Indoctrinating In Sects

This is a great record, go out and buy it.

BUG PRENTICE – THE WAY IT CRUMBLES (Self-released)

“I wish that we could live in a library”, dream Bug Prentice on the woozy, melancholic “Spoons”, summing up an album that likes to sneak up on life from the far side, from a point of thoughtful academia or fanboy geekery.  Over 38 minutes, we pick up lyrical references to a drunk Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray’s films, Cole Porter and Kurt Vonnegut.  “Angular Spirals” doesn’t seem to be riffing on anything specific, but sounds more like a Vorticist lonely hearts column than your average pop song: the narrators of these songs seem more comfortable away from the action, immersed in scholarly footnotes, DVD extras and bottomless YouTube rabbit holes.

So it’s astonishing how emotionally direct this record is.  Ally Craig might be delivering lyrics consisting of compact, absurd vignettes (“Ceilidh Dancer”) or just dicking about (hipster grunge parody “Moustache”), but his gorgeous, dry, delicate voice, like the smoked out ghost of Jeff Buckley, makes it seem like he’s whispering soul-drenched secrets.  The music also gives the songs visceral immediacy: the guitar plays elastic mandelbrot blues that’s somewhere between John Renbourne, Thurston Moore and James Blood Ulmer, whilst the rhythm section hide subtly in the background for long periods, before erupting into hefty Slint-shaped blasts.  If one song sums the record up, it’s “Nebraska Admiral”, a beautiful brooding lament that teeters on the edge of atonality but which has the cornballiest, music-halliest opening couplet you’ll hear all year, sounding like mid-90s Kristin Hersh with lyrics by Ian Dury.   If you’ve seen Ally live, you’ll know he can wrench the sentimental core from an Ivor Cutler piece and reveal the unsuspected profundity in a song from The Muppets, so this mixture of cabaret schmaltz and surreal sincerity should come as no surprise.  This is one of the best Oxford albums in recent times, but be prepared to put some work in, The Way It Crumbles is one tough cookie. 

You Let One Off?

Quick review of an all-dayer a little while ago, featuring a previously unseen paragraph, cut from Nightshift because there wasn't room/ it was about a band from outside Oxon/ it was undbearably knowing.

ROYAL PARDON, MD, Bully, 19/9/15

It’s quite refreshing to find an all-dayer with no trappings.  The mysteriously named Royal Pardon (“Run that past one again, footman”) from newcomer MD Promotions is not tied to charity, advertising, label promotion or the dressing up box, it’s a just a 7 hour selection of local music in a big beer-fuelled room, which is more than enough justification for a day out.  Opener Kid Kin’s laptop is broken, so we get a truncated, on the hoof mini-set of his texturally savvy library music melodies.  As ever, the tenor of his De Wolfe electro is a delight, but this swiftly salvaged set is perhaps indicative of a bill of often great music and great ideas that don’t necessarily always make for great sets. 

31hours are a band for whom stylistic cohesion is probably not a major concern, though that’s not to say their eclectic prog pop isn’t immensely pleasing.  If there is a thematic anchor to their music it’s that high fret-twiddling jam block-thwacking Afroals sound, which is probably the least interesting element, outweighed by freeze-dried Glass Animals balladry and lush Pompeii era Floyd soundscapes.

Pipeline’s funky contemporary indie is a far simpler proposition, along the lines of The Wedding Present without the poetry and Senseless Things without the tequila.  The vocals are winningly effortless, and if the set of snappy tunes runs out of steam slightly before the finish line, this is a band that is maturing steadily.

We Have A Dutch Friend, by contrast, have a long way to go.  Their blueprint of sweet Sundays lilts punctuated by strident Chumabawamba folk harangues is viable enough, but the playing is messily fragmented and joylessly stilted, probably because they appear petrified almost to the point of collapsing; perhaps that lowlands connection could suggest something to settle the nerves. 

We’re used to Tiger Mendoza’s hip-hop airs and post-EDM power pop, but tonight perhaps the best moments are when angle-ground guitar thrashes are laid over asbestos beats in a manner recalling light industrial acts like Ministry and Nitzer Ebb.  Some of the transitions between tracks are not as fluid as they might be, and sometimes different compositional elements seems to jostle each other to get to the front of the mix, but overall this set shows that ian De Quadros is an inventive and varied producer.

