CD playing on the PA throughout.  They probably thought it was messages from the ether.

Yet again Gorwelion comes up trumps, with ultra-super-mega-perky indie pop outfit Seazoo, who are blessed with an infections sense of fun, a knowledge of how catchy tunes work, relentlessly bouncy basslines, and a synth made out of a doll’s head that goes whoodly-wheep in a seemingly random fashion. They do a song which sounds like Free’s “Alright Now” played by excited Care Bears. They are superb.  Oxford promoters Swiss Concrete should be brought back for one night, just to book this colour-saturated joy of a band, where they could raise many a flagon of speed-laced Tizer; hell, play them loud enough, they could raise the spectre of John Peel, his Ooberman T-shirt barely creased by the afterlife.

After this food beckons.  Having tried to support the ethical vegetarian hippy stall, we get frustrated by their inability to actually have any food (“You could come back in about an hour”), so we visit the Dalicious stall, which we work out is named after the fact that it sells some rather tasty lentil dal, and not because it sells floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew (note to self: set up business to sell floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew).

Hoping to strike gold twice, we return to Gorwelion for Violet Skies.  She shares some ground with Haula, not least an impressive larynx, but her electronic torch songs are just too studio-smooth and her onstage drama the stuff of Eurovision heats.  If she stopped trying so desperately to affect, she could be someone to watch, though.

It’s funny to think of Alphabet Backwards being classed as Veterans, because they still act like naughty kids, leaping around the stage and trying to get people to wind up the security guy.  This is pop, not as youthful rebellion, but as childish fun, like The Red Hand Gang getting hopped up on tartrazine.  All this, and their playing is inch perfect too, never missing the opportunity for maximum bounciness.  The keyboards are a wee bit too quiet, but this is balanced by Steph’s flowing Sandie Shaw dress.  They are ten times more fun than Summer Camp, whom we’d just watched briefly, not to mention summerier and camper.

“Who likes Saint Raymond?” asks the visibly refreshed singer of soft-centred hardcore Leeds lads Brawlers.  “I mean, we’ve never heard of them, and we only ask because we just stole their fucking beer”.   He then proceeds to share said bevvies with the crowd.  Now accessories to the crime, we have no choice but to give up and enjoy the band, which despite being musclier and much louder and far far more tattoed is actually a good analogue to Alphabet Backwards: they are working very hard for you to have a good time, and are not worried a wet fart about anything else.  Pop music, in other words.

Peasants King finish off the Gorwelion stage.  Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in that name somewhere?  Hell, don’t bother answering, we gave up after finding no fewer than 19 errors on the first page of the Truck programme alone.  Plus the cover looks like it could be the 1985 catalogue from Clockhouse at C&A, so it’s best left under lock and key.  Peasants King make a decent Britrock sound, but it all feels a bit old hat, from the guy playing a separate floor tom - so 2008 - on up.  Perhaps at the other end of the festival we’d have got more from them, but on the home straight we need more to grab us.

Y-Fronted

I was going to write a big intro to this post, but I've sprained my left wrist and typing hurts. Much of this review appears in this month's issue of Nightshift.

TRUCK, Hill Fm, Steventon, 20-1/7/12

You can never go back, ladies and gentlemen.  You can’t step into the same river twice.  Or the same rank slurry puddle, for that matter.  This year’s Truck festival, salvaged after last year’s financial shortfall by the people behind Y-Not Festival in Derbyshire, has taken a Back To Basics approach in its promotion.  There’s clearly logic to that, but can people stop talking about the triumphant return of the Barn, please?  We don’t mind the damp faecal reek so much, but the atrocious acoustics make it a poor place to perform live music; fine as a means to an end in a farmyard festival, of course, but hardly a selling point.  And this is our problem with back-harking halcyonism, it normally comes intertwined with a conservative outlook.  Of course Truck memories are about buying doughnuts from the vicar and singing along to Biffy Clyro and Supergrass, but they’re also about discovering such improbable wonder as epically plastic syngoths Motormark, recorder quintet Consortium5, maximalist hipsters Islet, homespun piano-tinkler Luke Smith and whatever the hell you want to describe Thomas Truax as.  The big question looming over the 15^th Truck festival was, could they capture the subtle magic of the event along with the broad flavours?

