Daft Punt

Here is my thorough review of this year's Punt festival.  I thought it was a strong night out, I saw nothing bad, and nothing phenomenal.  Mutagenocide were unoriginal and a wee bit sloppy (by the incredibly high standards of classic metal, anyway, where you have to be spotlessly good in a crowded field), but they were still worth a listen, and Manacles Of Acid were my favourite act.  It didn't feel as though there were enough surprises for me to call it a top rank Punt, but I guess that skipping last year  contributed to that somewhat.  It's a wonderful insitution, anyway, I'm looking forward to 2013 already!  


Elements of this review are to be found in Nightshift's Punt mega-article.

THE PUNT, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Duke’s Cut/ Junction/ Wheatsheaf, 16/5/12

Ostensibly, The Punt is a showcase for Oxford music, but secretly might not be.  Sounds like an idiotic observation, but in fact the annual night-long, multi-venue event isn’t a glossy advert for local sounds, or an aural taster menu to invite putative new listeners, it’s more like an initiation test for potential recruits to the scene.  In its duration and complexity The Punt is a challenge, not a night out – the musical equivalent of Atomic Burger’s Godzilla meal, the sonic sister to an episode of Takeshi’s Castle.  And if proof were needed curator,  Nightshift’s Ronan Munroe is a puckish trickster as much as a promotional ambassador, we need look no further the presence of Tamara Parsons-Baker as the opening act.  She is a performer of some talent, with a powerful voice, but her dark vignettes of wispy intensity are a deliberately perverse introduction to the night, barbed lines left hanging portentously in the room, wintry guitars providing the lovelorn backdrop .  It’s a strong set, but she’s at her best when she comes over as a more animated Leonard Cohen, and at her worst when she just sounds like someone bitterly sniping at their ex-partner.

Secret Rivals are a perfect foil to this opening gambit, with their melodic, 6 Music friendly pop nuggets.  On record we just keep on finding more to love in their scrappy indie pop flurries, but live they’re still a smidgen sloppy.  In a way that doesn’t matter, the joy of the band is that they toss the Mentos of pop into the Diet Coke of indie with gay abandon, and let the sugary mess explode across the venue.

Undersmile are a geologically-paced sludge metal band fronted by two atonally chanting ladies who look as if the creepy twins from The Shining have grown up listening to Babes In Toyland.  It all sounds horrifyingly like half-orc mating calls played at quarter speed, and is absolutely brilliant.  And also pretty rubbish.  But mostly brilliant.

The Duke’s Cut is a new Punt venue, and one where the fact that the performers are completely invisible to all but about ten of the audience is balanced by the decent ale and the cosy camaraderie.  Toliesel sound at first like The Band with some pub rock elements, and are perfectly pleasant, though they seem to be pushing too hard, turning sweet vocals into rough hollers.  But, we decide to stay for their whole set, and soon the music makes perfect sense, revealing winning melodies under the murk.  Even the crackles from a slightly overstretched PA add to the natural warmth of the music.  In a reversal of Punt logic, Toliesel win us over with slow increments of quality songwriting, rather than flashy bandstanding, making us glad we stayed the distance.  Although it was mostly because it was too much effort to push our way back out of the crowd.  We sincerely hope there was one random person sitting at one of the pub tables in the early evening, who was hemmed in and forced to listen for the entire night.

Simple probability dictates that there’s always one Punt act that gets an underservedly small audience, and this year it’s Band Of Hope.  Mind you, the fact that they’re playing in the cavernous Junction club compounds the problem.  Incidentally, the venue turns out to be a pretty good addition to the night, although we’re not sure a pile of rocks and road signs is a great decor choice, it makes the room look like a student’s back garden.  The band is a lush ensemble playing relaxing country and folk, with excellent flourishes from fiddle and pedal steel. At times they have a lackadaisical Sunday jam session air that erases some of the character form the songs, but “Baby You’re A Mess” is a solid gold winner.

We catch the end of Deer Chicago, and their sound, which can often seem unnecessarily bombastic and forcedly epic, works far better in a cramped sweaty Duke’s Cut.  Sadly, as things are running late we only catch a fragment of The Old grinding Young.  They sound a little like parent band Ute, but with Radiohead twitches replaced by expansive rootsiness.  Too early to tell whether this will prove a good move.

