Cowley The Beast

A review of a pretty bad day out. Mind you, they're all bad days out now aren't they?


OX4, various venues, 9/10/10


Throughout the afternoon, passersby are enticed up to the doorway of Cafe Tarifa by the music the Oxford Folk Festival has booked, only to turn away after discovering the £5 entry fee, yet the vast majority of those who have spent twenty quid on an OX4 wristband don’t venture out to see anything until the sun has set. Somewhere in this paradox is the promoter’s eternal frustration, and the problem couched at the heart of OX4. You can go on all you like about “Oxford’s Creative Quarter” and musical diversity, but whilst this festival may superficially resemble The Punt, OX4 is more like a touring gig writ large: there are a handful of big acts (all from outside the county, if not the country), and the rest of the multifaceted day is like one long local support act that nobody goes to see. We visit the open mike at the new INevents space, to find the host begging for participants – it seems a musical community, like music itself, just can’t be forced.

But good music there is, and it’s OX4’s secret victory that all the best acts we see are homegrown. The Folk Festival stage is strong, with highlights from Bellowhead’s John Spiers, and Huffenpuff, a duo of accordion and soprano sax/flute, which blithely skips through the glade of musical history grabbing fragments of Breton, klezmer and jazz like so many falling blossoms. Hretha build intricate yet reserved instrumentals that are full of delicate mystery, and construct their arrangements with clockwork precision when most post-rockers rely on sketchy dynamics. Despite taking far longer to set up than one man with a keyboard has any right, Chad Valley make a quietly euphoric music that isn’t far from late 80s Scritti Politti or a sun-bleached Beloved, and once you’ve forgiven the fact that the vocal sounds like Tony Hadley with hiccoughs the set is strong.

Some days it feels as though every band in the world can be defined with reference to The Beach Boys. In that sense Fixers fall somewhere between the approaches of Animal Collective and The High Llamas, but more importantly they play the set of the day. The smooth, AM sound beneath the soaring falsetto serenades is as much Dennis Wilson as it is Brian, and intrigues those of us who feel that Surf’s Up is at least as good as Pet Sounds. The pastel-tinted songs are also dusted with mid-80s synth tones and Phil Spector drum patterns, yet manage to retain a cohesive and individual air.

Fixers are proof that music can be retro and still feel fresh, but the lesson has been lost on most of the larger acts. Everything Everything offer a stilted ersatz funk that could make Arthur Russell spin in his tragically early grave, and Glitches are the same but worse, a Wanky Goes To Hollywood melange of syn drums, stupid hair and ineffectual yelping. Jesus, we love the 80s and these two acts are making us sound like we write for Proper Music Pub Rock Weekly by their sheer lack of vision. Dog Is Dead are a tight band with some decent tunes, if you can battle past the fact they sound like Level 42, and Willy Mason is impressive in holding a large audience with just an acoustic and some slow paeans, but does remind us queasily of an unhoned Springsteen. More reference grabbing from Abe Vigoda, who make a passable swipe at Talking Heads artfunk and Devo japery without having the character to equal either.

The hipster homogeneity of the name acts, with influences stretching from Now 5 to Now 8, takes the edge off the event, but as with all art, the gems are there for the dedicated. Our final act is the excellent Mr Shaodow, for whom half the room sadly leaves within minutes, but who energises the remainder with pure expertise, originality and intelligence. As someone who has lived in London, China and Oxford, he could tell you that good musicians are united by hard graft and talent, not their postcode.

Inside Truck

And here's Sunday from Truck. Nothing more to add, I feel wierd today & I'm going to lie down.

Truck, Hill Farm, Steventon, 2010 Sunday

The Holy Orders are almost beyond criticism, because they came all the way from Leeds and they’re playing at 10.30 in the morning in a Barn that has a forceful smell of bovine faeces that even the Bisto kids couldn’t convincingly pretend to like, when they’d probably like to be lolling on the grass like most of the Truckers. Luckily they aren’t half bad, melding Mudhoney’s rock slur with something altogether less acceptable that’s more like Wyld Stallyns. It’s all rough hewn and unrefined, but undoubtedly enjoyable, especially “Paper, Scissors, Stone”, which is a budget At The Drive-In blast.

