Truck 2013 Friday Pt 2

Frankie & The Heartstrings play on the main stage on Friday.  We literally cannot tell you anything about them.  The programme mentions The Smiths, Orange Juice and Dexy’s, but we’ve already seen how accurate that thing is.  Instead of writing notes, our we draw a picture in our notebook of a local musician who’s walking past, which says everything about how interesting The Heartstrings are.  It’s not even a very good picture.

We were talking to someone earlier in the day about how wide a range of customers festivals now get, embracing a greater variety of age and social background than in the distant past.  Sadly, though, they still attract the stupid.  A girl in a portaloo next to us is shouting to her friend outside: “Oh my God!  It stinks in here!  It smells like...it smells like...shit!”.  If that’s a surprise, it begs the question what she was planning on doing in there if not the passing of human effluent.  Hopefully she couldn’t work out how to unlock the door.

Kudos to the Virgins stage for booking a couple of the more unusual acts of the festival, even if they’re well known to Oxford gig goers, not least a favourite of ours, King Of Cats.  Max Levy’s tortured rodent screech and his allusive – or perhaps, elusive – lyrics won’t be garnering fans as swiftly as Ady Suleiman, but he has a small, appreciative following, probably because underneath the awkward swagger, he can actually write songs.  He’s playing with a rhythm section today, although the solo songs work best, possibly because his music is intimate and idiosyncratic, or possibly because his timing’s so wayward the band sounds weird, one of the two.  We fervently hope a Trucker or two got their “I won’t forget this!” moment from Max, and are currently telling baffled friends about his geeky intensity.  “He’s like a beat poet Rick Moranis.  No, he’s like Kurt Cobain if he’d never left the D&D Club.  Oh, I can’t explain, you have to go see him”.

What’s worse?  Bands like The Joy Formidable who make a “come hither” gesture as soon as they’re onstage, or punters who actually move closer?  Performers, stop worrying about a few measly feet of space, and listeners, if you want to jump about having a good time, don’t wait for a formal invitation, it’s a fucking rock festival not the Jane Austen Re-enactment Society.  That rant aside, the band is rather good, throwing out graceful, melodic pop songs with a nice punchy rhythm and choruses people can hoof beachballs into the heavens to.  Plus, we like it when drummers sit side on at the front of the stage, it’s like showing your workings: The Joy Formidable, the Pompidou Centre of rock and roll.

Bo Ningen is a very good band, at times a great band.  They take the ultra-scuzzy garage burn that Japanese bands seem to do so well – Guitar Wolf springs to mind – and add some untamed freakout sections, as well as a mystical rock vibe which sort of reminds us of Steppenwolf, and then play it all in a manner that suggests someone said Didcot power station will explode if they ever drop below maximum intensity.  Which is great, but as it’s in the Barn we can’t hear most of it, just a sort of rhythmic hum, so we buy a CD.  If we throw the stereo down a well and sit in a cowpat, it’ll be just like being there all over again.

We don’t like Ash, but we drop in on the main stage and see that lots of people do, so we nip out in case we stop being miserable, and it all goes a bit Christmas Carol.  The Ghost of Indie Discos Past is certainly in attendance, any road.  And just to prove we don’t mind music that revisits the past we’ve come direct from the Saloon, where an uncredited white haired gent is chiming out Dylan and Byrds covers on his Rickenbacker, and we rather enjoy it.  Then the Bennett brothers get up to join him.  If Betfred had a kiosk on site, we’d have put good money on that happening.

We really like Beta Blocker & The Body Clock’s music, it’s like a Benylin-woozy Dinosaur Jr with the odd new romantic synthetic flourish.  Sadly, the vocals let them down, sounding like petulant children who won’t do their homework, and with so much charmless reverb over the top you have to assume they really wanted to play the Barn.

We should have gone for a wee when they were on, because afterwards we lose our sweet spot in the Saloon to answer the old call of nature (no aroma surprise reports from next door, this time), and when we return The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band are in full swing, and the building is impossible to get into.  From what we can hear from outside the group is killing it as usual, the shouts and screams coming through the swing doors tell us that there’s not much difference between the Rabbits’ raucous jazz riot and a proper western bar brawl: bodies fly about the place, the noise is intense, and the piano never stops playing.

