Here we go, part 2. Saturday at Truck. I'm going to eat a pizza soon, and I'm going to have it with spinach leaves and hummus, and just maybe a pint of beer. Then tomorrow I'm going to see the glorious Stornoway (it does mean I'll have to see the rubbish Dreaming Spires, whom I avoided at Truck), and Sunday I'm going to see the Vorticist show at the tate befopre it closes. I can't see why you'd want to knwo this, but I've told been told this site isn't strictly a blog, so I thought I'd add some meaningless eprsonal info. I'm currently wearing dark blue briefs.
Were we slightly critical of the gentrification of Truck’s catering earlier? Opinions change on Saturday morning when we find we can get a proper coffee and some orange juice a few feet from the tent, which balances out the burger we had for dinner. Chav for supper and middle class for breakfast, that’s our motto! What’s that? Lunch? No time for it, we’d rather visit the Butts ale stall, still the non-musical highlight of Truck. Great service, great beer and it costs £2.80 a pint. Two pounds bastard eighty! It’s akin to a miracle. We’re also told by parents that it would be worth our while to borrow a child just to experience Roustabout Theatre’s My Secret Garden, a weird mixture of improvised theatre and archaeology. Well, maybe not, but we do drop in on Nick Cope, who is entertaining some pre-schoolers with his chirpy activity songs. “Stand on one leg”, “Let’s pretend we’re moles”. Not so much later we find ourselves in the presence of Alphabet Backwards, whose music is really the same thing, for those slightly older. “Imagine you’ve just passed your driving test”, “Pretend you just got off with another sixth former”. Unashamedly perky pop, delivered with unashamed chops, it’s pity you don’t see this mix more often. A 21st century Squeeze.
The more spacious Truck layout has enticed us to spend more time away from the main stages, and we are very impressed with some of the Cabaret Clandestino bookings. Ex-Oxonian Face0meter delivers his wordy alt folk with some charm. The obvious reference point is Jeffrey Lewis, though we prefer to think of him as a cross between Richard Stillgoe and Jasper Carrott. Musically it’s beyond sloppy, but as entertainment it’s gold. Hyper-folk performer James Bell doesn’t have the gig of his life, but has energy enough to get away with it. Storyteller Paul Askew also stumbles a few times, but has material to hide the cracks, a long piece about taking a gaggle of words to the botanical gardens before kidnapping a pronoun reminding us of a punk Richard Brautigan; poet George Chopping eclipses him, though, with a perfectly balanced mixture of sweet natured observation and steel-melting bile. And yes, just so the cosmic balance is restored, there’s some absolute rubbish too: The Oxford Imps do fourth rate Whose Line Is It Anyway? guff whilst acting like a punchably upbeat genetically engineered Partridge Family. The festival programme has a typo of “improve” for “improv” – we couldn’t think of better advice for them. Oh, and Mark Niel is just skin-crawlingly awful. He laments the fact that his hometown of Milton Keynes is a bad comic’s punchline – funny, without that comment we’d have no idea he had any notion of what a punchline was.
The main stage bookings are strangely underwhelming in the afternoon, but Two Fingers Of Firewater add some spice to proceedings, their widescreen country rock and well-groomed boogie harking back to Truck history. They make the transition from Charlbury to Truck without losing any punch.
Blessing Force is brilliant: not only is a lot of the music very good, but what is not good is hilarious. In the Last.FM tent on Saturday, we enjoyed being alternately entertained by the music and entertained by the sheer hideous hipster spectacle of things. Sealings fell into the former category. In the past, we’ve been unconvinced by this noisy drum machine backed duo: they weren’t doing much wrong, but it was more a souvenir of good music, than good music in its own right. This time, however, everything fell into place, as the intensity rose from a Jesus & Mary Chain drone to a Swans-inspired squall. Solid Gold Dragons, on the other hand, were possibly the worst thing to happen to us over the weekend – and that includes getting nearly vomited on by a toddler. Their plastic, stadium pop with light reggae inflections might be just about acceptable if the vocals weren’t so clod-hoppingly oafish, even whilst they tried to plumb cosmic realms of imagery. Imagine Big Audio Dynamite on an off night fronted by Bernard Matthews. No, wait, sometimes the trumpet made it more like a tired James lead by Derek Nimmo taking the piss out of Morrissey. No, wait, can we please stop thinking about this, forever?
