Truckadero

Here's the Saturday review from this year's Truck festival.  I've since discovered that Haula is a local artist, persumably from Wantage, but her website still claims she comes from London so I've left that bit in.  

Musically, Sunday starts slowly, but then perhaps Sundays always should.  Wallflower are a sonically muscular emoid bunch, let down by some kidney-rippingly bad vocals; Fox Chapel make pleasant enough pop, that might have forgettably inaugurated some T4 all-dayer a few years ago; Safe To Swim are rhythmically very strong, all rubbery goth indie that closely resembles Placebo, which is fine so long as you don’t mind things that sound like Placebo.  To stave off boredom we invent the game Gaffer Tape Vs. Jaffa Cake, the rules to which we sadly can’t tell you until you get a special tattoo and give us your house.

So, it’s back to the reliable Gorwelion Horizons stage, who keep delivering strong acts on Saturday, although they seem to have cheated and sneaked a few non-Welsh musicians in, such as London-based Ugandan Haula. She has an outstanding contemporary soul voice and a commanding but not over-egged stage presence, which makes her set a pleasure.  Musically she leans on R ‘n’ B, both in its contemporary sense, and the original coinage: there’s a tasty moment when the band drop into a Chickenshack type blues glide that really suits her delivery.  Sometimes the backing gets sterile and sessiony, and the lyrics tend towards the platitudinous, but it’s a strong showing all the same.  Closing song “Freedom” gets a glorious main stage singalong reaction from the crowd (apparently she has a following in Wantage, somewhat oddly).

According to our notebook we listen to Decovo at this point, but it clearly makes no impact on us.  Allusondrugs, however, are a different proposition.  Their messy potage of Mudhoney riffs, twitchy Biffy Clyro vocals, windswept guitar lines and half-inched Blur tunes is fun, but we love the fact that at any one point one of them is going off on a freakout, but at no point all of them are.  They’re simply intriguing.  “I like herpes more than I like Irn Bru”, they announce unexpectedly, which is a thousand times more worth saying than, “Truck fest, how ya doing?”, you have to admit.

Walking past the Veterans stage (no Virgins left after the first day, which is how all good festivals should be), we intend to skip The Shapes, but are drawn in by the magnetic power of their classic pop, which is grown up without being washed out.  We then go and see The Magic Gang just in case they sound like The Magic Band, which is the sort of logic you end up with having decided to skip lunch due to queues and fall back on beer.  They don’t.  In fact, they sound like The Housemartins, Weezer and very, very well-behaved young men.  We rather enjoy it, but they’re hardly kicking out the jams; in fact, they’d probably be considered limp by the WI who made the jams.

Veterans Flowers Of Hell endear themselves to us immediately by being notably relaxed and sounding like The Velvet Underground with extra fiddle and trumpet, and then they prove us right by playing a really great cover of “Heroin” with extra fiddle and trumpet.  And then they honour Czech dissident freaks Plastic People Of The Universe, which should happen more often.  And, all this whilst the engineer has left a vintage soul CD playing on the PA throughout.  They probably thought it was messages from the ether.

Yet again Gorwelion comes up trumps, with ultra-super-mega-perky indie pop outfit Seazoo, who are blessed with an infections sense of fun, a knowledge of how catchy tunes work, relentlessly bouncy basslines, and a synth made out of a doll’s head that goes whoodly-wheep in a seemingly random fashion. They do a song which sounds like Free’s “Alright Now” played by excited Care Bears. They are superb.  Oxford promoters Swiss Concrete should be brought back for one night, just to book this colour-saturated joy of a band, where they could raise many a flagon of speed-laced Tizer; hell, play them loud enough, they could raise the spectre of John Peel, his Ooberman T-shirt barely creased by the afterlife.

After this food beckons.  Having tried to support the ethical vegetarian hippy stall, we get frustrated by their inability to actually have any food (“You could come back in about an hour”), so we visit the Dalicious stall, which we work out is named after the fact that it sells some rather tasty lentil dal, and not because it sells floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew (note to self: set up business to sell floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew).

Hoping to strike gold twice, we return to Gorwelion for Violet Skies.  She shares some ground with Haula, not least an impressive larynx, but her electronic torch songs are just too studio-smooth and her onstage drama the stuff of Eurovision heats.  If she stopped trying so desperately to affect, she could be someone to watch, though.

It’s funny to think of Alphabet Backwards being classed as Veterans, because they still act like naughty kids, leaping around the stage and trying to get people to wind up the security guy.  This is pop, not as youthful rebellion, but as childish fun, like The Red Hand Gang getting hopped up on tartrazine.  All this, and their playing is inch perfect too, never missing the opportunity for maximum bounciness.  The keyboards are a wee bit too quiet, but this is balanced by Steph’s flowing Sandie Shaw dress.  They are ten times more fun than Summer Camp, whom we’d just watched briefly, not to mention summerier and camper.

