You Know My Ipsden Lie

Supernormal is always fantastic, but this was one of the best. I very much hope it returns in 2025.

SUPERNORMAL, Braziers Park, 2-4/8/24 

The opening act at Supernormal is Spiritual Advisor & Nice Strangers, about which the programme states, “Sorry, I haven’t a clue what this is”. We can’t tell whether this is the compiler giving up, an obscure conceptual joke, or a hint that Graeme Garden will be doing some bucolic festival puns - “Bring me the hedge of Alfredo Garcia!” - but the fact that we considered all of these options and more proves the extent to which Supernormal sits outside the standard festival experience. If the average music weekender consists of acts trotting out their biggest hits, punters killing time until the headliners arrive, epic queues and agonising bar prices, then Supernormal is a communal experience in which performers and audiences mingle together without a sniff of a VIP area, and in which every change of act offers a surprise...not always a welcome one, mind, but that’s part of the fun. Connections can be drawn between acts all over the bill, so in true Supernormal spirit, this review will entirely ignore the running order. 

Shake Chain are a band we’ve seen many times in Oxford. In most environments the clear split between the band on stage playing excellently wiry post-punk and performance artist Kate Mahony doing some maggotty crawling around (or outside) the venue is shocking, but such is the semipermeable membrane between audience and performer at Supernormal, her brattish toddler presence in the crowd barely raises an eyebrow, though her mewling and puking vocals still sound great. Other acts who spurn the stage’s boundaries are Robyn Rocket, who strolls slowly round the field delivering soothing little delayed trumpet lines over ambient washes and susurrations and is probably what they play when the ECM office is hungover, and Maria Uzor, who spends a good percentage of her set dancing or kneeling in front of the stage. Her intriguing, bouncy songs have a pop heart, an experimental mind, and a raver’s sweaty trainers, as she co-opts a vintage Hoover synth sound and a digital tom rhythm resembling Raze’s ‘Break 4 Love’. Slimelord also make some classic genre nods, but not the ones we expect from the name: yes, they can churn out sludge passages, but underneath that they’re barely disguised death metallers, all cantering riffs, barked vocals, and a bassist whose windmilling hair gets caught on the Shed stage’s splintery roof. 

Connections to deeper traditions occur throughout the weekend, especially in those sets happening in or around Braziers House itself. Paul Dunmall’s solo sax set drops in the odd free improv sputter and squawk, but his fluent smiling lines sound more like Paul Desmond with the odd sheet of Coltrane sound, and his piece on soprano gestures towards Parkerish runs and eddies. Paddi Benson & Grace Lemon’s uilleann pipes duos, with a little rhythm guitar underpinning, were inspired by ballroom dances held in Bedlam Hospital, but are not wild or careening, instead inhabiting a lovely space between folk forms and cellular minimalism. We don’t have the expertise to state whether Jali Fily Cissokho’s Senegalese songs exist within any tradition, but we know that his kora playing is wonderful, spicing delicate cascades of notes with slashing chords. Yakka Doon plays pure 60s coffeehouse folk in the sitting room, and we imagine John Renbourn or Bert Jansch chiming in at any moment. An acapella number is especially beautiful, particularly as our position behind a piece of antique furniture means we can’t see anything, and it sounds like a tuneful ghost - “Show the spectre some affection”, as Leo Robinson notes in his modern day take on Harlem Rennaissance/beat jazz poetry. Isiah Hull delivers his writings alongside the band GG, who often sound like a stuttering Slint who can’t quite get started, and we christen the marriage of emotional verses and laissez-faire sonics “slachrymose”.  Wormhook also features spoken word and austere monastic singing, though phrases like “toad pulpit boil nexus” make for more dense texts, accompanied by a pseudo double bass made from a big branch and a length of rough hawser, which creates a powerful guttural rumble, but isn’t big on variation. Infinite Livez’ lyrics are poetic in spirit, but his delivery is soulful and looped, like an understated lofi Jamie Lidell, and his occasional flute invokes Rahsaan Roland Kirk. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Common People

I bought an early Simple Minds album today in the charity shop.  We will find out whether they were not shit before I'd heard of them, as some people claim - NB, it turned out not to be true for Genesis.

