Yellow Jack Swing

I just bought a ticket to this year's Audioscope festival in Oxford.  You should too.  Anyway, here's the last ever Ocelot article (from me, I mean, I presume it will carry on without me...although perhaps the pain will prove too much).

There are 6 members of Francis Pugh and the Whisky Singers.  None of them is called Francis Pugh, but they have been in various Oxfordshire bands of quite surprisingly varied styles over the years – you’ll quite probably have heard of some of them, but we won’t waste any time on the past, because the Whisky Singers don’t belong in the past...they belong in an eternal present where rousing folk tunes are sung in warm snugs, effortlessly emotional melodies are projected into the darkness outside, in defiance of bad times, misery and, you know, not being in an inn singing at the top of your lungs.

I’ve seen them play The Jericho Tavern, starting up acoustically in the downstairs bar, and leading listeners up the stairs.  In similarly inventive fashion, they’ve arranged folk pub crawls, where trundles down the roads of East Oxford are interspersed with waystations promising shots and shanties, pints and ballads.  There are some hints of early 70s Dylan about the band’s music, although they shy away from his more esoteric lyrical tangles, but any number of reference points can be drawn up...drawn up, and tossed away again, because any band that takes the best of train whistlin’ American song and melds it with unpretentious British folk traditions will always only be important in the moment, the precise second that the smoky tendrils of song drift out and surround you, the second your voice rises to sing along with songs you never heard before, yet somehow know.

Plus, they’ve got a cornet, that’s pretty cool.

YELLOW FEVER/ BIG TROPICS/ BE GOOD, Daisy Rodgers, Wheatsheaf 12/9/14

In a world that’s increasingly market-tested one of the great pleasures of small gigs is not knowing what to expect.  When Be Good take to the Daisy Rodgers stage, most often frequented by well-kempt indie poppers, we hadn’t predicted reverby late ‘50s balladry that sounds as if it should be about milkshake and eroticised motorbike crashes.  They deliver this post-doo wop very well, throwing in a little surf tremolo, some brash 80s colours and even a droplet of grunge slackness, and if it sometimes feels as though Marty McFly put the band together by nipping into his high school prom at ten year intervals, the effect is surprisingly cohesive: a few more gigs to settle the nerves, and another couple of tunes as strong as “I’d Have Told You Anything” and we could have a real contender.

A few years ago Big Tropics’ sound would have been an eyebrow-raiser too, but inexplicably in recent years the default setting for young bands in this town seems to have become sterilised, wipe-clean soul-pop in the vein of 5 Star and New Edition.  Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – we’ll take Debbie Gibson over Stevie Ray Vaughan any day – matters aren’t helped by bands like this who churn through up-beat tunes with dead-eyed resignation in place of gay abandon.   Whilst the gratuitous synth parts, straight from the 12” disco mix of the theme from CHiPs, go some way towards excusing the limply anonymous vocals, Big Tropics seem to have forgotten the golden rule of pop performance: always get high off your own supply.  We see a punter at the bar wearing white socks with trousers that are too short, which just about sums them up: it’s fun, it’s retro, but it doesn’t really fit together.

There are no shocks in Yellow Fever’s set.  They’ve become just as excellent a band as we knew they would be when we first saw them a few years ago, finding their teenage feet.  Again their sound, melding chiming hi-life guitar parts to A Certain Ratio style introspective indie-funk, has become more prevalent in the intervening years, but they manage to make the mixture smoother than many, by building it around a core of well-written tunes (indeed, a one-off cover of “Rip It Up And Start Again” fits snugly amongst their best tracks).  The sound has got heavier and denser in recent times, every jam block break counterbalanced by a crushing crescendo, but it’s an unforced charm, a sort of polite insouciance emanating from the stage that really proves how this band has grown in stature.  Like we say, character: it could be the most important thing your band will ever have. 

 

Yellow Jack Swing

2 gigs this weekend, in tiny venues: lovely mixture of the inspired, the enjoyable and the deeply (klub) cack.  And half decent beer.  Stuff yer bloody O2 arena shows, sonny.  Here's something from The Tossalot.

What sort of music do you like?  Oh, you know, bit of everything.  Since about 2004 that has been the only answer given by anyone to this question.  Without exception.   Perhaps it’s now international statute and we somehow missed the announcement.  Whatever the reason, I really miss a time when people were honest about genre affiliations, and happily, even proudly, stated their predilection for trad jazz, northern soul, baroque, drum n bass, or what have you, because most of these “bit of everything” types secretly only really go to one sort of gig.  That’s partly why I like Skeletor promotions: they just say, “screw it, we like metal.  So here’s some metal.  Did we mention the metal?” 

And not only do they provide a much-needed metal service, they do it bloody well, offering monthly gigs mixing high calibre local and touring acts, sorting us much-needed drinks deals in the rather pricy Academy, and making suitably crass metal posters with all skeletons and that on.   They’re also not afraid to give stage time to Oxfordshire’s younger metal fraternity, giving exciting Academy shows to teenage bands who wouldn’t even be allowed into the majority of Oxford’s venues. 

You want technical metal, progressive metal, death metal, some other sort of metal that you might not be able to accurately categorise, but which is definitely metal?  Good on you, go to Skeletor, it’s fucking great for metal.  Unless you want stoner metal, in which case go to Buried In Smoke, who are equally great, but perhaps that’s another article for another day.

YELLOW FEVER/ BRIGHTWORKS/ DUCHESS, The Wheatsheaf, 3/1/14

Anyone who has been to the wrong student parties is wary of percussion: witnessing a stoned gaggle attempt to recreate side two of Exile On Main Street using only bongos and kitchen implements can put you off for life.  Still, in the right hands it can be a powerful tool, and Duchess are at their best when three of them are bashing, scraping or rubbing away at something sonorous, whilst chirpy pop vocals and African-influenced guitars gambol gaily over the top.  From the “Wild Side” fret slides at the start , to the Bow Wow Wow does Taiko clamour at the end,  Duchess’ set is a bundle of bouncy, upbeat glee, and if it might feel as though they’d dropped through a timewarp from a UCL charity bop in 1986, one’s cynicism can only survive as long as one’s feet remain still.

Brightworks also swipe a few Ghanaian guitar licks, but are an altogether odder proposition.  The mathpop trickeries are an interesting addition, albeit not one to raise many Oxonian eyebrows, but the vocalist is what really makes Brightworks unique, crooning poetic fragments with an atonal angst, whilst occasionally poking out rinky-dink lines on a tiny keyboard, like an emo John Shuttleworth.   Occasionally they remind us of rubbery 80s pranksters Stump, but in general easy reference points remain elusive.  Brightworks are many things throughout their set, and, frankly, “any good” isn’t always one of them, but we need artists whose output can’t be boiled down to a single hashtag.  Now more than ever.

Yellow Fever have always been fun, but in their early days they were happy to base their sound on Arctic Monkeys’ rabble pop, which placed them firmly in a comfortable, crowded field.  Over the past couple of years they’ve refined this sound, removing the blokey, everyman wallop and replacing it with either a taut intensity that brings them in line with local heroes Spring Offensive, or a freeze-dried fake funk that is a little like early Foals.  At their very best Alexis Panidis’ woodblock-heavy rhythms underpin (yet more) West African guitar twiddles and Dele Adewuyi’s quietly emphatic vocals smuggle in an emotional subtlety, and you can’t help but feel that another year or so will see them as one of Oxford’s very finest acts.

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.