Nudy Bah!

When I submitted this review, the editor wrote back, asking if there was any chance I could remove the word "mong".  Erm, yes, without a doubt.  I must have been 17 before I discovered what mong meant, after many years of calling people "mongs" and "monging out" - I still sometimes forget what it actually means and how offensive some people may find it...to me it just sounds harmlessly childish like "doofus" or "durr-brain", and I find it comes out unbidden.  So, in Nutshaft you'll have seen it replaced with the word "dweeb", but I've left "mong" in below for the sake of honesty.  There's a lso a little bit extra here than what ended up in the published edition, making it EVEN MORE critical of the shit acts.  but they were pretty shit...or at least one of them was, and 2 were just unconvincing.  Evil Eye were good, although I have seen them play better.

Oh, and here's the June Ocelot piece, which is absolutely idiotic.  Or mongy, if you prefer.

Vegetable fronds uncurling against an alien horizon.

Exasperated scientists arguing with hidebound politicians in a striplit bunker.  Thick teak tables are pounded, plastic coffee skiffs upended, sheaves of closely scrawled paper collapse in the slipstream of a flailing white-coated arm.

An unearthed Neanderthal riff mutating on contact with air, spinning into Mandelbrot patterns, engulfing camera crews and lone hikers alike.  A light drizzle on the heaving, writhing hell creature, as it rests before the next attack.

Augmented hyenas tearing at the carcase of a lost courier in a feral weed-choked city.  Cracked surveillance cameras film the atrocity from multiple angles, sending the footage to data banks that shall never be accessed.

A rusty blues mechanism marching to a burnt out war, a conflict that has become meaningless habit to a cyborg militia.  Ballistics flash on the horizon, scarring the brown dusk, but are ignored by trudging chrome feet. Forces clash.  Infantry fall.  The final result is ambiguous.

A trio made up of members from much missed Oxon acts Dr Slaggleberry and 50 ft. Panda has made a record of abstract rock and brutally ornate dynamic switches played with a winning mixture of improbable precision and sweaty metal abandon.  It is available in digital form on a pay what you wish basis from Bandcamp, or in a fetching handmade sleeve on CD.

Pretentious rubbish by ponces who wouldn’t know a proper tune if it bit them on the balls in 13/8.

At least one of these is a fair description of Masiro’s debut EP.

NUDYBRONQUE/ CHARMS AGAINST THE EVIL EYE/ TORN LIKE COLOURS/ MARK SOLLIS, It’s All About The Music, Wheatsheaf, 13/6/14

Mark Sollis’ voice sits somewhere between a supper club crooner and a wounded bear.  He has a song about sheep, replete with melodic bleating, and a song about local musical miserablist and walking Gallifrey Base discussion board, Mark Bosley.  Put it like this: he has character, and character goes a long way.  But, sadly, not always far enough.

Torn Like Colours, on the other hand, have apparently had all their character removed, possibly by the sort of high-spec vacuum packing device used to seal an astronaut’s risotto.  Their music is a hideous melange of suburban rocking, something like Lita Ford without the leather, and relentlessly joyless chirpy pop, something like drive time on Satan AM.  They try to inject some interest by knocking out a tired mash-up and nicking an intro from “Eye Of The Tiger”, but none of it saves a moribund set.  We suspect this band escaped from an English language teaching video in 1988, in which some plucky kids save the endangered youth club with pop and rock, whilst explaining the gerund.

Charms Against The Evil Eye also sound like they’re stuck in about 1988, where their lives were filled with erudite indie, poetry and occasional caches of scratchy Oxfam psychedelia.  The lyrics could mostly have been culled from Science & Nature questions from Trivial Pursuit, which is a refreshing change from the norm, and the songs are neat, built on unexpectedly muso-ish fretless bass and precise drums, and topped off with guitar that jumps between Peter Buck chiming and blurred Gedge hyper-strums.   Highly enjoyable, if lacking spark at some junctures.

Our beer-soaked gig notebook simply reads “floppy Suede mongs” under the heading Nudybronque.  Not really fair, as their music has the melodic sensibility and feeling of restless invention that typified pre-fame Pulp, but in a way they’re more a bundle of proto-Britpop signifiers than a band; probably great to start a cultural studies discussion with, but not great to listen to.  We suspect this set, in a hot empty room, after the band missed soundcheck when stuck in traffic, is not the one on which to judge them, and our notebook’s dismissive damnation is probably a long way from describing a promising band.  But, sadly, perhaps not far enough.