A small break is presumably there to let the engineer grab some dinner and go and find more Cliff Richard records to play us, but we return after 40 minutes to find the atmosphere changed for the better.  Not only is the room thankfully a little busier, but the later sets have a more coherent flavour, none more so than Cosmosis whose affable acoustic roots rock (think Stone Temple Pilots busking Cure songs) is presented with such unforced bonhomie even those of us who have an anaphylactic reaction to wackiness get swept up in the japes.  The lead vocalist keeps looking shiftily from side to side, as if to check that they’re getting away with it, but the set proves that music doesn’t have to be serious to be worthwhile.

Duchess announce that this is their last gig, which is a pity as their playing is tighter than ever.  It’s low-key as valedictory sets go, but not short on energy, especially a bouncy “South Parade”.  As well as inheriting Paul Simon’s trick of slipping filched global drum patterns underneath eloquent pop (Rhythm Of The Saints is in evidence as much as the obvious Gracelands), we catch snatches of motif and melody that remind us of “Walk On The Wild Side”, “Down Under” and “I Started A Joke” - but mostly we pick up pure character and musical fluency.  They will be missed.

Word count limited.  Bel Esprit: Longpigs.  Gene.  Gomez.  Las.  Mansun.  Stone Roses.  Sum of parts?  Nope.  “Creep” cover?  Best not, eh.

The Scholars were an epic alt stadium act who may as well have been called The Copy Editors, and whom we didn’t care for.  Strangely, Zurich, the trio that evolved from them are rather excellent despite ostensibly dealing in the same sound.  A lot of the bombast and bluster has been excised  leaving elemental, muscular glory pop with flightpath vocal lines and dark disco rhythms, along the lines of a Cinemascope Half Rabbits.  Their music might not be complex or mysterious, but it snags the spirit and skewers the emotions, an unexpectedly direct and affecting conclusion to a highly enjoyable but not always entirely convincing event.

Contra(ce)ption

"Homercles cares not for beans"

THE FAMILY MACHINE – HOUSES THAT YOU LIVED IN (Beard Museum)

There’s a moment listening to the gorgeous “Quiet As A Mouse” when we realise that it sounds like something from a vintage Oliver Postgate TV show.  Listen to that wiltingly simple vocal melody and those urbanely bucolic drizzles of guitar, and couldn’t this be what Gabriel the Toad might sing if he had to explain something intangibly complex like regret or absence, instead of hot air balloons and sharing?  What makes this album beautiful is not just the lovely sound – although the sound is lovely, from the 60s soundtrack horns and Bacharach bass of “Long Way From Home” to the Golden Syrup Abbey Road warmth of “Morning Song” – but the way that the deftly constructed miniature songs seem to say a lot about huge topics in very few words, like indie folk as written by Saki.  Or Yoda.

The key concept that resurfaces throughout the records is home, whether as welcoming shelter after a hard journey or as mute witness to painful absence: the title track could easily be a rewriting of Philip Larkin’s “Home Is So Sad”, over a melancholic melody that somewhat recalls early 90s R.E.M. It’s not always easy to hone in on what specifically these allusive little songs mean, especially “We Ain’t Going Home” which simply repeats its title in reverberant harmony like the world’s most elegant footie chant, but perhaps they are not supposed to be tied down.  Most great pop music is brash and cocksure, but The Family Machine’s intimate intricacies are more haiku than high kick, and should be cherished as amongst the county’s very best.

Truck 2015 Saturday pt 2

The Loose Salute looks like part of a cryptic crossword clue (is “EU salt” a thing?), but is actually a laid-back Americana outfit.  Truck ain’t short of them, of course – there are probably more dobros than bleeding toilets onsite this year – but the band stands out with some ace sleepy, syrupy vocals and lap steel lines arcing across the songs like distant flares in a winter sky.

We’ve never been that excited by their Ghostbox For Dummies schtick, but we have to say that Public Service Broadcasting do have a knack for programming a good 1989 drum and sample pattern and adding stadium krautrock moves.  The expansion to a quartet makes this a more satisfying set than last year’s Audioscope headline, and we leave cautiously in favour.

Tellingly, Bo Ningen is the only act for whom the programme compiler couldn’t find any other bands to reference. Perhaps we shouldn’t compare them to musicians, but to forces of nature.  With arcane hand gestures, manically garbled lyrics and streaming hair entangled in fretboards, the quartet resemble demon witches, the bassist and vocalist particularly looking like someone has shoved some haunted coathangers into a black windsock.  Although they start somewhat tentatively, they soon explode, and the set concludes with waves of coruscating noise and a bass wielded like a sacramental axe.  The silly fake snow machines that have been infuriating us all day in the Barn are left off for the entirety of the set: fun time is over, mortals, taste the ritual.

