Say you were going to Pizza Express or something. I know you have more class than that, but just imagine. Say you went over the corner to look at their little touchscreen tills they create your bill on. At that point you'd notice how crappy the graphics on the tills are, how lame the marble effect on the individual "buttons" is and how unconvincing and unecessary the depth shadows are. You'd notice it looks like something from an Amiga game, like Bloodbowl. Why the hell do these till software designers make thier product look like the team selection screen from Kick Off 2? Why why why?
Some of this review featured in Nightshift recently, but a lot of it is "previously unreleased".
Cornbury, Cornbury Park, 3-4/7/10
SATURDAY
The shelves of WH Smith reveal that true confessions are big business nowadays, so here’s our addition to this literary slagpile: we’ve never liked the look of Cornbury. Probably this is because its mixture of safe tunefulness and fading stars make it look as though it was booked by the customers at the Waitrose deli counter after ten minutes looking at The Sunday Express Magazine and a copy of Q from 1991. But, although it’s easy to be dismissive of folding chairs, Pimms and falafel wraps, we’ve decided we actually prefer these to unpalatable energy drinks, bad hash and vomiting poi jugglers as our festival accoutrements. Yes, we admit it, we like Cornbury very much, and if the lineup isn’t our idea of musical nirvana, the best acts truly shine in a relaxed, well organised setting with excellent sound engineering on every stage.
What’s bad about Cornbury (aside from David Gray)? Apart from being kept awake till half past give a shit on Saturday morning by drunken revellers, which we thought Poshstock might be immune to, the towering ineptitude of the bar staff drives us to enforced sobriety: we’re sadly unsurprised that there are sixteen Carlsberg pumps to one tapped barrel of ale, but we’re more shocked that someone’s designed a bar where there’s not enough room for the legion of easily confused employees to pass when one of them is pouring a pint. Our other black mark is the assumption that everybody onsite wants to watch the main stage. There are long periods when there’s nothing on except the big acts, while at other times we’re torn between two enticing prospects happening simultaneously on the smaller stages. As if to reflect this the official programme not only offers no information about performers lower down the bill on the two central stages, but doesn’t even give any listings for the Riverside stage: essentially, we spent three quid on a little book to tell us who The Feeling are, when it’s the one fucking thing we’re trying to forget.
So, our weekend starts with pot luck, as we stumble across Dave Oates (who looks like a Riverside organisor, but is apparently not) introducing Volcanic Dash, who turn out to be pretty decent at playing Dad’s day off R ‘n’ B, spiced by good sax and a soulful female vocal. They end with a rattle through “Honky Tonk Women”, and seeing the singer shout “one more time” a bar before the song ends is rather heartwarming in a festival that can get too slick at times.
Taylor Dayne, an American minor popstrel in the late 80s, apparently chose her stage name because she thought it sounded British. Presumably Tiffany Page was one of the discarded options. She plays harmlessly perky pop, a little like P!nk without the brattish trailerpark attitude, and a little like Rachel Stevens without the dance routines, synths and glossy production. Her’s is a well-filleted version of guitar pop, a sort of musical chicken nugget – a guilty pleasure on occasion, but no replacement for the real thing.
Some festivalgoers don’t turn up to Cornbury until the big names start coming out, whilst others arrive for the day, but only shift from their little wagon circle in front of the main stage for toilet visits or emergency rosé replenishment. It means that some obscure acts get unfairly ignored, and there are fewer people evident at the start of an excellent set by Les Clochards than there were last time they played The Wheatsheaf. It doesn’t faze them any, and they deliver their trademark brand of lush Gallic cafe indie with the same stately grace as usual, a gorgeous “Démodé” being the highlight. Light airy music, but their background in vintage punk and indie bands gives the music a classically French stubborn defiance (in the sense of getting whipped on absinthe and inventing new art forms, not overpricing croques madames to tourists and bombing Greenpeace). Sad that their subtler moments lose out in a sound war with the nearby fun fair rides; “Criez si vous voulez aller plus vite!”
We catch the end of The New Forbidden who play a bluesy approachable rock that’s essentially Dr. Feel-Passable-Mustn’t-Grumble-Bit-Of-Gyp-From-The-Old-Back-And-The-Waterworks-Aren’t-What-They-Were-But-Worse-Things-Happen-At-Sea, and then it’s back to Riverside for Dead Jerichos, whom we love because they play every single gig as if it’s the last Friday night before the Pandorica opens. Rock energy so improbably infectious that it isn’t even punctured when a snare drum breaks and there’s a brief gap whilst another is located. Their music isn’t a startlingly original confection, being a rough mix of Jam basslines, The Edge’s guitar, Jimmy Pursey vocals and Buzzcocks drums, but each short invigorating shot of espresso pop is a joy to witness. Later, we couldn’t resist breaking the itinerary for a song and a half from Borderville, a band with the same passion and intensity as Dead Jerichos, but who have filtered it through Broadway excess rather than laddish euphoria.
