Memoir! Heat

I just came across this. I used to hold over my last review for MusicOMH until the next one was published, so their site always had the latest, but I dropped out of the habit of writing for them a little over a year ago. Nothing against them, I hasten to add, I just found that it wasn't exciting me too much to write these reviews, so I sort of sidled away. Might go back to it one day.

MY LIFE STORY – LOVING YOU IS KILLING ME (Exilophone/ Republic of Music) 

The Smiths and Oasis are often celebrated as bands whose B-sides were as strong as their A-sides, but My Life Story deserve to be added to that list. Megaphone Theology, their compilation of flip-sides – or, more accurately, CD single bonus tracks - in some ways showcases a more relaxed and exploratory band than the singles or albums. Nowhere else in the catalogue can you find anything resembling the strangely moving stream of consciousness of 'I Love You Like Gala', the restless inventiveness of the string of 'Emerald Green' songs, which set the same words in myriad styles, nor the torch song glory of 'Silently Screaming', which is roughly “What if R.E.M.’s 'Nightswimming' were written by Disney theme era Elton John?”. Even their wonderful Edwardian drawing room take on Wire’s 'Outdoor Miner' is squirreled away on an obscure EP, whilst their somewhat corpulent cover of The Stranglers’ 'Duchess' got wheeled out as a single. 

So it’s fitting that 'B-Side Girl', a lightly ironic love song to both partner and pop music, is one of the best tracks on My Life Story’s fifth album. It’s a shimmering swoon, a languorous heat-haze of a song with a subtly muscular bassline that has flavours of vintage Ride, whilst also resembling a hungover Wannadies with a touch of the literary psych-pop of cult Californian songwriter and Stewart Lee favourite, Anton Barbeau. Roughly half of Loving You Is Killing Me fits this classic indie songsmith mould, with the upliftingly melodic 'Numb Numb Numb' recalling Duffy, the Britpop-era mononymic guise of under-rated pop penman Stephen Duffy, of Tin Tin and Lilac Time “fame”. It boasts a gorgeously misty outro, with a refined melancholy which is echoed by the closing track, 'Wasted', a sort of bare bones Erasure tune which leaps from emotional intimacy to West End melodrama in three and a half minutes. This is proceeded by 'The Urban Mountaineer', a slightly Beatlesy take on that small slice of British indie history that came between C86 and baggy, which gave us swagger without belligerence. 

For some, the idea of My Life Story without the fanfares and fringe flicks of their first two albums will seem wrong, like spotting James Bond eating Greggs in a tracksuit. For those diehards, there are plenty of brash and brassy tunes on offer, even if they don’t quite embody the Camden cabaret style of the 90s. 'Running Out Of Heartbeats' is a bedroom glam stomp, a trashy collision between early They Might Be Giants and late Bis with some wailing guitar which is just about ridiculous enough to be allowed, and 'I’m A God' is a synthpop bluster which betrays the influence Marc Almond has always held over Jake Shillingford. These more vibrant tracks aren’t always quite convincing though: 'Identity Crisis' is an acknowledged riff on Marc Bolan’s hip-swivelling doggerel and is perky but forgettable, whereas 'Naked', a song about nudists being, err, nude sounds like The Longpigs having a crack at The Banana Splits theme - intriguing, perhaps, but not something to which you might wish to return very often. 

Tracks like this make the album feel a little slight.  Whilst the Scott Walker cosplay baritone of 'Tits And Attitude' is memorable, and the sinister undertow of 'Bubblewrap', where romance meets stalkerism in a Depeche Mode style, is delightfully eerie, with just ten tracks over 36 minutes the record seems to be lacking one or two more corkers to flesh it out...maybe Jake’s saving those in case CD singles make a comeback. 

 

Sub Pub

I've just recently taken delivery of the last 3 Lunchtime For The Wild Youth annual-review editions, so expect to see some late-90s action here in the coming days.

dEUS – IN A BAR, UNDER THE SEA (Island) 

Having read a fair few of these zines now, I’m interested in how many people write about albums that seem to encapsulate a moment of their lives, or which got them through some difficult period. I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t really listen to music like that, even though listening to music is a huge part of my life. Firstly, I’ve never been one to cane a record, and I almost never listen to the same thing over and over – at least, not since I was about 13 and didn’t have many records to choose from. Music is tied to certain memories simply by ubiquity, rather than quality. For example, if I think of dance music from my university days, I don’t come up with the scattershot genius of Aphex’s I Care Because You Do, or the clinical precision of Photek’s Modus Operandi, but the cheeseball Clayderman trance of ‘Children’ by Robert Miles, or that Armand Van Helden remix of ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos (although, listening again just now, this isn’t bad, even though the vocal samples sound like they’re saying “Honey, bring me toast to my lips, he’s got a big dick”...or is this an aural Rorschach test which is revealing something about my deepest thoughts?). 

