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
Showing posts with label Borderville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Borderville. Show all posts
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Friday, 4 November 2011
Alter Boys
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.
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.
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Bank Data
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.
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.
Monday, 3 January 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Park Live
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.
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.
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Riverside 2010 Saturday Pt 2
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.
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.
Saturday, 12 June 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
Punt & Jury
Interesting one, this. A lot of lukewarm reviews of acts that have grown in stature in the interim. Except 32, who are probablys still atrocious - don't think they've played a gig since this. Don't know how they managed to blag this, to be honest. Must be very nice young lads, or possibly schooled in mesmerism.
THE PUNT 2007, various venues
Jessica Goyder’s Joni-Mitchell-meets-jazz tunes are as light, sweet and frothy as a cappuccino topping, and she plays them with great dexterity. But we’re telling you this because we already knew it, not because we heard it at The Punt, where a weedy PA turned Jessica’s Minnie Ripperton scatting into the sound of an adenoidal, constipated Clanger. I know Borders is hardly Knebworth, but really the sound of pages turning shouldn’t be as loud as the music…
Mr. Shaodow seems to have found the volume control, but has inadvertently stumbled across a slapback sound that would make Sun Studios cream. Not really what a rapper wants, we’d have thought. Still, Shaodow overcomes such obstacles with a confident performance of his literate and amusing tracks. Musically it’s superb, but Shaodow really wants to work on his stage patter, he comes off like a desperate Butlins comedian at times.
Thirty Two are repugnant. Ostensibly they’re metal, but the way the guitars chug through their chords with no sense of dynamics reminds us more of some twobit bar room blues band. At one point blue and red spotlights make the band look like they’re on one of those 80s 3D films; if only the music had the same illusion of depth.
Mondo Cada’s brutal grunge metal is just what we need to eradicate the memory of Thirty Two, and they deliver one of the best sets of the evening. Sludge riff bleurgh pounding psychedelic violence Eynsham psychosis rumbled: even sense and syntax cower before the might of Mondo.
Another unexpected treat comes in the shape of Joe Allen and Angharad Jenkins at the rather cramped QI bar. His songs are subtle and well-constructed, but it’s the fluid folky electric violin ladled over the top that really wins us over. It’s like a tiny bonsai Cropredy happening just for us! Joe might want to be careful that his neatly packaged angst doesn’t send him down the white slide to David Gray purgatory, but for now we’ll happily celebrate a great new voice in town.
The Colins Of Paradise is comfortably the worst band name at The Punt. They’re certainly no slouches as musicians, though, resolutely wheeling out light funk grooves with well-trained sax solos battling six string bass flourishes. If only it weren’t so horrifically trite and soulless, we’d be frugging away like anyone. Can we do our “Flaccid Jazz” joke again now, please?
It’s the vocals that make a lot of people wary of The Gullivers, but we think the bruised and awkward quality of Mark Byrne’s singing works rather well against the suburban punk thud of the music. Tonight’s performance is uneven, but lovable, like a gangly Dickensian urchin who’s grown out of his clothes.
Their music oscillates wonderfully between free improv dribbles and testifyin’ gospel rock, with occasional trudges into Tom Waits territory, and Mephisto Grande go down a storm at a crowded Purple Turtle. Much as we like them, it still feels more like half of SCFT than a proper band, but perhaps it’ll take time to heal the loss of one of our favourite Oxford groups.
Stornoway are possibly Oxford’s best band at the moment, and we love them. But when you’re listening to their delicate folk pop from the back of a packed Wheatsheaf, and not all the band are present, it’s hard to take much away from the experience.
And the other contender for top local band title comes from Borderville. If you tried to teach martians about rock music with nothing but videos of Tommy and the musical Buffy episode, a Rick Wakeman album and a scratchy 7” of “Ballroom Blitz” they’d probably turn out performances just like Borderville. Fun though Sexy Breakfast were it’s great to see Joe finding songs that really suit his voice, and a band who can be theatrical without being smug (well, OK, maybe a tiny bit smug). “Glambulance” calls for fists in the air, and for one night The Music Market is a Broadway theatre.
We only catch the last tune by The Mile High Young Team. It sounds pretty good, and certainly better than their rather overly polished recordings. It’s not much of response we suppose, but then Punt should leave you confused, dizzy, and possibly slightly drunk.
THE PUNT 2007, various venues
Jessica Goyder’s Joni-Mitchell-meets-jazz tunes are as light, sweet and frothy as a cappuccino topping, and she plays them with great dexterity. But we’re telling you this because we already knew it, not because we heard it at The Punt, where a weedy PA turned Jessica’s Minnie Ripperton scatting into the sound of an adenoidal, constipated Clanger. I know Borders is hardly Knebworth, but really the sound of pages turning shouldn’t be as loud as the music…
Mr. Shaodow seems to have found the volume control, but has inadvertently stumbled across a slapback sound that would make Sun Studios cream. Not really what a rapper wants, we’d have thought. Still, Shaodow overcomes such obstacles with a confident performance of his literate and amusing tracks. Musically it’s superb, but Shaodow really wants to work on his stage patter, he comes off like a desperate Butlins comedian at times.