A smidgen of the Jericho energy wouldn’t go amiss in Joshua Radin’s rootsy set. Like a Happy Shopper muesli bar, you feel as if it ought to be good for you to experience, but turns out to be dry and tasteless.
“Have you got soul, Cornbury?” shouts the MC. Well, look at us, and what do you think? A pasty, paunchy heartland morass whose idea of a sex machine is probably sitting on the lawnmower whilst it idles and who most likely probably phone Neighbourhood Watch if Bootsy Collins ever strolled down the street. So, Staxs is possibly the ideal act, a busman’s holiday affair wherein seasoned session players kick back with a bit of a soul revue. That’s soul as lingua franca for a good time night out rather than a narrative urban folk music, and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” has had all the melancholy and impotent anger squeezed out along the way. But they do make great music all the same, with a powerful vocal, and some fantastic brass players, who alternate between molten solos and horn stabs that punch like a rivet gun. This goes on for forty lovely minutes, until Kiki Dee comes on. She’s still in good voice but her songs are simply drab by comparison.
Relaxing with some homemade mint lemonade – you don’t get that at The Cellar – we catch Buddy Guy and his alligator blues; it hasn’t evolved since forever, but it has a deadly bite. The band is good, and play a solid big stage blues set, but when Buddy steps up the others just fade into the background, which is impressive as he’s about 800. His guitar sound is amazing, each acid-etched note drawing a line back to BB King, sideways to Albert Collins and forward to Jimi Hendrix. He plays “Hoochie Coochie Man” with such a perfect mix of soul baring emotion and carny roustabout repartee that we feel as if we’d never heard the song before, and if that ain’t a definition of raw innate talent, we don’t know what is.
We were hoping to get the same experience from Dr John, and at first it was promising: he has a battered organ and a baby grand, each topped with a human skull; he ambles onstage with the confident air of a mafia don who knows he owns us all; he wears a superbly sharp voodoo suit and looks like a child’s drawing of Orson Welles disguised as Bryan Ferry; he can sit at a keyboard better than most people can play it; he drawls raps drenched in the cartoon skullduggery that was so influential on Tom Waits. But for the first half of the set the music doesn’t really gel, and simply sounds like a competent bar band, an effect possibly not helped by the fact that an insufficiently audible trombone took the place of a stomping horn section. Things are just getting going when the band slips into a dirty funk chug and it’s suddenly all over. The conclusion is that whilst Buddy is happy with the elder statesman’s showcase on a festival stage, Dr John probably still only gets on top of his awesome game with a few hours in a dark sweaty room, not sixty polite minutes in the Cotswolds sun.
Squeeze, on the other hand, are so happy to trot their greatest hits out to the punters they probably have wristband blisters. Before the first track is even out they’re pointing the mike at the audience for a singalong, and, in fairness, a large percentage of the crowd are eager to take them up on the offer. All around us tipsy parents are reliving their 5th form disco whilst their kids cause havoc with bubble machines, and Squeeze get a grand reception, which is fully deserved. As with Crowded House, also on the heritage trail, it’s amazing that Glenn Tillbrook’s voice hasn’t aged at all, and still has the tuneful chumminess of their old hits. And what hits they are. Squeeze have got so many top notch pop songs in their arsenal you forget how great they are. Admittedly, we’re not sure this competent set adds anything to the tracks, but it’s never a bad time to hear them again.
Candi Staton knows her audience too, and you can’t blame her for giving them what they want. Impressively, her rich voice is just as strong as it was when we saw her a decade ago, and her set is a super-slick ball of fun, with a cantering romp through “Suspicious Minds” standing out, but most of the audience don’t get to their feet until “Young Hearts Run Free”, so she cleverly makes it last about fifteen minutes. With her sparkling dress and ballsy soul delivery Staton is a bit like an alternate universe Tina Turner who hadn’t erased all her character in post-production somewhere in the early 80s. Good solid entertainment.
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Shrub Be Good To Me
I was told last night that most of the old OHMs are online, so you never know I may find an old review that slipped through the cracks. Imagine the joy. Sadly, the one I wrote where Alastair Tervit wrote a paragraph in the middle whilst I was in the loo was never used, and resides on a discarded hard drive. It's crazy what you could have had.
SEABUCKTHORN – A MANTRA PULLED APART
Seabuckthorn looks a bit like one of those posh old English names that have had all their syllables blanched out of them over the years, like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondely. You can imagine an old monocled gent filling in the hotel reception book, wheezing, “It’s pronounced Seddon”. However, it turns out to be a sort of shrub, and this seems fitting because, although your actual seabuckthorn is found in Europe and Asia, this CD brings up images of empty American mesas, dusty scrub and hazy sundowns.
This is less a collection of compositions more a series of flourishes and echoes. There are plenty of Spanish guitar trills, but they arrive and drift away like farmsteads on the horizon on a Midwest train ride, instead of sitting in dramatic flamenco centre stage. If The Omega Man were remade on the set of The Good, The Bad & the Ugly this record could be the soundtrack, in which empty Western saloons reverberate to the tread of gunslinging ghosts, and louvre doors hang by one hinge. All of which means it’s a gorgeous listen, and Seabuckthorn (AKA Andy Cartwright) has created the record with precisely the right balance between the eerily spacious and the structured, the ambient and the encapsulating.