OH! COMMUNITY, DIVINE SCHISM, Common Ground, 7/5/23

Divine Schism’s Oh! Community all-dayers have been a regular highlight of Oxford’s post-lockdown music palette. By holding them in community-run spaces like the Common Ground coffee shop and art space they seem to attract people who might not explore classic dingy beer-dungeon venues, and today we see intrigued passers-by decide to step in, as well as some under-18s who can’t access most gigs. But, crucially, the bills have not been tempered or diluted to comfort the casual listener, and today’s line-up spans the delicate and the discordant, above a valley of the absurd.

Sensibly, the day starts with the approachable. Young singer Beth Pirrie has a lovely, unshowy voice and gives an excellent reading of a song by Corinne Bailey Rae (even though she can’t pronounce Corinne Bailey Rae). Green Hands are a pleasingly relaxed threepiece, recalling Wilco or Silver Jews at their least threatening, but The Bobo – with regular collaborator Kid Kin – are more memorable, their ethereal synthpop icily austere whilst being attractively melodic – imagine if the 3 ghosts who visited Scrooge had been the members of A-Ha.  

Suep deliver the sort of scrappy organ-led pep that has been played loud and tipsy in garages since 1963, and often remind us of old-school Truck favourites Fonda 500. They have a synth line that nicks to tune from ‘Love Will Tear us Apart’ which they put above a countryish lope, and some Bow Wow Wow buoyancy with a keyboard that sounds like a disappointed kitten. They merge into Garden Centre, sharing members, but with Max “King of Cats” Levy at the helm, giving them a more foscussed Monkees flavour (plus the best parasite shanty you’ll ever hear). Sinews, although having a hardcore underpinning and a taste for Bleach-era Nirvana, are fitting bedfellows with a surprising ear for a tune despite vocals delivered with the angry belch of a killer whale with a hangover.

The day really belongs to a pair of bands who are part high-concept performance art, part farcical prank...which is what all great pop is, ultimately. Dream Phone toss nasally pitch-shifted Auto-Tune vocals above infectious electro-punk à la Blectum From Blechdom, at times sounding like nightmare pier-end entertainers, Daniel Bedingfield & Orville. Shake Chain are more intense, and as the band begins Kate Mahoney is crawling agonisingly from the middle of the street outside, before delivering the second number from under a rug. When The Fall’s final line-up morphed into Imperial Wax, they had a vocalist conundrum: an MES impersonator would have been crass, but a standard rock singer leached some of the magic. Shake Chain sound like an alternate reality version of the group, where lean wiry post-punk is paired with a Diamanda Goulash of visceral howls and startling sobs.

The only way to follow that is with good tight bands. Ex-Void play sweet-minded college rock with a nod to Throwing Muses, or even Juliana Hatfield. They do a nice sprightly Arthur Russell cover, though they aren’t experts at mid-song gear changes. Holiday Ghosts splice in some classic rock ‘n’ roll chug driven forward by Gedgey hyperstrums, and are frankly excellent. Oh, and those kids we mentioned earlier? They got into the day, and went bananas for Shake Chain; there may be a future for mankind after all.

Split and Run?

Looks as though I neglected to upload this at the time.  Better late than etc.

MELT BANANA/ SHAKE CHAIN, Divine Schism, The Bully, 3/4/22

Depending on where they’re standing in the venue, the time it takes people to notice Kate Mahony varies. The rest of Shake Chain take to the stage and strike up a buzzing hypnotic rhythm, with no frills or fripperies, but enough focus to keep it interesting, but eventually you spot Mahony, scrunched in a coat, writhing agonisingly slowly through the crowd, some rough beast crawling towards The Bullingdon to be born. And, once they take the stage, looking studiedly bemused throughout the set, Mahony’s vocals are the unfiltered wailings of a neonate, primal howls that, if they are forming words, have sheared the edges off most of them in the journey from the hindbrain to the mic so you’d never know. There’s nothing weak and mewling about the performance, though, and Mahony as Id Vicious overlays the band’s raw and elemental rock mantras, so that it all sounds like The Nightingales haunted by a poltergeist. Amongst this glorious skree there’s a surprisingly groovy number, where a garage gogo beat accompanies the repeated cry “You’re running me over!”, like something from the soundtrack to Kill Bill. If Bill were already dead. And so were everyone else.

