Don't Believe The Hypotheses!

Hypothesis: I actually think this review is a bit shit.  I stand by the opinion - two good bands, one which I should probably hate but actually have a lot of time for - but I don't think it's well written.  Never mind, an off-day is allowed.

31 HOURS/ ZURICH/ DAISY, Daisy Rodgers, Jericho, 23/3/18

Hypothesis: many performers portray characters, but some performers come to believe in them.  David Bowie donned theatrical masks, and Randy Newman’s vignettes are all voiced by different characters, but they were obvious artistic techniques, whereas Sun Ra really actually seemed to believe his interstellar back-story, and Anton Newcombe apparently doesn’t realise he’s talentless arse rather than rock saviour.  Although Daisy’s early recordings were strong, we were worried that their violent, obsessive imagery was proof of incipient stalkerism rather than a taste for macabre trappings.  Thankfully newer material veers away from this theme – and is, if anything, musically superior.  The new quartet is tight but light on its feet, decorating emo-pop tunes with mathy curlicues and post-rock textures.  There’s still a little darkness in the lyrics though: the new songs have more obvious hooks, but they hide plenty of barbs.

Hypothesis: you can love music, without being particularly knowledgeable about it.  We may have spent more of our life than we like to remember studying sleevenotes and sitting through support bands, but our experience is not necessarily deeper than someone whose record collection consists of Rubber Soul, the best of ELO and a Motown compilation strewn in a passenger seat footwell.  Similarly, although we can get everything Coldplay has to offer from elsewhere, they don’t deserve the abuse they get.  Zurich is another band that provides a handy, one-stop rock digest for the busy listener, squishing together a world of epically sad pop stretching from Joy Division to Maximo Park, via Doves’s dusky disco bombast.  Zurich might deal in broad strokes, big themes and barn door targets, but their arranging skill and melodic ear make them well worth the effort.

Hypothesis: prog has its plus points, but decent tunes isn’t one of them.  When 31 Hours starts up, with a web of impressive polyrhythms masking an anonymous composition, we’re inclined to agree.  However, it doesn’t take long for the set to reveal subtly catchy tunes hidden amongst ELP wigouts and late Floyd billows – we had David Sylvian jotted in our notebook before being treated to a one- Japan cover – and we realise 31 Hours has more in common with the carbonite-frozen pop of Glass Animals than anything Gong once wafted out of The Manor’s back door, with single “Castile” a window on a world where Gomez made Kid A.  Top tunes married to muso structure, in other words.  Hypothesis: even we aren’t right all the time.

Yellow Jack Swing

I just bought a ticket to this year's Audioscope festival in Oxford.  You should too.  Anyway, here's the last ever Ocelot article (from me, I mean, I presume it will carry on without me...although perhaps the pain will prove too much).

There are 6 members of Francis Pugh and the Whisky Singers.  None of them is called Francis Pugh, but they have been in various Oxfordshire bands of quite surprisingly varied styles over the years – you’ll quite probably have heard of some of them, but we won’t waste any time on the past, because the Whisky Singers don’t belong in the past...they belong in an eternal present where rousing folk tunes are sung in warm snugs, effortlessly emotional melodies are projected into the darkness outside, in defiance of bad times, misery and, you know, not being in an inn singing at the top of your lungs.

I’ve seen them play The Jericho Tavern, starting up acoustically in the downstairs bar, and leading listeners up the stairs.  In similarly inventive fashion, they’ve arranged folk pub crawls, where trundles down the roads of East Oxford are interspersed with waystations promising shots and shanties, pints and ballads.  There are some hints of early 70s Dylan about the band’s music, although they shy away from his more esoteric lyrical tangles, but any number of reference points can be drawn up...drawn up, and tossed away again, because any band that takes the best of train whistlin’ American song and melds it with unpretentious British folk traditions will always only be important in the moment, the precise second that the smoky tendrils of song drift out and surround you, the second your voice rises to sing along with songs you never heard before, yet somehow know.

Plus, they’ve got a cornet, that’s pretty cool.

YELLOW FEVER/ BIG TROPICS/ BE GOOD, Daisy Rodgers, Wheatsheaf 12/9/14

In a world that’s increasingly market-tested one of the great pleasures of small gigs is not knowing what to expect.  When Be Good take to the Daisy Rodgers stage, most often frequented by well-kempt indie poppers, we hadn’t predicted reverby late ‘50s balladry that sounds as if it should be about milkshake and eroticised motorbike crashes.  They deliver this post-doo wop very well, throwing in a little surf tremolo, some brash 80s colours and even a droplet of grunge slackness, and if it sometimes feels as though Marty McFly put the band together by nipping into his high school prom at ten year intervals, the effect is surprisingly cohesive: a few more gigs to settle the nerves, and another couple of tunes as strong as “I’d Have Told You Anything” and we could have a real contender.