We drop in on Temples, but really they can’t complete with the psych punk noise still ringing in our ears, so we grab another pint or two and head back to the Market stage for Peter Cook & The Light.  Now, Joy Division are one of the truly great British bands, New Order are not short of a classic or two, and Peter Hook’s aggressively melodic bass playing was a big component of these, but sadly his voice is just rubbish, in the least interesting way possible.  We only keep from dropping off by imagining that we’re watching Peter Cook & The Light (“She’s lost control again, Dud”.  “Bloody Greta Garbo!”).  This music deserves celebrating, but a slightly moribund trot through the back catalogue isn’t the best method of doing so.

A far more welcome hors d’ouevre to the headline set comes from Truck favourite Piney Gir, in a sugary whirlwind of pirouetting skeletons and lollipop percussion and a polka dot frock and kids onstage and a bumblebee costume and synchronised tambourines and girlpop and fieldmice and grins and the glorious “Greetings, Salutations, Goodbye” and not enough synths.

Basement Jaxx are billed as Truck’s “first festival headliner”, which seems like splitting hairs and evidence of one contract clause too many, but blimey, they don’t half bring things to a conclusion.  The band has taken the concept of a “soul revue”, and run with it to create a “house panto”.  There are guys in gorilla suits and a couple of girls done up like the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of soul sisterhood, and a huge woman with a huge voice getting all gospel pop on us whilst looking uncannily like the fortune teller from Monkey Island.  The single segue of a show contains hits and equally interesting connecting material, reliably banging beats, an interestingly stripped back “Romeo” and even a timbales solo.  The band never revisited on the dense layered intrigue of their debut LP - in a reminder how experimental they were, The Wire listed Remedy in their top 20 releases of 1999, just above Captain Beefheart and The Fall! – and we never expected anything other than crowd-pleasing from this set, but it is still a beautifully put together show and a barrelful of fun.  What else should we have expected from the people who had psychotic monkeys run amok over Gary Numan riffs and now have a video featuring a twerkbot?  First festival headliner?  Job most emphatically done.

And with that we head off into the night: ha, press parking, eat dust, suckers!  It has been a very enjoyable Truck, full of classic moves and exciting new ideas.  Some people will doubtless say that Basement Jaxx were too commercial, but frankly we’ve yawned through enough worthy country acts and third tier indie warhorses over the years to welcome a bit of showmanship.  This was the busiest Truck to date, which is great, but frankly it also sometimes felt like it: nobody should have to miss a whole set to have a piddle.  Truck has always treated people well, and not as cash-haemorrhaging cattle, as witnessed by the reasonable catering prices, the fact that a lot of the trading positions are given to charities when doubtless more revenue could be raised elsewhere, and the fact that we walked in with a bag stuffed with beers.  There’s talk of the festival getting bigger in 2016.  That sounds interesting, but the organisors must make sure that they retain the respect for artists and customers that Truck has always been synonymous with.  Otherwise, if they’re not careful, one day we might be pinpointing the moment Truck died – and unlike Paul McCartney, it won’t be a paranoid fantasy. 

Truckadero

Here's the Saturday review from this year's Truck festival.  I've since discovered that Haula is a local artist, persumably from Wantage, but her website still claims she comes from London so I've left that bit in.  

Musically, Sunday starts slowly, but then perhaps Sundays always should.  Wallflower are a sonically muscular emoid bunch, let down by some kidney-rippingly bad vocals; Fox Chapel make pleasant enough pop, that might have forgettably inaugurated some T4 all-dayer a few years ago; Safe To Swim are rhythmically very strong, all rubbery goth indie that closely resembles Placebo, which is fine so long as you don’t mind things that sound like Placebo.  To stave off boredom we invent the game Gaffer Tape Vs. Jaffa Cake, the rules to which we sadly can’t tell you until you get a special tattoo and give us your house.

So, it’s back to the reliable Gorwelion Horizons stage, who keep delivering strong acts on Saturday, although they seem to have cheated and sneaked a few non-Welsh musicians in, such as London-based Ugandan Haula. She has an outstanding contemporary soul voice and a commanding but not over-egged stage presence, which makes her set a pleasure.  Musically she leans on R ‘n’ B, both in its contemporary sense, and the original coinage: there’s a tasty moment when the band drop into a Chickenshack type blues glide that really suits her delivery.  Sometimes the backing gets sterile and sessiony, and the lyrics tend towards the platitudinous, but it’s a strong showing all the same.  Closing song “Freedom” gets a glorious main stage singalong reaction from the crowd (apparently she has a following in Wantage, somewhat oddly).