So, for this issue I thought I’d review an album that, far from being a key milestone in my life or one of the greatest records ever heard, is one I can barely remember. dEUS – note to self, don’t start a sentence with the band name again, because the word processor doesn’t like the lower-case initial  – were a Belgian band who, in one of those odd quirks, had a minor hit in the music press with the lopsided Beefheartian indie of ‘Suds and Soda’ - it didn’t break the top 40, but go far more radio play and kudos than such a strange little European single would normally. I say “were a Belgian band”, but I now discover I should have typed “are a Belgian band”, as they’re still going, and the last five of their eight - eight! - albums have been number one in their home charts. Well, fair play. 

In A Bar, Under The Sea was their second album, and I bought it when it was released, although I’m not sure why: maybe HMV in Oxford had a big display for it, or something. I recall playing it a few times, liking it, but then basically putting it on the shelf and forgetting about it. So, here’s to the first spin in...who knows how long? What I discover is that it’s a very low-key album, from the tiny lofi scrap that is the opening track, to the mumbled lyrics, and after-hours jazz stylings of some of the numbers. The overall vibe is of busked ditties and organic hip-hop grooves, and good touchstones would be Beck’s music from the same period, Money Mark’s stoned organ doodles, or that brief era of low-slung beats on Folk Implosion songs. You’re far more likely to nod your head to this album than lose your mind to it. I have also decided that my lack of memory of the album is rather less about the quality of my memory than the understated nature of the music: ‘Serpentine’ is a sort of R.E.M. nursery rhyme with some nice pizzicato strings but it drifts by unobtrusively, ‘A Shocking Lack Thereof’ has lovely cheap metallophone elements sprinkled across it but underneath is a greyscale bluesy grumble, and ‘Disappointed In The Sun’ is a slightly wry piano tune sounding like a shy, awkward Ben Folds. 

Unusually, I find I like the singles the most. ‘Theme From Turnpike’ has some scuzzy jazz loops and comes off like a trip-hop Tom Waits, and this is followed on the LP by ‘Little Arithmetics’, a lovely tuneful little lope with a tiny hint of The Byrds, which is hugely catchy. ‘Roses’ starts off somnolently, as if it were a tentatively strummed demo of something designed to emulate Nirvana’s ‘Something In The Way’, but slowly builds a head of grungy steam until it begins to resemble Sonic Youth from a few years earlier. Only ‘Fell Off The Floor, Man’ doesn’t quite deliver, being a strange bit of disco at which different sonic elements have been tossed apparently without plan programme. Listening to this CD provides and important reminder: not every album needs to be earth-shattering. I enjoyed a lot of this, even if only a percentage of my attention was held at certain points. Not every record needs to be Rubber Soul, or Hex Enduction Hour, or The Goldberg Variations (Gould for me, thanks, if you’re offering), sometimes something lighter or slighter will work its own magic. Hell, I might even seek out dEUS’s 2023 album How To Replace It, stranger things have happened. 

Digs Your Own Whole

 This review went over the word count, but the editor kindly kept it all in. 

HOUSE OF ALL/ THE PLAN/ TOP SHORTAGE, Divine Schism, Florence Park Community Centre, 15/3/25 

When we first saw Top Shortage we tentatively labelled them “avant-grunge”, and although the set was spirited, we were equally tentative about calling them “any good”. A lot can happen in just over a year, however, and tonight they are excellently gnarled and weighty, the opening number dark, oppressive and grimy like an abandoned underground carpark, through which the ululating punk-yodel vocals drift like a suspicious wraith: think Metal Box with the dub extracted. At other times they resemble a twisted Francophone Television, and a new song sounds as though someone tried to reconstruct a fragmented Devo tune without looking at the pieces in a round on The Krypton Factor. The band is still sometimes scrappy, but this merely highlights the mocking sneers as they take aim at suburban bigotry. 

