Truck-A-Doodle-Done

Hand a bit better, but still twinging.  Who heard Belshazzar's Feast at the Prom two nights ago?  Kicked arse, my friends, kicked arse.



Truck 2012, Saturday

Saturday morning rolls around, and everyone’s sipping tea, eating bacon and peering through sunglasses.  In the old days, couldn’t you get a nice healthy pasta salad at Truck?  Now, it’s all pizza, curry, doughnuts and burgers.  Oh, come on, we can’t eat a burger for yet another meal.  We absolutely refuse.  Oh, go on then.  And stick some bacon and a fried egg in it too, whilst you’re there.

The See See start our non-cholesterol day with laddish indie psychedelia strung between Cast and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.  There’s quite a lot musically to recommend them, but the effect is spoilt by a desperate, shopworn swagger onstage.  Watching them is like idly flicking through a 90s copy of Loaded in the STD clinic waiting room.  We imagine.  Opening the main stage, Yellow Fever are proving that real stage presence comes naturally to a lucky few, even if they’re barely old enough to get into venues.  With a vast gaggle of young fans crowding the stage, and some rubbery, twitchy little tunes, the band remind us a little of the early days of The Dead Jerichos.  Impressive though the set is, they’re still finding their feet musically – some of the twiddly guitars clearly shoot for Foals but come up nearer to Level 42 – but when a band improves this much between every gig we see, we know it won’t be long before they write a track we can adore.

Banbury’s Pixel Fix, mind you, make Yellow Fever look ancient.  They put in a most commendable effort, but could do with coming out from The Arctic Monkeys’ shadow and developing the electronic elements.  If they hung around at the Second Stage they might have seen Toliesel, and picked up a few tips.  Their references might not be revolutionary – there’s a lot of the Americana with table manners we used to hear from The Epstein, and a little of Aztec Camera’s well-bred pop music in the mix – but they show that quality songwriters and musicians will always be worth listening to.

Plenty of experience in Flights Of Helios too, a band that grew from The Braindead Collective, and who have been in roughly ten trillion great Oxford acts.  Each.  They make windswept, open-ended pathos-pop, that moves between the dubby warmth of ambient popsters like Another Fine Day, and a darker shoegazing paranoia (with bits of The Dark Side Of The Moon laying about in between). Oddly for a band who developed from an improv project, there are a couple of moments that feel too formal – a disco hi-hat rhythm sounds slightly gratuitous at one point – but this is neverthelessone of the sets of the weekend, bursting with ideas.  The best moments feature Chris Beard’s fragile, melismatic vocal lines floating liturgically over hissing keyboards and fizzing guitar.  A man next to us explains how one track brought a tear to his eye, and that hadn’t happened since Babe II: Pig In The City.  He tells us all about his favourite scenes, too.  Lucky us.

We’re impressed by just how unreconstructed Kill It Kid’s priapic blues and scuzzy cock rock is.  They have good, honest heavy rock structures, and not one but two excellently coarse vocalists.  One Zeppelinised howl from either sex, nice touch.  However, when the chemical toilets are emptied during their set, and a vicious stench wafts across the crowd just as they sing “dirty water tastes so sweet”, we have to make an exit, in case cosmic irony starts playing more dangerous tricks.

The Last Republic are very boring.  Their light synth rock could be from the closing credits to an old brat pack movie, and even whilst you try to listen your brain keeps drifting onto other topics, no matter how idiotic.  So, anyway, apparently in Babe II there’s a really good slow-motion fire scene with clowns, and a part where “Mafia dogs turn the pig into a kind of Jesus”.

Jesus, time for a pint.  We’re ecstatic to see that this year the bars only serve organic ale and cider on tap, instead of pissy High Street lager; if Truck can find someone next year to sell us an espresso and a bottle of good claret, we might be really on to something.  Outside the bar we find some other journalists taking refuge from The Last Republic.  Hilariously, a snapper from a publication that shall remain nameless misunderstood the request for a security photo this year, and sent in a shot of The Skatalites to prove he was a music photographer.  If you saw a white man in his 30s trying to get backstage with an ID photo of an aging black ska musician, we know who it was.

Right, enough of this chatting, we need to go and see Crash Of Rhinos.  Their post-hardcore sound is definitely enticing, although they have too many subtle, thoughtful passages when what they really need is more...well, more rhino.  Over at Jamalot nothing much is happening, except for some little kids busting some funkily awful moves and three lubricated lads pulling off the tricky Three-Way Chest Bump manouevre, who jovially tell us to “fuck off” for reading the paper whilst dance music is playing.  Fair point, we concede...but we bet they never finished the Guardian cryptic crossword. 

