Truck 2012 Friday Pt 2

We pop in on Delta Alaska, who are like nothing else than a blythe AOR version of Oxford’s Scrappy-Doo pop wastrels, Secret Rivals, and end up with Josh Kumra, a young man with a surprisingly eloquent vocal delivery, who isn’t above showboating or swiping a tune form MGMT to keep the party going.  Not a chart-topping act we expected to get excited about, but Josh is a talented, professional performer who deserves to capitalise on his sudden success.

Oh, and, speaking of which.  Late on Saturday the staff at the Rapture merchandise tent tell us they’ve not sold a Fixers album all day.  Inconceivable when this outstanding, gorgeous record has only recently been released after a long delay?  If you saw their set, then no.  A hundred times, no. As if to prove our claim that past glories can never be relived, Fixers contrast last year’s joyous, epochal Truck performance with what can most generously be described as a wonky drunken stumble somewhere in the rough vicinity of their songs.  Jack Goldstein spends some while slurring into the mike about how he isn’t sure if this is a “festival” or a “festiVAL!”  The set is a hiLARious disasTER, put the random emphases where you like, Jack, old son.

Over in the Barn, Spring Offensive are snatching Fixers’ local hero crown, sharpening up the angular points, and dousing it in pop sugar.    They have a knack of writing vast music with the drastic emotional pull of a Hollywood blockbuster, and making them sound subtly intimate.  It’s a trick Clock Opera could do with learning, as their set is far from bad, building heart-wrenching songs on slightly fidgety rhythms, but it becomes two dimensional and predictable long before we wander away.

Jamalot is a small tent hosting DJs and a few live acts – it also has a couple of very comfy sofas, which we make grateful use of once or twice over the course of the festival – although it’s hard to know who’s on when.  We’re not sure if this is because a dance tent is on the periphery of the organisers’ concerns, or because the sort of people who book a stage like that don’t quite get round to arranging the acts before the programme copy deadline.  Judging by the timetable outside the tent, which is so randomly inaccurate it was probably created by John Cage with the I Ching and a box of twelve inches, we lean towards the latter interpretation.  We do, however, manage to see funky jazz outfit The Heavy Dexters, over an hour later than advertised.  Like the Disco Pimps, they could do with adding some proper filth to their sound, but their saxophonist does have lovely, conversational phrasing, and they also do a pretty cheeky arrangement of “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, so it’s a close but clear victory at the final count.

The very second their set is finished, beatboxer Pieman takes over.  It takes us a few bars to realise the chunky beats are coming from a man’s mouth, not the DJ.  Of course, as with most beatboxing, turntablism - or arguably live hip hop in general - the show is a showcase of techniques and effects rather than a cohesive artistic statement, but in the face of someone who can make a righteously flatulent dubstep bass like that with their lips, our criticisms evaporate.  Top stuff.

Nipping back to the Barn we hear what sounds like a cross between metal and techstep drum ‘n’ bass from Turbowolf.  Then the track stops and we think we must have imagined it.  Regardless, the rest of their greasy cartoon heavy rock is infectious fun.

Tim Minchin isn’t funny, and The Guillemots don’t really seem to be delivering, probably due to Fyfe Dangerfield’s throat infection, so we return to the Barn for Future Of The Left.  We think we’re scribbling lots of insightful notes about their angular hardcore, but in the morning we discover we’ve just written “Grrrrrr” for twelve pages.  Two things are sure: a) when they add a buzzing, two finger keyboard to their sound, it’s like a hideously brilliant cross between Bis and Atari Teenage Riot, b) when they finish with an unfeasibly distorted, disgusted and dystopian Mclusky track, it literally recalibrates our ears so that we can’t listen to Mystery Jets.  Seriously, don’t recall any of it.  We think they were probably harmless and vapid and bouncy and perfectly acceptable, but we have no real memory of doing anything whilst they’re on except replaying the preceding ten minutes in our minds. 

Sing it.

