A Day In A Manger

I'm trying, and failing, to think of good science/music puns.  Here's Jan's Ocelot piece.  Not sure how much longer I'll write these Ocelot articles.

It’s the new year, and it’s time to explore fresh vistas.  New broom, sweeps clean, and all that.  Actually, all brooms sweep clean, otherwise they’re just sticks; if your old broom didn’t sweep clean, then clearly you left it too long to get a new broom.  Anyway, forget brooms.  Why did you bring up brooms, this is a music column.  So, we suggest that you go out and discover a new act or two, so you can talk about them in later years when they’re ginormous, with a smug condescending tone.

One band you could start with is Balloon Ascents.  I stumbled across this Oxford quintet recently, and were astonished by the relaxed confidence on stage – so much so that my muzzy old brain harked back to memories of shows by glam urchins Sexy Breakfast.  And, although there’s a taut sense of cabaret about Balloon Ascents, they also have a light, folky subtlety in their sound – refreshing for such a young band - which has perhaps been influenced  by Stornoway.  Like all great pop music, they sound utterly timeless and astonishingly contemporary, and if they’re perhaps yet6 to write a killer song, the construction of their current set is evidence of great compositional skill, that is just one giant hook away from wrenching the hearts away from a generation of listeners.

There’s not much online yet, just a couple of live acoustic videos.  These are fine, but don’t capture the graceful weight of the full band...still, that’s all the more reason to seek them out in some cosy venue near you, isn’t it?

PAUL BRENNAN – JUST A DAY (Own Label)

Slowly, Paul Brennan has been nudging his way into our consciousness as a singer-songwriter who doesn’t wallow in a drab morass of self-pity, and as a purveyor of simple, old-fashioned  tuneful songs, who doesn’t turn this conservatism inwards in an endless spiral of dead rock traditionalism and tedious hardware worship.  It’s a bit odd that Brennan, a man who pens hummable melodies with straightforwardly emotional lyrics with solid, unfrilly arrangements should be such a rarity.  Perhaps just singing a song, like telling a joke, is much harder than it looks.

“Just A Day”, it has to be said, wavers on the edge of being a joke, taking a potshot at the hollow consumerist centre of Christmas.  This, of course, is nearly as much of a cliché as spraying fake snow in shop windows and Christmas Eve vomit in the gutters, but it doesn’t stop it being a valid point.  What we like most about the song is not the easy ¾ strumming, nor the damnedly catchy Ringo-simple vocal line but the undercurrent of hope that saves the song from being an empty tirade.  In the video, a drunken, angry Santa stumbles through the streets of Witney before collapsing in tears at a graveside, and it’s easy to see Brennan as the sad, sozzled conscience of Britain, perhaps taking the mantle that Paul Heaton seems to have let slip.

Brennan’s last single was “Dance Like Morrissey”, a jaunty indie cross between The Wonderstuff and The Saw Doctors – the video to which saw him once again get twatted on spirits, incidentally – and some adept Googling found a discussion of the song on a Morrissey message board, where one listener had observed “you sound like Michael Stipe if he’d just been kicked in the mouth”.  Not quite sure how they came to this conclusion, but one of Brennan’s strengths is that he doesn’t revel in the obfuscatory mystery of R.E.M.’s best lyrics and vocals, preferring to shoot straight for the heart – although perhaps when “Just A Day” breaks down to a sleighbell rhythm with the line “just hope you’re not alone” it’s a festive homage to “Everybody Hurts” (or, at least, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”).  This might not be the most sophisticated record of the year, but if you relish the idea of singing along to a great melody, and surreptitiously wiping a tear away as you hoist your 11^th gin of the evening, Paul Brennan will be a name to watch out for in 2014.

 

I Don't Recall Writing This, But I Mastodon!