Thirty Two are repugnant. Ostensibly they’re metal, but the way the guitars chug through their chords with no sense of dynamics reminds us more of some twobit bar room blues band. At one point blue and red spotlights make the band look like they’re on one of those 80s 3D films; if only the music had the same illusion of depth.
Mondo Cada’s brutal grunge metal is just what we need to eradicate the memory of Thirty Two, and they deliver one of the best sets of the evening. Sludge riff bleurgh pounding psychedelic violence Eynsham psychosis rumbled: even sense and syntax cower before the might of Mondo.
Another unexpected treat comes in the shape of Joe Allen and Angharad Jenkins at the rather cramped QI bar. His songs are subtle and well-constructed, but it’s the fluid folky electric violin ladled over the top that really wins us over. It’s like a tiny bonsai Cropredy happening just for us! Joe might want to be careful that his neatly packaged angst doesn’t send him down the white slide to David Gray purgatory, but for now we’ll happily celebrate a great new voice in town.
The Colins Of Paradise is comfortably the worst band name at The Punt. They’re certainly no slouches as musicians, though, resolutely wheeling out light funk grooves with well-trained sax solos battling six string bass flourishes. If only it weren’t so horrifically trite and soulless, we’d be frugging away like anyone. Can we do our “Flaccid Jazz” joke again now, please?
It’s the vocals that make a lot of people wary of The Gullivers, but we think the bruised and awkward quality of Mark Byrne’s singing works rather well against the suburban punk thud of the music. Tonight’s performance is uneven, but lovable, like a gangly Dickensian urchin who’s grown out of his clothes.
Their music oscillates wonderfully between free improv dribbles and testifyin’ gospel rock, with occasional trudges into Tom Waits territory, and Mephisto Grande go down a storm at a crowded Purple Turtle. Much as we like them, it still feels more like half of SCFT than a proper band, but perhaps it’ll take time to heal the loss of one of our favourite Oxford groups.
Stornoway are possibly Oxford’s best band at the moment, and we love them. But when you’re listening to their delicate folk pop from the back of a packed Wheatsheaf, and not all the band are present, it’s hard to take much away from the experience.
And the other contender for top local band title comes from Borderville. If you tried to teach martians about rock music with nothing but videos of Tommy and the musical Buffy episode, a Rick Wakeman album and a scratchy 7” of “Ballroom Blitz” they’d probably turn out performances just like Borderville. Fun though Sexy Breakfast were it’s great to see Joe finding songs that really suit his voice, and a band who can be theatrical without being smug (well, OK, maybe a tiny bit smug). “Glambulance” calls for fists in the air, and for one night The Music Market is a Broadway theatre.
We only catch the last tune by The Mile High Young Team. It sounds pretty good, and certainly better than their rather overly polished recordings. It’s not much of response we suppose, but then Punt should leave you confused, dizzy, and possibly slightly drunk.
Saturday, 19 December 2009
Pantomime Villains
I make no secret of thr fact that I'm monstrously hungover an have a very busy day ahead, so here's a recent review of a great LP, now I'll go and have a nice lie down.
BORDERVILLE – JOY THROUGH WORK
No-one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that ornate, theatrical pop music would ever be seen again. Whilst Travis was paving the featureless yellow path that led to Coldplay’s ubiquity, the ears of the scene were either tuned to dour, po-faced post-rock expanses in the form of Mogwai and Godspeed or the mumbled introspection of Low and The Tindersticks. And yet, some survived who believed in the power of drama, who revelled in the communicative possibilities of façade and pretence, who felt that musical invention was better shown by intricate, intelligent orchestration than by the portentous length of tracks (or their titles). And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.
Whilst cabaret pop hasn’t precisely taken over the world, Borderville’s gloriously over-reaching debut album seems a perfect zeitgeist Polaroid, a record so theatrical it should come with a glossy programme and an unfeasibly overpriced ice cream. And it’s an incredible piece of work, welding Bowie’s cracked actor dramatics to off-Broadway torch songs, with crescendos direct from Queen’s halcyon days. Joe Swarbrick may not have the most agile - or even tuneful - voice in town, but he may well have the most expressive, alternating between stage whisper and Christ-pose rock howl to wring every ounce of emotion from elaborate rock opera opuses. The wonderful “Short Sharp Shock” is a prime example, capturing the whiff of deflated expectations as a band packs up after a show, offsetting some emotive, barely pitched yelps with massed Original Cast Recording backing vocals. Everything about this surprisingly varied LP is overdone to a T, and Borderville have clearly realised that, whilst sincerity and chest-bashing might do the trick, emotions can be far more powerfully expressed if we all realise they’re artificial. The mask is always more frightening once you know it’s a mask.