According to our notebook we listen to Decovo at this point, but it clearly makes no impact on us.  Allusondrugs, however, are a different proposition.  Their messy potage of Mudhoney riffs, twitchy Biffy Clyro vocals, windswept guitar lines and half-inched Blur tunes is fun, but we love the fact that at any one point one of them is going off on a freakout, but at no point all of them are.  They’re simply intriguing.  “I like herpes more than I like Irn Bru”, they announce unexpectedly, which is a thousand times more worth saying than, “Truck fest, how ya doing?”, you have to admit.

Walking past the Veterans stage (no Virgins left after the first day, which is how all good festivals should be), we intend to skip The Shapes, but are drawn in by the magnetic power of their classic pop, which is grown up without being washed out.  We then go and see The Magic Gang just in case they sound like The Magic Band, which is the sort of logic you end up with having decided to skip lunch due to queues and fall back on beer.  They don’t.  In fact, they sound like The Housemartins, Weezer and very, very well-behaved young men.  We rather enjoy it, but they’re hardly kicking out the jams; in fact, they’d probably be considered limp by the WI who made the jams.

Veterans Flowers Of Hell endear themselves to us immediately by being notably relaxed and sounding like The Velvet Underground with extra fiddle and trumpet, and then they prove us right by playing a really great cover of “Heroin” with extra fiddle and trumpet.  And then they honour Czech dissident freaks Plastic People Of The Universe, which should happen more often.  And, all this whilst the engineer has left a vintage soul CD playing on the PA throughout.  They probably thought it was messages from the ether.

Yet again Gorwelion comes up trumps, with ultra-super-mega-perky indie pop outfit Seazoo, who are blessed with an infections sense of fun, a knowledge of how catchy tunes work, relentlessly bouncy basslines, and a synth made out of a doll’s head that goes whoodly-wheep in a seemingly random fashion. They do a song which sounds like Free’s “Alright Now” played by excited Care Bears. They are superb.  Oxford promoters Swiss Concrete should be brought back for one night, just to book this colour-saturated joy of a band, where they could raise many a flagon of speed-laced Tizer; hell, play them loud enough, they could raise the spectre of John Peel, his Ooberman T-shirt barely creased by the afterlife.

After this food beckons.  Having tried to support the ethical vegetarian hippy stall, we get frustrated by their inability to actually have any food (“You could come back in about an hour”), so we visit the Dalicious stall, which we work out is named after the fact that it sells some rather tasty lentil dal, and not because it sells floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew (note to self: set up business to sell floppy pastrami clocks or lobster and telephone stew).

Hoping to strike gold twice, we return to Gorwelion for Violet Skies.  She shares some ground with Haula, not least an impressive larynx, but her electronic torch songs are just too studio-smooth and her onstage drama the stuff of Eurovision heats.  If she stopped trying so desperately to affect, she could be someone to watch, though.

It’s funny to think of Alphabet Backwards being classed as Veterans, because they still act like naughty kids, leaping around the stage and trying to get people to wind up the security guy.  This is pop, not as youthful rebellion, but as childish fun, like The Red Hand Gang getting hopped up on tartrazine.  All this, and their playing is inch perfect too, never missing the opportunity for maximum bounciness.  The keyboards are a wee bit too quiet, but this is balanced by Steph’s flowing Sandie Shaw dress.  They are ten times more fun than Summer Camp, whom we’d just watched briefly, not to mention summerier and camper.

“Who likes Saint Raymond?” asks the visibly refreshed singer of soft-centred hardcore Leeds lads Brawlers.  “I mean, we’ve never heard of them, and we only ask because we just stole their fucking beer”.   He then proceeds to share said bevvies with the crowd.  Now accessories to the crime, we have no choice but to give up and enjoy the band, which despite being musclier and much louder and far far more tattoed is actually a good analogue to Alphabet Backwards: they are working very hard for you to have a good time, and are not worried a wet fart about anything else.  Pop music, in other words.

Peasants King finish off the Gorwelion stage.  Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in that name somewhere?  Hell, don’t bother answering, we gave up after finding no fewer than 19 errors on the first page of the Truck programme alone.  Plus the cover looks like it could be the 1985 catalogue from Clockhouse at C&A, so it’s best left under lock and key.  Peasants King make a decent Britrock sound, but it all feels a bit old hat, from the guy playing a separate floor tom - so 2008 - on up.  Perhaps at the other end of the festival we’d have got more from them, but on the home straight we need more to grab us.