Showing posts with label Face0meter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Face0meter. Show all posts
Friday, 2 September 2011
Saturday, 16 January 2010
Running Out Of Relevant Pun(t)s
More old Punt tales. 50ft Panda, who are sadly no more, were generally known as Soft Panda round these parts. Oh, how we laughed...
THE PUNT 2008, various venues
You can imagine Face0meter falling somewhat flat performing his twitchy caffeinated anti-folk to a crowd of weekend drinkers, but when he gets to rant and sing unamplified in a bookshop he instantly wins over all-comers. Abetted by the excellently named Dapper Swindler, Face0meter produces what sounds like frenzied Polish dance tunes with lyrics by Bob Dylan via Edward Lear, and shows an odd mixture of New York cool and slightly frightening effervescence: imagine Lawrence Ferlinghetti as an assistant scoutmaster. Faceometer’s vocals may not be very supple, but his way with language is dexterity itself.
Desmond Chancer (AKA Tomohawk from The Big Speakers, amongst other acts) leads his band The Long Memories in a smoky trawl through gutter life jazz ballads that instantly recall “Blue Valentine” era Tom Waits. The music is louche and endearing, with some excellent jazz sax solos, but sadly the vocals let everything down, tumbling into the songs with all the subtlety of a drunken Wellington boot. Perhaps this sort of thing just doesn’t work until we reach the wee hours.
Having hilariously heard a man at a bar ask for two pints of Confidence, and invented the genre Nu-Gazing (hard trance remixes of Chapterhouse), we find ourselves at the Purple Turtle for International Jetsetters who certainly aren’t short of “jaunty” and are far from lacking in “cheery”. Very occasionally the strong female vocal reminds us of Patti Smith in its declamations, but some of the rather average music has the consistency of damp pastry, which spoils the effect.
Cat Matador are far more successful at creating high octane indie rock, with plenty of chiming guitar and intriguing violin. Occasionally the mood got lost somewhere between “epic” and “introspective”, but the music definitely had force and character enough to keep the healthy crowd interested.
Over at the surprisingly pleasant Thirst Lodge Black Skies Burn have unlocked the Pandora’s Box labelled “Racket”. This is proper metal with huge white noise guitars and vocals that sound like an emasculated pig being sucked into a black hole. The whole shebang is polished and well-crafted, but we do wish that the drummer were working as hard the room-prowling vocalist, the rhythms never seemed to blast along as we’d hoped.
Non-Stop Tango sound like Talking Heads and King Crimson and Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and The Doors and Hawkwind and Bjork and The Fall and The Art Of Noise and lots of others. Not necessarily our opinion, but this is just a selection of comments we overheard in The Wheatsheaf as the set progressed, which goes some way to explaining how varied their sound is. Composed of Oxford’s free improv luminaries, Non-Stop Tango is really an experiment in taking groove-based music and destroying it from the inside, bombarding funky basslines with electronic drums, tinny keyboards and incomprehensible vocals. Not many people last the distance, but if they left confused we’ll call it a victory. The Punt needs bands like this. No scratch that, the world needs bands like this, there aren’t enough surprises left.
Sadly Alphabet Backwards isn’t just someone rewinding an episode of Sesame Street, but happily they are a pretty feisty pop concoction with some excellent fizzing keyboards and bouncy backbeats. Sadly the vocals let the side down with some clumsy pub rock intonations, but apparently the normal vocalist is off tonight, so we’ll give them a bye. Worth a second listen, we feel.
50ft Panda are Oxford music’s equivalent of a Belgian truffle: creamy and delicious, but too rich to want too much of. Imagine all your favourite heavy rock records distilled down to their essence, and that’s what this duo produce: nothing but firy drumming, the riff, and the volume (my God, the volume!) again and again and again. They really do it incredibly well, but, like another local duo that had two people making the noise of ten, Winnebago Deal, you wouldn’t want to listen to it for more than thirty minutes.