The rest of the band is also superb, dealing in the wild dynamic variations that can only be achieved with sensitively controlled ensemble playing. Keyboard player “Woody” Woodhouse deserves especial praise for his improbably fluent runs across the ivories, the synth whoops of live favourite “Glambulance”, the tipsy stumbling solo of “Lover, I’m Finally Through” and the jerky mazurka of “Short Sharp Shock” particularly standing out. What’s most impressive about the record is how much variation the band achieves with a relatively sparse sonic palette: it would have been all too easy to drench everything in swooning strings and ersatz effects, but Borderville have retained the sound of a simple rock quartet and pushed it into some intriguing places
No matter how unfair we find it, most of the world considers every damn person in Oxford to be a limp-wristed, pretentious, teddy-clutching silver spoon sucker, honking away about Byron and ponies. A review of Winnebago Deal some years ago in the NME said something like, “What are you lot so grumpy about? Was your 15th century quad not properly manicured this morning?” Yes, even the whiskey-soaked death-grunge hollers of two hairy creatures from darkest Eynsham brought forth plummy images from Uncle Monty’s most rose-tinted recollections. We feel that, if this is how the world sees us, we should embrace it. We’ve already given the world the preppy Bowdlerised art-funk of Foals and Stornoway’s warm-jumpered folk poetry, let’s complete the picture with Borderville’s greasepainted bombast. Cherish them.
BORDERVILLE – JOY THROUGH WORK
No-one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that ornate, theatrical pop music would ever be seen again. Whilst Travis was paving the featureless yellow path that led to Coldplay’s ubiquity, the ears of the scene were either tuned to dour, po-faced post-rock expanses in the form of Mogwai and Godspeed or the mumbled introspection of Low and The Tindersticks. And yet, some survived who believed in the power of drama, who revelled in the communicative possibilities of façade and pretence, who felt that musical invention was better shown by intricate, intelligent orchestration than by the portentous length of tracks (or their titles). And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.
Whilst cabaret pop hasn’t precisely taken over the world, Borderville’s gloriously over-reaching debut album seems a perfect zeitgeist Polaroid, a record so theatrical it should come with a glossy programme and an unfeasibly overpriced ice cream. And it’s an incredible piece of work, welding Bowie’s cracked actor dramatics to off-Broadway torch songs, with crescendos direct from Queen’s halcyon days. Joe Swarbrick may not have the most agile - or even tuneful - voice in town, but he may well have the most expressive, alternating between stage whisper and Christ-pose rock howl to wring every ounce of emotion from elaborate rock opera opuses. The wonderful “Short Sharp Shock” is a prime example, capturing the whiff of deflated expectations as a band packs up after a show, offsetting some emotive, barely pitched yelps with massed Original Cast Recording backing vocals. Everything about this surprisingly varied LP is overdone to a T, and Borderville have clearly realised that, whilst sincerity and chest-bashing might do the trick, emotions can be far more powerfully expressed if we all realise they’re artificial. The mask is always more frightening once you know it’s a mask.
The rest of the band is also superb, dealing in the wild dynamic variations that can only be achieved with sensitively controlled ensemble playing. Keyboard player “Woody” Woodhouse deserves especial praise for his improbably fluent runs across the ivories, the synth whoops of live favourite “Glambulance”, the tipsy stumbling solo of “Lover, I’m Finally Through” and the jerky mazurka of “Short Sharp Shock” particularly standing out. What’s most impressive about the record is how much variation the band achieves with a relatively sparse sonic palette: it would have been all too easy to drench everything in swooning strings and ersatz effects, but Borderville have retained the sound of a simple rock quartet and pushed it into some intriguing places
No matter how unfair we find it, most of the world considers every damn person in Oxford to be a limp-wristed, pretentious, teddy-clutching silver spoon sucker, honking away about Byron and ponies. A review of Winnebago Deal some years ago in the NME said something like, “What are you lot so grumpy about? Was your 15th century quad not properly manicured this morning?” Yes, even the whiskey-soaked death-grunge hollers of two hairy creatures from darkest Eynsham brought forth plummy images from Uncle Monty’s most rose-tinted recollections. We feel that, if this is how the world sees us, we should embrace it. We’ve already given the world the preppy Bowdlerised art-funk of Foals and Stornoway’s warm-jumpered folk poetry, let’s complete the picture with Borderville’s greasepainted bombast. Cherish them.
Tuesday, 22 September 2009
Truck 2008 Pt 3
And onto Sunday...Oh, This Is Seb Clarke turned out to be anything but, but I never found out who they actually were, so I'm leaving that bit in.
