You Gotta Get (Further) Up To Get (Further) Down!

This is not an astonishing review, but I wrote it when I had COVID - actually, I have a strong suspicion I contracted it at this gig - and wasn't feeling very good; that's my excuse and you can't prove otherwise.  Oh, unless you're one of those clever people who can poove COVID is made up, of course, naturally your arguments are incontrovertible.

DEEPER/ HURTLING/ MOOGIEMAN & THE MASOCHISTS, Divine Schism, Jericho, 9/12/21

One of the pleasures of this job is watching poor acts becoming good. But even more so is watching good acts become unexpectedly better. Down the road tonight, Young Knives are touring their fifth, and definitely best, album whereas we’re watching The Masochists. We thought they’d penned their career highlight in ‘Mr Curator’, a mandelbrot-mutating satirical rant about industry “creatives” which is like a Nathan Barley treatment written by Wyndham Lewis and Allen Ginsberg, but they followed it with the astonishing freeze-dried Frankie Knuckles funk of ‘Ghost Driver’. Both these are played tonight, yet are eclipsed by new tracks: ‘Psychotronic Dream’ is a Moorcock acid travelogue squeezed into a krautrock version of 60s garage, and elsewhere some unnervingly intoned monologues ride the minimal thrum of a pop band having a crack at Basic Channel. Frankly, we don't dare guess what they’ll do by December 2022.

We’ve not seen Hurtling before, so can’t comment on their development, but our expectations from the opening song were proven wrong, as a refined shoegazey elegance gave way to some more visceral power trio noise. We’re reminded of Belly – not that Hurtling sound like them, but both bands’ ostensibly elegant arty pop soon exhibits a love of old-fashioned rocking out. Not that this is a problem, mind, as they nod towards the less emotional end of grunge, a la Tad or Mudhoney, or perhaps Sonic Youth in their more straightforward mode.  Perhaps none of the songs will set up home in your head, but the sound is gloriously powerful (as you might imagine when one member plays in My Bloody Valentine’s touring outfit).

Chicago’s Deeper don’t give us time to make assumptions about their sound, they simply pick us up and hurl us into the middle of it. They trade in uptight elastic rock in the manner of Devo, but with all pristine edges frayed and surfaces smeared with oily finger-marks. Their concise rock bulletins have an insouciant urban swagger, like Wire multiplied by the Strokes, and occasionally they go for a more atmospheric yelp and become an amphetramine-addled Cure, but whatever variation they apply, the music remains infectiously taut, and the performance authoritative but joyfully relaxed (and Shiraz Bhatti’s drumming is relentlessly fantastic). Forget this job, watching bands like Deeper is a pleasure for anyone, full stop.

Strange Party?

Warm, isn't it?

ODDBALL, Isis Farmhouse, 8/6/19

This week the leader of the free world told us that the moon is a part of Mars.  We laughed at the time, but, spending a day in the colourful whirlwind that is the Oddball festival, suddenly such maverick cosmologies start to seem feasible – after all, we’re gearing up for Iffley lock to become a distant banlieue of Saturn with the Sun Ra Arkestra’s first ever trip to Oxford, and by six pm, a glance into their eyes reveals that a fair percentage of the crowd seem to have taken a psychic trip to Proxima Centauri, even if their physical husks still walk among.

And whilst we’re considering something as topsy-turvy as Commander Trump piloting Spaceship Earth through the inky galaxy, how about having the comedown before the trip?   We’re used to Moogieman making quirky, scientifically accurate new wave, like Robin Ince fronting Devo, but today he and drum machine prodder Stefano Maio turn in a set so bleak and unpsychedelic it’s actually otherworldly.  Imagine a John Carpenter soundtrack playing on a slowly decelerating Victrola whilst razor-honed guitar chords accompany the deadpan pronouncement “Don’t get lost”, and you have a set highlight.  New song “Journey To The East” is pretty much just a squelchy synth ostinato with some sententious metaphysical pronouncements intoned over the top, and is basically the opening to Sapphire & Steel rewritten by a paranoid Gurdjieff.  It’s brilliant, but (ironically) disorienting, and we’re glad we had the beautifully cascading kora notes of Jali Fily Cissokho to ease us into the festival.

There’s an outstanding representation of Oxford acts, from The Elephant Trip’s smoking-is-cool, shades-indoors-at-night Black Angels grooves, to Tiger Mendoza’s suet-fried melding of lysergic hip-hop beats with leather-clad rock guitar riffs, courtesy of Chris Monger from Shotgun Six (surely a shoe-in for Oddball 2020), to grief-pop heroes Flights Of Helios, who tonight get the balance between the band’s Pink Floyd vistas and Chris Beard’s stricken angel vocal spot on.  In fact, the festival’s only poor decision – apart from a few people’s final pint – is the installation of an onsite barber, whom we saw doing no business all day.  Who wants their aerials cut, man?

Whilst the day offers plenty to perplex sonically, perhaps the oddest experience is finding that the pub itself has been inexplicably rechristened the Android Garden, and that behind the bar instead of pint-pourers we find Chief Mixalot DJing some late 90s drum and bass classics - anyone witnessing the rare sight of Nightshift dancing is advised to repair immediately to the Psy-Care healing tent for a lie down.

