Common People

I bought an early Simple Minds album today in the charity shop.  We will find out whether they were not shit before I'd heard of them, as some people claim - NB, it turned out not to be true for Genesis.

OH! COMMUNITY, DIVINE SCHISM, Common Ground, 7/5/23

Divine Schism’s Oh! Community all-dayers have been a regular highlight of Oxford’s post-lockdown music palette. By holding them in community-run spaces like the Common Ground coffee shop and art space they seem to attract people who might not explore classic dingy beer-dungeon venues, and today we see intrigued passers-by decide to step in, as well as some under-18s who can’t access most gigs. But, crucially, the bills have not been tempered or diluted to comfort the casual listener, and today’s line-up spans the delicate and the discordant, above a valley of the absurd.

Sensibly, the day starts with the approachable. Young singer Beth Pirrie has a lovely, unshowy voice and gives an excellent reading of a song by Corinne Bailey Rae (even though she can’t pronounce Corinne Bailey Rae). Green Hands are a pleasingly relaxed threepiece, recalling Wilco or Silver Jews at their least threatening, but The Bobo – with regular collaborator Kid Kin – are more memorable, their ethereal synthpop icily austere whilst being attractively melodic – imagine if the 3 ghosts who visited Scrooge had been the members of A-Ha.  

Suep deliver the sort of scrappy organ-led pep that has been played loud and tipsy in garages since 1963, and often remind us of old-school Truck favourites Fonda 500. They have a synth line that nicks to tune from ‘Love Will Tear us Apart’ which they put above a countryish lope, and some Bow Wow Wow buoyancy with a keyboard that sounds like a disappointed kitten. They merge into Garden Centre, sharing members, but with Max “King of Cats” Levy at the helm, giving them a more foscussed Monkees flavour (plus the best parasite shanty you’ll ever hear). Sinews, although having a hardcore underpinning and a taste for Bleach-era Nirvana, are fitting bedfellows with a surprising ear for a tune despite vocals delivered with the angry belch of a killer whale with a hangover.

The day really belongs to a pair of bands who are part high-concept performance art, part farcical prank...which is what all great pop is, ultimately. Dream Phone toss nasally pitch-shifted Auto-Tune vocals above infectious electro-punk à la Blectum From Blechdom, at times sounding like nightmare pier-end entertainers, Daniel Bedingfield & Orville. Shake Chain are more intense, and as the band begins Kate Mahoney is crawling agonisingly from the middle of the street outside, before delivering the second number from under a rug. When The Fall’s final line-up morphed into Imperial Wax, they had a vocalist conundrum: an MES impersonator would have been crass, but a standard rock singer leached some of the magic. Shake Chain sound like an alternate reality version of the group, where lean wiry post-punk is paired with a Diamanda Goulash of visceral howls and startling sobs.

The only way to follow that is with good tight bands. Ex-Void play sweet-minded college rock with a nod to Throwing Muses, or even Juliana Hatfield. They do a nice sprightly Arthur Russell cover, though they aren’t experts at mid-song gear changes. Holiday Ghosts splice in some classic rock ‘n’ roll chug driven forward by Gedgey hyperstrums, and are frankly excellent. Oh, and those kids we mentioned earlier? They got into the day, and went bananas for Shake Chain; there may be a future for mankind after all.

Crack, Class A

This was a wonderful event.  Divine Schism have been right at the top of their promoting game for about 18 months now, got to as many of their gigs as you can...they;re normally reasonably priced, too.

HYPERDAWN/ KID KIN/ THE BOBO, Divine Schism, The Library, 12/2/20

By 2030, middle-aged hipsters will complain about two things: the disappointing appearance of tattoos on sagging street food and craft brew bloated flesh, and why their beloved tapes now sound rubbish, the permanence of both having been ill-considered, in different ways.  Still, there’s an aesthetic in the sounds of tape degradation that one can appreciate, even as it spoils once cherished recordings.  For example, new Oxford artist The Bobo utilises layers of fuzzy, twisted samples of their own voice as virtual accompanists, in a fashion that recalls that odd pre-emptive ghost track that occurs on some worn cassettes.  These enticing vocal pile-ups are joined by effected synth stabs, strewn brightly like scrunched sweet wrappers.  Tonight’s performance is a little hesitant, and could do with a touch more variation, but is often excellent in obscuring epic pop behind a glitchy sonic miasma, much in the way that Jenny Hval might: one track sounds like the pale spectre of a Kosheen banger wandering lost in a barrage of field artillery, which is something we’re eager to revisit.