The Spring And The Book

Trying to write something interesting here, but it's hard, because I'm listening to an LP of poetry that my friend found on the street.  It's quite good.  Thom Gunn's full of crap, though, isn't he?

SPRING OFFENSIVE/ COUNT DRACHMA/ ALL WE ARE, St Barnabas Church, 14/6/12

The priest at St Barnabas gets a birthday cards made from cereal boxes.  Not the sort of thing we find out at most gigs, but the parish magazine keeps us diverted in St Barnabas’ whilst we wait for Liverpool’s All We Are to locate the venue.  Ironically for a band who aren’t on time, they’re painfully “now”, laying well brought up Beach Boys vocal lines over quietly malleted toms and light guitar noise in an introverted indie style, like Fleet Foxes having a go at being Sigur Ros, or a grown up version of Fixers at a farmers' market sipping carrot juice, instead of a heady cocktail of LSD and reverb.   All We Are’s sound fits a beautiful church; it’s not just their sepulchral elegance, but because all these smiles and handclaps make them look like trendy 80s vicars.

Count Drachma, a Stornoway spin off, present their take on traditional Zulu songs.  The fiddle licks and excellent cajon rhythms give the set a swinging zydeco air, whilst the vocal lines have the apparently effortless waft of much great folk music.  Perhaps the band could do with more bite, and the vocals more authority, but for a recently formed, extra-curricular outfit, it’s rather good.  In fact, it’s precisely rather good, and probably not destined to set anyone aflame.

Unlike Spring Offensive, whose music is as heart-wrangling and emotionally wrought as it is possible for pop music to be.  Always an excellent band, in the past our criticism has been that they push their climaxes too hard, forcing their songs to one more crescendo.  But not any more.  Tonight, even in older songs, each sonic pinnacle is entirely earned, each huge chorus blossoming naturally.  Part of this is down to the guitar parts, which now seem to owe more to Stars Of The Lid or Mogwai than Youthmovies, slowly burning then crashing in fizzing waves.  The drums, too, have a haunted clockwork eeriness where once they thumped a bold tattoo. If evidence were needed that this is a band at the height of their powers, check the arrangements, subtle alterations to the songs that use the natural reverb of the church to magnify every facet. 

A band of vision and hard graft, Spring Offensive look as though they can achieve anything after tonight’s celebration of beautifully controlled, twitchy romanticism.  There are light boxes everywhere, broadcasting couplets like some Barbara Kruger rip off, but it’s the piles of books on the floor that intrigue us.  We pick one up, and out falls a newspaper clipping from 1825, which we slip into our pocket.  That’s Spring Offensive for you: they make big gestures, but it’s the tiny surprises that you take away with you.

Annual Probe

Here are my favourite 5 Oxford records of 2011. I wrote this for www.musicinoxford.co.uk, but they didn't appreciate they were in alphabetical order. Never mind. I also wrote a little precis of the year, whcih boiled down to "why can't anyone write as well as me?", so I'll leave that out for now.

Borderville – Metamorphosis: An octagonal package bursting with pretension, playfulness, performance and pop music. New developments in theatrical rock from the in sect.

Coloureds – Tom Hanks EP: A grubby confused no man’s land in the ongoing dance music war between the brain and the feet.

Duotone – Ropes: Perfectly turned studio folk knick-knacks that are as intriguingly mysterious as they are artfully decorative.

Fixers – Here Comes 2001 So Let’s All Head For The Sun EP: A paean to the Beach Boys and Ibiza house made from pastels, sherbert and reverb. It was even mixed by someone called Bryan Wilson, what are the chances?

Spring Offensive – A Stutter & A Start single: Suppliers, along with Fixers, of truck’s other great Oxford set this year, the ever-resourceful Spring Offensive offer us, not only a clipped piece of pop yearning, but a neat one-shot video and a colouring book

Holy Truck

Of course, since I wrote this review Truck festrival (or rather, Steventon Events, who run it) has gone bust. I decided to leave the review as it was writtena day or two after the event, rather than go into hysterical eulogies. I'll miss it, though, for all its faults.