Southend’s The Plan have a warmer disposition. Their sprightly twin vocals and twangy little guitar parts make them a stick-man sketch of The B-52s, whilst a cute dinkiness in the keys gives them an air of Pram at their most ramshackle. A tendency towards 2/4 country rhythms is intriguing, but not as much as the lead vocalist’s rectangular Diddley-style guitar, which looks as though it was hewn from some ancient cellar door. Perhaps some of the songs are over too quickly, and the set never quite achieves full momentum, but it is nonetheless chirpy and likable. 

There are two reliable ways to make your post-punk band sound great. Firstly, have two drummers (some practical drawbacks here), and secondly, have Steve Hanley on bass (best of luck with that one). House Of All, a band formed entirely of ex-Fall musicians – plus a stand-in for guitarist Pete Greenway who cannot currently tour – actually have three drummers trading places on two stools, and there are a few old faces beaming happily at the sight of Paul Hanley and Karl Burns bashing away together for the first time since 1984, but even those not versed in Fall history will concede that the band sounds like a twitchy thunder god hot-wiring a juggernaut.  

Unless you’re one of Mark E Smith’s sisters, everyone agrees that the one person justified in making Fall-style music is Martin Bramah, founder member of the group and teenage friend of MES. Although there has been a Stalinist rewriting of history to claim that every element of The Fall was under Smith’s control, it is likely that Bramah was responsible for bringing many of the influences squashed together to birth the Fall sound. We hear a lot of those tonight, from the scuffed garage psych evident in opener ‘Aim Higher’ to the Lovecraftian grotesqueries in the lyrics to ‘Harlequin Duke’. Bramah’s declamatory vocals somewhat resemble those of Smith, but there’s a liturgical air to his gnomic utterances, and by the end the gig feels like one long fractal sermon. In a late-career inspiration burst, House Of All have released 3 albums, plus 2 full-length collections of live tracks and reworkings, in a mere two years. Tonight’s honed set has a strong sonic blueprint, but enough ideas and variations to make each track exciting and unique. Always the same, always different, might we say? No, actually, that sounds stupid... 

I'm sure it's not the intention, but this headline band's name just made me think of peanut butter

I felt more at home with this small gig - I even got to sit on an old sofa for a lot of it, which is certainly nicer than being crushed in the O2.

THE LAST WHOLE EARTH CATALOG/ SUNGLASZ VENDOR/ BIGHANDSANDALLGRISTLY, Divine Schism, Common Ground, 6/2/25 

You know a band will be ungainly with an awkward name like bighandsandallgristly, but at the outset their hesitant tinkly confections with timid violin and quavery vocals barely cohere at all. As the set progresses they shape up like a cross between Dirty Three and Penguin Cafe Orchestra, whilst still resembling very shy baby otters who have found some instruments (all except the drummer who is unusually busy and who brings a Broadcast bounce which is lovely but does tend to drown out the rest of the band). Their best track is like bossa nova in the shape of a lumpily crocheted cardigan, and we find the set ultimately unconvincing whilst being oddly fascinated to see them play again. 

Perhaps bighands... were invited onto the bill by The Last Whole Earth Catalog who were fed up with having the stupidest name within a three-mile radius. They share a low-key eclecticism although TLWEC’s music is far more cogent, often bringing Vanishing Twin vibes with 60s soundtrack keys, sugary boogaloo vocals and crisp, tidy rhythms. Despite it being a grimly cold evening, they warm the room with summery lilo pop that has enough intimacy to feel direct and honest, and enough textural savvy to hold the attention. Occasionally it feels like there are one too many people with one too many ideas on stage, and maybe a jazzoid instrumental sounding like a Kia-Ora-fueled Matt Bianco is a bad call, but overall this is a strong set. 

Bristol’s Sunglasz Vendor have a name that is only mildly infuriating and so let the side down, but are definitely the pick of the night sonically. Again, they bring different styles together, from the most spartan of slowcore minimalism to rasping Sonic Youth noise rock via some gnarly wired Pixies pop but it’s all so much more organic, partly due to the excellent bassist anchoring everything with unflashy lines whilst barely blinking, let alone rocking out. ‘Ice Cream Tubs’ switches gears again at the end of the set, with Cassels-like rant-rock disenchantment, but even this reduces to a strangely arid desert of tiny tones and tics half-way through. We might have had very little idea what was coming next for most of tonight, but with Sunglasz Vendor it was invariably a pleasant  discovery. 

