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.

Punt Up Emotions

Most of this review appears in the current issue of Nightshift.  The new bits are mainly the bits where I say people are not so good - fair enough, as Nightshift booked the event.  So, read on if you are hoping for some negativity to leaven what you've already read.

PUNT, Cellar, PT, Wheatsheaf, White Rabbit, Turl Street Kitchen, 13/5/15

The stage at the Purple Turtle is dedicated to the late sound engineer, blues fan, musician, husky owner and huskier singer, Tony Jezzard.  If his spirit dropped by tonight, it would certainly appreciate the volume levels on display, but more likely his spectre would smile wryly at the tales of a locked venue, a PA shoved together at break-neck speed, and an electrocuted soundman.  After such a start to the proceedings, it seems churlish to moan about the stage running late when James Serjeant has had the national grid pumped through his skinny frame, so we start our night at the Cellar, with only the most cursory grumble...just for the sake of form, you understand.

There, Balkan Wanderers are kick-starting the night with more crackling energy than James Serjeant’s first piddle of the night (yes, yes, we’ll stop now), buoying the crowd with spicy East European pop, and inspiring some surprisingly early hedonistic dancing, considering it’s Oxford on a Wednesday and most of us are still digesting our burritos.  Superficially they resemble gypsy punk rabble rousers Gogol Bordello, but listen carefully beyond the thumping drums and shoutalong choruses, and you’ll find that Balkan Wanderers have replaced the wild aggression with chirpy, quirky mid-80s indie pop, in the vein of Grab, Grab The Haddock, or even Stump.  This allows the band’s secret weapon, the conversational intimacy of Claire Heaviside’s clarinet, to slowly steal the show.  In what will become a leitmotif throughout the evening, we overhear someone saying the band should have finished the Punt.

Back at the PT, The Shapes have now taken the stage, offering a breezy cocktail of Radio 2 melodies and light rock styles.  They have a track that resembles The Beautiful South, they have a tune that sounds like Tom Petty, they even have a song called “Tom Petty” that sounds a wee bit like 10cc and a wee-er bit like Darts.  In many hands this would all be pretty generic fluff, but there’s a mercurial, alchemical sensibility at work that keeps the music interesting; take “Mr Sandman”, a mash-up of The Beatles’ “Something” and Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage”, with keyboard player Colin Henney throwing properly loopy jazz-dance poses as he doles out elegant fruity chords.  You’ve heard of Dad rock, but this is more like Eccentric Uncle rock – enjoy it, but don’t sit on their knee.

Entering The Wheatsheaf’s upstairs room, you can really tell that this is the only Punt venue that exists solely for listening to live rock, such is the room’s dinginess, the cosy crush of the crowd, and the full-fat glory of the sound.  It’s a sound that suits Ghosts In The Photographs, who open the dam to wave upon wave of Explosions In The Sky styled guitar noise.   Perhaps we’ve come across this tumescent post-rock business before, and Ghosts do nothing new, but who ever complained that a sunset was unoriginal, eh?  Imposing, impressive stuff.

“Money is the devil’s pie”.  Did Rhymeskeemz really just say that?  Let’s assume we misheard.  Ah, now, he certainly did just slip “I’m sick of my dad’s impressions” into a litany of politico-social criticisms, which we like a lot.  Yes, there’s a lot to enjoy about this rapper, who has a vibrant wit that keeps his bars the right side of cliché, and a nice rhythmic variation.  But the vocals just don’t seem to bear any relation to the music, as if the backing tracks were composed in isolation, and DJ Bungle has just unleashed them for the first time.  An enticing new discovery, but a frustratingly unconvincing set.

Outside The White Rabbit, a morris side is giving it the full hanky.  Considering it’s as close as we can get to a native Cotswold music style, there really should be some morris on the Punt bill one day.  Get your applications in for 2016, chaps!  Inside, things are less old-fashioned, but sadly, rather more dated.  White Beam, featuring local band veteran Jeremy Leggett, are certainly not too bad, but hark back to 1991 or so, when indie dance has dissolved into lightly funky, floppy rhythms and thin, fuzzy guitar provided a sickly European cousin to grunge.  Probably, lots of older Punters feel a warm glow of the post-Ride Oxford sound displayed here, but it simply reminds us exactly why Britpop happened.