We’ve enjoyed Emmy The Great a lot in the past, as a solo performer.  With a backing band her songs seem to have had the edges sheared off, and the lyrics lose some of their bite, and the whole thing comes off prettily quirky, like The Juliana Hatfield 3, so we go back to the Second Stage to see Man Like Me.  This proves to be one of the better decisions we’ve made in recent times.  What we find is three cheeky London lads shouting, throwing shapes and climbing up the tent rigging whilst the backing track plays what we suppose we should call post-grime, but actually sounds like Village People pastiches knocked up on some kid’s iPhone on the way over.  It’s terrible.  It’s brilliant.  It’s a euphoric mixture of early Beastie Boys, The Streets and some half-arsed entry into a T4 roadshow talent competition.  It’s truly brilliant.  It’s truly terrible.  As pop music should be.

65 Days Of Static are a band whom we’ve admired, but never quite understood before, but perhaps on a Man Like Me high, we find their crescendo-happy set deeply invigorating.  Synths buzz and massed percussion is crashed, like a Stomp cover of “Mentasm”.  It’s a set of pure gall and energy and we’re sudden – and  incredibly late - converts.

Lucy Rose makes some quite lovely and delicate music.  So far as we can tell.  Can’t get in to the tent, you see, so good for her.  Luckily, Mackating are at Jamalot making The Heavy Dexters look like amateurs by going on a full ninety minutes late, and with half the band missing.  So, OK, not a set for the annals, but the interplay between the buoyant dancehall delivery of Fireocious and Ilodica’s sweet Horace Andy quaver is delicious.  It’s also great when Fireocious stops the band mid-song, warning “Put some pace in it, bloodclot!”, like we’re witnessing a reggae Totale’s Turns.

Daft Punt

Here is my thorough review of this year's Punt festival.  I thought it was a strong night out, I saw nothing bad, and nothing phenomenal.  Mutagenocide were unoriginal and a wee bit sloppy (by the incredibly high standards of classic metal, anyway, where you have to be spotlessly good in a crowded field), but they were still worth a listen, and Manacles Of Acid were my favourite act.  It didn't feel as though there were enough surprises for me to call it a top rank Punt, but I guess that skipping last year  contributed to that somewhat.  It's a wonderful insitution, anyway, I'm looking forward to 2013 already!  


Elements of this review are to be found in Nightshift's Punt mega-article.

THE PUNT, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Duke’s Cut/ Junction/ Wheatsheaf, 16/5/12

Ostensibly, The Punt is a showcase for Oxford music, but secretly might not be.  Sounds like an idiotic observation, but in fact the annual night-long, multi-venue event isn’t a glossy advert for local sounds, or an aural taster menu to invite putative new listeners, it’s more like an initiation test for potential recruits to the scene.  In its duration and complexity The Punt is a challenge, not a night out – the musical equivalent of Atomic Burger’s Godzilla meal, the sonic sister to an episode of Takeshi’s Castle.  And if proof were needed curator,  Nightshift’s Ronan Munroe is a puckish trickster as much as a promotional ambassador, we need look no further the presence of Tamara Parsons-Baker as the opening act.  She is a performer of some talent, with a powerful voice, but her dark vignettes of wispy intensity are a deliberately perverse introduction to the night, barbed lines left hanging portentously in the room, wintry guitars providing the lovelorn backdrop .  It’s a strong set, but she’s at her best when she comes over as a more animated Leonard Cohen, and at her worst when she just sounds like someone bitterly sniping at their ex-partner.

Secret Rivals are a perfect foil to this opening gambit, with their melodic, 6 Music friendly pop nuggets.  On record we just keep on finding more to love in their scrappy indie pop flurries, but live they’re still a smidgen sloppy.  In a way that doesn’t matter, the joy of the band is that they toss the Mentos of pop into the Diet Coke of indie with gay abandon, and let the sugary mess explode across the venue.

Undersmile are a geologically-paced sludge metal band fronted by two atonally chanting ladies who look as if the creepy twins from The Shining have grown up listening to Babes In Toyland.  It all sounds horrifyingly like half-orc mating calls played at quarter speed, and is absolutely brilliant.  And also pretty rubbish.  But mostly brilliant.

