Truck 2012 Friday Pt 2

We pop in on Delta Alaska, who are like nothing else than a blythe AOR version of Oxford’s Scrappy-Doo pop wastrels, Secret Rivals, and end up with Josh Kumra, a young man with a surprisingly eloquent vocal delivery, who isn’t above showboating or swiping a tune form MGMT to keep the party going.  Not a chart-topping act we expected to get excited about, but Josh is a talented, professional performer who deserves to capitalise on his sudden success.

Oh, and, speaking of which.  Late on Saturday the staff at the Rapture merchandise tent tell us they’ve not sold a Fixers album all day.  Inconceivable when this outstanding, gorgeous record has only recently been released after a long delay?  If you saw their set, then no.  A hundred times, no. As if to prove our claim that past glories can never be relived, Fixers contrast last year’s joyous, epochal Truck performance with what can most generously be described as a wonky drunken stumble somewhere in the rough vicinity of their songs.  Jack Goldstein spends some while slurring into the mike about how he isn’t sure if this is a “festival” or a “festiVAL!”  The set is a hiLARious disasTER, put the random emphases where you like, Jack, old son.

Over in the Barn, Spring Offensive are snatching Fixers’ local hero crown, sharpening up the angular points, and dousing it in pop sugar.    They have a knack of writing vast music with the drastic emotional pull of a Hollywood blockbuster, and making them sound subtly intimate.  It’s a trick Clock Opera could do with learning, as their set is far from bad, building heart-wrenching songs on slightly fidgety rhythms, but it becomes two dimensional and predictable long before we wander away.

Jamalot is a small tent hosting DJs and a few live acts – it also has a couple of very comfy sofas, which we make grateful use of once or twice over the course of the festival – although it’s hard to know who’s on when.  We’re not sure if this is because a dance tent is on the periphery of the organisers’ concerns, or because the sort of people who book a stage like that don’t quite get round to arranging the acts before the programme copy deadline.  Judging by the timetable outside the tent, which is so randomly inaccurate it was probably created by John Cage with the I Ching and a box of twelve inches, we lean towards the latter interpretation.  We do, however, manage to see funky jazz outfit The Heavy Dexters, over an hour later than advertised.  Like the Disco Pimps, they could do with adding some proper filth to their sound, but their saxophonist does have lovely, conversational phrasing, and they also do a pretty cheeky arrangement of “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, so it’s a close but clear victory at the final count.

The very second their set is finished, beatboxer Pieman takes over.  It takes us a few bars to realise the chunky beats are coming from a man’s mouth, not the DJ.  Of course, as with most beatboxing, turntablism - or arguably live hip hop in general - the show is a showcase of techniques and effects rather than a cohesive artistic statement, but in the face of someone who can make a righteously flatulent dubstep bass like that with their lips, our criticisms evaporate.  Top stuff.

Nipping back to the Barn we hear what sounds like a cross between metal and techstep drum ‘n’ bass from Turbowolf.  Then the track stops and we think we must have imagined it.  Regardless, the rest of their greasy cartoon heavy rock is infectious fun.

Tim Minchin isn’t funny, and The Guillemots don’t really seem to be delivering, probably due to Fyfe Dangerfield’s throat infection, so we return to the Barn for Future Of The Left.  We think we’re scribbling lots of insightful notes about their angular hardcore, but in the morning we discover we’ve just written “Grrrrrr” for twelve pages.  Two things are sure: a) when they add a buzzing, two finger keyboard to their sound, it’s like a hideously brilliant cross between Bis and Atari Teenage Riot, b) when they finish with an unfeasibly distorted, disgusted and dystopian Mclusky track, it literally recalibrates our ears so that we can’t listen to Mystery Jets.  Seriously, don’t recall any of it.  We think they were probably harmless and vapid and bouncy and perfectly acceptable, but we have no real memory of doing anything whilst they’re on except replaying the preceding ten minutes in our minds. 

Sing it.