In contrast to the sludge avalanche of Undersmile, and the doomy prog of Caravan Of Whores, Mutagenocide proffer a far more traditional brand of metal.  There are elements of the post-Pantera stylings of previous Punt stars Desert Storm, but most of the set consists of resolutely old school chugging rhythms, twiddly guitar solos and growled vocals that are probably all about large-breasted elf duchesses in the Hades branch of Games Workshop. There’s very little to set Mutagenocide apart from a vast roster of metal acts up and down the count(r)y, but they’re enjoyable enough, the penultimate track pulling off some good aural pummelling.

When you see LeftOuterJoin expending vast amounts of energy playing live syn drums along with some pounding trance, you have to ask what the point of it is.  It would sound just the same (and fractionally more in time) if the rhythms were programmed.  But, artists don’t have to dwell in a world of cold logic, and in many ways the victory of this act is its very redundancy.  The set veers from excellent techno to cruddy Euro cheese pretty haphazardly, but the sheer spectacle is a euphoric joy.  The fact that he’s also brought trippy projections and two lasers into the Wheatsheaf, Oxford’s least rave-friendly venue, is worth as many extra points as you can tally. Plus there are some over-sized smoke machines, that trip the pub’s fire alarm, and cause the venue’s windows to be opened for the first time this millennium.  A set to remember.

Into the home straight at The Junction with rapper Half Decent.  His delivery is truly excellent, and the backing tracks are chunky but he does share a fault with nearly all live hip hop: paradoxically, what should be a match of visceral rhythms and intimate poetry, generally drifts into empty gesturing.  Half Decent spends a lot of his set asking us to dance and sing along, when he would do better concentrating on delivering some very wry, insightful fast-paced lyrics (and dumb fun lines like “Making girls wetter than a washing machine”, for good measure).  He puts on a good show to a gaggle of exhausted music fans, but we’re sure the rapturous stadium gig happening in his head was even better.

Manacles Of Acid is watched by the hardcore, the shell-shocked and those unbeatable party people who may live to regret it.  We started the night with a harrowingly bleak preacher disguised as a nice acoustic singer, and we end it with unforgivably niche electronica dressed up as a bright clubber’s party.  Using only vintage hardware (including a TR606 worn round the neck) the man named Highscores produces a seemingly endless string of classic acid house and Detroit techno which thrill s the faithful, but is clearly a closed book to half the room.  We fall into the former camp, loving the beautifully crafted layers of mutated basslines and crisp drum patterns.  There are confetti cannons and some sort of cross between a fly and a character from Starlight Express running round the room, who may or may not officially be part of the show, and it’s an uncompromising conclusion to the night.

And so we leave The Junction, dazed and deafened, feeling as though we’ve split the past five and a half hours equally between enjoying, working and speed drinking.  The Punt feels even more like a twisted musical hazing ritual as we wait woozily for the late bus home.  Thank you, Sir, may we have another?

Tamara Never Dies

Right, I'm in a real old hurry again tonight, got to be out of the house soon, so here's a new review that was posted this very day at Oxfordbands. How exasperatingly contemporary!

TAMARA PARSONS-BAKER – DEMO


The second half of this demo is noticeably superior to the first. The vocals are sweeter and far better controlled, the arrangements are neater, the songs are approachable and lucid, and the melodies are flowing without being too intrusive. It’s very good solid acoustic singer-songwriter fare, and it’s butt-numbingly tedious.

“You’ve Failed” isn’t too bad, being a lightly pretty little confessional that’s a smidgen like Laima Bites’ early recordings, without the sparkle. “Sore Kara” is a run of the mill lament enlivened fractionally by some decent double-tracked vocals, and “This Is My Image” is an anonymous ditty with some off the peg blues twiddles, and a frustrating deliberate breathy high end crack in the vocals that is so prevalent nowadays as some sort of signifier of intensity (damn you, Morissette!). The voice is sweet and crisp and attention grabbing without being imposing, but it’s singing nothing of any import in the least memorable way. This is the sort of music to make thoughtless old men in empty open mic bars mumble “She’s not bad” into their slowly supped pints, and the sort of music to depress us woefully at the lack of ambition: before we know it we’re cleaning our keyboard with a retractable pencil instead of focussing on the music.

