Foci Festival

Ocelot; Nightshift.

Did you ever like a band so much you forgot to listen to them?  Find an act’s output so reliably entertaining that your mind just files them squarely under Good then moves on to worrying about other things?  I had that recently when I went to see the album launch by the excellent Jess Hall and found The Family Machine playing support – suddenly I realised how long it had been since I had watched the band, or spun their album.  Admittedly, they don’t play hundreds of gigs, and aren’t the county’s foremost proponents of self-promotion, but it’s still odd that I found myself surprised all over again by how good they sound; anyway, their up at the crack of noon laissez faire ambiance is one of the things I like about watching them, in a world where so many performers seem to be in a constant froth of hyperbole, onstage or online.

If you don’t know the band, they play a sort of subtle country pop with stoned grins and glistening electronic edges, whilst smuggling dark, serrated lyrics into our minds in the diplomatic bag of hummable melodies.  Admittedly, their most recent material might not have the immediacy of their older work, but it still washes over the ear gloriously, and “Quiet As A Mouse” might be their best track, a floating autumn  leaf of a tune, buoyed up by the limpid vocals of We Aeronauts’ Anna – and, in true Family Machine form, it’s a cutesy stalker tale, half True Crime, half Beatrix Potter.  Why not be won over by a machine of loving grace?

FOCI’S LEFT – LIFE IN A LESS SOUTHERN TOWN (Omni Music)

There are two sorts of ambient music.  One gets you relaxed, and one makes you uneasy; one’s a warm duvet and one’s a chill breeze; one’s a forgiving hug, and one’s a suspicious glance.  Although the second album by Oxford musician Mick Buckingham covers both ambient strains, it’s definitely better when leaning towards the latter.  The most satisfying element of this record is its density – where many ambient composers are happy to let things run, Buckingham has created a CD of real sonic depth, with a lush textural  variety, from the pitched-up honks at the opening (that remind us of “Galleons Of Stone” by The Art Of Noise) to “In Our Lives, There Have Been Many Terrors”, in which distant metallic clanks are borne on zephyrs through crumbling ruins.  

 Occasionally the sounds are just too well worn, and the ear can’t help but associate echoey piano with lachrymose US soaps, and sawtooth synth hums with encroaching Silurians, but in general this is a well-constructed thoughtful slice of musical atmospherica.  Perhaps “Transistory Stringency” – yes, the titles are best ignored, frankly – is thin and meandering, but overall this record marries the amicable bubbling of early Global Communication with the elegant austerity of Tim Hecker or Leyland Kirby.  The record ends with some unexpected drum n bass action, and if the breakbeat tweaking is a little ham-fisted, the mournful Aphex horns underneath embody the record’s true, dark heart.   Good stuff, in short, but more misery next time, please, Mick; perhaps we should have written a bad review, to get the ball rolling.

 

Yo! Rushil's Bum Show

It was quite hard to write this review.  I don't like reviews that get unecessarily aggressive, and I certainly don't like anything ad hominem, but, then again, I did (and do) truly abhor this man's music.  Quite tough to express my utter displeasure at listening to his record without doing it in such a way that it appears personal.  So, this was my attempt to be vicious, but along one parameter only.

There's a really clumsy sentence in here, but I'll leave it in just to show Rushil that I know my own limitations.  I certainly know his...

RUSHIL – OSCILLATIONS (Apple Jam)

Rushil’s website says he grew up with music.  “Rushil cherished being at the center of all the creativity”, we’re told.   He goes on to say that as a grown up performer, “Nothing was more important than the experience I got from playing live.  The mind struggles to ever totally be present at any given time; playing live allows for nothing less than total immersion”.  That’s great, isn’t it?  Scientists and philosophers still don’t really understand why music can feel so personally special, so soul-scrapingly intimate, beyond even other art forms, and it’s wonderful that Rushil loves his music.  Nothing can take that away from him; like the charity money on Bullseye, that’s safe.

Luckily.  Because, Jesus felched, from outside the “center of creativity” this record brings no comfort whatsoever, and is more likely to inspire the primary symptoms of gastric flu, dragging itself from the mire of stodgy faceless rock to the stinking nadir of passive-aggressive wheedling.   There are points on this record where the music gets away with simply being blandly generic and vapid: “Here And There” throws its big, yearning chorus over an acoustic intro with all the perfectly controlled abandon of an advert for sugar-free beverages full of slo-mo bungee jumps, and other more introspective moments could soundtrack the sort of sidebar ad for toothpaste or something in which friendship is defined by fannying about on a twilit beach that you click by mistake and can’t shut up for 8 minutes.  At other times, sadly, the album is nowhere near as good as this.