Which means that picking favourite tracks is academic, your best bet is to let the record wash over you whilst staring out of the window into the evening. (No, scrub that, we just tried it, and saw a hatchback, a courier’s van and a whippet, so it probably depends on where you live). Still, we like the plucked strings on “Illumination” that are swirling and mysterious like a Nazca earthwork, and “Strange Dreams In The Wilderness Again” in which stalking wolves of static warily eye guitars plucked on the edge of oblivion. Elsewhere we get little flavours of Slint, Fushitsusha, Seefeel and locals Hretha, one of whom guests on the CD.
Perhaps “Abyss Eyes” could be excised, but there isn’t a moment from this record that is a let down, and there are some gorgeous fragments of song hidden in the bleak expanses of the album. Our choicest moment is on “Painted Wolf Howl”, where a forcefully plucked guitar with a vast delay is suddenly shadowed by a glockenspiel to play a lopsided motif that sounds like a mix between “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the theme from Crossroads. It’s a sparse and perhaps forbidding album, maybe, but certainly not an empty or ill thought out one.
SEABUCKTHORN – A MANTRA PULLED APART
Seabuckthorn looks a bit like one of those posh old English names that have had all their syllables blanched out of them over the years, like Featherstonehaugh or Cholmondely. You can imagine an old monocled gent filling in the hotel reception book, wheezing, “It’s pronounced Seddon”. However, it turns out to be a sort of shrub, and this seems fitting because, although your actual seabuckthorn is found in Europe and Asia, this CD brings up images of empty American mesas, dusty scrub and hazy sundowns.
This is less a collection of compositions more a series of flourishes and echoes. There are plenty of Spanish guitar trills, but they arrive and drift away like farmsteads on the horizon on a Midwest train ride, instead of sitting in dramatic flamenco centre stage. If The Omega Man were remade on the set of The Good, The Bad & the Ugly this record could be the soundtrack, in which empty Western saloons reverberate to the tread of gunslinging ghosts, and louvre doors hang by one hinge. All of which means it’s a gorgeous listen, and Seabuckthorn (AKA Andy Cartwright) has created the record with precisely the right balance between the eerily spacious and the structured, the ambient and the encapsulating.
Which means that picking favourite tracks is academic, your best bet is to let the record wash over you whilst staring out of the window into the evening. (No, scrub that, we just tried it, and saw a hatchback, a courier’s van and a whippet, so it probably depends on where you live). Still, we like the plucked strings on “Illumination” that are swirling and mysterious like a Nazca earthwork, and “Strange Dreams In The Wilderness Again” in which stalking wolves of static warily eye guitars plucked on the edge of oblivion. Elsewhere we get little flavours of Slint, Fushitsusha, Seefeel and locals Hretha, one of whom guests on the CD.
Perhaps “Abyss Eyes” could be excised, but there isn’t a moment from this record that is a let down, and there are some gorgeous fragments of song hidden in the bleak expanses of the album. Our choicest moment is on “Painted Wolf Howl”, where a forcefully plucked guitar with a vast delay is suddenly shadowed by a glockenspiel to play a lopsided motif that sounds like a mix between “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and the theme from Crossroads. It’s a sparse and perhaps forbidding album, maybe, but certainly not an empty or ill thought out one.
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Heart Of Gloss
No time to chat, crit. kittens, I have to leave for Truck in 20 minutes.
THE GRACEFUL SLICKS – Demo
The Graceful Slicks amused a few people recently by asking Nightshift’s online community for an experienced tambourine player. You had to assume this was either a collective of such intricate musical complexity they had crafted challenging parts for hand percussion, or a bunch of skunked monkeys who had no idea. In truth, the demo is neither of these, it’s not the work of musicians striking out for new and adventurous sonic territories, but it does show a band with a strong vision, and a laudable control of their elementary resources.
The opener ushers us in quietly at a nice unhurried lope, all strummed guitar, shrugged drums and submerged vocals. The track has an untroubled, smiling demeanour and immediately brings to mind slackerdelic ne’er-do-wells The Brian Jonestown Massacre, without the paranoia or internecine warfare. It’s a simple but attractive ditty that could have been busked from the back of a VW van by a teenaged Evan Dando. It goes on for weeks, but never gets boring.
Track two is arguably even simpler and less dramatic, a sing-song seesaw of a tune that brings to mind Syd Barrett’s nursery rhyme efforts, such as “Terrapin”. Aside from a very slow build at the start, and an unnecessary guitar solo at the end, the song does nothing. It’s not hypnotic in a trance or kraut fashion, mind, just sort of static. Cryogenic rock, maybe. The lyrics are sheer guff, but are luckily barely audible, so we can hope fervently that the song doesn’t actually mostly consist of “water’s always cold”. The eerie lead guitar line ambles back and forth across the whole song like the harmonica in Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West soundtrack, much beloved of Fields Of The Nephilim and, of course, The Orb.