Over at the Turl Street Kitchen, 18 year old Katy Jackson is pulling the carpet from those over twice her age with some delicately tuneful acoustic ditties.  The first impression is of Joni Mitchell without the paranoia and patchouli, but it soon becomes clear that there’s a sardonic side to Katy, as if she’s looking askance at her melodies and raising her eyebrows at her own undoubted ability.  Our next reference point is the smooth cynicism of Evan Dando, and before we know it we’ve spotted a Lou Reed influence in the vocal delivery.  We’ll definitely be revisiting this songwriter at a less hectic date.

But for now there’s a pint to be tossed back, and a wobbly jog back to The PT on the cards, to check out another very young act, fraternal duo Cassels, who take the flea-bitten sneer of early Sebadoh and weld it messily onto the fuzzy tuneful surge of The Pixies.  They’ve got the ‘flu today, apparently, and if so, we’re quite excited to see them at peak fitness.  Apparently, we hear, if they were feeling better, They Could Have Closed The Punt (mark 2).

At every Punt there’s one act that ends up with a crowd that’s just a little too large.  Sometimes it’s a band that just proves too big a draw, as anyone who stood craning at the doorway to see The Young Knives or Little Fish in earlier years will attest, but often it’s a quieter act who can’t battle past the increasingly, ahem, relaxed crowd.  Whilst Water Pageant might not have been quite as up against it in the volume stakes as The August List a few years ago, we can’t really hear anything from the back of the White Rabbit but some pleasant vocal fragments and what sounds like a mellotron.  A couple of tasty ingredients, doubtless, but we can’t really judge the dish.

Sometimes we worry that the Turl Street Kitchen is a little too refined for the maelstrom of spilt pints and tinnitus that is The Punt.  In about three minutes flat Despicable Zee has destroyed that notion by calling the audience grumpy, and starting a good natured argument.  Then again, Zahra Tehrani, of Baby Gravy/BG Records fame, probably starts an argument at every rehearsal.  And she’s the only band member.  Beyond acting like a surly drumming Jack Dee, her music stretches from drunken clockwork electro in the style of Plone, through MIA flavoured attitude pop and a kind of Capitol K home-made doodling, to a beery hip hop barn dance featuring various local MC luminaries...some of whom may have even known how the track goes.  This is messy, abusive, unfinished music, of the sort that dodges every traditional indicator of quality.  It’s almost certainly the best set we see all night.

Zaia and Maiians on at the same time?  Don’t the organisors realise how confused we are by this point?  How about some other vowels to help us get our bearings?  The former are a phenomenally slick reggae band, with plenty of juicy bass and stabbing brass, who sound wonderful in the Cellar’s resonant gig space.  Strictly, this is the sort of band you want to listen to at a festival, in a set long enough to allow you to take all the substances, read a book, fall in love, start a political party with a stranger and still have time to nip to the cake stall a few times, but our brief exposure tonight leave us impressed.  Maiians are equally bouncy and dancefloor-focused, but a little more ornate, with their excellent cross-rhythms and organic kraut-electronica keyboard lines.  Those who discover the band tonight will go home very happy, we suspect.  These are two acts that exemplify the observation that crowd-pleasing isn’t always the same as stupid.

And, incidentally, we hear they both Could Have Closed The Punt.

Like Cassels, Esther Joy Lane has apparently climbed from her sick bed to play for us.  Seriously, we’d never have known.  The trick of unfurling rich reverbed vocal melodies over freeze-dried beats suggests a strong Grimes influence (as does the T-shirt Esther wears on her Soundcloud page), but there’s a sultry steeliness to the delivery that contrasts with Grimes’ pastel comedown haze.  If this set might have been suited to a PA bigger than what could be squeezed into the corner of a city pub, in quality it cuts easily through sonic paucity. 

Sadly, we don’t make it back to Turl Street to catch Adam Barnes, having got confused, lost a notebook and accidentally drank some beers, but we’re present and correct for Rainbow Reservoir back at The White Rabbit.  The trio play a punky pepped-up pop racket, with a devil take the hindmost insouciance, but without any vestige of aggression.  In this sense the band reflects the singer’s American roots, harking back to US college keg parties rather than British commuter town basements, red cups hoisted rather than glasses in the face, and if the wordy songs sound a bit like Kim Deal reading out her PhD, the best of the tunes are packed with fire, fun and energy. So much so, we think the band Could Have Closed The Punt.