Steventon locals Lost Dogs make such queries feel meaningless.  Like ancient, stoic trees watching over human concerns and making them seem petty and ephemeral, their harp-blowin’ blooze-rockin’ songs about whiskey, devil women and problems with carburettor maintenance in the 1973 Plymouth Baracuda (probably) is the true sound of rural Oxfordshire, has been for decades, and shall be until the last trump, no matter how much we argue about Johnnies come lately like Truck.  It’s tempting to call Lost Dogs unoriginal, or even culturally negligible, but they’re simply good fun, and we’ll take that any day.

This year’s error-ridden programme makes a profound fluff by likening Gabriel Minnikin to Brazilian frazzle-heads Os Mutantes.  We later realise that the entire description has been accidentally pasted from that of a different act, but the damage is done, and we feel so deflated by the demure, Gram Parsons style Americana on display, that we find it difficult to engage with Minnikin, even though he’s probably not bad.

Ute might have had a clear Radiohead influence, but offspring band The Grinding Young have a less yearning sound that’s more like a British Pavement.  There are big gestures, some good ideas, and a clarinet on a display.  There are also some ill-advised bow ties, but they pale in comparison with other fashion errors we see round the festival, from mystifyingly prevalent woodland animal costumes to a very brave, and probably quite warm, PVC fetish cop outfit.  Special kudos to the cross-dressing pint-puller who is still resplendent in his glamour gown years and years after the other Truck barstaff gave up on the idea.  Keep living the dream.

And if you want to wear something unsuitable and parade round a field giving nary a fuck, you could do a lot worse than find Alphabet Backwards providing the fizzy pop soundtrack. Along with the slithery synth lines and the impossibly catchy vocal hooks, this year they also share with us the name of their favourite weatherman.  Then again, judging by the music, surely every second of their lives is glorious Bank Holiday sunshine, right?

The rough opposite of Poledo, whose club-footed grunge is dour-faced, and about fifty times less well played.  They whine and stumble their way through a few snot-nosed tracks on the Barn stage, and we suppose that they might have a petulant sort of power in a smaller setting, but we slip away to watch something more vibrant in the shape of Kill Murray, who aren’t afraid of a bit of toned rock musculature under their pop melodies.  They boast plenty of stadium endings and some vocal lines so vast and emotive you’re not sure whether they’re nicked from Pablo Honey or The Best Of A-Ha, making them an excellent band for a summer afternoon.

It’s always been a Truck trend to have epic, energy-laden bands in smaller tents, whilst grown-up, relaxed musicians while away the afternoon on the main stage, and Michele Stodart, formerly of The Magic Numbers continues this tradition.  Her songs don’t do much for us, but her voice is low and friendly, creating a warm zone like a fondly remembered teacher or Test Match Special.  She’s a bit like Tanita Tikaram without the A Levels.

Country duo The Hi & Lo have a pleasing sound of relaxed rustic simplicity at the Second Stage – it’s almost as if they’re inviting you to join in and hum your own parts – but it’s The Dead Jerichos whose sense of space is most telling.  In a way it’s sad that this is their final show, but parts of this set, all guitar delay and airy rhythms, remind us of how much they’ve changed since the whirlwinds of sweat and cheap lager at their early gigs.  We’re very interested to see where they end up next.

Vadoinmessico make a very pleasant summery pop music, but they’re the people who are actually supposed to sound like Os Mutantes, and they still don’t so we shut down in a reviewer’s sulk, only to wake up for the start of Federation Of The Disco Pimp, who threaten to supply that sought after experience, a good Truck funk act.  Despite a very sharp horn section, they still don’t have the scuzz and excitement we crave: great funk is like being given a mad drunken tour of a foreign city’s best, dingiest night spots, by a dodgy local you just met, and whom you're sure is your new best friend, even while you're wondering whether they’re going to stab you in the face down the next alleyway.

Truck 2011 Saturday

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?

Charlbury 2011 Sunday

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.

Spires Like Us

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.

2010s - Thousands Of 'Em!

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.

Charlbury Switchblade

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.

Hit (South) Parade

Something different today, my favourite Oxford records of 2009, as published with other selections on Oxfordbands. The text style of the first line refers ot the fact that Alphabet Backwards' bassist, Josh, was smothered all over billboards, buses and TVs in 2009 as part of one of those infuriating mobile phone ads, in which he talked guff about starting a "super-band", or something equally facile. He is actually a very good musician, but from the ads you'd assume he was just a twat who clumps along to "Smoke On The Water" in his Mum's attic. Hopefully the phone company paid him handsomely for his time, but sadly I imagine he did it for free, the starry-eyed pop flump.


