Universal Credit

It's so pleasing to post a review to a record that is truly excellent.  Seek this one out, if you don't know it.

This differs a tiny bit from the published version, which refers to "downhearted" puppets, because the editor thought that "clinically depressed" might not be appreciated by all readers.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm fine with that, I'm not a "political correctness gone made" person, and I think it's important that editors consider what would be right for their readership, and the sensitivity in considering this issue reflects well on them.  However, as I know I didn't intend any malice in the usage, and as I don't think referring to a mental health diagnosis should be any different from alluding to physical conditions creatively - we've all read reviews that talk about "dead leg rhythms" or "sausage-fingered" guitarists or drummers "who must be deaf" etc.  Perhaps those should be made a ting of the past too. Anyway, if you have any thoughts either way, I'd be fascinated to hear them.  

Or, just ignore that self-regarding waffle and buy the album.  Did I mention that it's excellent?

LUCY LEAVE – EVERYONE IS DOING SO WELL (Divine Schism)

“We’re different, you can tell by looking at thumbs!”.  It sounds like a slogan from a rejected SEGA ad campaign, but it’s the outro refrain of one of the many excellent tracks on Lucy leave’s second album (if refrain is the right word for what sounds like three clinically depressed Sesame Street characters intoning a disappointing mindfulness mantra out of time with each other).  In a way, “Thumbs” typifies the album, by taking a nice neat, compact pop tune – in this case a chunky bass-led Sebadoh saunter – and pushing it off balance.  Whether it’s a sudden scribble of Frith/Kaiser guitar notes, an awkward falsetto croon, overblown freak-out recorder flurries or an inscrutable lyric (“alluvial fiasco!”), each track seems to contain one element which at first appears designed to commit musical sabotage, but which turns out to make perfect sense after a few listens.

From the opener, “Talking Heads” – which doesn’t sound like Talking Heads at all, more like Aerial M playing Yo La Tengo -  to the closer “Grandma 2”, a self-effacing Blur song which ends by quoting a 20s novelty jazz tune, listening to Everyone Is Doing So Well is like tripping up and stumbling headlong through the town, never quite falling, never regaining equilibrium, confused yet strangely exultant.  As with previous Lucy Leave releases, there will be those who find this record unnecessarily oblique, too understatedly asymmetrical, and conclude that the band is scrappy and can’t play – news update: they can play like motherfuckers – but for those of us who would edit the fuzzball abandon of “Gymnastics Club” into the prom scene of every John Hughes movie, this album is mysterious, ludic and quite, quite wonderful.  We love it.  You can tell.  Look at our raised thumbs.

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.

Steventones

Most of this stuff is in the latest Nutshaft.  There are a few dashed off dismissive criticisms that were cut, to make the review more positive.  It was a good festival, I enjoyed it more than last eyar, but by God, there was a lot of incredibly average music on the bill (and a lot of people going non-average mental for it, inexplicably).

Funny how awful I found Ady Suleiman this year, last time I saw him I thought he was at least acceptable.

TRUCK, Hill Farm, Steventon, 15-17/7/16

“We’re running two hours behind,” says the engineer at the Gorwelion Horizons stage, “and twenty minutes ahead”.  Oh, thanks, that’s – wait, what?  Have we entered some sort of South Oxfordshire Twilight Zone where normal rules don’t apply?  Is Didcot power station, the slow dismantling of which continues with a controlled explosion partway through the festival, some sort of mystical key that keeps the laws of logic and science in place?  Looks like it, fellow Truck travellers, looks like it.  How else do we explain the fact that there are 2500 more people here than in 2015, and yet the site feels open and uncluttered, and there are very few queues?  That the ecstasy of a crowd’s response over the weekend seems inversely related to our ability to remember the music?  That the amount we can enjoy the event doesn’t really seem to be linked to the quality of the line-up?  That a pint of Hobgoblin is about the same price as it is on George Street, and Truck still allows you to bring your own drinks, whilst other festivals claim they need to charge six quid a pop?  Is everything topsy-turvy in this field?