Oh, wait a minute.  They did.  Right, is the bar still open?

When I Punt My Masterpiece

This morning I really like Sleaford Mods and Georg Philipp Telemann.

PUNT FESTIVAL, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Wheatsheaf/ White Rabbit/ Turl Street Kitchen, 14/5/14

The Punt is an endurance test of pop music and beer, it helps to line the stomach first.  We’ve just finished a big bowl of salt and carbs in a noodle bar, and are cracking open our fortune cookie, to find the legend “Soon one of your dreams will come true”.  Hey, that’s remarkably similar to the sign-off on our handy Punt guide, “may all your musical dreams come true”.  This looks to be a cosmically blessed event, quite possibly the greatest night in cultural history; and, look, we didn’t even get any sauce on our shirt.

The Purple Turtle brings us crashing back to mundane reality, starting 20 minutes late, whilst bits of the PA are hastily tinkered with.  This means we only get to see about 15 minutes of Hot Hooves – which is about 7 songs, of course.  Although he’ll doubtless hate us for saying so, their lead vocalist seems to be slowly morphing into Mac E Smith, drawling and chewing his way through acerbic songs over taut and unvarnished pub punk, and spending most of the space between tracks shouting about the venue’s lighting: plus can anyone really deliver lines like “attitude adjuster plan” and not sound a little bit MES?  Unlike their well-turned records, the songs in this set are almost smothered by their own energy, “This Disco” especially is reduced to a heavy thrum through which Pete Momtchiloff’s vocals barely penetrate.  Pop will erase itself, perhaps, but it sounds bloody good whilst it does so.

Down the alleyway at the Cellar, another slightly more mature band is showing the youngsters how it’s done, although in a quieter, more introspective fashion.  Only Trophy Cabinet amongst tonight’s acts would introduce a song called “Rant” and then drift away on an airy zephyr of dreamy “ba ba ba”s.  Their classic, refined indie owes a little to James, a smidgen to A House, and a lot to that band from 1986...oh, you know the ones...we can’t recall the name, but we can just visualise the exact shade of lilac vinyl their 7 inch came in.  Sometimes the band keeps everything a little too reined in, when a bit of pop fizz might enliven the show, but they can certainly write some cracking little tunes.

Whilst our Eastern dessert oracle thinks that our dreams are coming true, Aidan Canaday is possibly still asleep.  Looking surprisingly like comedian Tim Key he slurs somnambulistically through lyrics that rarely seem to develop beyond slackly repeated phrases.  This might be quite intriguing, in its way, but doesn’t fit well with the polite salon folk pop the rest of The Cooling Pearls is producing.  And the polite salon folk pop ain’t great.

Neon Violets are an object lesson in why live music in a decent venue is irreplaceable.  We’re just chatting to some old friends at the top of the Cellar’s stairway (The Punt acting like a sort of school reunion for aging pasty-faced scenesters), and we nearly don’t go down: “Sounds alright from here, it’ll only be a bit louder inside”.  Well, that’s where we were wrong, because in close proximity, what sounded like pleasingly chunky blues rock, a la Blue Cheer, becomes a glorious, immersive experience, huge drums ushering you down dark corridors of fuzzy guitar overtones.  The material is relatively simple, but the sound is deep enough to get lost in.  From the doorway, we’d never have dreamed it.

One downside to The Punt is all the bloody people turning up at venues, when we’re used to seeing local acts in a tiny knot of regular faces.  So, although we are in The White Rabbit whilst Salvation Bill is playing, all we can hear from the back of a truly packed bar are occasional bloopy drum machine loops, and tinny fragments of guitar and tremulous vocal.  It sounds as if someone is playing a Plaid remix of Radiohead on a small boombox.  This is actually quite a pleasing sound, but not precisely what Ollie Thomas was shooting for, we suspect.