Chefs will tell you that many different dishes can be created with the same base sauce. Mephisto Grande are like that. As a duo they’ve got the basic recipe down - free reed drones, brimstone Beefheart growls and bludgeoning rhythms – but today they’re augmented with skronking sax and members of The Oxford Gospel Choir for a dense slab of Pentecostal rock, featuring the best cover of “Frere Jacques” ever. If the vicar of Steventon had got on stage during this and announced we were all going to hell, the local church would have been filled with repentant sinners by tea time.
This Is Seb Clarke have some excellent burgundy Beatles suits, and create some decent straight up trio rock that’s a bit like half of The Hives, but the programme had promised us 12 piece horn driven heaven, so we slope off feeling hard done by.
If anyone wasn’t sure what a kora was, Jali Filli Cissokho explained it to us; he then explained how one plays it with four digits, just in case nobody was yet flawed by the man’s talents. The rippling cascades of notes he plucks from this African harplike instrument are as succulent as they are impressive, and can seem heartbeat simple or cortex complex depending on where one focuses. Perhaps his voice, though sweet, is a little limited, but then again as he comes from the story-telling griot tradition, maybe understanding the lyrics would have helped. It hardly matters when you can lose your Sunday afternoon exhaustion in this impeccable playing. If you saw anyone walking round Truck with their jaws dangling open, they probably hadn’t got over Cissokho’s set yet.
On Sunday the Pavilion was given over to Piney Gir. Not wanting to venture in between sets in case she makes us do cross stitch or dress up as a raccoon, we edge into a strange hinterland at the edge of the campsite, full of non-musical attractions, including craft demonstrations, a cycle powered entertainment system (sadly closed at the time) and a little hut where a frankly petrifying man attempted to draw us in for some lessons in “woooing” (sic) whilst scratchy easy listening played. We also get to see the large number of Truckers who like to hang out in the campsite all day, playing footie and strumming guitars: quite an expensive way to camp out with your mates, but each to their own. In search of another subset of Truckers, some children explain that the playbus is fun, but would be better if it drove around, and that Truck is a good festival because they “saw a tractor”.
We return in time for Bordervillle, who are excellently dressed as if they’ve come from a time travelling wedding, except Joe Swarbrick who looks like a boy band Edward Scissorhands. Dead Kids should be watching this outstanding set – this is how you do pastiche and genre melding. In some ways it’s a parody of 70s pomp bands like Queen, and Broadway musicals, but it’s also a celebration of what can be great about those things, presented with imagination and a well-rehearsed flow. The sort of arch and theatrical act that makes you want to describe them like a Victorian playbill: “A vaudevillian confection of sonorous majesty” it is, then.
Luke Smith’s set is delayed because of generator problems. Doesn’t matter, we’re happy just to stand and listen to him talk, seeing as he’s the most erudite and charming man at the festival. The music might well be somewhat derriere garde, stemming from music hall ditties and 70s MOR, but as an extension of Luke’s chummy personality it works perfectly. Nobody else here would pen a tune like “You’ll Never Stop People Being Gits”, ridicule their bassist, take the piss out of audience singalongs, and still come out looking like the nicest man in town.
We’ve always admired KTB, but never really been that excited by her. Good, therefore, to see her as part of the excellent folk quartet Little Sister, doling out melismatic harmonies, acoustic tapestries and hot Appalachian fiddle licks. They somehow manage to get some of the audience doing forward rolls round the field, which is no mean feat when we’re this tired.
Les Clochards are sadly not mentioned in the programme, and misadvertised outside the Pub Tent, so it’s not surprising they start playing to a mere scattering of listeners. Their tasty Gallic café indie sound soon draws in passers by, however, because nobody could resist that mix of syrupy vocal, French accordion and fluid bass. Also, that’s Peter Momtchiloff from Talulah Gosh and Heavenly on guitar, should you have your I Spy Book Of Jangle Pop on you.
“Come and see The Nuns tomorrow”, says a flier tout on Saturday. Your smug reviewer answers, “OK, as long as they’re an all female tribute to The Monks”. “Yes,” she replies, “yes they are.” Put us in our place, didn’t it? If you don’t know who The Monks are, you’re stupid. They are one of the finest alternative rock bands, and quite possibly the first. They started in Germany in the early 60s in an attempt to create an anti-matter Beatles, and they’ve influenced approximately everyone who’s any good, ever. They’re the only band better than The Fall, according to Mark E Smith, which is unprecedented praise. The Nuns’ set is good, but doesn’t quite capture the full distorted grandeur of the originals. A celebration of, rather than an alternative to, The Monks.
Neil Halstead, from Slowdive, feels somewhat guilty about playing acoustic guitar on the shoegazing bill. “I don’t even have a pedal,” he admits. No matter as he performs lovely smoky wisps of song that keeps the small crowd happy. Nothing onstage to explain why he’s held in reverence, perhaps, but something rather lovely all the same.
Scotland’s Camera Obscura are so twee and melodic, we imagine that Swiss Concrete are backstage with their diary open ready to catch them. At times they’re like The Sundays, but more twee, or like The Cowboy Junkies, but more twee. They’re good, but they’re really twee. There’s no synonym for “twee” so we’d better stop now.