Sat & Sun copming very soon.

Yes, there are a lot of words here. Don't read them if you don't weant to, I don't mind. There are plenty of blogs out there that average 10 words a post, go and find them, if you don't like reading. You deserve each other.


TRUCK FESITVAL, Hill Farm, Steventon, 22-4/7/11

FRIDAY

Oh, there’ll be letters. Pints will be mumbled into. The internet may be utilised. Truck has done the unthinkable, and redesigned the festival site. Not only is the main stage in a different place, it’s in a different damned field. And the barn is gone. Everyone loved the barn. Everyone loved the atrocious acoustics, awkward bottleneck entrance and lingering smell of cow faeces. Who wants this new Clash stage, with its high-quality PA and easy access?

Well, we do. We feel that, for the most part, Truck’s new, more spacious layout is a success, and if they have co-opted some of the trappings of the well-heeled boutique festivals they helped to create – posh sit-down dining, stalls selling over-priced nick-nacks made from old Penguin paperbacks – the old, unpretentious, home-made atmosphere still survives. And, yes, you can still buy doughnuts from the vicar and grub from the Round Tablers (quote of the weekend: “I got a lovely burger, but it was weird to buy it from the masons”).

Our weekend starts in the new Clash tent, with Gaggle, a large bunch of vibrantly bedecked young ladies doing a line in big tribal pop chants. It’s something like a school nativity play version of Bow Wow Wow, and is good honest fun. There are about 35 of them, which we suppose might look impressive if we hadn’t just spent 20 minutes as part of a large and twitchy crowd at the Steventon level crossing, as some sort of ovine emergency meltdown caused by sheep on the line a few miles away meant that the barriers had to be kept inexplicably closed.

The Wood stage is a cosy, intimate tent that is sadly a little underused over the weekend, but it’s a the perfect place to watch Water Pageant, a likable folk-pop trio, whose delicate sound might get lost in larger spaces. At another corner of the site, the Last.FM stage is curated on the Friday night by BBC Oxford Introducing, and we’re tempted to say this was the lineup of the weekend. The Braindead Collective swap their free improv racket for an exploration of open-ended pop, and it works beautifully, Chris Beard’s lucid, careening voice sailing high above a mixture of dub touches and Fripp-like effects.

Mr Shaodow follows them admirably, with a crowd pleasingly boisterous set that may have hidden some of his clever lyrics, but highlights his way with an eager audience. Shadow is one of an odd breed of Oxford-connected artists who always get a rave reception at Truck, but who generally play to small, indifferent audiences in the city (cf testpilot, nervous), and with this in mind we can hardly blame Shaodow for keeping things accessible. One question though: are we missing something or is DJ Watchcase the worst hip hop moniker in a fifty mile radius?

You Are Wolf aren’t mentioned in the programme, but we stumble across her making complex loops of vocals and keyboard, to deliver a lilting traditional folk song over the top. She then announces it was actually a Dolly Parton cover! Did we imagine this?

Back at the Wood stage, London’s Non-Classical club have taken over for the evening, and we have the pleasure of being amongst the small attendance for one of the sets of the weekend, from Consortium 5, a recorder quintet. In previous years a recorder only ensemble at Truck might have meant Piney Gir and chums arsing about and playing smugly dire Steely Dan covers, but Consortium 5 is a highly drilled, professional group of musicians, offering us a little Purcell and a lot of contemporary composition. The sonic range is astounding, from the sound of a baroque traffic jam through a Ligeti-like cloud of chirrups to the final number, a mass of breathy percussive bursts and gasping trills, like Thomas the Tank Engine and friends playing Takemitsu. It’s random discoveries like this that make Truck special.

There are lot of people on the Truck bill this year who Used To Be In Bands, which is fine, but there are also a lot Whose Dads Used To Be In Bands: Truck wants to watch that it doesn’t become some sort of indie Cornbury. An example for the prosecution would be Liam Finn, offspring of him out of Crowded House, who is decent enough but pretty dull, going for a wall of sound pop effect, but losing us swiftly.