In contrast, Melt Banana’s show starts with the minimum of fanfare. The Tokyo duo simply take to the stage, quietly set up in front of a bank of amps the size of a Transit van, and then immediately and efficiently commence pummelling. The constituent parts are straightforward – intense beats triggered by a glowing handheld device that looks like a novelty TV remote, Ichiro Agata’s razorwire guitar parts, and Yasuko Onuki’s high-octane yelping – but over an hour they are mixed, merged and shuffled like the deck of steamboat cardsharp. In fact, despite the relentless hammering, the thing one takes away from this set is just how intricate and lithe the performance is, best evidenced in a quickfire parade of seven Napalm Death-length microsongs. Onuki’s vocals, although clearly influenced by hardcore, have an elasticity that places them nearer to funk or rap, and Agata’s guitar-playing, as well as being phenomenal, is not afraid to pull back from the cascades of noise for some classic rocking: we hear a riff AC/DC would be proud to own, and a chug with which Lemmy would gladly share a bottle. As the closer, ‘Infection Defective’, with its rolling Massive Attack bassline and icy crystal shards of guitar attest, Melt Banana shoot for your head, your heart, and your dancing feet at once. And all of them are killing blows.

O Positive

Not only was this a fantastic day of music, run by excellent people, the review was an absolute blast to write.

OH, COMMUNITY! FESTIVAL, Florence Park Community Centre, 7/11/21

Oh, yes please! This wonderful all-dayer is perfectly named, being not just a chance to catch some new music, but also an opportunity for the almost forgotten before-times practice of hanging out, chatting about sets, and buying merch from friendly faces. Fittingly, many performers are also present for the other acts, not least half of new duo The Dumplings, who runs the desk for the rest of the day. Their chirpy, punky bulletins are scrappier than Scrappy-Doo on Scrapheap Challenge, and they have a micro-song celebrating Divine Schism founder and local lynchpin Aiden Canaday: O, Captain! my Captain!

Fortitude Valley and Fightmilk are muscularly melodic indie bands providing tuneful oases early and late in the running order, the former giving classic jangle an invigorating shot of grunge-adjacent energy a la The Breeders, whilst the latter spring from the less theatrical end of Britpop, and balance serious lyrics with extra brut wryness between songs. Both have albums mere days old for sale: oh, don’t mind if we do...

Local favourite EB delivers her intriguing unrap in the hugest tinted glasses, like a cross between Su Pollard and Horatio Caine. Musically, though, she’s more a mixture of Peaches and Gwen Stefani, and “Rodeo Queen” manages to revel in the pleasures of urban pop whilst acting as feminist satire on the culture: O, tempora! O, mores! Yay Maria also rides the laptop rhythms, and if there’s sometimes more reverse reverb than songwriting on display, the set has the unpretentious cabaret vibe of early 80s underground New York. We imagine Grace Jones, Keith Haring and a pre-record deal Madonna bopping at the front: oh! you pretty things.

Chunky emo-flecked rockers Junk Whale deliver a strong set, too exciting for one reveller, who smashes the venue’s delightfully old-school mirrorball whilst leaping, fist-aloft, across the dancefloor: O Superman. Things calm down for Alice Hubble, a synth duo (meaning there are two members, but happily more than two synths) who proffer slow, bleakly buzzing but oddly euphoric songs in a style we christen Giorgio Moroser, making one want to become a heartsick cyborg: oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt.

Shake Chain’s set is approximately Birth Trauma: The Musical. Whilst the band plays the sort of taut, psych-fuelled aggression-rock that Fat White Family promised but never quite delivered, performance artist Kate Mahony crawls slowly from underneath the stage, wrapped in a coat, limbs sticking out like the Isle of Man flag gone Cthulhu. She slowly grows into an astonishing howling vortex of bemused rage which is half Chuck Schuldiner from Death, half Moaning Myrtle, and by the end she’s raging behind a Beuysian totem built from the venue’s furniture whilst the band imitates military munitions: oh! what a lovely war.

Only Codex Serafini could follow that, a quintet enacting high-octane ritualistic space jams in black masks and bright pink robes, like the Squid Game guards jamming after hours to exorcise the horrors they’ve witnessed.  This is as close to witchcraft as one can get with a saxophone: oh, oh, oh, it’s magic! And they evidently summoned something impossible from an indescribable dimension (or Amsterdam) in the shape of Personal Trainer, equal parts LCD Soundsystem, Talking Heads, funk revue, art happening, shirts-off hardcore communion, and pep rally. There are abstract passages suddenly coalescing into ultra-tight backing vocals, there’s a bassist on a singer’s shoulders, there’s percussion played standing on a table because...well, frankly, by this point, fuck “because”. Sounds like a horrible mess? O ye of little faith. And then, suddenly, we’re out in the strangely silent suburban streets on a chilly Sunday night, wondering when the next bus is: oh, Christ is that the time?