“Who likes Saint Raymond?” asks the visibly refreshed singer of soft-centred hardcore Leeds lads Brawlers.  “I mean, we’ve never heard of them, and we only ask because we just stole their fucking beer”.   He then proceeds to share said bevvies with the crowd.  Now accessories to the crime, we have no choice but to give up and enjoy the band, which despite being musclier and much louder and far far more tattoed is actually a good analogue to Alphabet Backwards: they are working very hard for you to have a good time, and are not worried a wet fart about anything else.  Pop music, in other words.

Peasants King finish off the Gorwelion stage.  Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in that name somewhere?  Hell, don’t bother answering, we gave up after finding no fewer than 19 errors on the first page of the Truck programme alone.  Plus the cover looks like it could be the 1985 catalogue from Clockhouse at C&A, so it’s best left under lock and key.  Peasants King make a decent Britrock sound, but it all feels a bit old hat, from the guy playing a separate floor tom - so 2008 - on up.  Perhaps at the other end of the festival we’d have got more from them, but on the home straight we need more to grab us.

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?

Truck & Coverage

Here's the Friday from this year's Truck.  Some of it has been in Nutshaft, and some of it hasn't.  And here's the July Ocelot thingummy, whilst we're about it:

I was going to write about Hot Hooves this month, but you all know about them already.  You do, right?  If you don’t know about Hot Hooves and Mac and The Point and Talulah Gosh and Les Clochards then simply chuck this magazine over your shoulder and go and find out. 

Instead, I’m going to talk about a band I know nothing about, just because I saw them last night and they were good.  All I know about Jeff Wode is that they’re named after a scene in Withnail & I, and that they’re from Oxford, and that I saw them last night, and that they were good, but I still want to write about them because randomly walking into a small venue to see a young trio playing raucous but witty music is what makes me happy.  Jeff Wode don’t take themselves too seriously, but still put their backs into the music.  Not enough bands do this.  Jeff Wode are sloppy and untrained, but not half-arsed.  Wish I could say that more often, too.  Their abrasive, melodic, angry, sensitive thrash pop reminded me a little of Sebadoh at their grimiest, and even of The Lemonheads in their early punk days, but their real victory is making stodgy, sticky grunge thumping sound sly and hypnotic, and not brattishly petulant.  A band like this is a wonderful discovery at the bottom of the bill. People who turn up late wonder why they never see the great new bands before anyone else: well, it’s free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t.

TRUCK FESTIVAL, Hill Farm, Steventon, 19-20/7/13

This year, it’s a sort of Omnitruck.  There are little bits of everything that has been popular in Trucks past (except metal) all dotted around the site on special stages: there are big, slightly backward looking indie names on the main stage, there’s a little metal shed full of Americana, there are old characters and a smattering of new local bands, some stoned East Oxonians spinning reggae, and a BSM/Alcopop! stage for people who like math pop and dressing like Ferris Bueller.  It’s a lovely lineup, and our only wish is that it could be a little less ghettoised, and that styles could be mixed up on different stages, as it was this that drew us to Truck in the first place.  And there should be probably be some metal. 

Our weekend starts with Oxford’s Dallas Don’t, who attack Postcard Records’ jangle with the snarl of Future Of The Left, and who spark up rich, poetic indie tunes by throwing themselves at them full pelt – the drummer especially plays like he’s trying to stab excitable cockroaches with a skewer.

We feel as though new stage The Great Western Whiskey Saloon And Blues Kitchen was probably created by polling the residents of the Abingdon area about what they’d want from a festival: proper pub stools, no stupid new-fangled pop music and vintage Watneys beermats, please, squire.   Apart from the fact that the doorway isn’t really big enough, and that moving on to spirits would be ill-advised in this searing sunshine, this turns out to be a wonderful stage, hosting quality performers, and warm-natured crowds.  Opening act The Spare Room, for example, layer some wonderful West Coast three-part harmonies over pretty little guitar and glock ditties, which proves that novelty isn’t the only route to success.

Although we could have done with more as we approached the Market Stage for Wildswim.  Instead of the mixture of quirky electronica and Victorian light opera we’ve got from them before, we hear something that sounds worryingly like Tears For Fears, so we do a quick 180 and visit Truly Ford at the Virgins stage instead, which seems to be the old BBC Introducing stage, give or take.  She’s a young singer from Faringdon (although her Twitter account proves she can’t spell it, so it may be some sort of elaborate lie, probably connected with the moonlanding), and she shows some real promise, dark cello tones enriching strong, approachably dramatic compositions.  Our only real complaint is that she tends to over-emote vocally, which is the curse of current pop music: schoolkids should be made to listen exclusively to Billie Holiday and Leonard Cohen for at least two years before being allowed a sniff of Alicia Keys.