Ulrich Schnauss fills the barn with delicious vox humana keyboard washes and synth squiggles, which are underpinned by drum parts, until he sounds like a cross between Klaus Schulze and 808 State. The trouble is that the beats sound kind of tired, especially in the Barn’s reverb, and it may have been better to let the drones do the talking.
Chefs will tell you that many different dishes can be created with the same base sauce. Mephisto Grande are like that. As a duo they’ve got the basic recipe down - free reed drones, brimstone Beefheart growls and bludgeoning rhythms – but today they’re augmented with skronking sax and members of The Oxford Gospel Choir for a dense slab of Pentecostal rock, featuring the best cover of “Frere Jacques” ever. If the vicar of Steventon had got on stage during this and announced we were all going to hell, the local church would have been filled with repentant sinners by tea time.
This Is Seb Clarke have some excellent burgundy Beatles suits, and create some decent straight up trio rock that’s a bit like half of The Hives, but the programme had promised us 12 piece horn driven heaven, so we slope off feeling hard done by.
If anyone wasn’t sure what a kora was, Jali Filli Cissokho explained it to us; he then explained how one plays it with four digits, just in case nobody was yet flawed by the man’s talents. The rippling cascades of notes he plucks from this African harplike instrument are as succulent as they are impressive, and can seem heartbeat simple or cortex complex depending on where one focuses. Perhaps his voice, though sweet, is a little limited, but then again as he comes from the story-telling griot tradition, maybe understanding the lyrics would have helped. It hardly matters when you can lose your Sunday afternoon exhaustion in this impeccable playing. If you saw anyone walking round Truck with their jaws dangling open, they probably hadn’t got over Cissokho’s set yet.
On Sunday the Pavilion was given over to Piney Gir. Not wanting to venture in between sets in case she makes us do cross stitch or dress up as a raccoon, we edge into a strange hinterland at the edge of the campsite, full of non-musical attractions, including craft demonstrations, a cycle powered entertainment system (sadly closed at the time) and a little hut where a frankly petrifying man attempted to draw us in for some lessons in “woooing” (sic) whilst scratchy easy listening played. We also get to see the large number of Truckers who like to hang out in the campsite all day, playing footie and strumming guitars: quite an expensive way to camp out with your mates, but each to their own. In search of another subset of Truckers, some children explain that the playbus is fun, but would be better if it drove around, and that Truck is a good festival because they “saw a tractor”.
We return in time for Bordervillle, who are excellently dressed as if they’ve come from a time travelling wedding, except Joe Swarbrick who looks like a boy band Edward Scissorhands. Dead Kids should be watching this outstanding set – this is how you do pastiche and genre melding. In some ways it’s a parody of 70s pomp bands like Queen, and Broadway musicals, but it’s also a celebration of what can be great about those things, presented with imagination and a well-rehearsed flow. The sort of arch and theatrical act that makes you want to describe them like a Victorian playbill: “A vaudevillian confection of sonorous majesty” it is, then.
Luke Smith’s set is delayed because of generator problems. Doesn’t matter, we’re happy just to stand and listen to him talk, seeing as he’s the most erudite and charming man at the festival. The music might well be somewhat derriere garde, stemming from music hall ditties and 70s MOR, but as an extension of Luke’s chummy personality it works perfectly. Nobody else here would pen a tune like “You’ll Never Stop People Being Gits”, ridicule their bassist, take the piss out of audience singalongs, and still come out looking like the nicest man in town.
We’ve always admired KTB, but never really been that excited by her. Good, therefore, to see her as part of the excellent folk quartet Little Sister, doling out melismatic harmonies, acoustic tapestries and hot Appalachian fiddle licks. They somehow manage to get some of the audience doing forward rolls round the field, which is no mean feat when we’re this tired.
Les Clochards are sadly not mentioned in the programme, and misadvertised outside the Pub Tent, so it’s not surprising they start playing to a mere scattering of listeners. Their tasty Gallic café indie sound soon draws in passers by, however, because nobody could resist that mix of syrupy vocal, French accordion and fluid bass. Also, that’s Peter Momtchiloff from Talulah Gosh and Heavenly on guitar, should you have your I Spy Book Of Jangle Pop on you.
“Come and see The Nuns tomorrow”, says a flier tout on Saturday. Your smug reviewer answers, “OK, as long as they’re an all female tribute to The Monks”. “Yes,” she replies, “yes they are.” Put us in our place, didn’t it? If you don’t know who The Monks are, you’re stupid. They are one of the finest alternative rock bands, and quite possibly the first. They started in Germany in the early 60s in an attempt to create an anti-matter Beatles, and they’ve influenced approximately everyone who’s any good, ever. They’re the only band better than The Fall, according to Mark E Smith, which is unprecedented praise. The Nuns’ set is good, but doesn’t quite capture the full distorted grandeur of the originals. A celebration of, rather than an alternative to, The Monks.