Perhaps feeling guilty for giving up on Finn so quickly, we decide to give Africa Junction more of a chance, and are amply rewarded for doing so. At first, they sound too studied to make anything from their polite African percussion – Jesus, we left East Oxford for the weekend to get away from this stuff – but as the tempo drops, and the balafon starts to lead the music, it wafts out of the Cabaret tent like a warm sirocco.

Johnny Flynn reminds us happily of childhood TV, and Rolf Harris painting vast wall-sized pictures with house paints. Flynn’s band similarly takes simple, bold strokes and throws them together to create something impressive. There’s nothing here we’ve not heard before, just chunky folky choruses, lively trumpet lines, bluesy guitar licks, and a bit of ‘cello to underpin things, but the whole is rather lovely.

James Surowiecki wrote a book called The Wisdom Of Crowds, claiming that large groups of people are effectively cleverer than individuals. Our problem with this theory has always been that vast crowds of people are generally seen assembled to watch adequate but unexciting things like Coldplay or Michael McIntyre – just how fucking clever can they be? Still, we get a little buzz of pleasure in seeing hundreds of Truckers swaying along to Bellowhead’s outstanding version of “Amsterdam”, squeezing every drop of tawdry voyeurism and tragic celebration from Brel’s composition. In truth, this is the outstanding moment of set that is very good, but doesn’t reach the heights of their 2010 performance. Uncharacteristically, it’s the slower tracks that are more successful this time round, although the wah-wah mandolin does lend a funky edge to the more upbeat songs (images of Starsky & Hutch driving through Cecil Sharp House in a flurry of madrigal manuscripts). Not up to their own high standards, perhaps, but still probably the best festival band on the circuit.

Nipping out to catch some of Spring Offensive’s set turns out to be an excellent decision. We’ve always admired their music, but tonight the Introducing stage witnesses a band coming of age. Not only do they perform with an acidic intensity we’ve never seen before, but new track “52 Miles” takes the melancholic triumphalism of their best songs, but replaces the Youth Movies guitar twiddles with a slow-burning haze that eventually erupts into a bloom of furry beauty. A very good band just got better.

And we follow that be revisiting a good local band whom we had somewhat forgotten. Dive Dive remind us that they can produce bitter little nuggets of pop excellence, and send us off happily into the night, or at least towards the beer tent.

Spires Like Us

If you think this review is interesting, you may as well go and download the record. Free, innit?


V/A – SPIRES (download compilation)


For the most part, twenty-first century culture leaves us enraged or mordantly amused, provoking spittle-flecked rants that paint us as some unholy cross between David Mitchell and Travis Bickle. But, when Aaron Delgado from Phantom Theory decides to get some of his favourite local acts together for a free download compilation celebrating Oxford music you’d have to say that this is what the internet age is all about: the record is free, effortless, and was all round the world in the time it must have taken the curators of the old OXCD album to cost the cover art. And what’s more, it’s actually damned good too.

From the opening trio of tracks that could be subtitled “the riff in Oxford”, there’s a pleasing variety to the selections, and there are even a few eyebrow raisers for jaded Oxford cognoscenti – we were pleasantly surprised that The Winchell Riots could ease off the bombast with the affecting “My Young Arms”, and gratified that Spring Offensive’s sprawling epic “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters” works in bijou edited segments. Also, Secret Rivals’ “It Would Be Colder Here Without You” is a lovely chirpy ditty with fluffy vocals which is like being on a bouncy castle made of cappuccino forth, and goes some way towards eradicating the effect of some woefully slipshod live sets. Every listener will have their own favourites, but our highspots are Alphabet Backwards’ “Collide”, whose dual vocals and tinny guitar sounds like two siblings singing along to their favourite pop song, recorded by holding a tape player up to Top Of The Pops, and “Filofax” by Coloureds, a stutterjack dance track which is like a fax machine raping a ZX Spectrum to the sound of Korean synth pop.