I'm just plotting a pub quiz I intend to write soon. Last time I did it the music round got booed, because I expected people to name not only the act who had a dance hit from the 80s or 90s, but also who they were "featuring" in the offical act name. I called it Late Twentieth Century Chart Dance Crediting Minutiae, and I thought it was a great round, but hardly anyone got any of them. And I never even used any of the three Jellybean tracks I had up my sleeve, just to make it easy!

Anyway, I've thought of something even more horrible, so I shall report back if it ever transpires.


MAMMOTH & THE DRUM – Demo

Mammoth & The Drum’s Myspace comments on their experiences in the studio recording this album, “we've felt like big kids in a sweet shop...'what about if we tried this?'”. Well, what did the tracks sound like before these additions? This record may be a lot of things, but a blueprint for sonic experimentation it is not: somehow we can’t imagine Brians Wilson and Eno sitting up all night with their furrowed brows resting on the mixing desk before one of them leaps up with dawn inspiration, shrieking “Eureka! Synthesised strings!” To be honest, before getting all wild-eyed and putting fake vinyl crackle on the intro to “Johnny Lightening [sic] and his Blue Ray Gun”, should Mammoth & The Drum perhaps have gone back to make the drums less clunkily elementary? Should they have checked that the vocals didn’t sound like Harry Enfield’s DJ Dave “Nicey” Nice? Not ‘alf!

The thing is, M&TD are not a bad band at all, but in recording a full length CD they may have bitten off more than they can chew, when a four-tracker and a bit of gigging experience might have been the best step. We hate to penalise musicians for stretching themselves, we despise artists playing safe, but in challenging themselves to create a big, varied LP, M&TD have ended up challenging the listener to sit through it all without throwing the stereo into a bloody tarpit or the middle of a glacier, with the other mammoths. Whole tracks could happily have been excised from this recording: “Back to Zero” is nasal, clodhopping, constipated folk rock that makes the ears itch for something better, and “It’s Now or Never” is a charmless trudge through a blasted pub blues wasteland: ironically, with its cheeky jibes at rockers who think they’re cool and Russell Brand’s coiffure, there’s an ironic distance between target and effect that can be filed with Chad Kroeger’s “Rock Star”. “Dawning of the New Dark Age” also has stupid lyrics, which goes off like a 50s editorial by likening the Far East to a sleeping giant, before claiming it will “consume everything in its wake”...surely “in its path”, not “its wake”, right? Or is it just those snoozy Orientals being damned inscrutable again?

This is all a pity, as there’s evidence that M&TD are a decent proposition. “Who says you shouldn’t surf in Jimmy Choo shoes?” is a perky slice of pub rock (in its best sense of music to experience with a full pint and a few mates), with a chorus lifted wholesale form The Rolling Stones, which is fine because they filched most of their early tunes anyway. “No Ordinary Day” has a nicely phased 60s guitar and lyrics about naughty drugs that nods politely to Oxford’s hippy roadshow Redox, whilst “Extracts from my Brain - Part 3 (Do Replicants cry?)” is the pick of the bunch, introspective like Wish You Were Here era Pink Floyd, with an interesting arrangement and some more restrained and affecting vocals. The duo seem to treat music as a bit of fun, and we salute that, as rock ‘n’ roll, especially in Oxford, can sometimes lose sight of the value of a good night out, but sad to say listening to the whole of the LP isn’t much fun. In fact, it’s a bit of a chore. Most of the music sort of happens unconvincingly, and it feels as though somebody is desperately trying to divert your attention. Hang on, whilst we’re typing this, is somebody downstairs nicking the telly?

Like a panda shuffling listlessly round its cage in Colchester Zoo, we feel that judging M&TD on the back of a full length recording isn’t the same as seeing them in their natural habitat: get them on in some cheery boozer on a Friday night, or stick them in the middle of next year’s Hanneyfest lineup, and we can imagine having a grand old time, but for now we’ll pass. The band may have felt like kids in a sweet shop recording this CD, but we feel like diabetics in a sweet shop listening to it: there’s lots and lots here, but it’s not for us.