Even getting in confuses us, as we have to come past the main stage, but then walk the entire length of the site before doubling back, meaning that most of our experience of Puma Rosa comes drifting on the breeze.  It’s good stuff, though, like a chunked up Candy Says with a brief trip into The Sugarcubes’ witchy scarepop.  The charming chaps at Retro-bution Gaming, who are offering Truckers the chance to relive some classic console fun over the weekend, are surprised by our knowledge of the Neo Geo and that our definition of “retro” means Chuckie Egg and text adventures, so before we can feel any older, we sneak across to the BBC Introducing Virgins stage for some less contentious classic japes from Kancho!  Their two man rock laced with exhortative vocals brings up a marriage between departed locals 50ft Panda and Days Of Grace, but such retro-referencing is unimportant.  What’s important is the fat riffs stomping over the field like corned beef golems with murderous intent.

Monarks don’t manage to kick things into gear nearly as well, resembling an emoier Six. By Seven.  There’s nothing wrong with their set, but it’s unconvincing, like getting a telegram reading “Rock the fuck out” delivered on a silver platter by an aging asthmatic royal retainer.

The main stage seems to be home to some pretty shocking nonsense at this year’s festival, and indeed, the younger clued-up audience seems to treat the Market stage as the place to be, but Ady Suleiman has got to be about the most egregious offender, with his cruddy unplugged Jamiraquoid reggae soul fluff fouling up the air.  On this evidence it wasn’t Curiosity Killed The Cat.  It was shame.  Still, at least Ady has some songs and only stays onstage for thirty minutes, whereas at the other end of the field there’s a great big trailer full of Boss salespeople in which a man in a stupid patchwork cap plays inane blues licks constantly for the entire weekend.  If Nightshift were rich we would have just strolled up, bought every piece of mojo artillery in the place, and then smashed it up, set it on fire and used it to cook marshmallows for the Rotary Club volunteers.

They may have trouble understanding numbers, but once again the BBC Cymru Gorwelion Horizons tent hides some of the festival’s gems.  Not only do Cut Ribbons provide a lovely antidote to the fretwank fraternity – “I don’t think this guitar can go in E, let’s do a different song” – but they play percolated pop laced with melody that resembles Stereolab without the krautrock, or the glory days of Alphabet Backwards when they were all about sherbet and heartache.  Cool Michael Nesmith/Benny from Crossroads woolly hat, too.

We take a quick visit to the kids’ tent, where we find a man dressed as a sheriff sitting in the dirt and singing a very slow, dirge version of “I Get A Kick Out Of You”, like a clown having a break-down, and we decide that the very young have far more taste than any of us, especially anyone aged 16-22, who should be setting the world aflame with music.  Take Homeplanetearth, a not entirely unpleasant but far from weighty young crusty-pop ensemble who make us think of Back To The Planet.  And we’ve not thought of Back To The Planet since 1993.  How blissful those 23 years have been.  Bastards.

Amazons are like The Presidents Of The USA via Then Jericho, except crapper, so we make a trip into The Barn, which now seems to be pretty much sidelined as a stage and which is generally empty all weekend – although perhaps nobody can stand to run the gauntlet past Big Billy Twiddlebollocks and his Boss Box of Bad Blues.  Forty Four Hours weren’t strictly worth the effort, but they are at least interesting, the two of them dressed in black and ranting politely over wistful piano chords and thin drum machines like Richard Clayderman’s audition to join Atari teenage Riot.  Then we notice the boys are twins, and so we’re left with the image of Jedward: The Rehab Years.

People are not walking, they are running towards the Market tent for The Magic Gang, cramming in and dancing like it’s 1999 and it’s going out of fashion and nobody’s watching and there’s no tomorrow.  We’ve seriously not seen this many people crammed into a space since we went to the coffee stall: there are 8 of them stuffed behind that table, but we still have to ask 4 times to get a cuppa?  Is it a test? 

Truck used to be a huge proponent of metal, and whilst Brighton’s Black Peaks don’t signal a return to past interests, they are the only decent heavy band we’ve seen at Hill Farm for about 3 years.  They take the most acceptable parts of noughties metal and weld them firmly to a thrash chassis before spraying it all with the sort Kerrangular post-post-rock we hear a lot of nowadays, and that’s all just fine, but it’s Will Gardner’s vocals that floor us.  His harried screams and guttural growls are like a vortex of crows, and he inspires a proper old-fashioned mosh pit in the packed Nest tent from old-school metallers and members of The Club That Cannot Be Shamed.