Kid Kin is back to solo performance after a brief hiatus, and, in swapping guitar for keyboards, they have made their music cleaner and crisper than ever, a spick-and-span contemporary version of the sort of tuneful clinical lushness you’d find as instrumental beds for non-trailer cinema ads and corporate videos circa 1992.  As such, this is glossy music for shiny CDs, not scuzzy tapes, from the tricksy Detroit drum programming to the grown-up, ironed-shirt keyboard curlicues (one selection of near-cheesy piano flourishes is high-end easy listening made ruggedly cool – Richard Clayderman, you da man!).  One track reminds us of Boards Of Canada, so perhaps the set would sound even better recorded to VHS and left in the attic for a decade or so.

Salford duo Hyperdawn smash the outmoded into the modern, their tables laden with tiny sleek keyboards and digital triggers, alongside two huge reel-to-reel tape players.  This wonderful set can be thunderously huge or timid and tiny, but from vast sad looped choirs that sound like 10CC’s “I’m Not In Love” sung by bone-tired analogue banshees, to creamy lopsided R’n’B croons, it never moves far from melancholic melody lines that are a delicate as the long tape loops wound around a handy mike stand.  “Plastic” introduces a home-made string instrument, and comes off like Tom Waits’ backing band having a crack at Cocteau Twins, and “The End Of The World” features frenetic mike rubbing that could be an attempt to isolate and capture a single strand of feedback for a sonic lepidopterist’s specimen drawer.  The response from the spellbound crowd is simply, wow!  Not to mention, flutter.

Big Cat Sensuality

I'm getting old, my attitudes to sex are changing.  Last birthday party, someone brought in a curvacious woman in a bikini...a flap on her stomach opened up and out poppped a cake.  Best birthday ever.

This gig took place the day of the US election results, in case you can't guess.

THREE TRAPPED TIGERS/ THE PHYSICS HOUSE BAND/ KID KIN, Club.The.Mammoth, O2, 9/11/16

Received opinion states that prog and math rock are introspective, self-justifying genres, with no relevance beyond their complex musical conventions.  Maybe so, but on a day in which the US electorate has made a decision with vast international ramifications, the inward gaze is a tempting option.  Kid Kin provides a warm, amniotic space for reflection, with stately keys and meditative fuzzy guitar.  Sometimes it’s feels a bit too pretty, but then he brings in a bass synth that sounds like the Matterhorn clearing its throat, and we are swept up again.  He’s adept at live looping too: make a mistake with that and you have to live with it for a fair while - a bit like voting in a president.

Received opinion states that contemporary prog is a rollercoaster music, that can only retain interest through continually switching direction.  Whilst The Physics House Band’s set might have so many time signatures that it could be some sort of muso version of bingo calling, they are also fantastic at setting the controls for full steam ahead.  They’ve got the intricate synths and the twiddly guitar phrases, but they aren’t afraid of chugging out a chunky groove that could almost be Rainbow.  Despite their nerdy name, it’s great to see that tricksiness can be wonderfully augmented by sweat, passion and Whistle Test hair.  They sell T-shirts after gig; given the comprehensive demo workout we’d just witnessed, they might have done better selling drumkits.

Received opinion states that prog is a backward facing genre, but Three Trapped Tigers show us what can be done when math rock is influenced by the sounds and structures of electronica.  They are a little like prog jesters Focus signed to Warp, and their music is very silly, although in a world containing the phrase President Trump, “silly” may need recalibrating.  Regardless, their maximalist monkey seizure music is firy, fun and surprisingly funky.  Received opinion says that technical performers like this can’t be joyous and exciting, but then again, received opinion had fifty quid on Clinton to win.

