Shift Key Personnel

Here's the latest Nightshift review and the latest Ocelot piece.  Might stop doing these soon - have to write another one later today, and I'm running out of ideas.  Also, not convinced anybody whatsoever reads it...in Oxford, anyhow.  Perhap they do in Salisbury, but that's not much use...although it does allow them to read music crit written in sentences.

Search enough charity shops and record fairs and sooner or later you’ll come across one of the LPs that John Betjeman made setting his music to lightly funky session jams.  They’re a lot of fun, and you certainly can’t imagine any poet laureate since following suit (although we’d be prepared to hand over good money for a soundclash between Carol Ann Duffy and Stephen “Tintin” Duffy), but in Oxford we don’t really need them, because we have The Relationships.  This quartet, that has just released their 4^th album, Phase, is centred round the clipped, poetic lyrics of East Oxford bard Richard Ramage, who could easily give Sir John a run for his (pre-decimal) money.

The words are not only masterfully controlled, they’re also fascinated by a Betjemanian period in Britain’s history; whilst most rockers see the mid-50s as the birth of cultural validity, Ramage sees it differently, wishing to retire to the decade in question if “Mullioned Sunshine Windows” is to believed.  If you want to understand contemporary culture, the band seem to say, you have to appreciate that complex moment where Victorian constructs met the post-war social contract, where domestic art struggled to find a character in that lacuna between Vorticism and The Beatles’ first LP.  Find me a lyricist who can drop references to antimacassars and Brian Jones with such elegance, and I’ll buy you a season pass for the Clapham omnibus.

But the band isn’t just about the librettist, the airy, summery indie music is played by some of the most technically adept, yet tastefully restrained players in the whole shire, and will please anyone with a penchant for Postcard Records, the Canterbury scene  and early R.E.M.  The Relationships: cheaper than a time machine, rockinger than a History BA.

  

NIGHTWORKERS/ THE GRACEFUL SLICKS, The Cellar, 12/4/14

The only bad thing about The Graceful Slicks' first number is that it has to finish.  Because, you see, not only does their work have an ahistorical simplicity and atavistic two chord punch that is less a collection of music, more a glimpse into the universal anima mundi, but they tend to fluff the endings up.  To some ears tonight’s set will be a generic string of psychedelic grooves and garage buzz that never seems to quite get as far as an actual song, whereas to others it will be a whirlwind of wordless howls and mysterious murmurs, a primitive Lascaux painting in sonic form, an ochre mammoth sketched in sludgy blues changes.   We fall in the latter camp, and especially love “Bulbul Tarang”, not so much a composition as a peaty aroma of sound, cut through with sheet aluminium slashes from the bowed guitar.  It’s timeless, transcendent and hypnotic.  But, you know, they could still do with fluffing up the endings a bit less.

A tune or two into their set, the headliners announce, “We’re not wankers from Brighton”.  Yes, we can see how you’d wish to clarify that, seeing as it can appear as like Nathan-Barley-On-Sea.  A few bars later, the tired mind decodes the stage drawl:  “We’re Nightworkers, from Brighton”.  And work they do, throwing themselves wildly into a set composed primarily of sweat and wildly waggled outdated haircuts.   The music leans towards classic rock with a laddish swagger and a lightly narcotic haze – think Black Rebel Motorcycle Club meets Cast – and is highly entertaining, even if it never reaches the ignition point the songs crave.  The vocals are strong, yet malleable enough to offer some variation, and the keys are excellent, finding unexpected space in the songs to fill with cheeky synth lines or vintage thriller Rhodes.  In fact, the whole band are very good, but we still find our attention wandering before the gig is over.  Nightworkers: they’re not wankers, not by any means, but they’re not our new favourite band, either.

The Spillage People

Got to be quick, the bath's running.   Since my last post I filled my iPod.  It's a full-fat maximum size one, too.  I'm all the way up to compilations in hard cases beginning with Q, in my loading.  I guess I'd need about 14 iPods to hold all my records.  I have a lot of records.  It doesn't make me a getter person, sadly.