The local presence is strong at this year’s festival, but Lucy Leave possibly take the crown.  Their crazing paving pop brings together prog, psych and punk with Blur’s sense of a good tune, whilst the drumming is astonishingly frenetic and jazzy, like Gene Krupa squashing ants for money.   If you wondered what it would sound like if Stump, Tiger, Neu! and Hawkwind got together down the pub for a pint of mild and a game of astronomy dominoes, Lucy Leave’s “40 Years” will give you an inkling.

As if they’ve been playing too much Tekken at the Retro-bution tent, two bands in succession take us back to the early 90s.  Glitched give us politics, anger and syndrums in a way that should make Forty Four Hours hang their heads in shame if they’re still backstage at the Barn, and DMAs relive that brief moment before Oasis became a tedious brand, when they were still an intriguing mixture of influences culled from diverse sources like the Roses, shoegaze, The Who and Flowered Up.  Except, in place of The Beatles DMAs seem to have venerated Simple Minds and The Housemartins.  That’s odd and not always successful, but they make a good case for themselves, and everyone in the tent seems to know the words, so fair enough.  Plus, the acoustic guitarist looks as though he’s got everyone else’s coats on, perhaps he lost a bet.

Punting For The Weekend? No, Wednesday, Idiot.

Common Peeople was actually pretty good.  The fact I only paid for one of the two days made the food and drink prices just about bearable.  That Chas & Dave are more interesting than Primal Scream I had always suspected, but am now certain.

There is no reason for the multiple Blade Runner refs in this review, so don't try to crack the code.

PUNT, 11/5/16, PT/ Cellar/ Sheaf/ Turl St Kitchen/ White Rabbit

 The mark of a vintage Punt is not the great acts you see, but the great acts you don’t.  We can’t remember a year where we’re forced to miss so many top notch performers, and the fact that what we did see ranges from entertaining to outstanding brands this one of the very best Punts in the event’s long and sometimes wobbly history.

Someone with vivid memories of being wobbly is engineer James Serjeant, who was electrocuted whilst setting up last year’s Punt, and so wisely elected not to load in the Purple Turtle PA during a Ragnarok rehearsal rainstorm.  Although it means he makes it to the end of the night unfrazzled, it does mean that the PT runs late, and therefore we don’t get to see as much of Moogieman & The Masochists as we’d like.   We do, however, see enough to know they look like the PTA impersonating Kraftwerk, they sound like Devo playing Tom Lehrer and they posit reusing disposable cameras as a metaphor of minor civil disobedience. 

The Cellar is only next door, but The Great Western Tears make it feel as though we’d ridden a  transmit beam direct to Nashville.  Theirs is unreconstructed country, easy on the ear and impeccably performed.  If the tendency towards cliché puts you off, the syrupy beauty of the pedal steel soon wins you back round.

Discovery of the night occurs at The Wheatsheaf and the torrent of literate punk pop unleashed by The Beckoning Fair Ones.  Their dour, snarky twitch rock reminds us of barely remembered Peel favourites Badgewearer (look them up, it’ll be worth it) whilst the walls of synth vying with the guitar point towards Future Of The Left.  Niall, from much-missed indie mongrels Dalls Don’t is on vocals and guitar...and he seems to have found  his bandmates by entering the terms “low-slung female bassist” and “self-conscious keyboard player” into some sort of auto-generative muso software.  Amazing what they can do nowadays.

Continuing what is a rather noisy Punt, Slate Hearts impress with their unashamed grunge: unashamed in that they sound like Mudhoney at their scuzziest, and that one of them wears the least cool dungarees witnessed in public since 1991.  If the dirty fluff from under the beds of a ten storey flophouse were squeezed together into the form of riffs, it would sound like this, ie fantastic.