“Three” is an ugly, lachrymose slur over rustily distorted guitar and thumping toms, that sounds like a maudlin constipated drunk moaning his way over the soundtrack to a cut-budget TV western, and “No Way Out” is dollop of over-egged emotive keening, rather like Bryan Adams’ “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You”, with all the tune liposucked out and left to quiver in a self-pitying heap in the clinical waste bin.  The title track is essentially the same, but has the advantage of being 39 seconds shorter.  And, what’s this?  We’re only 6 bloody tracks in, there’s still the melody-free cross between Chad Kroeger and Semisonic called “Never See The Light” to go; we’re nowhere near the chicken in a bucket Counting Crows of “Sometimes”, let alone the fading adenoidal caterwaul of “E22” that marks the finish line. 

Rushil is obviously a bright lad – he’s reading Law at Oxford, which is no intellectual holiday – but this record just goes to show that academic and artistic intelligence are entirely separate entities.  Then again, what was it he said?  “The mind struggles to ever totally be present at any given time”.  Ah, perhaps that explains it; maybe he made this record whilst under hypnosis, or veterinary sedatives; maybe he was making 9 albums simultaneously, each of which might contain enough material to build a slightly passable  gestalt.  Or maybe it’s just utter rubbish.  Yes, the simplest option is probably the best - remember Occam’s Razor?  And can we use it on our ears when you’re done with it, please? 

Totalitarian's Turns (It's Sow Or Never)

Ocelot thing, and Nightshift thing.  Two (2) things.

The singer runs offstage, and comes back as a nun.  Halfway through the next number, a melismatic gospel paean to the saviour, the nun costume is off.  The singer finishes the song wearing nothing but some (rather snug) knickers.   During the following tune, a man in a mysterious shiny mask dresses her in a tutu.  The set ends with the singer sitting on this vaudeville gimp, playing guitar and singing through a gas mask.  This is not the sort of theatre one usually finds at bottom of the bill at The Wheatsheaf, and for thinking about stage presentation to a greater extent than “Will these pizza stains show up under the coloured lights?” Gemma Moss deserves credit.  But, frankly, even the most interesting presentation won’t rescue a whole set of unconvincing music, and luckily Gemma’s dark cabaret songs and vocal acrobatics impress without the Ken Russell trappings. 

Her style is somewhere between smouldering and emphatic, like an R n B diva doing Jacques Brel in the waiting room to Hades.  There is a lot of despair in Gemma’s music, words like “help” and “crazy” seemingly only ever a chorus away, but her voice has a rich soulful warmth that dispels any fears of a hectoring miseryguts (there are quite enough of those on the solo artist scene already).  It’s early days for Gemma, who came out of the friendly crucible of Oxford’s open mike nights, and she’s only done a handful of full gigs, but we suggest you seek out the next one.  Unless you actively like mediocrity, that is.

OVERLORD/ XII BOAR/ 13 BURNING. Port Mahon, 8/2/14

Metal is a music of extremes.  Nearly all the best bands are too fast, or too slow, or too loud, or too Nordic, or too dressed as decomposing priests, whereas 13 Burning are just too pallidly anonymous to make much impression.  There are definitely positives to note, especially the vocalist who has a powerful keening high tenor, like a crooner version of Bruce Dickinson, but then again he also mimes along to the plodding guitar solos whilst looking like George Michael circa 1988, which reduces our good will noticeably.  As this is their second gig, we’ll not write them off, but they need to become more...something.  More anything.  More metal.

Now, Aldershot’s XII Boar are not sonically extreme, playing a whiskey-marinated mixture of Sabbath riffs and Motorhead growls set against the slack depths of early Mudhoney, but they are extreme in their dedication to head-kicking numbnuts rocking.   Which makes them fantastic, obviously.  Whether they’re playing stoner thumps, Southern boogie or sloppy half-inched solos, they do it with that winning mixture of total sincerity and cheek-tonguing cabaret that only great heavy rock bands can pull off.  The guitarist also has an LED knuckleduster and the ability to shout “fuck yeah!” with the theatrical timing of a master comedian.  This shit is much harder than it looks.

Overlord are a young band – we’re informed that their guitar- and vocalist, Nightshift writer Tal Fineman, was legally allowed in the venue scant days ago – and they have an awful lot of talent to admire.  Unfortunately, as yet the overall effect is a little muddled.  Entertaining chugs suddenly turn awkwardly introspective, and infectious party-on cowbell parts are abandoned at frustratingly odd junctures.  The set is like a Rubik’s cube that might be rearranged into a number of quality tracks, but at the moment is a tantalising jumble, not quite Zep-rock, not quite classic metal, and with uncertain nods towards prog.  Their cover of Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral” shows how good they can be when they stick to one furrow.  It’s OK for a song to do one thing well, but lots of Overlord’s song try to do 12 things, and wind up a bore.