 

When I Punt My Masterpiece

This morning I really like Sleaford Mods and Georg Philipp Telemann.

PUNT FESTIVAL, Purple Turtle/ Cellar/ Wheatsheaf/ White Rabbit/ Turl Street Kitchen, 14/5/14

The Punt is an endurance test of pop music and beer, it helps to line the stomach first.  We’ve just finished a big bowl of salt and carbs in a noodle bar, and are cracking open our fortune cookie, to find the legend “Soon one of your dreams will come true”.  Hey, that’s remarkably similar to the sign-off on our handy Punt guide, “may all your musical dreams come true”.  This looks to be a cosmically blessed event, quite possibly the greatest night in cultural history; and, look, we didn’t even get any sauce on our shirt.

The Purple Turtle brings us crashing back to mundane reality, starting 20 minutes late, whilst bits of the PA are hastily tinkered with.  This means we only get to see about 15 minutes of Hot Hooves – which is about 7 songs, of course.  Although he’ll doubtless hate us for saying so, their lead vocalist seems to be slowly morphing into Mac E Smith, drawling and chewing his way through acerbic songs over taut and unvarnished pub punk, and spending most of the space between tracks shouting about the venue’s lighting: plus can anyone really deliver lines like “attitude adjuster plan” and not sound a little bit MES?  Unlike their well-turned records, the songs in this set are almost smothered by their own energy, “This Disco” especially is reduced to a heavy thrum through which Pete Momtchiloff’s vocals barely penetrate.  Pop will erase itself, perhaps, but it sounds bloody good whilst it does so.

Down the alleyway at the Cellar, another slightly more mature band is showing the youngsters how it’s done, although in a quieter, more introspective fashion.  Only Trophy Cabinet amongst tonight’s acts would introduce a song called “Rant” and then drift away on an airy zephyr of dreamy “ba ba ba”s.  Their classic, refined indie owes a little to James, a smidgen to A House, and a lot to that band from 1986...oh, you know the ones...we can’t recall the name, but we can just visualise the exact shade of lilac vinyl their 7 inch came in.  Sometimes the band keeps everything a little too reined in, when a bit of pop fizz might enliven the show, but they can certainly write some cracking little tunes.

Whilst our Eastern dessert oracle thinks that our dreams are coming true, Aidan Canaday is possibly still asleep.  Looking surprisingly like comedian Tim Key he slurs somnambulistically through lyrics that rarely seem to develop beyond slackly repeated phrases.  This might be quite intriguing, in its way, but doesn’t fit well with the polite salon folk pop the rest of The Cooling Pearls is producing.  And the polite salon folk pop ain’t great.

Neon Violets are an object lesson in why live music in a decent venue is irreplaceable.  We’re just chatting to some old friends at the top of the Cellar’s stairway (The Punt acting like a sort of school reunion for aging pasty-faced scenesters), and we nearly don’t go down: “Sounds alright from here, it’ll only be a bit louder inside”.  Well, that’s where we were wrong, because in close proximity, what sounded like pleasingly chunky blues rock, a la Blue Cheer, becomes a glorious, immersive experience, huge drums ushering you down dark corridors of fuzzy guitar overtones.  The material is relatively simple, but the sound is deep enough to get lost in.  From the doorway, we’d never have dreamed it.

One downside to The Punt is all the bloody people turning up at venues, when we’re used to seeing local acts in a tiny knot of regular faces.  So, although we are in The White Rabbit whilst Salvation Bill is playing, all we can hear from the back of a truly packed bar are occasional bloopy drum machine loops, and tinny fragments of guitar and tremulous vocal.  It sounds as if someone is playing a Plaid remix of Radiohead on a small boombox.  This is actually quite a pleasing sound, but not precisely what Ollie Thomas was shooting for, we suspect.