The last track (no titles provided – they’d probably rather name their tracks after different joss stick aromas) is the slowest yet, a Spiritualized indie hymnal effort that dribbles along as slowly as stewed prunes strained through a colander. Bafflingly, it’s very dull, where the other two tracks were immersive and endearing, even though they didn’t appear to do anything too different. Suddenly a pleasing miasma becomes a dreary pall.
We can’t solve the mystery, but it does show that The Graceful Slicks – do we adore or abhor that ridiculous pun? – are a band doesn’t quite have control of its palette yet, which is what you’d expect from a first, budget demo (and one without a dedicated tambourine operative at that), and yet they clearly have a strong idea of where they want to go, and the evidence suggests it’ll a pleasant place to follow them into. A good start, in short.
Apologies if this review isn’t up to scratch: we’ve tried everywhere to find a pencil sharpening technician to complete the team...
THE GRACEFUL SLICKS – Demo
The Graceful Slicks amused a few people recently by asking Nightshift’s online community for an experienced tambourine player. You had to assume this was either a collective of such intricate musical complexity they had crafted challenging parts for hand percussion, or a bunch of skunked monkeys who had no idea. In truth, the demo is neither of these, it’s not the work of musicians striking out for new and adventurous sonic territories, but it does show a band with a strong vision, and a laudable control of their elementary resources.
The opener ushers us in quietly at a nice unhurried lope, all strummed guitar, shrugged drums and submerged vocals. The track has an untroubled, smiling demeanour and immediately brings to mind slackerdelic ne’er-do-wells The Brian Jonestown Massacre, without the paranoia or internecine warfare. It’s a simple but attractive ditty that could have been busked from the back of a VW van by a teenaged Evan Dando. It goes on for weeks, but never gets boring.
Track two is arguably even simpler and less dramatic, a sing-song seesaw of a tune that brings to mind Syd Barrett’s nursery rhyme efforts, such as “Terrapin”. Aside from a very slow build at the start, and an unnecessary guitar solo at the end, the song does nothing. It’s not hypnotic in a trance or kraut fashion, mind, just sort of static. Cryogenic rock, maybe. The lyrics are sheer guff, but are luckily barely audible, so we can hope fervently that the song doesn’t actually mostly consist of “water’s always cold”. The eerie lead guitar line ambles back and forth across the whole song like the harmonica in Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In The West soundtrack, much beloved of Fields Of The Nephilim and, of course, The Orb.
The last track (no titles provided – they’d probably rather name their tracks after different joss stick aromas) is the slowest yet, a Spiritualized indie hymnal effort that dribbles along as slowly as stewed prunes strained through a colander. Bafflingly, it’s very dull, where the other two tracks were immersive and endearing, even though they didn’t appear to do anything too different. Suddenly a pleasing miasma becomes a dreary pall.
We can’t solve the mystery, but it does show that The Graceful Slicks – do we adore or abhor that ridiculous pun? – are a band doesn’t quite have control of its palette yet, which is what you’d expect from a first, budget demo (and one without a dedicated tambourine operative at that), and yet they clearly have a strong idea of where they want to go, and the evidence suggests it’ll a pleasant place to follow them into. A good start, in short.
Apologies if this review isn’t up to scratch: we’ve tried everywhere to find a pencil sharpening technician to complete the team...
Thursday, 22 July 2010
Charlbury Switchblade
And here's part 2. Nothing much more to say tonight, I'm tired; winning the pub quiz by a record margin was nice, but I shoudln't have had that victory pint. In bed with the prom, I suspect.
RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 20/6/10
“Please welcome Slantay,” yelps the main stage MC as Sunday kicks off. Well, it’s written Slainte, but pronounced “slawncheh”, meaning “health” or, colloquially, “cheers”; a tough word for an Anglophone, perhaps, but surely if your job basically boiled down to saying the names of bands before they played, you might make the effort to work out what the words sounded like, no? Not as bad as the announcer later on who introduced Redox by telling us they played “one of” his weddings (classy), and yet still laboured under the misapprehension they were called Reedox.
After a slightly scratchy opening Slainte, who are a Gaelic folk act (get away), build to a great head of steam, leavening the predicted foot tapping reels with “La Partida”, a luminescent harp showcase.
Apparently, gents think of the Alphabet Backwards if they’re trying to stave off, shall we say, a particular moment of intimacy. Funny, then, that the band is a huge explosion of pure energetic release. The beauty of the band is that they balance their Sunny Delight exuberance with some excellent song writing, not to mention the fantastically ornate and playful synth lines, that are like being wined and dined by a sexually predatory Ms PacMan. My God, Sunday has started well.