We come across some new names during the day, Ia(i)n Ross clearly being such a new name that the event’s programme can’t decide how to spell it.  His amniotic synth washes are pleasing, but not as exciting as the old-fashioned hardware techno of ex-Vienna Ditto scamp Nigel Firth debuting as Oxford Audio Archive.  Plenty of acts on today’s bill, especially the spoken word artists, are gnomic, but Nigel’s the only one who’s gnomelike, sitting cross-legged behind a coffee table of teetering gadgets, and giggling quietly like he’s just got the jokes in Alice In Wonderland. His messy, but euphoric electronica has the glowing warmth of Pete Namlook, the ludic lo-fi chutzpah of Aqua Regia, and the sleek insistence of Hardfloor.  It’s enjoyably unpretentious, but when a Bollywood spectre starts to haunt a scrapbook jungle collage, it’s actually rather lovely too.

Perhaps the cream of the local crop, though, are expansive indie psych rockers and tambourine fetishists Knobblehead, who turn in an outstanding set of huge chugging tunes, mixing wild vibing with good honest melodic catchiness, part Brian Jonestown Massacre, part Jefferson Airplane.  At some points the blaring trumpet and tuneful chants even recall James circa Seven.  This is comfortably the best set we’ve seen them play, possibly because it’s the first time they’ve all managed to fit onstage simultaneously.

After all this, The Sun Ra Arkestra is an unusual headliner, but if this isn’t the sort of festival where expectations can be ravaged, nobody here has even tried to power a Moog by plugging into a leyline, and if bandleader Marshall Allen, at 95, hasn’t earned the right to do what the fuck he wants, then we’re from Betelgeuse (NB by this point, we aren’t entirely sure we’re not from Betelgeuse).  Tonight, they mostly eschew the frenzied freedom and synthesised abstraction of much of the back Ra-talogue for a smooth but slightly abstract lounge swing, including a surprisingly straight take on croon classic “Stranger In Paradise”.  Gavin Bryars once tried to capture the music of the Titanic’s band as they sank underwater, but the Arkestra make the sound of a Reno casino band melting into their daquiris, and if they seem to be treading water occasionally – space is the placeholder – and it isn’t the stellar voyage we expected, they sure can Pleaides tunes.

And then, it’s out onto the towpath for a moonlit stumble back to the mundane world.  Should the planets align, and Oddball return next year, we’ll certainly be there at the outset, ready for take-off.  Start the countdown, commander Trump...and smoke me a covfefe, I’ll be back for breakfast.

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.

Helter Seltzer

Marlborough Ham and North Sligo Mustard?  Maldon CM9 5WK Sea Salt and Quintuple Distilled Ardennes Red Wine Vingear?  They're fucking crisps. Get a  grip.

CLUB SODA/ MOOGIEMAN & THE MASOCHISTS/ THE LOST ART, All Will Be Well, Cellar, 15/4/16

Give The Lost Art a cursory listen and you’ll have them pegged as genial buskers: technically adept, but more interested in supplying a string of non-threatening tricks than a cohesive body of work.  However, the more we listen to the duo’s intricate compositions, the more character and variation we find, until our notebook is covered in scrawled references. Ben Folds.  Loudon Wainwright.  Simon & Garfunkel.  John Etheridge.  Sondheim Of A Down.  The lyrics might have come from a platter self-help fortune cookies, but musically there’s loads to enjoy, especially the way counterpoint is favoured over harmony, and their tendency to push to the top of their vocal range giving songs a strange monastic air.  That they look like two chemistry teachers trying to make the alkaline earth metals interesting just endears them to us more.

If The Lost Art are the Key Stage Proclaimers, Moogieman & The Masochists resemble proper children’s entertainers, from Moogieman’s stripy top and braces c ombo through to their micro-ditties about physics, philosophy and photographic technique: think Rod, Jane & Freddy do a doctorate.  Whilst it would be easy to label a man smug who includes the line “Occam’s Razor is epistemologically flawed” in a song about his tastes in totty, Moogieman has actually created something truly new in his laboratory beaker filled with the distillate from Devo, Kraftwerk, OMD and Open University broadcasts, and the band’s knack for an intriguing arrangement is exemplary.  Plus, cameraphile paean “Diana” has the most glorious gallic movie melody – why start a rock riot when you can settle down to watch Monsieur Hulot’s Darkroom with The New Scientist?  

Abingdon’s Club Soda may not remind us of kids’ TV, but with their US jock jacket and fluffy organ-led rock linking the sounds of Huey Lewis and Big Fun, they could well feature in a brat pack era teen comedy. If, like us, the feeling of living a Teen Wolf outtake doesn’t appeal, you can at least focus on the incredibly tight rhythm section and the vocalist’s natural charm with an airy tune.  And that’s what Club Soda are, really, the sonic equivalent of a low calorie snack, that will tide you over until it’s time for something more substantial. Plus, we’re surprised to discover that something sounding like the baseball organist playing a Berlin album track is rather good fun.  Hey, every day’s a school day, right?