Only Vixens, with their clunking off-the-peg indie rock and stodgily portentous TK Maxx goth vocals, let the side down. “The Hearts, They Cannot Love”? Nor these ears, son. It’s also a pity that Dial F For Frankenstein’s demise means that the record is already one step away from being a scene sampler, but “Thought Police” is a decent valediction, like a Mudhoney dirge retooled for maximum amphetamine effect by The Only Ones. In some ways, the greatest tribute we could give Oxford music in 2011 is that we love this LP, but it’s not the compilation we’d put together, which only goes to show how many good musicians are currently working in the city. And if you don’t like it? Well, it’s the twenty-first century, there are lots and lots of other things you could be doing. Pity they’re all shit, really.

2010s - Thousands Of 'Em!

As is traditional at this time of year, I selected my favourite local releases from 2010, for the MIO roundup. It's all pretty exciting this year, with a special podcast, a roundup of selections from a handful of contributors, and a public vote, which makes interesting reading. Essentially, it all goes to show how much MIO has changed this year - and I don't just mean the URL. It's now a truly fantastic resource if you like Oxon music...and if you don't, then what are you doing reading this? No kittens or nudity on this corner of the 'net, you must have got lost.

Anyway, it transpires that I was rather more obtuse/poetic/inane/lateral/smug in my descriptions of the best releases, but there you go. I still think the Morse-Hebrides joint allusion is pretty sweet in the Stornoway summary, and I think I'm the first person to go public with a Cursing Force gag. Happy new year, and so on.

By the way, I have a few plans for 2011, which will intrigue me, but will probably eat up time and put to bed once and for all the concept of running this as an actual blog where things are, like, blogged? Oh my God, my internal monologue has gone, like, totally Californian? So, you can expect just a few updates here every month? Rest assured they shall be awesome, and in no way groody?

I have an odd desire to listen to "Valley Girl" about now?



Alphabet Backwards - Primark

Sherbet-fuelled melodic nugget about the death of the High Street. As unashamed pure pop lovers, the Alphabets wear their hearts on their sleeves (shirts: £1.35)

Borderville - Joy Through Work

Only Richard Ramage can come close to Borderville in terms of literate lyrics that sneak up on strong emotions whilst you're not looking. If The Relationships are a mythical village school fete, Borderville are a baroque Hallowe'en masque at the end of time.

D Gwalia - In Puget Sound

Like a creaky harmonium making a drunken hour long phone call to the Port Talbot Samaritans.

Samuel Zasada - Nielsen

Rich, full-bodied and peppery with unexpected subtleties. Or am I thinking of shiraz?

Space Heroes Of The People - Dancing About Architecture

More totalitarian techpop from the now drummerless duo. One day there'll be none of them left in the band, just an autonomous laptop. And it'll be great.

Spring Offensive - Pull Us Apart

The cowbell rehabilitation starts here!

Stornoway - Beachcomber's Windowsill

There's been a murder, Lewis: Stornoway have destroyed the opposition for best Oxford LP.

V/A - Round The Bends

Surprisingly coherent grab bag of 'head covers raises dosh for needy nippers. Therefore if you don't like it you're evil as well as stupid.

Vileswarm - The Shaman's Last Waltz

Frampton comes undead! Euhedral reads the rites.

Xmas Lights - Treading The Fine Line

Posthumous release by much missed emperors of isolationist metal, a great ear-scouring sign off for Oxford's original Cursing Force.

Brook Shields Required?

Here's the game: 1) choose a composer 2) imagine what their most incongruously named offspring might be, eg Wayne Tchaikovsky. Playing this led me to the realisation that "Terence Trent Wagner" is the funniest group of five syllables I've ever heard.

Warning: preposterous PJ Harvey/prefix pun contained below.