And it doesn’t stop there. Sonny Black is a white haired chap playing acoustic blues, and although we sometimes feel we’ve heard enough white haired chaps playing acoustic blues in provincial music events to last us until the day the lost chord is unearthed, Black really is worth a listen. Not only does he have some effortless bottleneck technique and a great little bucolic melody in the lovely “North Of The Border”, but he can also celebrate Mississippi John Hurt’s “easy-kickin’ fingerpickin’” in an English accent without sounding like a dick. There’s a quiet grace about him and his music, and he should have been higher up the bill with a few more train loads of listeners to greet him.
Lee Christian’s Prohibition Smokers Club are a loose-limbed latin pop jam band, looking like a mushroom ingesting cult pretending to be Kid Creole & The Coconuts. The horns are punchy, and the set is pitched as a little interlude of fun, but still we felt it didn’t quite come together, and a cover of The Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” drove us to the bar. Everybody else in the whole of Charlbury seemed to love it, though, so what do we know?
“Think Maroon 5 meets Beverley Knight combined creatively with early Red Hot Chili Peppers,” says the programme’s write up of Alyse In Wonderband. Jesus, if we had thoughts like that we’d turn ourselves in to the nearest police station for the good of the nation. Actually, they’re not bad at all, a youngish band who have a natural control of their pop-funk, and perform it with plenty of vim, Alyse Kimsey’s voice working well above fluent keys. “Creep” in particular (no, not that one) has a groove that even cuts through our professional cynicism.
As is the case every year, billypure make like The Levellers to cheer up the revellers, and if it isn’t a revolutionary leap from their previous sets, they do a good job, as ever, and the James cover is an interesting arrangement. The violin sounds horribly scratchy though – get a new pickup!
The Shakellers make a big-boned chirpy rock racket, something like The Bluetones pepped up on MSG and barndance cider, but The Black Hats do the perky guitar bit far better, their new wave ditties as excitable as a friendly puppy – and, oh look, there’s Lee Christina on guest vocals, with some of that sneering chutzpah we missed from the PSC set. However, it’s Von Braun that really win us over, making a good grungy early Muhhoney noise with drums, two guitars and a frankly buggered mike lead. At times the songs lift off into surreally wired mantras approaching The Pixies at their effervescent best. A great discovery.
You have to wonder how some of the acts find themselves on the Riverside bill, and what they think of it when they get there. Take Dead Like Harry, who have travelled all the way from Sheffield and who have recently toured with Scouting For Girls, do they think “finally, back to the roots”, or “disembowel the agent” when they roll up onto Mill Field? Not to mention all the stall holders selling dayglo dope leaf hoodies and all that crud, who look as though they make about three sales all weekend, do they feel swizzed? Well, fuck ‘em, the Riverside crowd is too sensible for that rubbish – the wacky hats are left to wilt in the sun whilst the home made cakes stall does a justifiably roaring trade.
Dead Like Harry are, of course, awful, but they don’t enrage us as much as we expected, even though they sound like Keane played by Hothouse Flowers. In fact, they come across as a likable bunch, and their piano-flecked pop is easy to tune out whilst finishing the crossword.
Phyal have been warmly welcomed back for a few reunion gigs, and Riverside is exactly the sort of place their approachable rock romps make sense. “Crude” doesn’t quite hit the spot, but after some drumkit surgery and a few swigs of lemon squash – oh, Kevin Eldon, if only you’d been there – “Daisy” flies out of the traps, setting the clattering tone for the next thirty minutes. A superb set but, it must be said, after three reunion gigs Phyal need to stop with the nostalgia and make some new recordings, or shut up!
Nah, only joking, they’re always good value, as are The Mighty Redox. They are a truly under-rated band outside of the furry fraternity in which they move. Nick Clack and Graham Barlow, aside from looking like shiftless dropouts from some Restart scheme for unemployed wizards, are an outstanding rhythm section, but they certainly know their place, leaving the lion’s share of the stage to Phil Freizinger’s fuzzy guitar and the frankly loopy Sue Smith’s acid-sauteed vocal wailing. Set highlight “Eternity” sounds like Gong freaking out in a banshee wife swapping party, until the world is fed through Freizinger’s giant phase pedal, which probably has its own generator backstage.
The weekend finished with The Quiet Men, who aren’t the band aging scenesters will remember, but an Irish folk rock band, with a big line in Pogues songs. Well, that’s OK, we all like The Pogues, right? Crowdpleasing, we suppose, but a disappointingly unadventurous end to the weekend. But then again, the beauty of Riverside is that it can entertain old West Oxfordshire boozers, sun-drenched children, well-heeled salmon sandwich picnickers as well as miserable musical zealots like ourselves. And, the real miracle is not that they’ve managed to put on a festival for free that aims to please so many people, but that they actually succeed. We’ll definitely be back for more next year.
Slantay.
RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 20/6/10
“Please welcome Slantay,” yelps the main stage MC as Sunday kicks off. Well, it’s written Slainte, but pronounced “slawncheh”, meaning “health” or, colloquially, “cheers”; a tough word for an Anglophone, perhaps, but surely if your job basically boiled down to saying the names of bands before they played, you might make the effort to work out what the words sounded like, no? Not as bad as the announcer later on who introduced Redox by telling us they played “one of” his weddings (classy), and yet still laboured under the misapprehension they were called Reedox.