Hannah Bruce is the only completely unknown name to us on this year’s bill, so we make the effort to watch the entirety of her set.  Having got a little lost in The Turl Street Kitchen, and ended up trying to enter a room in which people were having a quiet meeting (it might have been anything from a divorcees’ book club to the Botley Church Of Satan), we find the clean white space, and settle down on the stripped floorboards for some acoustic balladry – which feels odd as back in the day The Punt would always start with stuff like this, not irascible bald rockers moaning about gobos.  Bruce has some strong songs, but tends to mar them a little by delivering them in a world-weary, battle-scarred voice that droops in exhaustion at the end of phrases, and seems to have eradicated all vowels as excess baggage.  At times this works, the songs like melancholic spectres evaporating from the ramparts as the cock crows, but at other times it all feels kind of half-baked.  One track, in its recorded form, sounds like The Wu-Tang Clan, Hannah observes; forgive us for wishing that we’d heard that, and not another sombre strum.

During some embarrassing joke interviews in this year’s Eurovision broadcast, Graham Norton filled a bit of awkward dead air with the wry observation, “You know, there are 180 million people watching this”.  At 9.30 on Punt night this sort of happens in reverse: Lee Riley performs what is comfortably the most challenging, experimental set of the evening, and for 15 minutes he is the only performer onstage across all 5 venues.  This sort of thing should definitely be encouraged.  As he coaxes sheets of rich hum and harsh feedback from a guitar, people either rush for the exit with a grimace, or stand with their eyes closed looking beatific. This brief drone and noise set may have made some people’s dreams come true, and could feasibly haunt the nightmares of others for decades to come.

Without meaning to, we end up shuttling between the White Rabbit and The Turl Street Kitchen for the last 6 acts on our itinerary.  At the latter, Rawz is reminding us of the frustrating dilemma of live hip hop: you can’t have huge booming beats and clear, comprehensible lyrics simultaneously, not unless you have a lot of time and high end equipment.  So, the backing for this set, whilst nicely put together, is relegated to time-keeper not sonic womb, a tinny metronome and not much more.  This is only a minor concern, though, as it allows us to hear every syllable of Rawz’ relaxed but tightly controlled raps.  Previously we’d picked up some of MF Doom’s bug-eyed cut-up logic in the Rawz recording we’d heard, but tonight his delivery brings to mind the understated and thoughtfully clipped style of De La Soul circa Art Official Intelligence.  Seeing Jada Pearl, a talented singer whom we’ve not come across for absolutely years, guesting on one track was bonus, too.

Perhaps it was the fact that he followed Lee Riley, but Kid Kin’s set at The White Rabbit mostly dispenses with this occasionally overly pretty bedroom mood music style, and supplies some crisp, kicking electronica.  The first number is a slow whirlpool of piano chords and clear, forehead rapping drum machine patterns, that reminds us a little of Orbital’s “Belfast”, before some burnished bronze noise overwhelms everything.  The next piece takes a vintage Black Dog beat and adds tidy post-rock guitar, and the set continues in a strong and varied vein.

Juliana Meijer is also expanding the sonic palette in Turl Street, using two guitars and some curlew call synth sounds (courtesy of Seb Reynolds, who has already played once tonight in Flights Of Helios).  The breathy vocals are winning, and remind us a little of Edie Brickell, albeit without the forced chirpiness.  There’s a delightful airiness to the set, but it never becomes mere background music, even if it does briefly skirt cocktail territory at times.

Vienna Ditto is a band in hiding.  They consist of a guitarist, who seems to hate guitar histrionics, keeping his Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy stylings low in the mix, and a torch singer who shies away from the spotlight.  They play electronic music, but tie themselves down to looping most of the drums live, as if in terror of quantised purity.  They play the blues, but are seemingly wary of appearing overly sincere.  They make wonderful, uplifiting pop songs, but tend to obscure them with walls of acidic synth squelch.  They make charming stage banter, but rarely on the mike, so only a handful of the audience ever hear them.  Perhaps this refusal to ever resolve their own paradoxes is the reason we love them, but whatever the reason, they are the perfect conclusion to a very successful Punt, with the talent to fill vast auditoriums, but the love of playing techno gospel burners in the corner of a cramped, sweaty pub on a Wednesday night.  You think this ramshackle duo isn't the best band in Oxfordshire at the moment?  Dream on.

Good Will Punting

Here's my review of this year's Punt festival. Fragments of it were used in Nightshift's roundup, but obviously only the nice bits, because they booked the acts.  Music In Oxford didn't do a review this year, sadly, so most of this is being seen for the first time.  Calm your thundering heart and read on.