However, flip back to the start of the CD, and the opening trio of tracks is far more enticing, even though they’re less polished, more awkward, and perhaps not completely ready to be heard. The tone is bleak, empty and melancholy, and Parsons-Baker’s voice has so much more character, if it perhaps exhibits less control. “To Possess” is sparse, dessicated and surprisingly hypnotic – there’s not much to it, but it seems to fit together with a cold logic, like a Japanese garden in the dead of winter. The epic “It’s What We Do”, at nearly eight minutes long, is even more fascinating in its starkness and simplicity, just a spare bass and some guitars which either chime gothically or strum with the heartless efficiency of the executioner’s axe. The vocal is deadeyed and hollow even as it’s lush and folky, Parsons-Baker managing somehow to sound like a mixture of Nico and Eddi Reader. The lyrics are pretty generic (and is that really a line about “scrambled eggs”?), but that doesn’t detract overly from the effect.

“Airs Collide” has a second male voice, and some drums, but just doesn’t quite seem to hang together. We like the continual two note ostinato that underpins the verses, but the chorus seems tacked on. There’s nothing wrong here, but the song lacks the power of the last two, it feels over-egged (scrambled or otherwise). Somewhere in these opening tracks is a show-stopping voice of defeated souls, and a music of existential doom, although it’s not quite ready yet. Our advice would be drop the pretty stuff, we’ve heard it a million times; get some properly striking lyrics written; develop the dark, bruising, autumnal delivery; throw the blues fills onto the fire; douse the fire and sit in a freezing garret feeling lonely; listen to some recent P J Harvey and turn of the millennium Nick Cave; weep a lot. That way, perhaps Parsons-Baker could create the sort of music to make sensitive young men in empty attic rooms nod quietly and avoid eye contact over their untouched lime sodas.

Well, we never said there was any fame and glory in this game, did we?

Charlbury Pt 2

CHARLBURY RIVERSIDE 2008

SUNDAY

Strolling past a random tent we find wizard-bearded Jeremy Hughes picking out some bucolic instrumentals on his guitar. He’s not officially part of the lineup, but frankly he’s better than at least half of the stuff we saw yesterday, and five minutes in his company is five minutes well spent. Plus you can’t deny he looks the part. It’s a neat start to a far more satisfying day of music; plus the sun stays out. It’s not the sort of thing we’d normally do, but permit us to quote a poem, in full:

The music comes and goes on the wind,
Comes and goes on the brain.

This was Thom Gunn’s take on Jefferson Airplane, and it could easily refer to The Tim May Band’s set on the main stage Their lilting folky AOR is expertly controlled and performed with some panache, but ultimately proves too polite to make much impression on us, even whilst we have to give them credit for their chops. The lyric “Nice to meet you, I must be going”, however, reminds us painfully of Phil Collins, so they blow it at the last hurdle.

I suppose it’s unhealthy prejudice, but forgive us for thinking that Tamara Parsons-Baker was going to be chortling jodhpurred lass singing nasal, plummy songs about palomino geldings. Imagine our surprise in being confronted with a beautifully clear voice that trickles through the air like a limpid stream above some subtle guitar. The first name that springs to mind is Laima Bite, even though some of the wispy Global Traveller lyrics remind us more of Jessica Goyder. There’s a slight danger of the featherlight tunes getting lost in the breeze, but this is still a great little start to the Second Stage’s day.

Vultures quickly ramp up the tempo with a series of early 60s pop nuggets that have approximately one riff and about 5 lyrics between them. This is not a criticism, in case you were concerned, and it’s like early Kinks played with Arctic Monkeys bounce and insouciance. There’s something about the way the drummer innocently stabs at the snare like it’s 1963 rather than whacking round the toms like it’s 1975 that puts a huge spring in our step.

The farcically named Bommerillo would have to do a lot to kill our mood, and their generic country rock is well turned and cheery even as it’s forgettable. On a Truck stage this wouldn’t last five minutes, but for now it’ll serve. A charming Californian bluegrass banjo player pours us a glass of homebrew and explains that US folk songs are exactly the same as English folksongs, “except at the end they hang the fucker”. Goodbye moral ambiguity. It turns out that Americans wanted simple endings long before Hollywood arrived.