At this point the sight of the Cellar bouncer eating raw eggs made our beer filled stomach somewhat queasy so we stumbled for the bus. Clanky Robo Gob Jobs will have to wait for another time. We can only hope that any inquisitive local music virgins who got a Punt pass found something they loved to treasure in their memories…and we hope they found something they abhorred too, that’s what music should be all about.
THE PUNT 2008, various venues
You can imagine Face0meter falling somewhat flat performing his twitchy caffeinated anti-folk to a crowd of weekend drinkers, but when he gets to rant and sing unamplified in a bookshop he instantly wins over all-comers. Abetted by the excellently named Dapper Swindler, Face0meter produces what sounds like frenzied Polish dance tunes with lyrics by Bob Dylan via Edward Lear, and shows an odd mixture of New York cool and slightly frightening effervescence: imagine Lawrence Ferlinghetti as an assistant scoutmaster. Faceometer’s vocals may not be very supple, but his way with language is dexterity itself.
Desmond Chancer (AKA Tomohawk from The Big Speakers, amongst other acts) leads his band The Long Memories in a smoky trawl through gutter life jazz ballads that instantly recall “Blue Valentine” era Tom Waits. The music is louche and endearing, with some excellent jazz sax solos, but sadly the vocals let everything down, tumbling into the songs with all the subtlety of a drunken Wellington boot. Perhaps this sort of thing just doesn’t work until we reach the wee hours.
Having hilariously heard a man at a bar ask for two pints of Confidence, and invented the genre Nu-Gazing (hard trance remixes of Chapterhouse), we find ourselves at the Purple Turtle for International Jetsetters who certainly aren’t short of “jaunty” and are far from lacking in “cheery”. Very occasionally the strong female vocal reminds us of Patti Smith in its declamations, but some of the rather average music has the consistency of damp pastry, which spoils the effect.
Cat Matador are far more successful at creating high octane indie rock, with plenty of chiming guitar and intriguing violin. Occasionally the mood got lost somewhere between “epic” and “introspective”, but the music definitely had force and character enough to keep the healthy crowd interested.
Over at the surprisingly pleasant Thirst Lodge Black Skies Burn have unlocked the Pandora’s Box labelled “Racket”. This is proper metal with huge white noise guitars and vocals that sound like an emasculated pig being sucked into a black hole. The whole shebang is polished and well-crafted, but we do wish that the drummer were working as hard the room-prowling vocalist, the rhythms never seemed to blast along as we’d hoped.
Non-Stop Tango sound like Talking Heads and King Crimson and Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart and The Doors and Hawkwind and Bjork and The Fall and The Art Of Noise and lots of others. Not necessarily our opinion, but this is just a selection of comments we overheard in The Wheatsheaf as the set progressed, which goes some way to explaining how varied their sound is. Composed of Oxford’s free improv luminaries, Non-Stop Tango is really an experiment in taking groove-based music and destroying it from the inside, bombarding funky basslines with electronic drums, tinny keyboards and incomprehensible vocals. Not many people last the distance, but if they left confused we’ll call it a victory. The Punt needs bands like this. No scratch that, the world needs bands like this, there aren’t enough surprises left.
Sadly Alphabet Backwards isn’t just someone rewinding an episode of Sesame Street, but happily they are a pretty feisty pop concoction with some excellent fizzing keyboards and bouncy backbeats. Sadly the vocals let the side down with some clumsy pub rock intonations, but apparently the normal vocalist is off tonight, so we’ll give them a bye. Worth a second listen, we feel.
50ft Panda are Oxford music’s equivalent of a Belgian truffle: creamy and delicious, but too rich to want too much of. Imagine all your favourite heavy rock records distilled down to their essence, and that’s what this duo produce: nothing but firy drumming, the riff, and the volume (my God, the volume!) again and again and again. They really do it incredibly well, but, like another local duo that had two people making the noise of ten, Winnebago Deal, you wouldn’t want to listen to it for more than thirty minutes.
At this point the sight of the Cellar bouncer eating raw eggs made our beer filled stomach somewhat queasy so we stumbled for the bus. Clanky Robo Gob Jobs will have to wait for another time. We can only hope that any inquisitive local music virgins who got a Punt pass found something they loved to treasure in their memories…and we hope they found something they abhorred too, that’s what music should be all about.
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