THE GRACEFUL SLICKS/ THE HAWKHURST/ CHARMS AGAINST THE EVIL EYE, Klub Kakofanney, The Wheatsheaf, 7/9/12

There’s a sense of wonder about Charms Against The Evil Eye.  Not only are they named after a creepy exhibit in the Pitt Rivers – there must have already been a band called Shrunken Heads Are Bare Cool – but their lyrics, concerning topics such as interstellar dark matter and autumnal ambience, could have been swiped from The Boys’ Big Book Of Science and I-Spy The Undergrowth.  Spread a little wide-eyed, mild psychedelia over friendly three chord jaunts in the manner of Robyn Hitchcock – or even their chum Anton Barbeau – and the effect is winning in the extreme.  It’s great to see Matt Sewell, a strong writer who’s never quite delivered live, finally find a rhythm section that can make these songs breathe. Charming stuff, if you’ll forgive the pun.

The Hawkshurst aren’t charming.  They’re angry.  Angry, political and into danceable folk, in a mid-80s antagonistic hoedown style, unsure whether to neck some cider or start a riot.  They’re definitely at their best channelling their rage, Fleur Fatale’s warm yet strident vocals trading haranguing licks with John West’s pipes, somewhere between The Oysterband and Chumbawamba.  When they ease off the throttle, and start indulging in fraught, wordy ballads that sound like Counting Crows, we lose interest drastically.  Come on, guys, stay irate: why not tape a picture of the MP for Witney to the backs of your instruments?

The Graceful Slicks aren’t a band who look as though they notice politics. Or anything since 1968.  Their early gigs were good, but prone to slip into tired Brit-pop grooves or Black Rebel self-consciousness, but now they’ve uncovered the true elixir of sloppy psych garage in the spirit of Sky Saxon, The Velvet Underground, or The Morlocks, and are wonderful.  All their songs are identical, thrashing a multi-guitar groove relentlessly whilst vocals mutate from murmur to howl: they change instruments and mike duties after each track, but it always sounds the same.  It will always sound the same.  Life is a myth, space is an illusion, and time one livid final flame.  Until it’s time to get the bus home, anyway.

 

Heart Of Gloss

No time to chat, crit. kittens, I have to leave for Truck in 20 minutes.

THE GRACEFUL SLICKS – Demo

The Graceful Slicks amused a few people recently by asking Nightshift’s online community for an experienced tambourine player. You had to assume this was either a collective of such intricate musical complexity they had crafted challenging parts for hand percussion, or a bunch of skunked monkeys who had no idea. In truth, the demo is neither of these, it’s not the work of musicians striking out for new and adventurous sonic territories, but it does show a band with a strong vision, and a laudable control of their elementary resources.

The opener ushers us in quietly at a nice unhurried lope, all strummed guitar, shrugged drums and submerged vocals. The track has an untroubled, smiling demeanour and immediately brings to mind slackerdelic ne’er-do-wells The Brian Jonestown Massacre, without the paranoia or internecine warfare. It’s a simple but attractive ditty that could have been busked from the back of a VW van by a teenaged Evan Dando. It goes on for weeks, but never gets boring.

Track two is arguably even simpler and less dramatic, a sing-song seesaw of a tune that brings to mind Syd Barrett’s nursery rhyme efforts, such as “Terrapin”. Aside from a very slow build at the start, and an unnecessary guitar solo at the end, the song does nothing. It’s not hypnotic in a trance or kraut fashion, mind, just sort of static. Cryogenic rock, maybe. The lyrics are sheer guff, but are luckily barely audible, so we can hope fervently that the song doesn’t actually mostly consist of “water’s always cold”. The eerie lead guitar line ambles back and forth across the whole song like the harmonica in Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West soundtrack, much beloved of Fields Of The Nephilim and, of course, The Orb.

The last track (no titles provided – they’d probably rather name their tracks after different joss stick aromas) is the slowest yet, a Spiritualized indie hymnal effort that dribbles along as slowly as stewed prunes strained through a colander. Bafflingly, it’s very dull, where the other two tracks were immersive and endearing, even though they didn’t appear to do anything too different. Suddenly a pleasing miasma becomes a dreary pall.

We can’t solve the mystery, but it does show that The Graceful Slicks – do we adore or abhor that ridiculous pun? – are a band doesn’t quite have control of its palette yet, which is what you’d expect from a first, budget demo (and one without a dedicated tambourine operative at that), and yet they clearly have a strong idea of where they want to go, and the evidence suggests it’ll a pleasant place to follow them into. A good start, in short.

Apologies if this review isn’t up to scratch: we’ve tried everywhere to find a pencil sharpening technician to complete the team...