I Like Big Mutts!

One of two reviews in the latest Nightshift, this is the review of the famous band (or famous enough to fill Oxford's largest venue, anyway...my mum's not heard of them).

FAT DOG/ ZIPLOCK, O2, 16/2/25 

With two sets of bright ravey keyboards, sprightly drums, and inscrutable, deadpan vocals Ziplock probably shouldn’t be funky, but they deliver a slice of Happy Meal electro bounce-pop which is part ESG, part EMF, and part whatever sounds good on an E. Halfway through the set they swap the Hoover synth lines for a thicker buzzing bass clomp and couple it with some surprisingly intricate and tricksy drum patterns until they sound rather wonderfully like Add N To (X) doused in cherry cola.  

They share members with Fat Dog, but in the thirty minutes between sets any desire for concepts like delicacy and elegance are presumably scoured out of them in some  backstage ritual, possibly involving dogs' heads and Tennent’s Extra. Their dance-punk attack is far more intense on stage than on record, Joe Love’s vocals rarely dropping below a nasal bellow, and the pounding gabber-adjacent electronic pulses often drowning out the live drums. The sound is elementary and elemental, not so much broad strokes as hard slaps. And it certainly galvanises the crowd to frenzied moshing within four bars flat. On the downside, the fiddle and sax are almost entirely inaudible for the whole gig, and a tendency to smother the vocals in unchanging delay turns the gig into a giant enveloping thump-hum, like being harangued by a totalitarian DustBuster. As non-stop pummelling goes, though, it’s all good clean (dirty) fun, and a larger stage than their last Oxford visit has not leeched the infectious energy from the band. 

There’s a clear line to be drawn back to the sleaze rock of Fat White Family – or more accurately, their chunkier sick-sequin spin-off Moonlandingz – but in some ways Fat Dog are more like a diseased glam version of Laibach, all joke jackboots and coked-up EBM, spiced with the controlled chaos antics of Gogol Bordello. What they lose in depth tonight they gain in potency, and if we long for some of the Ziplock quirkiness to vary the tone a little, the majority of a teeming Academy clearly couldn’t disagree more, howling along with every word, leaping like loons and hollering appreciation at every possible juncture: fair play, nothing wrong with a night of hedonistic noise (but do stop doing that woof-woof chant, you sound like the audience on The Word, and that runny dollop of lad culture is best left in the 90s).   

Outstanding In Afield

Here's my second review for this month's Nightshift. The editor reviewed the In A Different Place all-dayer, but as he was one of the organisers and had shifts on the door and so on, I wrote some copy. You'll find the text below interpolated into the review at feb.pdf.

IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, 1512/24 

Whilst one might expect the front bar to host acoustic acts, there’s a surprising array of styles and genres on display throughout the afternoon. However, opening act Aphra Taylor is a textbook example of a guitar-wielding singer-songwriter. This is definitely not to say that her set is generic, though, her voice full of smoke and sweetness, and her delivery enlivened by tiny trills and ornaments that make the performance unique. 

The merch table is surprisingly sparsely utilised during the day, but Sinews are selling a  “horseface T-shirt". Considering their set is like having your face trampled by rabid stampeding stallions, this seems fitting. Their post-hardcore flagellation draws obvious comparisons to Fugazi or Drive Like Jehu, but there’s a sensitive heart beating somewhere within the maelstrom. 

Baby Maker’s songs are like the flayed and brittle skeletons of new wave pop, with bouncy tunes reduced to chugging drum machines, cheeky guitar twangs, and wry vocals, offering hints of Arab Strap’s laconic lofi story-telling. The set is sometimes more intriguing than successful, but the character shines through. 

The most intense set of the day is possibly delivered by Pet Twin, whose music has morphed over the last year from sparse confessional pop to huge theatrical workouts, which seem to be cathartic rituals for Gallagher as much they are spectacles for the audience. A typical track merges thick treacly bass, heart-wrenching vocals, and euphoric keys, so that you’re not sure whether to dance, weep, or collapse in the corner. One or two tracks have slightly messy endings, but really who cares about the landing once you’ve soared in flight? And, just at the point we think things couldn’t get any better, The Bobo comes onstage for the subaquatic ghost rave that is ‘No To Dread’. 