A few years ago Big Tropics’ sound would have been an eyebrow-raiser too, but inexplicably in recent years the default setting for young bands in this town seems to have become sterilised, wipe-clean soul-pop in the vein of 5 Star and New Edition.  Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – we’ll take Debbie Gibson over Stevie Ray Vaughan any day – matters aren’t helped by bands like this who churn through up-beat tunes with dead-eyed resignation in place of gay abandon.   Whilst the gratuitous synth parts, straight from the 12” disco mix of the theme from CHiPs, go some way towards excusing the limply anonymous vocals, Big Tropics seem to have forgotten the golden rule of pop performance: always get high off your own supply.  We see a punter at the bar wearing white socks with trousers that are too short, which just about sums them up: it’s fun, it’s retro, but it doesn’t really fit together.

There are no shocks in Yellow Fever’s set.  They’ve become just as excellent a band as we knew they would be when we first saw them a few years ago, finding their teenage feet.  Again their sound, melding chiming hi-life guitar parts to A Certain Ratio style introspective indie-funk, has become more prevalent in the intervening years, but they manage to make the mixture smoother than many, by building it around a core of well-written tunes (indeed, a one-off cover of “Rip It Up And Start Again” fits snugly amongst their best tracks).  The sound has got heavier and denser in recent times, every jam block break counterbalanced by a crushing crescendo, but it’s an unforced charm, a sort of polite insouciance emanating from the stage that really proves how this band has grown in stature.  Like we say, character: it could be the most important thing your band will ever have. 

 

Quicksilver Medal

In one of the worst lyrics I've ever heard, John Lennon states, "a working class hero is something to be". I guess, but so is a lollipop lady, a rapist or an Iberian ribbed newt. He may as well have said, "a noun is a word that repesents a person, concept or thing". Anyway, here's an unrelated review.


THE WILD MERCURY SOUND/ DANCE A LA PLAGE/ LEWIS WATSON, Daisy Rodgers, Jericho, 24/2/12



Daisy Rodgers is doing something special. Every month their events, centred round the more accessible end of indie rock, are not only well-constructed and friendly, but encourage packed houses that must make musicians, customers and other promoters happy, surprised and murderously envious respectively. Tonight’s gig is no exception, a cohesive, amiable concert with a spectacular turnout, marred only by the typical Jericho curse of ceaselessly yabbering punters drowning out the quieter acts. So, we push to the front of the newly painted venue (now with the added vibe of a 1970s mental hospital), to hear Lewis Watson.

This young singer has apparently achieved over two million hits on YouTube. We admit to finding this slightly mystifying, but then again, we don’t quite see the attraction of Charlie’s finger appetite either. Lewis certainly has a very strong voice, with an impressive ability to phrase lines mellifluously, adding a little portamento at emotive moments. It’s a likable set, and impressively a Paolo Nutini cover fits snugly next to his own songs; on the down side, of course this means his songs sound like Paolo Nutini’s. Watson has a very significant talent, and we look forward to seeing him develop, but at the moment his music sounds too much like a Starbuck’s playlist to truly excite us. It’s early days, we could well be eating our words in no time.

Unlike Lewis, Dance A La Plage sound as though they’re fully developed already, with a supremely confident and veruca sock tight set of bouncy disco indie. This is a band that has clearly identified its sound, and worked hard to hone it in the live arena, with the strident vocals, the rubberised bass and the guitar-to-the-chin twiddles all inch perfect. Pity that it does exactly nothing for us, being not exactly bad, but aridly, sterilely forgettable. When the singer introduces an untitled track with the slip, “This one doesn’t have a song yet”, we conclude that old Freud knew a thing or two. Dance A La Plage clearly hit the spot for a number of people, but to us they’ll forever exist in the long dark Regional Battle Of The Bands Heat of the soul. Fair’s fair, they’d probably walk it.

A fizzing burst of guitar noise introduces The Wild Mercury Sound’s set, and whilst it’s hardly Merzbow, it sounds like pure energy after a polite evening. They play a full-blooded set mixing blues rock tall tales with emotive stadium paeans, and manage to pull off the all too rare trick of sounding enormous without simply turning the volume to the top, and this control allows the excellent, lightly yearning vocals space to soar. Perhaps the young, fresh-faced lads are a little clean cut to make this sort of emotional music work, and sometimes you want less Doogie Howser and more Howlin’ Wolf, but it’s nothing a decade or so of hard living and bad loving won’t cure. A rousing end to a decent night.