Neil Halstead, from Slowdive, feels somewhat guilty about playing acoustic guitar on the shoegazing bill. “I don’t even have a pedal,” he admits. No matter as he performs lovely smoky wisps of song that keeps the small crowd happy. Nothing onstage to explain why he’s held in reverence, perhaps, but something rather lovely all the same.
Scotland’s Camera Obscura are so twee and melodic, we imagine that Swiss Concrete are backstage with their diary open ready to catch them. At times they’re like The Sundays, but more twee, or like The Cowboy Junkies, but more twee. They’re good, but they’re really twee. There’s no synonym for “twee” so we’d better stop now.
Ulrich Schnauss fills the barn with delicious vox humana keyboard washes and synth squiggles, which are underpinned by drum parts, until he sounds like a cross between Klaus Schulze and 808 State. The trouble is that the beats sound kind of tired, especially in the Barn’s reverb, and it may have been better to let the drones do the talking.
Saturday, 18 April 2009
Charlbury Pt 2
CHARLBURY RIVERSIDE 2008
SUNDAY
Strolling past a random tent we find wizard-bearded Jeremy Hughes picking out some bucolic instrumentals on his guitar. He’s not officially part of the lineup, but frankly he’s better than at least half of the stuff we saw yesterday, and five minutes in his company is five minutes well spent. Plus you can’t deny he looks the part. It’s a neat start to a far more satisfying day of music; plus the sun stays out. It’s not the sort of thing we’d normally do, but permit us to quote a poem, in full:
The music comes and goes on the wind,
Comes and goes on the brain.
This was Thom Gunn’s take on Jefferson Airplane, and it could easily refer to The Tim May Band’s set on the main stage Their lilting folky AOR is expertly controlled and performed with some panache, but ultimately proves too polite to make much impression on us, even whilst we have to give them credit for their chops. The lyric “Nice to meet you, I must be going”, however, reminds us painfully of Phil Collins, so they blow it at the last hurdle.
I suppose it’s unhealthy prejudice, but forgive us for thinking that Tamara Parsons-Baker was going to be chortling jodhpurred lass singing nasal, plummy songs about palomino geldings. Imagine our surprise in being confronted with a beautifully clear voice that trickles through the air like a limpid stream above some subtle guitar. The first name that springs to mind is Laima Bite, even though some of the wispy Global Traveller lyrics remind us more of Jessica Goyder. There’s a slight danger of the featherlight tunes getting lost in the breeze, but this is still a great little start to the Second Stage’s day.
Vultures quickly ramp up the tempo with a series of early 60s pop nuggets that have approximately one riff and about 5 lyrics between them. This is not a criticism, in case you were concerned, and it’s like early Kinks played with Arctic Monkeys bounce and insouciance. There’s something about the way the drummer innocently stabs at the snare like it’s 1963 rather than whacking round the toms like it’s 1975 that puts a huge spring in our step.
The farcically named Bommerillo would have to do a lot to kill our mood, and their generic country rock is well turned and cheery even as it’s forgettable. On a Truck stage this wouldn’t last five minutes, but for now it’ll serve. A charming Californian bluegrass banjo player pours us a glass of homebrew and explains that US folk songs are exactly the same as English folksongs, “except at the end they hang the fucker”. Goodbye moral ambiguity. It turns out that Americans wanted simple endings long before Hollywood arrived.
We chat to Banjo Boy quite happily during Bourbon Roses’ set, as their straight up blues has little to offer, beyond some really rather decent harp playing (you know which sort of harp, don’t make me come down there). Once again, dubious non-native accents seem to be pretty common here on the Second Stage – we wonder if American folk musicians try to pretend that they’re Cornish…or whether we should "hang the fucker"
“Tell me, Captain Strange, won’t you be my lover?”. This next band might have taken their name from “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper”, one of our favourite camp SciFi disco romps (believe me, we’ve got a list), but they haven’t quite captured the fun with their sax-flecked ska-tinged cabaret rock. It’s quite like The Drugsquad with half the band missing, and maybe some fleshing out of the sound could reap dividends.The spirit is there, but most of the music isn’t.
We’re not 100% convinced by Stuart Turner’s growly voice – remember, we saw Mephisto Grande right here just 24 hours ago – but his chugging rockabilly guitar, replete with slapback sound, is a cracker. Banjo Boy offers Seasick Steve as a reference point, which can hardly be sneezed at – we certainly respect Stuart’s ability to lock into a groove and let his rhythms do the talking.