Cats Would Be Republicans, Of This I Am Certain

-Doctor, doctor, I think I'm a pair of curtains!

-Well, you managed to make this appointment, and express yourself quite concisely, so I suspect the delusion isn't too deep-seated.  I think you'll be fine.

KING OF CATS – AMERICA (Bandcamp download)

We always feel that a musician must be doing something right if they violently split opinion – by which we mean the opinions of dedicated listeners, not the predictable, shallow spats between reviewers and some teenage band’s friends and family.  We have seen King Of Cats provoke more anger and distress in audiences than is anywhere near common, and we have witnessed seasoned promoters, engineers and gig-goers in rapt attention, throwing around terms like “genius” with gay abandon.  We dare say it’s nice to be universally lauded as an artistic messiah, but when disinterested parties are prepared to spend time arguing about your worth, you know you’ve made a good start. 

Brighton (via Oxford) denizen King Of Cats has raised these post-gig debates by creating an onstage avant-troubadour persona that’s half wryly confessional anti-folk Woody Allen, and half punk noise ointment fly, a japing Loki creating harsh electronic bleeps and screeching atonally in the middle of quiet ballads.  And perhaps this download, billed as the debut LP, demonstrates a maturing of the Cats sound: the record might be wilfully lo-fi and amateurishly oblique, but it’s built around real songs, songs that the King seems to be intent on respectfully delivering, rather than puckishly destroying.  Perhaps, to be brutal, a man who can’t sing in any conventionally recognised manner has found a way to use his voice to serve his fascinating little songs.  So, only “Recorded at the gathering of the tribes galley, New York City” (like Brooklyn Beckham, all tracks are simply named after the US location in which they were created, and all apparent typos and random capitalisations are the artist’s own) is an ugly King Of Caterwauls screech, whereas “Recorded at Maggie’s house, San Francisico” is a grunge Dylan buzz, and “Recorded on a cherry picker in seattle” uses a querulous spider-strand of a vocal line to sketch out a lyric of melancholic resignation.  It’s as if King Of Cats has given up trying to use his flawed voice to sing, and has worked out how to use it to act. If it’s good enough for Lou Reed...

Most tracks start and end with the nostalgic click of a tape recorder, and musically the LP follows suit, being primarily a collection of sparse, rickety acoustic skeletons on the verge of collapsing into dust, but this awkward delicacy serves the fragmented intimacy of the lyrics perfectly.  There are some subtly lovely touches too, “Recorded on a plane, in the high desert and seattle” pitching an almost melodic croon against some thin, stately keys, like The Folk Implosion channelling Federico Mompou, and our favourite, “Recorded in the damp in New Orleans” coming off like some spectral, netherworld Paul Simon duetting with a chirruping digital canary.  The unexpected tinny electronic drums on the closing track also offer a pleasing palette change.

Lyrically, like most Cats tracks, America’s songs are emotional, diaristic outbursts refracted and atomised until they read like emo haikus, but at their best they can be surprising, funny and moving.  “Recorded Next to the traintracks inFlagstaff Arizona” is our pick, opening with the typically opaque, “I bet you six pounds you’ll get what you want to, by the end of October”.  There’s a defeated bohemian air to lines like this, like a beat poet who has thrown out the asocial boasting and outsider celebrations (we always felt that Ginsberg at least partly saw “Howl” part one as a checklist), and replaced them with distanced self-disgust.  “Let’s prove we’re men by lighting fires and pissing them out again”, as a repeated refrain sardonically advises.

We’re not going to claim this album is great – at times it’s not even any good – but it does feel like a worthwhile work of art, at once heartfelt and deliberately confounding.  A local reviewer can spend a lot of time listening to music designed to rock a chum’s VI form ball, or calculated to attract a Radio 2 playlister, and that’s fine, but it’s always wonderful to hear idiosyncratic music made solely for the tiny fraction of the world who will understand it, even if we don’t always feel ourselves to be part of that miniscule fraternity.  One glorious moment in “Recorded in golden gate park, San Francisco,at the end of a show” sums up King Of Cats’s relaxed artistry, as we hear his keening voice in the background, and some audience members jockishly high-fiving next to the recording mike: If you find something to love in King Of Cats, you’ll be welcomed with open arms, but if you don’t, there’s no pressure.  You might even find yourself on his next LP.