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.
Showing posts with label Black Sonny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black Sonny. Show all posts
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Thursday, 22 July 2010
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.
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.
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