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 2

The Rockingbirds, over on the Clash Stage, prove you don’t need to have a spurious movement and ugly stage sets to be exciting, they simply bash out vintage rock with country flourishes with self-effacing charm and leave everyone happy. See, sometimes that’s all you need, kids: some good music.

Anyone missing the surprising absence of Luke Smith from the lineup this year could have done worse than dropping in on wry pianist Matt Winkworth. Like Smith he has a relaxed sense of humour and a deft way with the ivories, but there is a glitzy, cabaret heart at the centre of Winkworth’s music, every tune leaving a waft of greasepaint and mildewed curtain velvet. Standout is “Elixir Of Youth”, a song about wanting to die that is made impossibly tragic by the jaunty old Joanna underneath it.

Wild Swim open their set with a proto-drum ‘n’ bass rhythm topped with a light operatic tenor. It could be the lost theme for Italia 90. Later they sound like Spandau Ballet might have, if they’d discovered a copy of Amnesiac in a time portal. All of which sounds slightly demeaning, but we are impressed with this young band, who may have grasped more than they can quite deal with as yet, but who look as though they have the potential to develop along exciting lines.

We choose to listen to Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou from outside the Clash tent. We’re quite partial to their winsome folk music, but can’t stand the sight of them gazing longingly into each other’s eyes, like a mixture between A Mighty Wind’s Mitch & Mickey and an 80’s Love Is... cartoon. Something tells us that if this act breaks up, it won’t be because of “artistic differences”...

We return to the Blessing Force hootenanny to hear a keyboard line that sounds like a medieval recorder part, putting us immediately in mind of Danish genius/madman Goodiepal. It turns out that this is the pinnacle of Jonquil’s set, but it’s all still good, taking ersatz 80 pop soul and creating new shapes form it in a way that must make Solid Gold Dragons weep with envy.

The fugu fish is apparently delicious, but in all but the most skilled hands it is a deadly poison. Sounds like the bagpipes and the djembe to us. We only hear small amount of The Geees’ pedestrian world-fusion jamming, but it’s a hideously painful experience.

There are only two ways to experience Thomas Truax’ home made instruments. Either watch him after a full 90 minute soundcheck in a high-end venue, where the subtleties of his Tom Waits songwriting can win out, or see him after no soundcheck, in a sweaty flurry of feedback and confusion that seems to capture part of his wired triple espresso New York charm. Today we have unexpected noises, guitar coming in at random levels, and songs lost in an Eno-ish dub. Wonderful.

You know that horrible Innocent Smoothies type trend, where packaging for allegedly healthy foods says “Look at me, I’m 100% natural, aren’t I lovely?”, so that now products can be as smug and enraging as their consumers? Well, Fixers should carry a label stating “this band is made entirely artificial components, and is bloody great”. Their set is mixture of fake Beach Boys keyboards, Ronettes vocals and Meatloaf tom flams, all tied to together with a catering sized delivery of delay. The effect is some of the most euphoric music we’ve ever witnessed, a whirlwind of sugary melody and psychedelic treatments, all of which is as inauthentic as Jack Goldstein’s California-Eynsham accent. Outstanding - and we’ve not even mentioned Jack’s vast tentacular beard, making him look like a Captain Birdseye from the Cthulhu mythos, or the endearingly over-excited exclamations between songs. A set for the annals, and vindication for a band some see as trendy Animal Collective copyists.

Slightly more refined local heroes, next, in the shape of Young Knives. And it’s a warm welcome back, as the set is far more enticing than last time we saw them live. They may not have got the wired maniacal electricity of their early sets, but they’ve moved through the safe, foursquare indie sound that typified gigs at the height of their fame. In fact, we swiftly remember all the things that we loved about them – although the sight of a middle aged mother, carrying her weeping toddler away from the stage, whilst singing along to “The Decision” says a lot about how time can cruelly catch up with you in this game. The House Of Lords, however, seems to be trying to cheat time, with a horrendous grebo haircut: is he living his life backwards, from chartered surveyor to petulant teenager? Any Carter USM covers likely on the next album?