SPRING OFFENSIVE – THE FIRST OF MANY DREAMS ABOUT MONSTERS

Unlike some drunken old colonels, we don’t lose any sleep over the way the word “gay” has changed its meaning. Unlike one of our old English teachers, we aren’t upset by current usage of the word “nice”. She used to get riled because the word was supposed to mean fastidious. Yeah, in the seventeenth century, when lest we forget, “healthcare” meant “being bled by your hairdresser”. In English, words mean pretty much whatever we want them to mean; unlike in France, the British government does not officially control the language (Jesus, can you imagine if it did? Three year waiting lists for the subjunctive, datasticks full of pronouns left in bars, creeping privatisation of the irregular verbs).

And yet, we still get miffed at the way “pretentious” is used. To us, it will always imply someone simply making a pretence. Therefore, in rock terms, it would be pretentious to hide your Eton accent with ersatz glottal stops whilst preaching revolutionary punk politics, and it would be pretentious to dress up in flimsy scraps of leather and prance round the stage looking like you want to fellate any passing roadie in a paddling pool of Jim Beam, when you actually prefer an early night with a mug of Horlicks, but it would not be pretentious to make a 14 minute single based on Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her five stage Grief Cycle.

It might be a bit bloody silly, but it wouldn’t be pretentious.

Yet, this is precisely what Spring Offensive have done, with their free download track “The First Of Many Dreams About Monsters”, and whilst it might be easy to dismiss behaviour like this as sophomoric, or needlessly ostentatious, but we feel that we can defend them. First up, there’s nothing wrong with shooting high, because you just might make it – we’re surely glad that Brian Wilson tried to make “teenage symphonies to God” and not “a couple of catchy tunes to net me some pussy” – and secondly, the conceptual elements of this song may have been useful for the band in its composition, but really we’d defy anyone in the world to work it out in a blind test. In fact, the handwritten notes that are supplied with the track conclude “we sing about the act of writing about grief”, which shows how far they are from producing Grief! The Kubler-Ross Story On Ice, although we do feel the distancing is a little meaningless, as if their intent was to present us with a concept and then immediately hide it behind layers of obfuscation (“Don’t you wish you’d never, never meta-“).

Add to this the fact that the lyrics are, as ever, wonderfully vague and allusive, having more in common with the imagistic snapshots of William Carlos Williams than your average pop song. “Beware the intruder/ I have scissors in my hand [...] He says he’s an artist” doesn’t give us enough data to construct any real picture, but does make a truly evocative yet unspecified image with a powerful economy of words...which is perhaps what all good pop songs do, after all. And it’s especially effective when delivered with a mixture of reticence and declamation by Lucas Whitworth, whose voice is sounding better than ever on this recording. There are other fantastic elements to this single, especially the guitars’ undulating shimmer in the quieter sections, the wonderful percussive loop at the start that sounds like an old typewriter being pecked at by a fledgling reporter, and the fact that the mammoth song hangs together without ever feeling stretched.

But this impressive release isn’t perfect. The seems a little too much in awe of local heroes Youth Movies in the crescendos, and we can’t help feeling that the rubbery Foals guitar lines and massed choruses are the least exciting part of Spring Offensive, even when they do them incredibly well. So, we urge everyone to download the record, it’s incredibly impressive, and hugely enjoyable, and yes, it’s a bit bloody silly, but the weird part is that Spring Offensive have released what might look like a magnum opus, a career summation, but have in fact revealed how swiftly they are outgrowing the old sound. There’s lots to get excited about here away from the obvious moments, and it could be the first glimpse of enticing new paths and alleys for the band to follow. The first of many, doubtless.

The Rillet Wild Show

This will probably be my last post until after the Easter weekend. I would wish my regular readership a pleasant break, but half of them will be with me in the interim...

