Supple Be The Dye

Two reviews in this month's Nightshift, here's the first. In other news, I ordered a new turntable today, looking forward to some crisp vinyl sounds for the first time in a while.



COLOUREDS – ELASTIC EP (Download)


Diversity is a wonderful thing, of course, but we’re pretty sick of bands trying to cover a vast range of stylistic bases, as if they were investors diversifying their portfolios. It’s doubtless fun to be a polymath, but to be honest we’d prefer most musicians to stick to what they’re good at, and stop chasing public acceptance at every turn. After all, John Lee Hooker only needed three chords and an amplified boot to make some of the great twentieth century music. Over and over again.

No surprise, therefore, to find that we respect Coloureds. They have found a sound they are great at making, and are doggedly sticking with it, tonal development be damned. This EP consists of three separate tracks, but frankly they all sound like tiny variations on the single pulsating mutant anthem at the heart of all Coloureds tunes. As on previous releases, Elastic is a neat balance between the hulking and the intricate, chunky Duplo blocks of bass and gambolling percussion topped with jittering treble flecks and tiny vocal blips. It’s like an old Bitmap Brothers computer game remixed by a French house act with a taste for chubby disco grooves.

There are three additional remixes, that are decent enough, but in essence this EP should be filed under More Of The Same, with a cross-reference to Spazz Bounce Electro Euphoria. It’s a gorgeous record, and we hope Coloureds don’t go trying to catch the latest dancefloor fashion. A chameleon is wonderful beasts, but a blank-eyed alligator would crush its tricksy little body in unevolved saurian jaws in a micro-second. All hail the crocodile rock.

Annual Probe

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

Truck 2011 Saturday Pt 3

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

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

Raving Private Cyan

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


COLOUREDS – TOM HANKS EP (Download)


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

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

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

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

The War On Pteradactyl

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


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


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

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

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

Spires Like Us

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


V/A – SPIRES (download compilation)


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

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

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

Chat Lines

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

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


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

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

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

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