Some people have complained that there aren’t enough slots for local musicians at Truck, which is odd, because it’s never claimed to be primarily a local festival. It’s like criticising Kind Hearts & Coronets for not having enough car chases. As it is we enjoy stumbling across the odd smattering of Oxfordshire acts, and Sunday continues with a hat trick of strong scenesters. Minor Coles impress with some spicy indie, and are followed by an excellent offering from Phantom Theory, who play a drum and guitar set that hasn’t got an ounce of fat on it, and who marry spotless arrangements with full tilt rocking to cut directly to even the most leaden Sunday morning brains, and who live in a world made entirely of RIFF. Like Truck alumni Winnebago Deal shaved and spruced for a job interview, Phantom Theory have clearly spent long hard hours honing their music, but waste no time in cracking it out onstage. Mosh and go.

But even they are eclipsed in the Beathive where The Keyboard Choir are making music hand built by robots. It’s a simple proposition: a bunch of synths, music that is pitched roughly between Klaus Schulze and Luke Slater, and a fifth column of dancers dressed in woefully poor android costumes. Not only is it musically one of the best things we see all weekend, but Seb Reynolds alternately doing a gangly newborn foal dance and trying to fix broken machinery is officially funnier than anything in the cabaret tent, ever.

After a quick trip to the Butt’s ale stall (great beer, no queues, Truck 7 prices – why go anywhere else?), we drop in on The Horizontal Instrument. There’s a fair amount of electronic music on today, and some people would say that it isn’t proper music. Well this is. And it’s properly awful. What we see is like Motley Crue with all the fun excised and surgically replaced by disco. Yes, that unpleasant. We only lasted two songs, so maybe it got better; maybe the end credits of Eldorado were a psychedelic funk explosion, but you can forgive us for never having found out. Sucked like an Electrolux.

We cock half an ear to Dead Jerichos as we pass, who seem to be today’s Shaodow, retaining local fans and winning over newcomers in equal measure, but the temperature in the Market Stage is about 4000 degrees, so we walk on by to the Beat Hive again. There’s also some “proper music paranoia” about Miaoux Miaoux. There he is plucking a guitar, playing Korg and programming in drum machine beats live. It’s decent electro, but it would be better if we didn’t have to watch each track being painstakingly put together. All very commendable, but it’s a bit like watching a glass blowing demonstration when all you want is a pint.

Sometimes we wonder at the logic of which acts play the main stage, as it’s so much bigger than any of the others, but with a band like Flowers Of Hell there must never have been any question. Their music is vast in scale, torrents of miserablist strings tumbling over humming guitars to form a whirlpool where Mogwai meets Morricone. They even do a Plastic People Of The Universe cover, which has got to be worth points. Every little helps.

At points all of Islet play drums, and yet theirs is not an aggressive sound – it’s more Stomp than Shit & Shine, and the music is built more on a cheeky bounce than a pummelling thud. With slinky basslines and plenty of barely controlled yelping the set comes off like Stump quirking out at Notting Hill Carnival, and is almost obscenely enjoyable. Highlights are a ritualistic dub number, in which the band chants and clatters over chubby Jah Wobble bass, and the almost poppy moments when they become a special needs Foals. Plenty of acts try to marry experimental showboating with a cohesive rock sound, but most fail; this is the real thing.

In the wake of Fuck Buttons there’s a new breed of leftfield musicians who aren’t afraid of offering tribute to simple, hedonistic musical pleasures. Take Masks, who may have the Vivian Girls t-shirt and Explosions In The Sky guitar hazes, but who also aren’t wary of throwing a huge 808 bass drum pulse behind one of their spidery numbers. In truth, the show is slightly hesitant, and the two guitar lineup can’t quite make enough noise to complement the backing tracks: they play a piece that’s supposed to sound like Godspeed, but it’s more like an old walk-on tape for Saxon. Near the end of the set things come together, and suddenly they make a sombre yet insistent post-goth groove that could soundtrack some hip torture dungeon. This isn’t just music, this is S & M music.

Dog Is Dead exist at the other end of the spectrum, completely unashamed about their away day pop with its sunny sax breaks and bleached funk guitars that put them equidistant between Pigbag and Vampire Weekend. We hate to admit it, but we rather like this uptight, grinning mess of Haircut 100 and Steely Dan, and find ourselves singing the line, “this is a zoo, could you not feed the animals?” all afternoon. Pop music: it’s not just there for the nasty things in life.