Having missed Kris Drever earlier, it was pleasant to see him accompany Kildare singer, Heidi Talbot. Like delta blues, early minimalism and acid house, you don’t have to do much with Irish folk song to make us feel warm and fuzzy, but Heidi has a gorgeous papery whisper of a voice, that sounds as though it’s offering each song to you as personal indulgence, and when we open our eyes, thirty minutes has gone blissfully by.

The Long Insiders have turned the cabaret tent into a 50s burlesque show for the evening, which we mostly steer clear of, primarily because we don’t think we have the critical vocabulary to adequately review boobies, but we do catch some of the hosts’ opening set. Very good they are too, knocking out a fizzy rockabilly with stridently melodic female vocals...but you do suspect they go home every night and stick pins into an Imelda May voodoo doll.

Interesting Developments

Vaughan Williams is ace. That is all I have to say today. Ace.


FIXERS – IRON DEER DREAM 7” (Young & Lost)


Jack Goldstein from Fixers claims that he found the title “Iron Deer Dream” in a book about Sylvia Plath, was unable to discover what it might mean, and subsequently found he couldn’t locate the passage again. It’s not essential, but it helps to suspend your disbelief and imagine that a suicidal poet’s biog sent an esoteric message to the band, it chimes well with their self-professed spirituality, and it certainly goes with the single’s cover, a tye-die fractal Masonic mystery that inhabits that wonderful space between beautiful and truly hideous.

It’s also useful if you manage some other mental dislocations. It’s handy to forget Fixers’ clumsy involvement with Blessing Force, a movement nobody can actually define, except to the extent that Fixers think they’re not in it anymore, and it sort of helps to try not to think about the extent to which the single sounds like latter day Animal Collective. Because it does. A lot. Which is fine, because not only have the Collective made some wonderful records, but their sound was only a rough collage of borrowed tricks anyway. In actual fact, “Iron Deer Dream” is better than Animal Collective’s recent recordings, although probably not quite on a par with their best work. Finally, in your Fixers reception yoga meditation, endeavour to ignore the way the track fits in with the already stumbling Hypnagogic Pop movement. Because if you start thinking about any of these things, you’ll dismiss Fixers as a zeitgeist scavenging trend parasite, and fail to notice just how brilliant a band they are.

From the nagging organ that sounds like Steve Reich arranging “California Girls”, “Iron Deer Dream” is a lovely little song, and may be Oxford’s first glimpse of summer. In truth, it’s barely song at all, it’s a cycling fade-out from a half-recalled childhood radio broadcast (as the references to the Berlin Wall seem to confirm). Over and over the melodic fragments turn, and immersing yourself in the song feels simultaneously like riding a powerful swell of sound, and drifting safely in amniotic fluid. If you could surf in a hammock, “Iron Deer Dram” would be your soundtrack.

Ironically, the song actually has its own little outro, and to be frank it bows somewhat overly deferentially at the altar of the Beach Boys (and we say this as proper Wilson worshippers ourselves). Our other issue is that the vocals are slightly too yearning, and there seems to be too much energy going into expressing barely decipherable lyrics that don’t appear to mean much. Perhaps they’re casting a spell. We wouldn’t put it past them.

“Iron Deer Dream” is Fixers’ calling card, and a fine one it makes. However, glorious listening experience though it is, it actually adheres slightly too much to their own template, a template that live sets indicate they may already be growing out of. If absolutely pushed we shall admit that we prefer the B side, “Egyptn Aberration CULT”, a tip of the hat to Detroit techno legends Drexciya, who don’t get nearly enough recognition (slightly confusing tributes from Turner Prize nominees notwithstanding), that also reminds us of the wonderful Model 500. The crisp handclaps are just as hypnotic as “Iron Deer Dream”’s reverby melodies, and less woozily dizzying. It reminds us of that bit in The Bell Jar that says “went batshit at a rave to ‘Strings Of Life’”...or did we imagine that?

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.