The White Rabbit is the venue least used to hosting live music at this year’s Punt, a fact attested by the fact the pub has left the house stereo on as the bands play.  Not that you’d hear it with Kancho! in full flow, mind.  There’s not much to it, drums are pummelled relentlessly and improbably overdriven bass strings twanged, with the occasional snatch of shouting, but it sounds pretty superb.  In filthy rock terms, they may be outfrizzed by Slate Hearts and Too Many Poets, and Cherokee might be a more original twopiece, but at their best Kancho!’s music is a shocking as their name’s original meaning (don’t Google it at work; Google Badgewearer instead).

Coldredlight is a name not well-known to Oxford’s gig-goers, and the Turl Street Kitchen’s small room is crammed with people who have come along to find out who this new act is.  What we find is Gaby-Elise and her guitar, playing some mesmeric, chiming songs.  She has a strong and strident voice, which oddly reminds us of Avril Lavigne, although an Avril Lavigne who’d swapped skateboards, ripped jeans and hours at the mercy of her publicist’s thinktank for evenings spent staring at misty moonlit hinterlands with nothing for company but a Mazzy Star record and the ghost of Robert Johnson.  We look forward to a less hectic visit to see this act before too long.

Kanadia aren’t necessarily noisy, but they are BIG.  Stadium big.  Epic reverb on the reverb big.  They sound a bit like pre-definite article Verve tackling some ’95 vintage PJ Harvey, and at one point they go so far as to sound like U2 half-inching Roxy Music’s “Love Is The Drug”. BIG, in other words.   Cellar engineer Jimmy is vaping some strange concoction that smells like candy floss, and being caught up in a gust of this is not a trillion miles away from experiencing Kanadia’s billowing confections.

Did we call Slate Hearts shameless?  Well, that’s nothing compared to Crystallite, who are playing the sort of mid-80s rock that can only be performed with one’s head in front of giant fan and one’s foot on a monitor.  By all that is rational and reasonable this should be unbearable, but there’s so much gusto and infectious energy onstage, nobody with any ounce of human decency could dislike them.  The singer is a whirlwind, looking a lot like P!nk with everything exaggerated to the limit (!ncarnad!ne, anyone?), and the band is having more fun than any single person inside the ring road right now, with those in the frost two rows coming a close second: in the face of exuberance like this, all our music journo, record collector notions of what is acceptable get lost, like tears in rain.

You go see a band featuring 50% of Undersmile, you better go prepared.   A stiff drink in hand, we return to the PT for Drore, who have taken the ‘Smile’s sludge and given it a wee D-beat kick up the fundament.  This is half rock and half silt, and experiencing it feels like having a sore throat in your ears.  In 1919, a man named Anthony di Stasio surfed through Boston on a black sticky wave during the Great Molasses Flood, and we now know what he must have felt like.   Yet another excellent band, then.

Lucy Leave have steadily become one of our favourite local acts in the past year, peppering their spiky pop with psychedelic curlicues and punk floyd textures.    They’re not always the tidiest band in history - drummer Pete Smith often sounds as though he’s working out which of his hands can move faster than the other – but all that proper grown-up stuff is irrelevant when songs are weird, wonky and wonderfully inviting.

We look up the word “crandle” on Urban Dictionary, and are completely bemused by the various definitions.  We see a couple of songs by the band Crandle and the result is much the same.  The opening number is a pretty tune, for which the female singer has pitch-shifted her voice down to a fruity baritone, so that it sounds like a melange of Antony & The Johnsons, and Crash Test Dummies.  Then they do a Leonard Cohen cover with cheap Casio backing.  This may or may not be any good, but it certainly won’t be forgotten.

Brown Glove take to the stage dressed as distressed pierrots, and proceed to play a piece of clockwork goth cabaret like JF Sebastian’s automata trapped in some Weimar of the damned.   With lots of harpsichord canters, twisted diva soprano and tiny bursts of super-compressed thrash guitar underpinning some very naughty lyrics, it’s a bit like The Tigerlillies appearing in the Flesh World readers’ waves forum.  Singer Gemma Moss has been known to come up with some pretty spicy stage shows in the past, but with Brown Glove, a duo with her partner David Kahl, she’s found a more subdued sense of theatre that lets the songs take centre-stage. 

And, that’s it.  The last pint is downed, and we murmur our goodbyes before stumbling towards bed with our feet aching and our ears ringing.  Time to die.