Welcome Bakkie

Christmas is like sport.  I understand why people like it, but not why they like it THAT MUCH.

UTE/ LUCY LEAVE/ SLATE HEARTS, Idiot King, Cellar, 16/12/16

Sometimes, a band and a venue just click together.  We’ve seen Slate Hearts a number of times in 2016, but the two most immersive experiences are here at the Cellar, their dense slabs of grunge just seem to fit the low, oppressive room (and the engineer – we can’t see but imagine that Jimmy Evil, the resident Lord Fader, is nodding approvingly throughout).  With lackadaisical inter-song mumbling, the band gives the impression of being slapdash stoners, and two-thirds of them dress as if they spend their downtime wrastlin’ swine for nickels, but there’s proper pop nous evident in the songwriting.  Slate Hearts are a sonic Richard Serra sculpture: huge, monumental and weighty, but rather less rough-hewn than they at first appear.

Lucy Leave gigs are always exciting.  The band builds songs from snatches of vintage pop styles (psychedelia, garage, even reggae) and melodic micro-mantras, leaving plenty of room for improvisation, but without slipping into the clunky slide carousel of solos that the majority of jazz and psych falls back on.  It’s as if the band is waiting to see what will lift each song to ecstatic heights – a sudden clattering drum fill, a tickly “Eight Miles High” guitar scribble, an ultra-rubato vocal stretch.  This means that some tracks, and occasionally whole gigs, can go by without catching fire, but also means that moments of glory surprise every time.  Tonight it’s “40 Years”, kicking us down a Teardrop Explodes mudslide towards a krautrock skinny dip.

Ignoring a little acoustic session, Ute haven’t played a gig in Oxford for five years, and they still sound like Radiohead’s less bombastic songs dusted with hi-life and calypso guitar, whilst the drums stutter out an inventive dessicated funk and a proper fat rock bass knocks on the back door.  If the vocals perhaps sound over-squeezed, like they’re the last smear of toothpaste in the tube, Ute knock us sideways like never before.  Perhaps it’s the crammed room, the boozy Bakhtinian carnival atmosphere and the hilarious raffle that precedes the set that reduces us to grinning putty, but when the band run offstage during “An Innocent Tailor” and the crowd howls like pissed-up police sirens and a man in a medieval bascinet takes their place with a glitter cannon, we don’t know what’s going on any more, except that it’s good.  It’s very good.

Parka, Penned

This is almost certainly the first gig I've been to where the support acts are someone thanking funding agencies and a woman chopping veg.  Viva MAO!

KAGOULE, Idiot King, MAO, 19/8/16

Paul Hobson, director of Modern Art Oxford, is explaining in a pre-gig talk how pieces in the gallery’s 50^th anniversary celebrations are occasionally moved to create new contexts.  Fresh dialogues can indeed be created between artworks through adjacency, but sometimes transplanting a whole art form from one milieu to another can reduce it to the status of curio.  It takes a while to get over the impression that Kagoule, a young Nottingham grunge-inflected trio airlifted from a sticky-floored gig dungeon to the austere MAO basement space, are specimens to de studied, sprawling on a pin, especially immediately after a short yam-hacking performance piece by artist Nacheal Catnott warning of the dangers of cultural appropriation.   Then again, as a pop band on the grindcore charnel roster that is Earache Records, perhaps the band is used to looking out of kilter.

Perhaps it’s this cultural displacement, but the first couple of numbers pass us by, seeming to deflate Mudhoney’s dumb scuzzy zeppelins of marsh gas to create the sort of light, harmless balloons bounced around by Superchunk.  All very pleasant, but hardly masterpieces to be recalled at the gallery’s 100^th birthday.  Then, the paranoid eddy of a Sebadoh style repeated phrase catches our ear, the anti-mantra honing our attention on a band with a surprisingly subtle melodic sense.  The songs may sound simple, but Cai Burns’ guitar is fascinatingly fluid, seemingly always in transition, eliding notes and greasily sliding between chords – plus, he makes good use of that deserted warehouse chorus sound found in the space between new wave and goth.  His vocals also repay attention, at first sounding like a half-arsed sneer, but eventually revealing a delicate reedy tunefulness that we’re surprised to find recalls Par Wiksten from The Wannadies.  What truly lifts the band, though, are Lucy Hatter’s basslines, which capture a little of The Pixies’ dark enormity and a lot of Jah Wobble’s mecha-dub relentlessness.

Kagoule have their faults, they seem uncomfortable ending songs, and there’s an occasionally sticky lack of rhythmic fluency between passages, but there are lots of ideas and idiosyncratic pleasures to reward anyone prepared to give their grubby pop a close listen.  Looks like Paul Hobson had the right idea all along.

Yucatan, You Can Jive...

Note: please do not put the words Christmas Special onto your gig poster, unless something special is actually going to happen.  And wearing a hat doesn't count.

MAIIANS/ KID KIN/ THE CRISIS PROJECT, Idiot King, MAO, 1/11/14

There are times when good sounds aren’t the same as good music.  The Crisis Project, a man from Bristol with a rack of tech, certainly knows which buttons to punch and which pots to twist to produce a tasty stutter, lurch or glitch, continually derailing what might just be warm house tracks with inventive treatments a la Funkstorung, but sometimes you just want him to stop and think about structure for a moment.  The second tune promises hints of early Black Dog, but soon gets swamped by the tricks and twiddles, until it’s more like watching a hardware tutorial than a gig.  Make us feel as though you’re gifting us art, not as though you’re selling us Kaos pads.

Kid Kin is almost the opposite, setting up surprisingly simple rhythms and spicing them with cleanly elegant keyboard lines and swathes of ultra-fuzz guitar crescendos.  The average Kid Kin track sounds like Mogwai jamming on the tension cues from a mid-afternoon game show, which might have ended up an overbalanced mess if he weren’t so adept at arrangement, constructing solid melodic edifices before swamping them with a deluge of warm reverbed strumming.  Some moments are overly nice, perhaps, but even then we’re reminded of Angelo Badalamenti’s knack for studied kitsch (ironically, as Twin Peaks was projected behind Crisis Project, whereas Kid Kin gets the first 30 minutes of Labyrinth, which rather shoots down the soaring sonic beauty).

Maiians, with their sleek yet bouncy double-drummer synth instrumentals at first seem like an Oxford music throwback, melding The Evening sand Sunnyvale with scrambled bits of The Egg.  Even bashing away in a dark basement there’s a seductive smoothness to their music, taking the kick of funk, but cosmetically covering the sweat and airbrushing out the solos, in a manner that recalls disco genius Arthur Russell.  Oxford has never been short of the arch, the articulate and the impeccably measured – and we’re not just talking about music – but it’s refreshing to see a band that takes controlled eloquence and adds dancefloor nous.  By the end of an impressive set, our reference points have morphed: Maiians are Tortoise at their warmest crossed with the sort of post-samba outfit you always see perking up the runners half way along the London Marathon...which is far more satisfying than pressing the machines that make the nice noises, as it turns out.