Like Baby Maker, Lord Bug’s songs are sparse and idiosyncratic, more like half-remembered dreams than pop tunes, and like Aphra Taylor, Libby Peet’s vocals lift them to spellbinding new places, her voice warm and jazzy yet introspective and mysterious, and her delivery full of wonderful slurs and rubati, so that she comes off like a strange melding of Amy Winehouse and Lou Barlow. For an act with a track called ‘Dog’s Dinner’ this is a beautiful and balanced set. 

The sound levels for GIGSY are perhaps a little low, but Khloë’s explosive stage energy would be enough for a gig to sound epic if the PA were rolled up newspaper attached to a dictaphone. Her music is a crunchy electronica take on dark-minded 80s synth – EDM meets EBM? - but the melodically aggressive vocal lines are built from club pop fun and burning rage, in equal measure  

Two of the themes running through today’s event are vocalists with wired stage presence, and music with a stoned psych groove. Both of these come together for local favourites Flights Of Helios, whose set is an eclectic melange of post-punk wiriness and expansive folky textures. Chris Beard is an imposing frontman, swaying at the front of the stage, screaming, crooning, cajoling and entreating by turns like a cross between a fundamentalist preacher, a Dickensian villain, and a praying mantis. There are touches of adventurous acts such as Spiritualized or Ultrasound in their set, but as a nod to Christmas, they turn ‘Good King Wenceslas’ into a psych-punk mantra, perfect for anyone whose Christmas dinner is composed solely of brandy butter and brown acid. 

The Subtheory bring back the classic trip hop sound, with low-slung beats, slinky bass,  and hazy late-night vocals (plus, unexpectedly, some excellent restrained guitar solos). Whilst it might be fair to accuse them of cosy 90s revivalism, they do it so incredibly well, and this set has the greatest spaciousness and poise of any on the bill. Cate Debu’s vocals are cool and clear, sitting unhurried at the centre of the chunky grooves, and with James from Pet Twin joining in the singers supply a softly spoken personality to the songs, so that they’re as much Portisheart and they are Portishead (sorry). 

As with Mandrake Handshake at last year’s festival, In A Different Place is headlined by a band who have moved from Oxford to London and found great success. Pecq might play their biggest gigs as part of touring bands for Barry Can’t Swim and Arlo Parks, but they more than own the stage as a trio, coming on to near darkness and launching into some understated tech-pop tunes that might convince you that “crepuscular bangers” is a genre. They take us on a slick, sleek ride through well tooled dreamy electro, but actually it i  the subtlest moments that they truly bewitch, and a hushed bleepy cover of ‘Wichita Linesman’ morphs into one of their own songs in a bubbling pool of squelchy synthtones. 

To Say Nothing Of The Newt

One of two reviews in the latest Nightshift. This one is a pretty typical record of a not hugely exciting release.

MONTMORENCY – LIVE AT NEWT STUDIOS (self-release) 

Young children always like to be told stories they already know, and certain roots music fans are the same, ever eager to hear jazz standards or trad classics one more time. Sometimes familiarity allows an artist space to dig into a song (there’s a reason Ella Fitzgerald’s greatest recordings are all American songbook chestnuts, rather than new compositions), and sometimes it can be used as a springboard for new and radical ideas (Albert Ayler’s honking attack on Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ sounds as though it's from a different universe to Ella’s). Montmorency – who get points for being named after the dog in Three Men In A Boat – have addressed four folk club warhorses on this EP, originally recorded in 2022. Do they bring anything new to the barn dance party? 

Most noteworthy are the vocals, with a simple unadorned tone at odds with the Mummerset aural cosplay of most folk singers, and the lightly quavering conversational tenor of ‘John Paul Jones’ almost reminds us of the literate angst of Hefner’s Darren Hayman. The other standout element is the lead guitar, which has a refined twang on ‘Shady Grove’ recalling the understated urbanity of The Shadows or even Bert Weedon, whereas the solo on ‘Sugar in the Hold’ comes with a whiff of Dave Gilmour. These moments of character catch the interest, but the upbeat countryish hoedown ‘The Fox’ falls woefully flat, and despite being a tale of carnivorous nature at its bloodiest has all the vim and vigour of a PTA meeting. There’s stuff to like about Montmorency, but these recordings are unlikely to become anyone’s go-to versions.