Alphabet Backwards: Alphabet Backwards
gr8 bnd v g pop lol [send to entire address book]

A Scholar & A Physician: She's A Witch
The funnest ball of funny electro fun anywhere in the world this year, from Truck's production go-to boys.

Borderville: Joy Through Work
"A band's reach should exceed its grasp/ Or what's a heaven for?" - Robert Browning (nearly)

Les Clochards: Sweet Tableaux
Oxford's wry Gallic cafe indie children deliver a blinder. Sounds like fat Elvis twatted on creme de menthe and blearily stumbling round the Postcard Records' bordello.

Hretha: Minnows/ Dead Horses
Orthographically frustrating upstarts produce clinical post-rock excellence.

Mephisto Grande: Seahorse Vs The Shrew
A revivalist hymn meeting seen through Lewis Carroll's mescaline kaleidoscope.

The Relationships: Space
Beuatiful chiming indie pop coupled with the most articulate lyricist ever to have flaneured the Cowley Road; think R.E.M.'s Reckoning crossed with Betjeman's Banana Blush, record collectors!

Mr Shaodow: R U Stoopid?
Serious messages, approachable humour, lyrical dexterity. His best yet, and that's some benchmark.

Stornoway: Unfaithful
The startled bunnies of lit-pop had a meteoric year. Let's be honest, you won't get long odds on their debut LP featuring in this list next year...

Vileswarm: Sun Swallows The Stars
An experimental dreamteam of Frampton & Euhedral, offering "doom drone": does exactly what it says on the tombstone.

Pilot Episode

And while we're at it, what's with people reading books as they walk along? I don't mean an A-Z or a Let's Go To Stuttgart guide, I mean a novel. They must be able to read all of 8 words before they have to look where they're going. I see them, trundling round Headington lapping up War & Peace. Some of them go at quite a lick,too. Madness.

WE AERONAUTS/ ALPHABET BACKWARDS/ MESSAGE TO BEARS, 3 Blind Mice, Wheatsheaf, 29/1/10

Outstanding ensemble WLTM song for meaningful relationship.

Message To Bears are phenomenal musicians. Every bucolically plucked guitar, subtly controlled rhythm and delicious violin lick is impeccably phrased and beautifully balanced. On its own this is enough to make the set a joy, but how much better it would be if they had just one memorable composition. Every piece chugs and arpeggiates its way along like a refined folky Mogwai – Implosions In The Sky, if you will – and we yearn for a soaring line from the violin to lift proceedings. Nick one from Sibelius or an Irish air or something, we don’t care, just give us a reason for this astonishing band to perform. One for late night headphone listening rather than a swamped Wheatsheaf, perhaps.

Band seeks audience for inconsequential frolics. VVVVGSOH essential!!!

As they’re a perky cross between Blur and Erasure, with two children’s TV presenters on vocals and a flurry of farty synth lines somewhere between Sky and Air, playing songs about low end High Street retail and duff sex, we’ll concede that Alphabet Backwards can verge on the infuriatingly wacky. But, by God, give us sugary, day-glo, shimmering pop songs like these and we’ll forgive any peccadilloes. As catchy as Ricky Ponting covered in velcro and spraying swine flu serum, these are possibly the most liberating, uninhibited, spring-loaded pop songs in Oxford’s history, and if you haven’t heard them yet get ready to be swept up in the euphoria or sent back to your miserable little life even more enraged than before.

Band looking for…err…not sure.

We Aeronauts suffer partly from being uncertain what they are. Epic pop? Folk shanty singalong? Belle & Sebastian delicacy? Stornoway eloquence? Here’s an idea: how about starting by becoming a band who sound like they’re all playing in the same room, who have discernable tunes, and whose concept of “arrangement” doesn’t approximate “seven people play simultaneously until we end up with an indistinguishable sonic hummus”? Perhaps it was the atrociously muddied mix, making them sound like they were playing in a wellington on Botley Road, or perhaps it was an off night, but in a blind test we’d never believe this was the band we found quite pleasant at Punt. If you believe this is one of Oxford’s best bands, then you’ll believe the people in lonely hearts ads really are slim, attractive, charming and into Chekhov.

Running Out Of Relevant Pun(t)s

More old Punt tales. 50ft Panda, who are sadly no more, were generally known as Soft Panda round these parts. Oh, how we laughed...