Toby is “the hottest new talent to come out of Oxford this year,” according to the MC. Never heard of him, we must admit. We do love to discover other pockets of music fan beyond our immediate East Oxford Mafia circle, but in this case they’re welcome to keep Toby. The boy can sing, we’ll give him that, but his dull slightly latin songs recall Ben Harper at his weediest, and even Jack Johnson (anecdote: a couple of years ago we overheard two teenage girls in a record shop excitedly discussing their purchase of the Jack Johnson album; we thought they meant the Miles Davis LP of the same name, and were on the brink of deciding that the young weren’t complete idiots, until we discovered he was just some strumming fucker). Toby’s music is accomplished, but only the way that building a model of Minas Tirith from lolly sticks is: accomplished, but pointless and faintly embarrassing. For a performer who’s not yet old enough to visit the beer tent, he has plenty of talent, but at the moment it is being squandered.
We should have watched Gunbunny instead, who seem to have improved roughly tenfold, if the brief snatch of their set we caught was indicative. Seriously tight and meaty grunge, it sounds like all of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff played at once. Do people still call this The Eynsham Sound?Hang on, did they ever call it The Eynsham Sound outside of our tiny mind?
Chantelle Pike has all sorts of elisions and vocal trills in her arsenal, but never pushes them too far, like certain R n B divas we could mention (at least we would if we could tell which one was which). Maybe her songs aren’t all winners, but “Save Me” for one puts us happily in mind of Juliet Turner, and she deserves her high billing.
Before the main stage home stretch we pop in on Deviant Amps, whose cheeky monkey zydeco pop is 50% The Ralfe Band, and 50% a bloody big mess. Good fun, though, and the Klub Kak contingent are dancing in force, which is entertainment in itself.
With their theatrical pomp, natural sense of drama and Woody’s intricate keys, Borderville burst onto the stage like a cross between ELP and Alvin Stardust. We’ll be frank, we have seen better sets from them, but full marks for the audacity of playing a lachrymose “Send In The Clowns” to an audience who were expecting to leap about to The (cancelled) Moneyshots…and then following it up with some Leonard Cohen. So, not up to their own high standard, but still light years ahead of most of the lineup.
It’s left to Witches to wrap up proceedings. At first we thought they’d blown it, the opening two numbers sounding rather like empty stadium bombast, but thankfully they soon settled into their dark, brooding mariachi menace; in fact they build to quite some heights of intensity, Dave at one point hopping round the stage waving some red maracas, looking for all the world like an air traffic controller who’s busting for the loo. “In The Chaos Of A Friday Night” is a jet black lump of insidious passion, which is balanced by a harpsichord led tune that comes off like a baroque consort playing 80s Tangerine Dream, and over it all Benek’s trumpet lines arc poetically. There aren’t many local bands who could take lineup changes in their stride like this and still keep soaring onwards.
And with that, it’s off to the station to get the train (except we find a lift on the way, woohoo!), satisfied with another Charlbury. We can’t pretend the music was as good as last year, and as noted The Beard Museum’s input was much mourned, but still we appreciate the enormous effort that has gone into creating a free weekend of entertainment, just for us. And, criticisms aside, we’d far rather be here for nowt than in Wakestock for £100+. We’ll be there in 2009, maybe we’ll bump into some of you; watch out for Banjo Boy’s homebrew, though, it’s a bit cheeky.
SUNDAY
Strolling past a random tent we find wizard-bearded Jeremy Hughes picking out some bucolic instrumentals on his guitar. He’s not officially part of the lineup, but frankly he’s better than at least half of the stuff we saw yesterday, and five minutes in his company is five minutes well spent. Plus you can’t deny he looks the part. It’s a neat start to a far more satisfying day of music; plus the sun stays out. It’s not the sort of thing we’d normally do, but permit us to quote a poem, in full:
The music comes and goes on the wind,
Comes and goes on the brain.
This was Thom Gunn’s take on Jefferson Airplane, and it could easily refer to The Tim May Band’s set on the main stage Their lilting folky AOR is expertly controlled and performed with some panache, but ultimately proves too polite to make much impression on us, even whilst we have to give them credit for their chops. The lyric “Nice to meet you, I must be going”, however, reminds us painfully of Phil Collins, so they blow it at the last hurdle.
I suppose it’s unhealthy prejudice, but forgive us for thinking that Tamara Parsons-Baker was going to be chortling jodhpurred lass singing nasal, plummy songs about palomino geldings. Imagine our surprise in being confronted with a beautifully clear voice that trickles through the air like a limpid stream above some subtle guitar. The first name that springs to mind is Laima Bite, even though some of the wispy Global Traveller lyrics remind us more of Jessica Goyder. There’s a slight danger of the featherlight tunes getting lost in the breeze, but this is still a great little start to the Second Stage’s day.
Vultures quickly ramp up the tempo with a series of early 60s pop nuggets that have approximately one riff and about 5 lyrics between them. This is not a criticism, in case you were concerned, and it’s like early Kinks played with Arctic Monkeys bounce and insouciance. There’s something about the way the drummer innocently stabs at the snare like it’s 1963 rather than whacking round the toms like it’s 1975 that puts a huge spring in our step.