Random thought for today, has anyone ever made this awful joke?  Cartoon frame of Minnie the Minx or similar, clearly the last one on the page, in which she's tucking into the traditional pile of mash with snorkers sticking out at angles having a "nosh up" in a "snooty" restaurant.  She's looking at us, saying.  "Reader, I married him *Chortle*".

THE PUNT – Purple Turtle/Cellar/Wheatsheaf/Duke's Cut/White Rabbit, 8/5/13

Like cultural futures market traders, some people go to see unsigned acts so that they can spot successes early on: “I saw them before you’d ever heard of them, chum” is a common cry, and might be one familiar to anyone who caught Young Knives, Stornoway or Fixers at previous Punts.  Tonight’s event is odd because, although it may well source a few similar anecdotes for future pub raconteurs, for those of us who live in the here and now the bill is chock full of potential, but a little short on match-fit performers and finished articles.

The Purple Turtle PA, sadly, doesn’t seem to be either of those.  As an engineer battles gamely throughout the night, the timings fall further behind schedule, and the sound becomes more and more wayward.  For Phil McMinn (who has played the Punt previously as part of Fell City Girl and The Winchell Riots, despite his cheeky onstage claims) this is a minor issue and, although the mix might be missing some laptop trickery, his acoustic songs with violin touches cut through technological difficulties. We’ve always admired rather than loved his previous acts, finding them too bombastic and desperately emotional to truly embrace, but this outstanding set hinges on his fantastic, ruby port voice, and a knowing way with melody and dynamics.  If the music is more down to earth than his old bands’, then the lyrics certainly are, touching on mountains, tents and, quite possibly, pony trekking and Youth Hostels, with a wordy dexterity that occasionally recalls Joni Mitchell.  Give that man a gold star, and some Kendall mintcake for his napsack.

More veterans stripping things down next door in The Cellar, as Listing Ships take to the stage for the first time as a trio, having lost a member to parenthood (which has probably killed more bands than drink, drugs and gate reverb put together).  No offence to the departed guitarist, but the band is a revelation as a threepiece, giving the compositions enough space to add a cheeky sashay to what was once a clumping krautcore goosestep.  Tonight keyboard parts reveal new squelchy qualities, and basslines suddenly exude the aromas of dub and New York punk funk: seriously, we can suddenly hear ESG in there, along with the predicted Tortoise and Explosions In The Sky. 

Candy Says...relax!  They might as well, they’re still soundchecking back at the PT.  Oh, they’re about to start...oh, no they’re not.  Must dash.

Beginning to know what a ping pong ball must feel like, we nip back to The Cellar for a bracing waft of Duchess.  We enter to a delightful bit of summery, Afropop fluff, which bears a marked resemblance to Bow Wow Wow.  It’s often lovely stuff, but they could do with going a little more wild (in the country) to lift these promising songs.  Perhaps if they swap one of the percussionists for some gigging experience, we’ll have a great band on our hands.

Limbo Kids have made some superb recordings, which is what you’d expect from members of Ute and Alphabet Backwards.  In the White Rabbit, though, the glacial fragments of late 80s chart hits they arranged into delicate towers of song seem to topple like so much icy pop Jenga.  The vocals are cheery but thin, the band look a little uncertain, and the whole affair is tasty, but somewhat undercooked.  This is their debut gig, we understand, and the conclusion is that they could well have been the best act of Punt 2014, but for now they’re just providing the hold music before our first visit to our favourite Oxford venue.

The Wheatsheaf, apparently held together by scraps of tattered carpet and the accrued tar of ancient cigarettes is not only our Oxford bolthole of choice, but also the most fitting venue for some proper rock in the Punt, making its rock ‘n’ roll case from the tattooed boozers in the downstairs bar to the leaking toilets in the venue above.  In the darkness with a pint of cheap ale is perfect place to see Bear Trap, a scuzzy quartet of grungers who look as though they should come from Oxford, Michigan, making mall rock in the back room of the local Lutheran chapel to kill drab small town weekends.  There are backwards baseball caps on- and offstage, all nodding vigorously to greasy rock that kicks like an irate lumberjack, but whines like a petulant teen.  We’d be lying if we said that these thrashed chords and raw snarls were in any way original, but we’d also be lying if we said we don’t sup back that cheap ale at double speed, with a dumbass grin on our silly face.