We chat to Banjo Boy quite happily during Bourbon Roses’ set, as their straight up blues has little to offer, beyond some really rather decent harp playing (you know which sort of harp, don’t make me come down there). Once again, dubious non-native accents seem to be pretty common here on the Second Stage – we wonder if American folk musicians try to pretend that they’re Cornish…or whether we should "hang the fucker"

“Tell me, Captain Strange, won’t you be my lover?”. This next band might have taken their name from “I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper”, one of our favourite camp SciFi disco romps (believe me, we’ve got a list), but they haven’t quite captured the fun with their sax-flecked ska-tinged cabaret rock. It’s quite like The Drugsquad with half the band missing, and maybe some fleshing out of the sound could reap dividends.The spirit is there, but most of the music isn’t.

We’re not 100% convinced by Stuart Turner’s growly voice – remember, we saw Mephisto Grande right here just 24 hours ago – but his chugging rockabilly guitar, replete with slapback sound, is a cracker. Banjo Boy offers Seasick Steve as a reference point, which can hardly be sneezed at – we certainly respect Stuart’s ability to lock into a groove and let his rhythms do the talking.

Toby is “the hottest new talent to come out of Oxford this year,” according to the MC. Never heard of him, we must admit. We do love to discover other pockets of music fan beyond our immediate East Oxford Mafia circle, but in this case they’re welcome to keep Toby. The boy can sing, we’ll give him that, but his dull slightly latin songs recall Ben Harper at his weediest, and even Jack Johnson (anecdote: a couple of years ago we overheard two teenage girls in a record shop excitedly discussing their purchase of the Jack Johnson album; we thought they meant the Miles Davis LP of the same name, and were on the brink of deciding that the young weren’t complete idiots, until we discovered he was just some strumming fucker). Toby’s music is accomplished, but only the way that building a model of Minas Tirith from lolly sticks is: accomplished, but pointless and faintly embarrassing. For a performer who’s not yet old enough to visit the beer tent, he has plenty of talent, but at the moment it is being squandered.

We should have watched Gunbunny instead, who seem to have improved roughly tenfold, if the brief snatch of their set we caught was indicative. Seriously tight and meaty grunge, it sounds like all of Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff played at once. Do people still call this The Eynsham Sound?Hang on, did they ever call it The Eynsham Sound outside of our tiny mind?

Chantelle Pike has all sorts of elisions and vocal trills in her arsenal, but never pushes them too far, like certain R n B divas we could mention (at least we would if we could tell which one was which). Maybe her songs aren’t all winners, but “Save Me” for one puts us happily in mind of Juliet Turner, and she deserves her high billing.

Before the main stage home stretch we pop in on Deviant Amps, whose cheeky monkey zydeco pop is 50% The Ralfe Band, and 50% a bloody big mess. Good fun, though, and the Klub Kak contingent are dancing in force, which is entertainment in itself.

With their theatrical pomp, natural sense of drama and Woody’s intricate keys, Borderville burst onto the stage like a cross between ELP and Alvin Stardust. We’ll be frank, we have seen better sets from them, but full marks for the audacity of playing a lachrymose “Send In The Clowns” to an audience who were expecting to leap about to The (cancelled) Moneyshots…and then following it up with some Leonard Cohen. So, not up to their own high standard, but still light years ahead of most of the lineup.

It’s left to Witches to wrap up proceedings. At first we thought they’d blown it, the opening two numbers sounding rather like empty stadium bombast, but thankfully they soon settled into their dark, brooding mariachi menace; in fact they build to quite some heights of intensity, Dave at one point hopping round the stage waving some red maracas, looking for all the world like an air traffic controller who’s busting for the loo. “In The Chaos Of A Friday Night” is a jet black lump of insidious passion, which is balanced by a harpsichord led tune that comes off like a baroque consort playing 80s Tangerine Dream, and over it all Benek’s trumpet lines arc poetically. There aren’t many local bands who could take lineup changes in their stride like this and still keep soaring onwards.

And with that, it’s off to the station to get the train (except we find a lift on the way, woohoo!), satisfied with another Charlbury. We can’t pretend the music was as good as last year, and as noted The Beard Museum’s input was much mourned, but still we appreciate the enormous effort that has gone into creating a free weekend of entertainment, just for us. And, criticisms aside, we’d far rather be here for nowt than in Wakestock for £100+. We’ll be there in 2009, maybe we’ll bump into some of you; watch out for Banjo Boy’s homebrew, though, it’s a bit cheeky.