Hannah Bruce is the only completely unknown name to us on this year’s bill, so we make the effort to watch the entirety of her set.  Having got a little lost in The Turl Street Kitchen, and ended up trying to enter a room in which people were having a quiet meeting (it might have been anything from a divorcees’ book club to the Botley Church Of Satan), we find the clean white space, and settle down on the stripped floorboards for some acoustic balladry – which feels odd as back in the day The Punt would always start with stuff like this, not irascible bald rockers moaning about gobos.  Bruce has some strong songs, but tends to mar them a little by delivering them in a world-weary, battle-scarred voice that droops in exhaustion at the end of phrases, and seems to have eradicated all vowels as excess baggage.  At times this works, the songs like melancholic spectres evaporating from the ramparts as the cock crows, but at other times it all feels kind of half-baked.  One track, in its recorded form, sounds like The Wu-Tang Clan, Hannah observes; forgive us for wishing that we’d heard that, and not another sombre strum.

During some embarrassing joke interviews in this year’s Eurovision broadcast, Graham Norton filled a bit of awkward dead air with the wry observation, “You know, there are 180 million people watching this”.  At 9.30 on Punt night this sort of happens in reverse: Lee Riley performs what is comfortably the most challenging, experimental set of the evening, and for 15 minutes he is the only performer onstage across all 5 venues.  This sort of thing should definitely be encouraged.  As he coaxes sheets of rich hum and harsh feedback from a guitar, people either rush for the exit with a grimace, or stand with their eyes closed looking beatific. This brief drone and noise set may have made some people’s dreams come true, and could feasibly haunt the nightmares of others for decades to come.

Without meaning to, we end up shuttling between the White Rabbit and The Turl Street Kitchen for the last 6 acts on our itinerary.  At the latter, Rawz is reminding us of the frustrating dilemma of live hip hop: you can’t have huge booming beats and clear, comprehensible lyrics simultaneously, not unless you have a lot of time and high end equipment.  So, the backing for this set, whilst nicely put together, is relegated to time-keeper not sonic womb, a tinny metronome and not much more.  This is only a minor concern, though, as it allows us to hear every syllable of Rawz’ relaxed but tightly controlled raps.  Previously we’d picked up some of MF Doom’s bug-eyed cut-up logic in the Rawz recording we’d heard, but tonight his delivery brings to mind the understated and thoughtfully clipped style of De La Soul circa Art Official Intelligence.  Seeing Jada Pearl, a talented singer whom we’ve not come across for absolutely years, guesting on one track was bonus, too.

Perhaps it was the fact that he followed Lee Riley, but Kid Kin’s set at The White Rabbit mostly dispenses with this occasionally overly pretty bedroom mood music style, and supplies some crisp, kicking electronica.  The first number is a slow whirlpool of piano chords and clear, forehead rapping drum machine patterns, that reminds us a little of Orbital’s “Belfast”, before some burnished bronze noise overwhelms everything.  The next piece takes a vintage Black Dog beat and adds tidy post-rock guitar, and the set continues in a strong and varied vein.

Juliana Meijer is also expanding the sonic palette in Turl Street, using two guitars and some curlew call synth sounds (courtesy of Seb Reynolds, who has already played once tonight in Flights Of Helios).  The breathy vocals are winning, and remind us a little of Edie Brickell, albeit without the forced chirpiness.  There’s a delightful airiness to the set, but it never becomes mere background music, even if it does briefly skirt cocktail territory at times.

Vienna Ditto is a band in hiding.  They consist of a guitarist, who seems to hate guitar histrionics, keeping his Bo Diddley and Duane Eddy stylings low in the mix, and a torch singer who shies away from the spotlight.  They play electronic music, but tie themselves down to looping most of the drums live, as if in terror of quantised purity.  They play the blues, but are seemingly wary of appearing overly sincere.  They make wonderful, uplifiting pop songs, but tend to obscure them with walls of acidic synth squelch.  They make charming stage banter, but rarely on the mike, so only a handful of the audience ever hear them.  Perhaps this refusal to ever resolve their own paradoxes is the reason we love them, but whatever the reason, they are the perfect conclusion to a very successful Punt, with the talent to fill vast auditoriums, but the love of playing techno gospel burners in the corner of a cramped, sweaty pub on a Wednesday night.  You think this ramshackle duo isn't the best band in Oxfordshire at the moment?  Dream on.

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.