You Let One Off?

Quick review of an all-dayer a little while ago, featuring a previously unseen paragraph, cut from Nightshift because there wasn't room/ it was about a band from outside Oxon/ it was undbearably knowing.

ROYAL PARDON, MD, Bully, 19/9/15

It’s quite refreshing to find an all-dayer with no trappings.  The mysteriously named Royal Pardon (“Run that past one again, footman”) from newcomer MD Promotions is not tied to charity, advertising, label promotion or the dressing up box, it’s a just a 7 hour selection of local music in a big beer-fuelled room, which is more than enough justification for a day out.  Opener Kid Kin’s laptop is broken, so we get a truncated, on the hoof mini-set of his texturally savvy library music melodies.  As ever, the tenor of his De Wolfe electro is a delight, but this swiftly salvaged set is perhaps indicative of a bill of often great music and great ideas that don’t necessarily always make for great sets. 

31hours are a band for whom stylistic cohesion is probably not a major concern, though that’s not to say their eclectic prog pop isn’t immensely pleasing.  If there is a thematic anchor to their music it’s that high fret-twiddling jam block-thwacking Afroals sound, which is probably the least interesting element, outweighed by freeze-dried Glass Animals balladry and lush Pompeii era Floyd soundscapes.

Pipeline’s funky contemporary indie is a far simpler proposition, along the lines of The Wedding Present without the poetry and Senseless Things without the tequila.  The vocals are winningly effortless, and if the set of snappy tunes runs out of steam slightly before the finish line, this is a band that is maturing steadily.

We Have A Dutch Friend, by contrast, have a long way to go.  Their blueprint of sweet Sundays lilts punctuated by strident Chumabawamba folk harangues is viable enough, but the playing is messily fragmented and joylessly stilted, probably because they appear petrified almost to the point of collapsing; perhaps that lowlands connection could suggest something to settle the nerves. 

We’re used to Tiger Mendoza’s hip-hop airs and post-EDM power pop, but tonight perhaps the best moments are when angle-ground guitar thrashes are laid over asbestos beats in a manner recalling light industrial acts like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb.  Some of the transitions between tracks are not as fluid as they might be, and sometimes different compositional elements seems to jostle each other to get to the front of the mix, but overall this set shows that ian De Quadros is an inventive and varied producer.

A small break is presumably there to let the engineer grab some dinner and go and find more Cliff Richard records to play us, but we return after 40 minutes to find the atmosphere changed for the better.  Not only is the room thankfully a little busier, but the later sets have a more coherent flavour, none more so than Cosmosis whose affable acoustic roots rock (think Stone Temple Pilots busking Cure songs) is presented with such unforced bonhomie even those of us who have an anaphylactic reaction to wackiness get swept up in the japes.  The lead vocalist keeps looking shiftily from side to side, as if to check that they’re getting away with it, but the set proves that music doesn’t have to be serious to be worthwhile.

Duchess announce that this is their last gig, which is a pity as their playing is tighter than ever.  It’s low-key as valedictory sets go, but not short on energy, especially a bouncy “South Parade”.  As well as inheriting Paul Simon’s trick of slipping filched global drum patterns underneath eloquent pop (Rhythm Of The Saints is in evidence as much as the obvious Gracelands), we catch snatches of motif and melody that remind us of “Walk On The Wild Side”, “Down Under” and “I Started A Joke” - but mostly we pick up pure character and musical fluency.  They will be missed.

Word count limited.  Bel Esprit: Longpigs.  Gene.  Gomez.  Las.  Mansun.  Stone Roses.  Sum of parts?  Nope.  “Creep” cover?  Best not, eh.

The Scholars were an epic alt stadium act who may as well have been called The Copy Editors, and whom we didn’t care for.  Strangely, Zurich, the trio that evolved from them are rather excellent despite ostensibly dealing in the same sound.  A lot of the bombast and bluster has been excised  leaving elemental, muscular glory pop with flightpath vocal lines and dark disco rhythms, along the lines of a Cinemascope Half Rabbits.  Their music might not be complex or mysterious, but it snags the spirit and skewers the emotions, an unexpectedly direct and affecting conclusion to a highly enjoyable but not always entirely convincing event.