If Bear Trap look American, Ags Connolly doesn’t half sound it.  Not only is his music old school one-man melancholy country – or Ameripolitan music, as he and his fellow Shaniaphobes like to call their sound, to differentiate it from whatever stadium schmaltz is being labelled country this week – his voice is pure Midwest drawl, which is odd as when speaking he betrays his West Oxfordshire home.  Normally this would be an unforgivable crime, but Ags’ voice is just so damn good, unhurriedly lolloping along the melodies like a cowpoke taking an easy stroll back from church on a glorious day, that all is forgiven.  Like Bear Trap, his music isn’t going to break new ground, but if it’s looking to break a few hearts, it might just succeed.

Fearing that we’d neglect The Duke’s Cut if we didn’t make the effort to walk there now, we make the rush there to check out The August List.  Thankfully, it’s not as punishingly busy as last year, but it’s still hard to make out much of this enjoyable duo’s music from the back of the crowd, in the doorway of the Ladies’.  Experience tells us that the music is a sweet, smily balance to Ags’ lachrymose laments, with unhurried porch-swing ditties drifting in from some mythical Deep South farmstead.  There’s an unforced connection between their voices that you only get if the singers are brother and sister, or husband and wife.  Or, judging by their musical reference points, both.

We have thoroughly enjoyed Death Of Hi-Fi’s recent album, but live, and shorn of many of the guest vocalists, their music feels like a functional backdrop, rather than a main event.  Like the paranoid feeling that things keep happening in your peripheral vision, the music always seems as though it’s about to usher in something big - whether that’s a stunning guest turn or a brash corporate pep talk, we’re not sure – but it never quite does.  Only rapper N-Zyme really makes a mark onstage, and he displays a nervous energy that seems to hamper his performance a little.  A strong band best suited to the studio, perhaps.

Our experience of tonight’s Punt has been of people doing old things very well, and people doing new things that might need a little nurturing or rethinking before they’re great, but that doesn’t mean that any of the performances are bad.  Except Nairobi’s, that is.  It’s a little unfortunate for them that both Duchess and Limbo Kids have nodded towards the post-Foals African influenced rhythms they favour, and we try to bear in mind that the PT sound system is shot away, but even with these byes, what we see is clumsy and disappointing.  With guitars doing an ugly Hi-Life widdle over clunky drums and a vocal that sounds like a disconsolate moose, it’s as if this set has been put together solely to annoy Andy Kershaw.  Sadly, the wonky world music jam happening in the doorway of Moss Bros as we wend our way back to The Wheatsheaf is more satisfying.

Like a hideous breeding experiment between Stump and The Peking Opera, The Goggenheim bring some much needed theatricality to the Punt.  Everything about this band is grating, from the unjazz skronk of the sax to the repulsive Man At C&A striped vests to the shrill declamatory dada vocals, and yet, against all logic, their songs feel like glorious pop nuggets. Whilst the band nail the wayward blowouts of improvisors Bolide to trashy backbeats and Beefheartian trellises, matriarchal abstract diva Grace Eckersley wails and coos barely coherent mantras.  There’s an otherworldliness about The Goggenheim, as well as a love of the cheap and brash, as if it were the sort of thing two-dimensional sci fi monsters might listen to on their night off. 

And so, we leave the frugging Macra and boogying Aquaphibians and make our way to The White Rabbit for the Punt’s denouement.  In a way, the biggest revelation of the night is how well this works as a final venue: the Goggenheim provide a mystifying climax, and this welcoming little pub acts as a come down party.  We slurp down a nightcap and enjoy After The Thought, who starts off in the style of Artificial Intelligence electronic acts such as B12 or early Black Dog, and then adds a sizable tray of guitar pedals.  There’s a sparse, almost systems music feel to the loops and rhythms, and a lot of the set sounds like the third Orbital album with half tracks turned down and someone playing guitar over the top.  The effect is hypnotic but, just maybe, it’s not quite as good as the third Orbital album without half the tracks turned down and someone playing guitar over the top.  Like much of tonight’s bill, After The Thought is an act with a relatively short gigging history, and we’re sure that soon this enjoyably textured music will become even more encapsulating.  Whether Matt Chapman will become an “I saw him first” topic for future boasts we don’t know, but we do know that we’ve explored a varied set of local acts, and supported a bunch of excellent Oxford venues that should be cherished, which is perhaps enough of a boast for anyone with a real love of live music.