Daisy Bones (Of Dead Saints, Presumably)

I was looking over the posts yesterday, and the number of times I introduce a piece by noting how ill I feel is concerning. Today, just so you know, I feel fine. This gig did its best to alter that, of course...

RELIK/ COWBOY RACER/ BREATHING LIGHT/ BROWNIAN MOTION, Daisy Rodgers, Jericho, 7/5/11


“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it”.

Groucho’s words ring true as we leave the Jericho after as much of Relik as we can handle. Daisy Rodgers promotions have been an excellent addition to the Oxford scene for the past couple of years, running well thought out, friendly nights, with lots of character (consider the dubiously named Rodd Of Hotness game, which allows advance ticket buyers to vote for a cover version to be performed on the night). The nights are also incredible successes – whilst many promoters of unsigned bands are found hoping for a turnout in double figures, the only trouble Daisy Rodgers’ door staff has is working out whether they have time to nip to the loo at some point in the steady stream of customers. But, whilst we have only support for the Daisy experience, this particular gig was something of a damp squib.

The depressing thing for us about the last election was not necessarily that the result wasn’t what we had hoped for, but the fact that so many people didn’t bother to vote (let’s not even start discussions on the referendum). Staffordshire duo Brownian Motion evoke a similar feeling: their dramatic, rootsy flurries, pitched somewhere between Counting Crows and Sheryl Crow aren’t really for us, but they truly deserve a better reception than 95% of the Jericho gives them, not so much talking through their set, as howling and whooping like chimps on a rollercoaster. The odd, wistful Cowboy Junkies moment in Brownian Motion’s set are immediately lost in the sea of babble, which is a pity as this is their strongest element.

Breathing Light’s first number has a turn of the 90s, polished goth feel to it, the unhurried, melodic female vocals and lightly scuffed guitar and keyboards instantly bringing to mind Curve, Lush, or even the first Cranberries LP. They’re pretty good at it, but the second number reveals a stronger influence: Portishead. “I Remember” is pretty much “Sour Times” without the chorus, and their Hotness vote-winning cover is “Roads”. They do a decent enough job of aping the introspective Bristolians, and it certainly suits the pellucid vocals, but they don’t really have the gravitas in the rhythm section to pull it off, and the set works best when they bring in a brighter, neo-shoegaze sound that reminds us a little of Tsunami (the US ethereal pop band, not Mark Cobb’s local rockers). It’s a highly promising set from a band who could do with working out what their own voice sounds like.

Cowboy Racer is the new project of Salad’s Marijne Van Der Vlugt. There are some other, session muso types onstage, but it’s Marijne most people have come to see, and it is she whom we find endlessly infuriating. Why does she drop into husky whispers and kooky chirrups mid-song, whilst gesticulating oddly, is it supposed to be sexily kittenish? Why does she suddenly leap on the spot, wild-eyed like TV-AM’s Mad Lizzie, are we supposed to feel swept up in euphoria?

Van Der Vlugt has a pleasant voice, but it’s a bit too thin to keep the interest alive in songs that sound like a toned down Transvision Vamp with electronics from the Byker Grove incidental music library. “R U Receiving Me?” is the best track, with unabashed Tomorrow’s World keyboards and some robotic disco-Kraftrwerk vocals, but even this melding of Yello and Goldfrapp isn’t as convincing as it should be: like the rest of the set, it feels undercooked and presented with a whiff of desperation. It takes them three tries to get through set-closer “Yellow Horse”, even though it sounds like a seven year old improvising over a Megadrive game – again, how can that end up sounding boring? Of course, there are middle-aged men around the stage staring intently throughout and filming the gig for their archives – one guy even has a smart phone in either hand. The technology has changed since they used to watch Salad, but sadly the music is equally slight and unsatisfying.

Relik don’t do much for us, but they are at least generic, not enraging. Their big-boned songs seem designed for fists in the air rock solidarity, taking a blueprint from The Foo Fighters and adding a little bit of Placebo, and we suppose they manage it well enough, keeping the sizable crowd entertained. If you like blocky, unsubtle clomps that sound like The Stereophonics strained through a giant tissue, then Relik will probably do the trick. Also a good choice if you like the idea of gigs (you know, drinking lots of expensive beer, talking through the supports and then standing in a big huddle feeling the same uncomplex pleasure of togetherness), but tend to find concerts in Oxford a bit frightening or confusing. Actually, Relik are good band for people who find the Daily Star crossword frightening and confusing. As Groucho nearly said: A child of five could understand Relik; send someone to fetch a child of five.