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.

When I Punt My Masterpiece

This morning I really like Sleaford Mods and Georg Philipp Telemann.

PUNT FESTIVAL, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Wheatsheaf/ White Rabbit/ Turl Street Kitchen, 14/5/14

The Punt is an endurance test of pop music and beer, it helps to line the stomach first.  We’ve just finished a big bowl of salt and carbs in a noodle bar, and are cracking open our fortune cookie, to find the legend “Soon one of your dreams will come true”.  Hey, that’s remarkably similar to the sign-off on our handy Punt guide, “may all your musical dreams come true”.  This looks to be a cosmically blessed event, quite possibly the greatest night in cultural history; and, look, we didn’t even get any sauce on our shirt.

The Purple Turtle brings us crashing back to mundane reality, starting 20 minutes late, whilst bits of the PA are hastily tinkered with.  This means we only get to see about 15 minutes of Hot Hooves – which is about 7 songs, of course.  Although he’ll doubtless hate us for saying so, their lead vocalist seems to be slowly morphing into Mac E Smith, drawling and chewing his way through acerbic songs over taut and unvarnished pub punk, and spending most of the space between tracks shouting about the venue’s lighting: plus can anyone really deliver lines like “attitude adjuster plan” and not sound a little bit MES?  Unlike their well-turned records, the songs in this set are almost smothered by their own energy, “This Disco” especially is reduced to a heavy thrum through which Pete Momtchiloff’s vocals barely penetrate.  Pop will erase itself, perhaps, but it sounds bloody good whilst it does so.

Down the alleyway at the Cellar, another slightly more mature band is showing the youngsters how it’s done, although in a quieter, more introspective fashion.  Only Trophy Cabinet amongst tonight’s acts would introduce a song called “Rant” and then drift away on an airy zephyr of dreamy “ba ba ba”s.  Their classic, refined indie owes a little to James, a smidgen to A House, and a lot to that band from 1986...oh, you know the ones...we can’t recall the name, but we can just visualise the exact shade of lilac vinyl their 7 inch came in.  Sometimes the band keeps everything a little too reined in, when a bit of pop fizz might enliven the show, but they can certainly write some cracking little tunes.

Whilst our Eastern dessert oracle thinks that our dreams are coming true, Aidan Canaday is possibly still asleep.  Looking surprisingly like comedian Tim Key he slurs somnambulistically through lyrics that rarely seem to develop beyond slackly repeated phrases.  This might be quite intriguing, in its way, but doesn’t fit well with the polite salon folk pop the rest of The Cooling Pearls is producing.  And the polite salon folk pop ain’t great.

Neon Violets are an object lesson in why live music in a decent venue is irreplaceable.  We’re just chatting to some old friends at the top of the Cellar’s stairway (The Punt acting like a sort of school reunion for aging pasty-faced scenesters), and we nearly don’t go down: “Sounds alright from here, it’ll only be a bit louder inside”.  Well, that’s where we were wrong, because in close proximity, what sounded like pleasingly chunky blues rock, a la Blue Cheer, becomes a glorious, immersive experience, huge drums ushering you down dark corridors of fuzzy guitar overtones.  The material is relatively simple, but the sound is deep enough to get lost in.  From the doorway, we’d never have dreamed it.

One downside to The Punt is all the bloody people turning up at venues, when we’re used to seeing local acts in a tiny knot of regular faces.  So, although we are in The White Rabbit whilst Salvation Bill is playing, all we can hear from the back of a truly packed bar are occasional bloopy drum machine loops, and tinny fragments of guitar and tremulous vocal.  It sounds as if someone is playing a Plaid remix of Radiohead on a small boombox.  This is actually quite a pleasing sound, but not precisely what Ollie Thomas was shooting for, we suspect.