After a slightly scratchy opening Slainte, who are a Gaelic folk act (get away), build to a great head of steam, leavening the predicted foot tapping reels with “La Partida”, a luminescent harp showcase.
Apparently, gents think of the Alphabet Backwards if they’re trying to stave off, shall we say, a particular moment of intimacy. Funny, then, that the band is a huge explosion of pure energetic release. The beauty of the band is that they balance their Sunny Delight exuberance with some excellent song writing, not to mention the fantastically ornate and playful synth lines, that are like being wined and dined by a sexually predatory Ms PacMan. My God, Sunday has started well.
And it doesn’t stop there. Sonny Black is a white haired chap playing acoustic blues, and although we sometimes feel we’ve heard enough white haired chaps playing acoustic blues in provincial music events to last us until the day the lost chord is unearthed, Black really is worth a listen. Not only does he have some effortless bottleneck technique and a great little bucolic melody in the lovely “North Of The Border”, but he can also celebrate Mississippi John Hurt’s “easy-kickin’ fingerpickin’” in an English accent without sounding like a dick. There’s a quiet grace about him and his music, and he should have been higher up the bill with a few more train loads of listeners to greet him.
Lee Christian’s Prohibition Smokers Club are a loose-limbed latin pop jam band, looking like a mushroom ingesting cult pretending to be Kid Creole & The Coconuts. The horns are punchy, and the set is pitched as a little interlude of fun, but still we felt it didn’t quite come together, and a cover of The Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ “Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em” drove us to the bar. Everybody else in the whole of Charlbury seemed to love it, though, so what do we know?
“Think Maroon 5 meets Beverley Knight combined creatively with early Red Hot Chili Peppers,” says the programme’s write up of Alyse In Wonderband. Jesus, if we had thoughts like that we’d turn ourselves in to the nearest police station for the good of the nation. Actually, they’re not bad at all, a youngish band who have a natural control of their pop-funk, and perform it with plenty of vim, Alyse Kimsey’s voice working well above fluent keys. “Creep” in particular (no, not that one) has a groove that even cuts through our professional cynicism.
As is the case every year, billypure make like The Levellers to cheer up the revellers, and if it isn’t a revolutionary leap from their previous sets, they do a good job, as ever, and the James cover is an interesting arrangement. The violin sounds horribly scratchy though – get a new pickup!
The Shakellers make a big-boned chirpy rock racket, something like The Bluetones pepped up on MSG and barndance cider, but The Black Hats do the perky guitar bit far better, their new wave ditties as excitable as a friendly puppy – and, oh look, there’s Lee Christina on guest vocals, with some of that sneering chutzpah we missed from the PSC set. However, it’s Von Braun that really win us over, making a good grungy early Muhhoney noise with drums, two guitars and a frankly buggered mike lead. At times the songs lift off into surreally wired mantras approaching The Pixies at their effervescent best. A great discovery.
You have to wonder how some of the acts find themselves on the Riverside bill, and what they think of it when they get there. Take Dead Like Harry, who have travelled all the way from Sheffield and who have recently toured with Scouting For Girls, do they think “finally, back to the roots”, or “disembowel the agent” when they roll up onto Mill Field? Not to mention all the stall holders selling dayglo dope leaf hoodies and all that crud, who look as though they make about three sales all weekend, do they feel swizzed? Well, fuck ‘em, the Riverside crowd is too sensible for that rubbish – the wacky hats are left to wilt in the sun whilst the home made cakes stall does a justifiably roaring trade.
Dead Like Harry are, of course, awful, but they don’t enrage us as much as we expected, even though they sound like Keane played by Hothouse Flowers. In fact, they come across as a likable bunch, and their piano-flecked pop is easy to tune out whilst finishing the crossword.
Phyal have been warmly welcomed back for a few reunion gigs, and Riverside is exactly the sort of place their approachable rock romps make sense. “Crude” doesn’t quite hit the spot, but after some drumkit surgery and a few swigs of lemon squash – oh, Kevin Eldon, if only you’d been there – “Daisy” flies out of the traps, setting the clattering tone for the next thirty minutes. A superb set but, it must be said, after three reunion gigs Phyal need to stop with the nostalgia and make some new recordings, or shut up!
Nah, only joking, they’re always good value, as are The Mighty Redox. They are a truly under-rated band outside of the furry fraternity in which they move. Nick Clack and Graham Barlow, aside from looking like shiftless dropouts from some Restart scheme for unemployed wizards, are an outstanding rhythm section, but they certainly know their place, leaving the lion’s share of the stage to Phil Freizinger’s fuzzy guitar and the frankly loopy Sue Smith’s acid-sauteed vocal wailing. Set highlight “Eternity” sounds like Gong freaking out in a banshee wife swapping party, until the world is fed through Freizinger’s giant phase pedal, which probably has its own generator backstage.