THE PUNT 2008, various venues


You can imagine Face0meter falling somewhat flat performing his twitchy caffeinated anti-folk to a crowd of weekend drinkers, but when he gets to rant and sing unamplified in a bookshop he instantly wins over all-comers. Abetted by the excellently named Dapper Swindler, Face0meter produces what sounds like frenzied Polish dance tunes with lyrics by Bob Dylan via Edward Lear, and shows an odd mixture of New York cool and slightly frightening effervescence: imagine Lawrence Ferlinghetti as an assistant scoutmaster. Faceometer’s vocals may not be very supple, but his way with language is dexterity itself.

Desmond Chancer (AKA Tomohawk from The Big Speakers, amongst other acts) leads his band The Long Memories in a smoky trawl through gutter life jazz ballads that instantly recall “Blue Valentine” era Tom Waits. The music is louche and endearing, with some excellent jazz sax solos, but sadly the vocals let everything down, tumbling into the songs with all the subtlety of a drunken Wellington boot. Perhaps this sort of thing just doesn’t work until we reach the wee hours.

Having hilariously heard a man at a bar ask for two pints of Confidence, and invented the genre Nu-Gazing (hard trance remixes of Chapterhouse), we find ourselves at the Purple Turtle for International Jetsetters who certainly aren’t short of “jaunty” and are far from lacking in “cheery”. Very occasionally the strong female vocal reminds us of Patti Smith in its declamations, but some of the rather average music has the consistency of damp pastry, which spoils the effect.

Cat Matador are far more successful at creating high octane indie rock, with plenty of chiming guitar and intriguing violin. Occasionally the mood got lost somewhere between “epic” and “introspective”, but the music definitely had force and character enough to keep the healthy crowd interested.

Over at the surprisingly pleasant Thirst Lodge Black Skies Burn have unlocked the Pandora’s Box labelled “Racket”. This is proper metal with huge white noise guitars and vocals that sound like an emasculated pig being sucked into a black hole. The whole shebang is polished and well-crafted, but we do wish that the drummer were working as hard the room-prowling vocalist, the rhythms never seemed to blast along as we’d hoped.

Non-Stop Tango sound like Talking Heads and King Crimson and Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and The Doors and Hawkwind and Bjork and The Fall and The Art Of Noise and lots of others. Not necessarily our opinion, but this is just a selection of comments we overheard in The Wheatsheaf as the set progressed, which goes some way to explaining how varied their sound is. Composed of Oxford’s free improv luminaries, Non-Stop Tango is really an experiment in taking groove-based music and destroying it from the inside, bombarding funky basslines with electronic drums, tinny keyboards and incomprehensible vocals. Not many people last the distance, but if they left confused we’ll call it a victory. The Punt needs bands like this. No scratch that, the world needs bands like this, there aren’t enough surprises left.

Sadly Alphabet Backwards isn’t just someone rewinding an episode of Sesame Street, but happily they are a pretty feisty pop concoction with some excellent fizzing keyboards and bouncy backbeats. Sadly the vocals let the side down with some clumsy pub rock intonations, but apparently the normal vocalist is off tonight, so we’ll give them a bye. Worth a second listen, we feel.

50ft Panda are Oxford music’s equivalent of a Belgian truffle: creamy and delicious, but too rich to want too much of. Imagine all your favourite heavy rock records distilled down to their essence, and that’s what this duo produce: nothing but firy drumming, the riff, and the volume (my God, the volume!) again and again and again. They really do it incredibly well, but, like another local duo that had two people making the noise of ten, Winnebago Deal, you wouldn’t want to listen to it for more than thirty minutes.

At this point the sight of the Cellar bouncer eating raw eggs made our beer filled stomach somewhat queasy so we stumbled for the bus. Clanky Robo Gob Jobs will have to wait for another time. We can only hope that any inquisitive local music virgins who got a Punt pass found something they loved to treasure in their memories…and we hope they found something they abhorred too, that’s what music should be all about.

Abingdon's Starting To Happen

Most of this review was used in Nightshift's 4 page report on the festival, but some of it has never been seen before. Be still, my beating heart.

TRUCK 2008, Hill Farm, Steventon

After last year’s festival, we really thought Truck had jumped the shark. Naturally, rescheduling was out of their control, but the general feeling was that the lineup was predictable and uninspired, and that Truck had been gradually ossifying into a noisy convalescent home for tedious country musicians. This year, however, turned out to be the best Truck for a long time. The lineup was pruned of some of the incumbents, but there was still a pleasant smattering of Truck favourites on offer; the site had been rethought but still kept to the familiar blueprint; and, most importantly, the atmosphere was wonderful. It’s so gladdening to see people going rubber-limb loopy in The Beat Hive before eating doughnuts and then sitting quietly to enjoy something acoustic at the Market Stage. More than anything else this year we got the impression that Truckers were open to all manner of different performances, and this was reflected in some surprising, but refreshing thematic booking policies, such as Crossword Records’ abstract hip-hop showcase, or the Sonic Cathedral shoegazing celebration. It was the sort of weekend to make anyone wax lyrical…anyone apart from Evan Dando, anyway…

Implausibly, our festival begins with a band from Hong Kong. DP is a guitar and drums scuzz riffing concotion, who make a great noise, but essentially feel like half of a good rock band. AC without the DC.