The Duke’s Cut is a new Punt venue, and one where the fact that the performers are completely invisible to all but about ten of the audience is balanced by the decent ale and the cosy camaraderie.  Toliesel sound at first like The Band with some pub rock elements, and are perfectly pleasant, though they seem to be pushing too hard, turning sweet vocals into rough hollers.  But, we decide to stay for their whole set, and soon the music makes perfect sense, revealing winning melodies under the murk.  Even the crackles from a slightly overstretched PA add to the natural warmth of the music.  In a reversal of Punt logic, Toliesel win us over with slow increments of quality songwriting, rather than flashy bandstanding, making us glad we stayed the distance.  Although it was mostly because it was too much effort to push our way back out of the crowd.  We sincerely hope there was one random person sitting at one of the pub tables in the early evening, who was hemmed in and forced to listen for the entire night.

Simple probability dictates that there’s always one Punt act that gets an underservedly small audience, and this year it’s Band Of Hope.  Mind you, the fact that they’re playing in the cavernous Junction club compounds the problem.  Incidentally, the venue turns out to be a pretty good addition to the night, although we’re not sure a pile of rocks and road signs is a great decor choice, it makes the room look like a student’s back garden.  The band is a lush ensemble playing relaxing country and folk, with excellent flourishes from fiddle and pedal steel. At times they have a lackadaisical Sunday jam session air that erases some of the character form the songs, but “Baby You’re A Mess” is a solid gold winner.

We catch the end of Deer Chicago, and their sound, which can often seem unnecessarily bombastic and forcedly epic, works far better in a cramped sweaty Duke’s Cut.  Sadly, as things are running late we only catch a fragment of The Old grinding Young.  They sound a little like parent band Ute, but with Radiohead twitches replaced by expansive rootsiness.  Too early to tell whether this will prove a good move.

In contrast to the sludge avalanche of Undersmile, and the doomy prog of Caravan Of Whores, Mutagenocide proffer a far more traditional brand of metal.  There are elements of the post-Pantera stylings of previous Punt stars Desert Storm, but most of the set consists of resolutely old school chugging rhythms, twiddly guitar solos and growled vocals that are probably all about large-breasted elf duchesses in the Hades branch of Games Workshop. There’s very little to set Mutagenocide apart from a vast roster of metal acts up and down the count(r)y, but they’re enjoyable enough, the penultimate track pulling off some good aural pummelling.

When you see LeftOuterJoin expending vast amounts of energy playing live syn drums along with some pounding trance, you have to ask what the point of it is.  It would sound just the same (and fractionally more in time) if the rhythms were programmed.  But, artists don’t have to dwell in a world of cold logic, and in many ways the victory of this act is its very redundancy.  The set veers from excellent techno to cruddy Euro cheese pretty haphazardly, but the sheer spectacle is a euphoric joy.  The fact that he’s also brought trippy projections and two lasers into the Wheatsheaf, Oxford’s least rave-friendly venue, is worth as many extra points as you can tally. Plus there are some over-sized smoke machines, that trip the pub’s fire alarm, and cause the venue’s windows to be opened for the first time this millennium.  A set to remember.

Into the home straight at The Junction with rapper Half Decent.  His delivery is truly excellent, and the backing tracks are chunky but he does share a fault with nearly all live hip hop: paradoxically, what should be a match of visceral rhythms and intimate poetry, generally drifts into empty gesturing.  Half Decent spends a lot of his set asking us to dance and sing along, when he would do better concentrating on delivering some very wry, insightful fast-paced lyrics (and dumb fun lines like “Making girls wetter than a washing machine”, for good measure).  He puts on a good show to a gaggle of exhausted music fans, but we’re sure the rapturous stadium gig happening in his head was even better.

Manacles Of Acid is watched by the hardcore, the shell-shocked and those unbeatable party people who may live to regret it.  We started the night with a harrowingly bleak preacher disguised as a nice acoustic singer, and we end it with unforgivably niche electronica dressed up as a bright clubber’s party.  Using only vintage hardware (including a TR606 worn round the neck) the man named Highscores produces a seemingly endless string of classic acid house and Detroit techno which thrill s the faithful, but is clearly a closed book to half the room.  We fall into the former camp, loving the beautifully crafted layers of mutated basslines and crisp drum patterns.  There are confetti cannons and some sort of cross between a fly and a character from Starlight Express running round the room, who may or may not officially be part of the show, and it’s an uncompromising conclusion to the night.

And so we leave The Junction, dazed and deafened, feeling as though we’ve split the past five and a half hours equally between enjoying, working and speed drinking.  The Punt feels even more like a twisted musical hazing ritual as we wait woozily for the late bus home.  Thank you, Sir, may we have another?