SPRING OFFENSIVE/ LIBELULA/ SMILING PIRATES – FAB, Jericho, 31/7/09


Despite the fact that this is their first gig, Smiling Pirates have already been through a few bands names – they’re billed on the posters as Neon Candlelight (shrug), and before that they were allegedly Kaleidovision (retch). But, call them what you want, what they really are is a mess, albeit a promising and likable one. They start out with big blocky piano parts and reverby guitar lines, an approximation of Keane and Sigur Ros at the bottom of a flooded mineshaft, but from there they swiftly move to their one discernible rhythm, the dark disco canter of many a band with Joy Division and Gang Of Four in their influence list. They’re a little like a Tesco Value version of Doves, and, although starting and finishing aren’t performing concepts they’ve really nailed, some of the middles are quite good. Their songs are like budget Jaffa Cakes, in that sense.

Promise is on display here, as well as a kind of affable unpretentiousness that wins them points, but there are a coupe of issues Smiling Pirates could do with addressing: a) the drummer, who throws himself at his skins with a frantic and barely rhythmic desperation during the crescendoes, thus looking like he’s playing Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (or Eddie Kidd’s Jump Challenge, for those who grew up with the BBC B), and b) the fact that the vocalist probably wants to be likened to Ian Curtis, but in actuality looks like a man trying not to make eye contact with the drunk skinhead at the bus stop, and has a voice like a bored supermarket announcer, even whilst his songs collapse around his ears. Clean up on aisle 3.

Londoners Libelula (it’s Spanish for “Dragonfly”, apparently, and has nothing to do with female anatomy, despite a heckle) have lots of differently shaped keyboards and some excellent syn-drums and create a humming pop buzz, roughly equivalent to The Human League with contemporary disco dolly vocals, or a Phildickian timeslip collaboration between the early OMD and already forgotten hitmakers Kosheen. The effect is rather lovely, due in no small part to Sarah Villaraus’ adaptable, but not overcooked, diva vocals, and her nice golden boots; in fact, at first there was a fear that the impressive vocals would be too emotive for the sparsely robotic technopop around which they twined, but then they played “Mountains”, a lithe Goldfrappian iceskate around chiming metallophone loops, and our final doubts were put to rest. They even have a dark minded tune that recalls the clumsy breakbeats of “Charley” era Prodigy, and even Kickin Vinyl hardcore mainstay, The Scientist. It’s heartening to see an act with unashamed commercial intent, who also have some clear ability with a tune, and enough ideas to keep miserable scribbling journos happy. Best of British to you, boys and girls.

Talking of commercial impact, Spring Offensive are a band who look as though they are only months away from an adulatory V festival set and an NME cover story, and they’re simply playing a debut EP launch at The Jericho. They’re tightly drilled rousing indie band, with tiny puzzle pop inflections, whose greatest strength is their fluent and witty use of rhythms (here’s a band who can make a three beat cowbell fill funkier than most overweight soul acts doing the rounds). The vocalist boasts a strong voice, but like so many current bands he belts things out in a yearning, fists aloft style that sounds like he’s in the audience singing along to his favourite tunes, as opposed to performing a song, and when the rest of the band come in on backing vocals they may as well be singing “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow”. We think they have better vocal arrangements in them somewhere, but for now, this egalitarian terrace singalong style at least sounds completely contemporary.

However, underneath all the high guitar strap Foals twiddles, and clever rhythmic tics, Spring Offensive are a thinly disguised folkpop outfit, chock full of bolshily literate songs something akin to a Stornoway who can talk to girls. And if lovely indie lilt “The Cable Routine” is their “Unfaithful” and an almost Chumbawambafied pecuniphagous* ditty about a man consuming his own wallet is their “We Are The Battery Human”, sadly they have a “Good Fish Guide”, in the shape of “1066”, an unfunny retelling of the battle of Hastings.

So, drop the second rate student humour. Drop the homemade T-shirts that make you look like a Why Don’t You? version of The Manics. From thereon in there’s no need to change anything, Spring Offensive, as you are a wonderful, euphoric, twitchily danceable new Oxford band, ands we wish you all the success in the world.




*It means “Money eating”; or at least it should, there’s obviously no such word.