Vacuous Pop’s well received line-up begins with Load.Click.Shoot whose bandy-legged disco pop sends hordes of kids in horrible plastic shades, who look like extras from Weird Science, into a dancing frenzy. Is this because the band are good (which they are, with their snotty take on Foals-esque puzzle pop and excellent naughty schoolboy keyboards), or because these guys have been cocked for some day-glo musical fun all morning? Load, click, shoot indeed.

Hey, the naughty schoolboy has been doing his homework. Alphabet Backwards’ keyboard player shares a cheeky Korg buzz with the previous band, but plays it spiced with nonchalantly adept arpeggios and Herbie Hancock twiddles. The two singers may look like a cut-budget children’s presenters (Magpie, not Blue Peter; Look In, not Smash Hits), but they play impossibly, gorgeously, heart-burstingly jolly acoustic-led pop that would sound as at home in the Top 40 as it would at a drunken barndance.

A spot of lunch later The European Union provides our first visit to The Market Stage, once again the most comfy part of Truck, with the most reliable sound. Sadly, although European Union were billed as sounding like Nirvana we turn up to a minimal folk pop song played by sleepy robots. Thereafter they step up into a trudge down The Band’s avenue, good ol’ boys chord progressions overlaid with hammered elementary piano and drawled self-conscious vocals. Passable.

Admittedly it’s not our dream of a collaboration between Bellowhead and Fuck Buttons, but Buttonhead’s set starts incredibly, a repeated wordless three note vocal motif over some complex pomp rock that sounds like Philip Glass’ Einsten On The Beach played by Magma. Except that it also sounds like Godspeed You! Black Emperor played by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Amazing. However, after a while the focus gets lost somewhere to the left of the kitchen sink, and the show becomes a valiant, but ultimately unsatisfying mashup; we would have stuck it out to the end anyway, of the falsetto vocals weren’t so tooth-pullingly terrible.

In diametric opposition to their look-at-me name, Holton’s Opulent Oog supply us with an untroubled, unobtrusive country lope. Pliant and friendly, perhaps, but with all the chutzpah of a shy 7 year old forced to recite in Sunday school. Of course, complaining about country pop at Truck is like shouting for “Born To be Wild” at Glyndebourne, so we’ll just edge away, quietly.

Over on the main stage, Little Fish are winning a small army of new fans. Aside from being musically spotless, Juju and Nez are rare in looking as though they were born to be onstage – even on the main stage, it’s rare to see an act that you can’t tear your eyes from. But, would it be terribly party-pooping of us to suggest that they write some more songs? There’s some padding in their repertoire, and the world doesn’t need another rock twopiece unless they’re very, very good. Worries for another day, perhaps, for now it’s another Fish victory.

There’s nothing precisely wrong with Green As A Primary’s melding of Mogwai and Prefuse 73, but this downtempo mood music is so fussily exact that it reminds us of bad cappuccino, polished foyers, overpriced theatre bars and aging bachelors trying to look urban and sophisticated in Stoke Newington. Could well sell millions, then…

“Who’s ready for some ramshackle, drunken, atonal, clueless, shambolic, dated indie, then?!” Perhaps it’s a good thing they don’t really go for MCs at Truck, as there’d be no real way of introducing “pop legends” The Television Personalities and their agonising set. Imagine a bad Go Betweens rip off encoded, bounced off the surface of Mars, and then reassembled in a brewery with half the data missing or corrupt. “Embarrasing” is the only word that serves.

Having found ourselves caught between two randomly scurrying children who appear to be demonstrating Brownian Motion for the deaf on the way back from the tea tent, we return to the main stage for Emmy The Great, who was a highlight of Truck 06. Sadly her music’s become more polite and tidy in the interim and this set turns into a nondescript wash of general pleasantness. Still, she’s retained an ear-catching literacy in her lyrics, and a delivery that seems to be intelligently hectoring and monstrously cute simultaneously, rather like losing a theological debate to a Care Bear.