Grade A Maracas

This is not a band I've liked at all before, so really pleasant to discover their new record is really rather good indeed.  The opening libe about releases turned out to be wrong, and was edited for the mag, but I've left it here to show my (ahem) humility.

THE SHAKER HEIGHTS – BRUNSKI (Skag Harry Records)

It’s almost exactly four years since The Shaker Heights released anything.  You remember them, right?  You’ll know you’re remembering them correctly if you can barely remember anything at all, such was the harmlessness of their light rock, filling gaps in midweek line-ups anonymously and efficiently like packing crate polystyrene nuggets.  And after all this time, has anything changed? Bloody right it has!  This single is pretty damned great.  Apparently, “Brunski” was inspired by Kafka and explores “the pressure of non-arrival”, which sounds like nonsense and justifies a certain piece of Wheatsheaf gents’ graffiti we shan’t reproduce here, but this is the only negative thing we can say.  “Brunski” opens with a coldly insistent drum machine goosestep, which is soon joined by skeletal fret-buzzing bass whilst some snide cyborg synth lines look askance from the shadows.  Into this freeze-dried goth diorama drift Robyn Cooper’s sad-eyed vocals, before the whole thing is lifted to a warmer place by a chorus recalling Tears For Fears.  It lasts brief seconds though, before we’re back in step with the melancholy march.  This is chilly music to turn a collar up against, bleak pop to make you blow onto your hands.   

The B side, “Sick And Weird” is a simpler acoustic ditty made special by the gaunt hollowness of the keyboards, sickly sonic mistrals blowing through the melody.  It’s like they took the sparsest track on Prefab Sprout’s Protest Songs and made it five times more miserable, without losing the prettiness of Cooper’s voice.  Nightshift spends a lot of time telling grown-up bands to stop being so sensible, get blitzed and try to capture some childish magic, but if The Shaker heights are anything to go by, take time out.  Have kids.  Get a mortgage.  Become a quantity surveyor.  Do anything, basically, if it improves your music this much.  

Hearth Hearted

Big Bang Theory, I meant, of course, in the last post.

Not like when a soldier dies, the bit below.

Anyway, here's a record review from this month's Nightshift, amazingly the first ever to have no live reviews. This means I gave the only actual bad review in the whole issue, excluding the demo pages. Yay.



SHAKER HEIGHTS – SITTING IN THE FIRE (Download single)


This single features “exclusive artwork based on the music”. It’s a line drawing of a man staring at a wall in an empty room. Yep, that’s roughly how it makes us feel, too. The single is not precisely bad – it’s well made and shows evidence of talent – but it is dully anonymous. The title track starts with good ingredients, a maudlin country-inflected vocal and some pleasing keyboard embellishments, but doesn’t know what to do with them. After a repeating these fragments a few times, the song drifts to a halt, like a finance administrator who realises that people stopped listening to his quarterly sales report half way through.

The B-side “Poised As Robots” is apparently “attack-rock”, if the press release is to be believed, although in reality it chugs along cosily like a vintage traction engine. It’s a simple heartfelt tune that’s far superior to the A side, but it still has trouble asserting itself. It’s as if the band have no faith in what they’re doing. So, we’ve got about one twelfth of a Beautiful South song coupled with a self-conscious Then Jericho track. Hmm, might take a look at that wall for a bit.

Valentine Temple

I've lost not only the Word file for this review, but also the hard copy of the magazine it was in, so I'm typing this from a scrap of A4 paper that I found in the bottom of the reviews vault. Baby Gravy are growned up now, and are very good; Shirley are called Silvanito now, and are still fun; The Brothers never crossed my consciousness again after this night; The Shaker heights still play in Oxford every now and then, but I steer well clear.

SHIRLEY/ THE BROTHERS/ THE SHAKER HEIGHTS/ BABY GRAVY - The Point, The Zodiac

Young people are great. They have such belief that things will work out, no matter how implausible they look. Take teenage band Baby Gravy. They have the youthful fire to believe that they can start a sixpiece melding Sexy Breafast style prog pop with dubby bass, The Psychedelic Furs' sax parts and vocals in the vein of The Slits, and make it work. Of course, it doesn't work at all. It sounds like two bands playing two songs at once. Badly. But sometimes a noble failure is worth a hundred safe successes. Watch out for this lot, they could really surprise us, so long as they don't start taking the easy route.

Much as The Shaker Heights do. they could really use some of Baby Gravy's open-minded outlook. Their chiming, slightly drony rock is a bit like early U2 (if you're being kind) and a bit like The Velvet Underground's Loaded (if you're being saintly). Listening to them is like finding a pebble washed smooth by the sea: immediately pleasant to the senses, but ultimately forgettable and impossible to distinguish from others.

Oxford music is known for many things, but white funnk is not one of them, which makes The Brothers an unusual proposition. They burst onto the stage in a flurry of mid-80s funk rhythms and oodles of glistening Rhodes, headed by a frontman strutting about like a bantam impersonating John Inman. At times it's somewhat uninspired, but the best tracks sound like The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" played in the style of Beck's Midnite Vultures LP, which is something you don't see every day.

Shirley's music is a frightening mixture of Bryan Adams, Los Lobos and McFly wth occasional Santana guitar solos and fists aloft choreography. Risible on paper, but in a weird inversion of the Baby Gravy principle, Shirley get away with it by putting in the hard work. Thus their songs are impeccably arranged, convincingly performed and all a neat two minutes long, with barely enough space for their adulatory fans to catch a breath in between. Four grown men throwing shapes and singing about their outlaw status is clearly ridiculous, and Shirley's relentless chirpiness is guaranteed to make the more straight-faced music fan physically sick, but I'll admit they made me grin for thrity minutes. Which is no mean feat, when you think about it.