Shift Key Personnel

Here's the latest Nightshift review and the latest Ocelot piece.  Might stop doing these soon - have to write another one later today, and I'm running out of ideas.  Also, not convinced anybody whatsoever reads it...in Oxford, anyhow.  Perhap they do in Salisbury, but that's not much use...although it does allow them to read music crit written in sentences.

Search enough charity shops and record fairs and sooner or later you’ll come across one of the LPs that John Betjeman made setting his music to lightly funky session jams.  They’re a lot of fun, and you certainly can’t imagine any poet laureate since following suit (although we’d be prepared to hand over good money for a soundclash between Carol Ann Duffy and Stephen “Tintin” Duffy), but in Oxford we don’t really need them, because we have The Relationships.  This quartet, that has just released their 4^th album, Phase, is centred round the clipped, poetic lyrics of East Oxford bard Richard Ramage, who could easily give Sir John a run for his (pre-decimal) money.

The words are not only masterfully controlled, they’re also fascinated by a Betjemanian period in Britain’s history; whilst most rockers see the mid-50s as the birth of cultural validity, Ramage sees it differently, wishing to retire to the decade in question if “Mullioned Sunshine Windows” is to believed.  If you want to understand contemporary culture, the band seem to say, you have to appreciate that complex moment where Victorian constructs met the post-war social contract, where domestic art struggled to find a character in that lacuna between Vorticism and The Beatles’ first LP.  Find me a lyricist who can drop references to antimacassars and Brian Jones with such elegance, and I’ll buy you a season pass for the Clapham omnibus.

But the band isn’t just about the librettist, the airy, summery indie music is played by some of the most technically adept, yet tastefully restrained players in the whole shire, and will please anyone with a penchant for Postcard Records, the Canterbury scene  and early R.E.M.  The Relationships: cheaper than a time machine, rockinger than a History BA.

  

NIGHTWORKERS/ THE GRACEFUL SLICKS, The Cellar, 12/4/14

The only bad thing about The Graceful Slicks' first number is that it has to finish.  Because, you see, not only does their work have an ahistorical simplicity and atavistic two chord punch that is less a collection of music, more a glimpse into the universal anima mundi, but they tend to fluff the endings up.  To some ears tonight’s set will be a generic string of psychedelic grooves and garage buzz that never seems to quite get as far as an actual song, whereas to others it will be a whirlwind of wordless howls and mysterious murmurs, a primitive Lascaux painting in sonic form, an ochre mammoth sketched in sludgy blues changes.   We fall in the latter camp, and especially love “Bulbul Tarang”, not so much a composition as a peaty aroma of sound, cut through with sheet aluminium slashes from the bowed guitar.  It’s timeless, transcendent and hypnotic.  But, you know, they could still do with fluffing up the endings a bit less.

A tune or two into their set, the headliners announce, “We’re not wankers from Brighton”.  Yes, we can see how you’d wish to clarify that, seeing as it can appear as like Nathan-Barley-On-Sea.  A few bars later, the tired mind decodes the stage drawl:  “We’re Nightworkers, from Brighton”.  And work they do, throwing themselves wildly into a set composed primarily of sweat and wildly waggled outdated haircuts.   The music leans towards classic rock with a laddish swagger and a lightly narcotic haze – think Black Rebel Motorcycle Club meets Cast – and is highly entertaining, even if it never reaches the ignition point the songs crave.  The vocals are strong, yet malleable enough to offer some variation, and the keys are excellent, finding unexpected space in the songs to fill with cheeky synth lines or vintage thriller Rhodes.  In fact, the whole band are very good, but we still find our attention wandering before the gig is over.  Nightworkers: they’re not wankers, not by any means, but they’re not our new favourite band, either.

I Want You To Play With My Stringaling

I thought that this was going to be a rubbish gig, and that I was bored of Thomas Truax.  but I wasn't.  So hooray for him.

THOMAS TRUAX/ THE AUGUST LIST/ HUCK, Pindrop, The Art Bar, 19/4/14

Huck’s voice is a fascinating thing, a delicate, charred blues keen that can be roughly triangulated from Chris Isaak, Neil Young and Kermit.  The songs he’s playing tonight, with a second guitar to add electric trills, all come from his folk operetta Alexander The Great, which isn’t about Alexander Of  Macedon (or even Eric Bristow), but appears to be a beat-flavoured rites of passage tale.  The full stage show is coming to town soon, and should be well worth a visit, but perhaps the songs feel a little thin without the theatrical element: they have all the grand dramatic gestures, as well as a dollop of highly literate tragedian’s nouse that can throw Pandora, Babel and Thomas Aquinas into a single lyric, but sometimes feel sparse when we yearn for a big, Jacques Brel arrangement.  The final number ramps up the gutsy bluesiness in a way that unexpectedly reminds us of PJ Harvey circa To Bring You My Love, and provides the set’s highpoint.

There’s not much we can tell you about The August List except that they’re great: they’re the sort of act that encapsulates you for 30 minutes, and leaves you realising you’ve still got a blank notebook.  We could tell you that “All To Break” sounds like Sabbath’s “Paranoid” rewritten by Johnny Cash and played by The White Stripes, or that their cover of Scout Niblett’s “Dinosaur Egg” has the rootsy quirkiness of a downhome Lovely Eggs, but what really matters is that this duo has the unhurried, natural sonic chemistry of all your favourite boy/girl duos, and a neat way with a high octane country blast like “Forty Rod Of Lightning”.  Alright, some of the yee-hah accents are of dubious provenance, but the music is wistful and frenetic by turns, and one tune features a Stylophone, so they’re clearly not too in thrall to deep South influences to add a cheeky Brit wink.

Stick insect thin and surrounded by home-made mechanical instruments, Thomas Truax looks like he’s come direct from a scene cut from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.  His creations, such as the Hornicator and Mother Superior, are either too well known to require a description, or too alien to be captured by one, but tonight’s set really brings home the quality of his songwriting – we’ll be honest, we thought we’d seen all he could offer, and that tonight’s show would be a tired trot through his cabaret schtick, but we were wrong.  A straight, eerie ballad version of Bowie’s “I’m Deranged” turns up early in the set, and quickly confirms that Truax is a talented performer without all the trappings (even as it confirms that he ain’t David Bowie), and from there it’s only a short hop to the abstract campfire howl of “Full Moon Over Wowtown”, performed acoustic in every cranny of the venue, including a quick jog round the block and a free shot of tequila behind the bar.  “The Butterfly And The Entomologist” is still a beautiful tale – and surprisingly apposite for Easter weekend – and a slow, treacly cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is a proper dues-payin’ roadhouse grind.  Perhaps the evening’s high point is “You Whistle While You Sleep”, which uses our favourite instrument, the Stringaling, to build a cubist house loop a la Matmos, before cutting to allow Truax to improvise insults to a loudmouth at the bar (who stayed wonderfully oblivious for the whole tirade).  Truax has enough tricks and techniques to last a roomful of musicians a lifetime, but this set proves that it’s in good old-fashioned composition and performance that he really shines.

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.