Same story with Lillian Todd Jones, who seems to be inflating some perfectly decent songs to bursting point, when they might be better off left alone.  Still, the main stage is a poisoned chalice in the early afternoon when it’s too hot even to muster the energy to throw rocks at the twat in the woodland onesie,so she and her band are allowed to try anything to keep people’s attention.  Plus she uses the word “meniscus” in a song, which gets her bonus BBC4 points.  She should have been on at Cornbury, they would have flipped for her over there...they’d probably think this was some of that punk rock they’d been hearing so much about.

At this point we take our second trip to the Barn.  Now, are you reading this, Truck festival?  Because, let us just mention something at this juncture, that we end up saying every year: the Barn is awful.  It could have been purposely designed as the worst acoustic environment in which to listen to music by an evil sonic scientist – a sort of anti-matter Lee Perry, perhaps – and yet the logic seems to have been to throw all the loudest acts in there.  When each strike of the snare takes 12 bars to decay, actually hearing a band takes a heroic effort of concentration and deduction, and even the very best act’s set is like watching 2001 through the bottom of a pint pot.  The Physics House Band are not the very best act, although they’re certainly not hateworthy, doling out complex jazz rock objets d’art.  They loosely resemble Battles, although they’re really just Skirmishes, and beneath all the math slapping crescendos their hermetic muso style reminds us ultimately of Weather Report.  And speaking of weather report, it’s glorious summer, so why are we in a boomy cattle shed listening to this?

Liverpool’s Ady Suleiman provides one of a couple of examples this weekend of an act that is shamelessly commercial, yet not hideously calculated (NB: we steered well clear of Lewis Watson).  He has a fine vocal style, with plenty of contempo-chops and smooth jazzy phrasing, existing in a strange but comfortable space between Sheeran and Sade, and he can pen an ear-catching lyric too.  Good luck to him.

We’re sitting back at the main stage, trying to think of a way to describe Milo Greene, so we ask the man next to us for an adjective.  “Benign”, he says.  Yeah, that’ll do.  Their Fleet Foxes style music seems to want to be anthemically big and subtly intimate simultaneously, and so ends up middlingly harmless.  Benign.  Good like a tumour is good: not exactly desirable in and of itself, but you suppose things could have turned out a lot worse.

Max Raptor make some popcore shapes, mixing wiry, lean energy with friendly old new wave chorus lines, something in the manner of early Biffy Clyro covering The Skids at a screamo night, but we’re in a sitting down mood so we return to the Virgins stage.  Generally, pretention is the worst crime a singer songwriter can commit – in the literal sense of pretending to be what they’re not, we quite like it when songs are about gryphons and particle physics and Mallarme, it at least fills the review word count nicely – but Ags Connolly is the exception.  Despite being a rural Oxfordshire boy who can almost certainly spell Faringdon and who has a speaking voice like a turnip salesman, when he sings it’s in a deep, western croon that sounds as though it’s being broadcast direct from Nashville (to us, that is – to Americans it probably sounds like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins).  And that should mean that we walk away without giving him a second listen, but something about his songs keep us enrapt.  It’s probably the lazily lachrymose melodies, and the sleepy-eyed resignation, that hits the spot in the soul where songs don’t need to be complex or original, they just need to be right.  That whiskey bar suddenly seems like a much better idea.

We love the members of the local Round Table and clergy who have supplied food at Truck for so many years, but we’re not complaining that there’s a nice a separate enclave for other culinary options this year, including fresh bread, pizzas, smoothies and real coffee, which is particularly welcome on Saturday morning, even though the organisation behind the counter makes the Jamalot crew look like NASA.  There are also stalls from charities, instrument builders, second-hand clothes sellers: it’s like a cheery little market place, which is only let down by the fact that it’s in a different field from the, err, Market stage.  The History Of Apple Pie are on there.  But The Masterclass On Mic Technique certainly ain’t.  Despite the fact that the vocals are pretty much inaudible, the music sounds like Weezer played by fifth-formers, which wouldn’t be so bad, if the gloriously useless programme hadn’t claimed they sound like Galaxie 500 and Smashing Pumpkins.

Tony Jezzard, who sadly passed away recently, provided sound for most of the events in Truck’s history, so we go to see one of his old bands, The Shapes, in the Saloon to raise a glass in his memory.  Whether the band find it as emotionally charged as we do, we’re not sure, but they play fantastically, and with more a touch more gusto than we’ve witnessed previously, adding a tang to their accessible mixture of Van Morrison, The Rembrandts and Squeeze.

If you find Ten Benson a bit too baroque, then you might appreciate guitar and drums duo Wet Nuns, who bash away at their huge stoner punk tracks like a cross between Winnebago Deal and Status Quo.  They do one song that just sounds like the riff from “Foxy Lady” made out of concrete over and over again.  Then they do another that sounds exactly the same.  Cracking stuff.