The farcically named Bommerillo would have to do a lot to kill our mood, and their generic country rock is well turned and cheery even as it’s forgettable. On a Truck stage this wouldn’t last five minutes, but for now it’ll serve. A charming Californian bluegrass banjo player pours us a glass of homebrew and explains that US folk songs are exactly the same as English folksongs, “except at the end they hang the fucker”. Goodbye moral ambiguity. It turns out that Americans wanted simple endings long before Hollywood arrived.
We chat to Banjo Boy quite happily during Bourbon Roses’ set, as their straight up blues has little to offer, beyond some really rather decent harp playing (you know which sort of harp, don’t make me come down there). Once again, dubious non-native accents seem to be pretty common here on the Second Stage – we wonder if American folk musicians try to pretend that they’re Cornish…or whether we should "hang the fucker"
“Tell me, Captain Strange, won’t you be my lover?”. This next band might have taken their name from “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper”, one of our favourite camp SciFi disco romps (believe me, we’ve got a list), but they haven’t quite captured the fun with their sax-flecked ska-tinged cabaret rock. It’s quite like The Drugsquad with half the band missing, and maybe some fleshing out of the sound could reap dividends.The spirit is there, but most of the music isn’t.
We’re not 100% convinced by Stuart Turner’s growly voice – remember, we saw Mephisto Grande right here just 24 hours ago – but his chugging rockabilly guitar, replete with slapback sound, is a cracker. Banjo Boy offers Seasick Steve as a reference point, which can hardly be sneezed at – we certainly respect Stuart’s ability to lock into a groove and let his rhythms do the talking.
Toby is “the hottest new talent to come out of Oxford this year,” according to the MC. Never heard of him, we must admit. We do love to discover other pockets of music fan beyond our immediate East Oxford Mafia circle, but in this case they’re welcome to keep Toby. The boy can sing, we’ll give him that, but his dull slightly latin songs recall Ben Harper at his weediest, and even Jack Johnson (anecdote: a couple of years ago we overheard two teenage girls in a record shop excitedly discussing their purchase of the Jack Johnson album; we thought they meant the Miles Davis LP of the same name, and were on the brink of deciding that the young weren’t complete idiots, until we discovered he was just some strumming fucker). Toby’s music is accomplished, but only the way that building a model of Minas Tirith from lolly sticks is: accomplished, but pointless and faintly embarrassing. For a performer who’s not yet old enough to visit the beer tent, he has plenty of talent, but at the moment it is being squandered.
We should have watched Gunbunny instead, who seem to have improved roughly tenfold, if the brief snatch of their set we caught was indicative. Seriously tight and meaty grunge, it sounds like all of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff played at once. Do people still call this The Eynsham Sound?Hang on, did they ever call it The Eynsham Sound outside of our tiny mind?
Chantelle Pike has all sorts of elisions and vocal trills in her arsenal, but never pushes them too far, like certain R n B divas we could mention (at least we would if we could tell which one was which). Maybe her songs aren’t all winners, but “Save Me” for one puts us happily in mind of Juliet Turner, and she deserves her high billing.
Before the main stage home stretch we pop in on Deviant Amps, whose cheeky monkey zydeco pop is 50% The Ralfe Band, and 50% a bloody big mess. Good fun, though, and the Klub Kak contingent are dancing in force, which is entertainment in itself.
With their theatrical pomp, natural sense of drama and Woody’s intricate keys, Borderville burst onto the stage like a cross between ELP and Alvin Stardust. We’ll be frank, we have seen better sets from them, but full marks for the audacity of playing a lachrymose “Send In The Clowns” to an audience who were expecting to leap about to The (cancelled) Moneyshots…and then following it up with some Leonard Cohen. So, not up to their own high standard, but still light years ahead of most of the lineup.
It’s left to Witches to wrap up proceedings. At first we thought they’d blown it, the opening two numbers sounding rather like empty stadium bombast, but thankfully they soon settled into their dark, brooding mariachi menace; in fact they build to quite some heights of intensity, Dave at one point hopping round the stage waving some red maracas, looking for all the world like an air traffic controller who’s busting for the loo. “In The Chaos Of A Friday Night” is a jet black lump of insidious passion, which is balanced by a harpsichord led tune that comes off like a baroque consort playing 80s Tangerine Dream, and over it all Benek’s trumpet lines arc poetically. There aren’t many local bands who could take lineup changes in their stride like this and still keep soaring onwards.
And with that, it’s off to the station to get the train (except we find a lift on the way, woohoo!), satisfied with another Charlbury. We can’t pretend the music was as good as last year, and as noted The Beard Museum’s input was much mourned, but still we appreciate the enormous effort that has gone into creating a free weekend of entertainment, just for us. And, criticisms aside, we’d far rather be here for nowt than in Wakestock for £100+. We’ll be there in 2009, maybe we’ll bump into some of you; watch out for Banjo Boy’s homebrew, though, it’s a bit cheeky.
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