Hannah Bruce is the only completely unknown name to us on this year’s bill, so we make the effort to watch the entirety of her set.  Having got a little lost in The Turl Street Kitchen, and ended up trying to enter a room in which people were having a quiet meeting (it might have been anything from a divorcees’ book club to the Botley Church Of Satan), we find the clean white space, and settle down on the stripped floorboards for some acoustic balladry – which feels odd as back in the day The Punt would always start with stuff like this, not irascible bald rockers moaning about gobos.  Bruce has some strong songs, but tends to mar them a little by delivering them in a world-weary, battle-scarred voice that droops in exhaustion at the end of phrases, and seems to have eradicated all vowels as excess baggage.  At times this works, the songs like melancholic spectres evaporating from the ramparts as the cock crows, but at other times it all feels kind of half-baked.  One track, in its recorded form, sounds like The Wu-Tang Clan, Hannah observes; forgive us for wishing that we’d heard that, and not another sombre strum.

During some embarrassing joke interviews in this year’s Eurovision broadcast, Graham Norton filled a bit of awkward dead air with the wry observation, “You know, there are 180 million people watching this”.  At 9.30 on Punt night this sort of happens in reverse: Lee Riley performs what is comfortably the most challenging, experimental set of the evening, and for 15 minutes he is the only performer onstage across all 5 venues.  This sort of thing should definitely be encouraged.  As he coaxes sheets of rich hum and harsh feedback from a guitar, people either rush for the exit with a grimace, or stand with their eyes closed looking beatific. This brief drone and noise set may have made some people’s dreams come true, and could feasibly haunt the nightmares of others for decades to come.

Without meaning to, we end up shuttling between the White Rabbit and The Turl Street Kitchen for the last 6 acts on our itinerary.  At the latter, Rawz is reminding us of the frustrating dilemma of live hip hop: you can’t have huge booming beats and clear, comprehensible lyrics simultaneously, not unless you have a lot of time and high end equipment.  So, the backing for this set, whilst nicely put together, is relegated to time-keeper not sonic womb, a tinny metronome and not much more.  This is only a minor concern, though, as it allows us to hear every syllable of Rawz’ relaxed but tightly controlled raps.  Previously we’d picked up some of MF Doom’s bug-eyed cut-up logic in the Rawz recording we’d heard, but tonight his delivery brings to mind the understated and thoughtfully clipped style of De La Soul circa Art Official Intelligence.  Seeing Jada Pearl, a talented singer whom we’ve not come across for absolutely years, guesting on one track was bonus, too.

Perhaps it was the fact that he followed Lee Riley, but Kid Kin’s set at The White Rabbit mostly dispenses with this occasionally overly pretty bedroom mood music style, and supplies some crisp, kicking electronica.  The first number is a slow whirlpool of piano chords and clear, forehead rapping drum machine patterns, that reminds us a little of Orbital’s “Belfast”, before some burnished bronze noise overwhelms everything.  The next piece takes a vintage Black Dog beat and adds tidy post-rock guitar, and the set continues in a strong and varied vein.

Juliana Meijer is also expanding the sonic palette in Turl Street, using two guitars and some curlew call synth sounds (courtesy of Seb Reynolds, who has already played once tonight in Flights Of Helios).  The breathy vocals are winning, and remind us a little of Edie Brickell, albeit without the forced chirpiness.  There’s a delightful airiness to the set, but it never becomes mere background music, even if it does briefly skirt cocktail territory at times.

Vienna Ditto is a band in hiding.  They consist of a guitarist, who seems to hate guitar histrionics, keeping his Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy stylings low in the mix, and a torch singer who shies away from the spotlight.  They play electronic music, but tie themselves down to looping most of the drums live, as if in terror of quantised purity.  They play the blues, but are seemingly wary of appearing overly sincere.  They make wonderful, uplifiting pop songs, but tend to obscure them with walls of acidic synth squelch.  They make charming stage banter, but rarely on the mike, so only a handful of the audience ever hear them.  Perhaps this refusal to ever resolve their own paradoxes is the reason we love them, but whatever the reason, they are the perfect conclusion to a very successful Punt, with the talent to fill vast auditoriums, but the love of playing techno gospel burners in the corner of a cramped, sweaty pub on a Wednesday night.  You think this ramshackle duo isn't the best band in Oxfordshire at the moment?  Dream on.