The weekend finished with The Quiet Men, who aren’t the band aging scenesters will remember, but an Irish folk rock band, with a big line in Pogues songs. Well, that’s OK, we all like The Pogues, right? Crowdpleasing, we suppose, but a disappointingly unadventurous end to the weekend. But then again, the beauty of Riverside is that it can entertain old West Oxfordshire boozers, sun-drenched children, well-heeled salmon sandwich picnickers as well as miserable musical zealots like ourselves. And, the real miracle is not that they’ve managed to put on a festival for free that aims to please so many people, but that they actually succeed. We’ll definitely be back for more next year.
Slantay.
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Riverside 2010 Saturday Pt 2
Huck & The Handsome Fee are very good, if a little one-paced, and Tamara Parsons-Baker vocals really shine in this unabashed ‘50s throwback. The Roundheels’ trad rocking is less intense, a bit of a light, fluffy country meringue, but is pleasant enough. The Delta Frequency make out that they’re all about the aggressive, subversive rock, but what we hear is like The Foo Fighters playing over a tinny old Front 242 LP. Ho hum.
Undersmile amuse us, not least because their name sounds like coy slang for a fanny. They supply a thick, dense grunge sound that just trudges on slowly forever, like a man ploughing treacle. The twin vocals detract from the Babes In Toyland effect a little, sounding like two girls who don’t want to eat their sprouts, but that aside they’re a fun new band.
Far more fun than Charlie Coombes & The New Breed, despite the fact they’re several squillion times more experienced. Actually, he’s not that bad, and has a very smooth voice, like a 70s sit com vicar having a crack at Nik Heyward, but the songs just aren’t there. He only needs one great Crowded House style pop hit and we’d love him, but for now we’re bored enough to consider going for a quick game of chess with the guy from the Mexican food stand.
With flagging energy levels, Riverside keep back three excellent acts to round off the day. The Family Machine still have the chirpiest pop songs in Oxford concealing sharpest barbs, but they feel distant on the big stage. Beard Of Zeuss make a sort of bang bang bang noise for a while and it sounds bloody great; by the end we’re not only unsure whether it is wrong to spell Zeus with two esses, but we’re wondering whether a few more might not go amiss.
Borderville synthesise the twin poles of the sometimes mystifying Riverside booking policy. They play “proper” music, with choruses and schoolroom keyboard technique and a respect for rock classics, yet they also throw it together with such calculatedly wild abandon and desperate drama that the gig becomes almost aggressively experimental. They start with a string quartet, which is over-amped and out of tune, but sets the tone of faded glamour from which the set springs in all its camp glory. This is what Glee would be like if Roxy Music sat on Mount Olympus and Pete Townshend carried amps down Mount Sinai. Improbably excellent music.
Undersmile amuse us, not least because their name sounds like coy slang for a fanny. They supply a thick, dense grunge sound that just trudges on slowly forever, like a man ploughing treacle. The twin vocals detract from the Babes In Toyland effect a little, sounding like two girls who don’t want to eat their sprouts, but that aside they’re a fun new band.
Far more fun than Charlie Coombes & The New Breed, despite the fact they’re several squillion times more experienced. Actually, he’s not that bad, and has a very smooth voice, like a 70s sit com vicar having a crack at Nik Heyward, but the songs just aren’t there. He only needs one great Crowded House style pop hit and we’d love him, but for now we’re bored enough to consider going for a quick game of chess with the guy from the Mexican food stand.
With flagging energy levels, Riverside keep back three excellent acts to round off the day. The Family Machine still have the chirpiest pop songs in Oxford concealing sharpest barbs, but they feel distant on the big stage. Beard Of Zeuss make a sort of bang bang bang noise for a while and it sounds bloody great; by the end we’re not only unsure whether it is wrong to spell Zeus with two esses, but we’re wondering whether a few more might not go amiss.
Borderville synthesise the twin poles of the sometimes mystifying Riverside booking policy. They play “proper” music, with choruses and schoolroom keyboard technique and a respect for rock classics, yet they also throw it together with such calculatedly wild abandon and desperate drama that the gig becomes almost aggressively experimental. They start with a string quartet, which is over-amped and out of tune, but sets the tone of faded glamour from which the set springs in all its camp glory. This is what Glee would be like if Roxy Music sat on Mount Olympus and Pete Townshend carried amps down Mount Sinai. Improbably excellent music.
Riverside Babylon
The giant monkey fun of Truck is coming this weekend, and I shall be there with a biro, some ripped notepaper and a rucksack filled with cheap bitter. To get you in the festival mood, today and Friday I'll post my review of the smaller, freer and, let's be honest, not really as good but bloody great fun all the same, Riverside festival. Lots of people thought this review was too harsh, because the event was free, but I - naturally - disagree. What's the value of giving a band a good review at a free event and a stinker a week later when the gig costs a fiver? And is there a sliding scale in the middle? "£3.50? Hmmm, let's pretend the bass was in time, even though we'll admit the guitar was out of tune". Poppy, and indeed, cock.
RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 19-20/6/10
A work colleague has a mug reading “A bad day fishing beats a good day working”. Hardly Kierkegaard, but bear it in mind when reading this review: although we saw very few acts that really inspired us (on Saturday at least), we’d rather spend a weekend watching disappointing music at Riverside than a night with decent bands at The Academy. It’s something to do with the delightful landscape, the excellent Marsh Gibbon ales, the friendly atmosphere and the knowledge that some people have gone to a lot of effort to create a weekend out for us all, and not asked for a penny.
Deer Chicago are a decent opener to the festival, constructing large scale edifices of ever-so-slightly angular rock with a sturdy, emotional voice spread over the top. All very Fell City Girl, though Jonny Payne’s voice doesn’t have the natural power of Phil McMinn’s. The odd Jam interlude works surprisingly well.
At first Alan Fraser & The Resignation Orchestra offer flat jazz with Tom Waits Gruffalo growling from festival organisor Dave Oates. Diverting, but not much else. However, after a minute or two they start to warm up, and Fraser’s soprano sax solos become more interesting and contrast with some excellent honks and bubbles from Tony Bevan’s bass baritone, which is roughly the size of a hatchback.
Music For Pleasure entertain us as ever. Their mixture of spicy mid-reign R.E.M. melody and pre-leyline Julian Cope energy is always fun, even if it lacks the character of their day job bands (Harry Angel and The Unbelievable Truth). It’s like many of long term local trier Mark Cobb’s bands, but with bigger balls.
The Black Dog Emporium sadly sound nothing like techno trailblazers The Black Dog, nor much like Black Sabbath, despite the programme’s allegations. Instead they play a tedious brand of lightly funky 70s rock. The word “Reef” came to mind, and not least because it felt as though we were grounded inextricably in musical shallows. The drummer made things mildly interesting with some carbonated fills, but the vocals were honked out as if by a bingo caller trying to communicate across a Swiss valley.
More foghorn vocal subtlety from Crackerdummy. They’re a capable post-grunge trio who remind us of average Irish act Mundy. They playing is good, and it’s all well put together, but only in the way a small brick wall is. A small wall where you were hoping to find a bouncy castle and bourbon jacuzzi.
Remember David Oates’ functional blues growling? It starts to feel like a halcyon era once Stuart Turner starts his rubbish gravelly groaning. It sounds as though he’s trying to scare an errant toddler, not entertain adults. Pity, as The Flat Earth Society are a good band, spinning a nice sticky rockabilly web, and capable of a John Lee Hooker style boogie chug. We live in a frustrating world in which most post-rock instrumental bands sound half finished, but where most blues bands are ruined by duff singers.
Last year Diplomat’s Coffee kept us awake for the weekend. Sadly, this year we’re forced to buy our brew from a drunk man selling Mexican food, who was frankly fortunate not to have burnt his fingers off or inadvertently stabbed himself with a potato wedge at any point over the weekend. On one visit he mumbled something impenetrable about Mary Whitehouse and pronounced “hot chocolate” with one syllable, and at the next he blessed our coffee, even though we doubt he’s taken holy orders.
If Music For Pleasure hark back to R.E.M.’s Green, David Celia immediately reminds us of Around The Sun. Wrong choice, Dave. But we give him a chance and although the music is a little grown up for us, he has some a warm voice with decent Neil Young flourishes and some nice delicate keyboard parts, so we’ll give him the thumbs up.
RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 19-20/6/10
A work colleague has a mug reading “A bad day fishing beats a good day working”. Hardly Kierkegaard, but bear it in mind when reading this review: although we saw very few acts that really inspired us (on Saturday at least), we’d rather spend a weekend watching disappointing music at Riverside than a night with decent bands at The Academy. It’s something to do with the delightful landscape, the excellent Marsh Gibbon ales, the friendly atmosphere and the knowledge that some people have gone to a lot of effort to create a weekend out for us all, and not asked for a penny.
Deer Chicago are a decent opener to the festival, constructing large scale edifices of ever-so-slightly angular rock with a sturdy, emotional voice spread over the top. All very Fell City Girl, though Jonny Payne’s voice doesn’t have the natural power of Phil McMinn’s. The odd Jam interlude works surprisingly well.
At first Alan Fraser & The Resignation Orchestra offer flat jazz with Tom Waits Gruffalo growling from festival organisor Dave Oates. Diverting, but not much else. However, after a minute or two they start to warm up, and Fraser’s soprano sax solos become more interesting and contrast with some excellent honks and bubbles from Tony Bevan’s bass baritone, which is roughly the size of a hatchback.
Music For Pleasure entertain us as ever. Their mixture of spicy mid-reign R.E.M. melody and pre-leyline Julian Cope energy is always fun, even if it lacks the character of their day job bands (Harry Angel and The Unbelievable Truth). It’s like many of long term local trier Mark Cobb’s bands, but with bigger balls.
The Black Dog Emporium sadly sound nothing like techno trailblazers The Black Dog, nor much like Black Sabbath, despite the programme’s allegations. Instead they play a tedious brand of lightly funky 70s rock. The word “Reef” came to mind, and not least because it felt as though we were grounded inextricably in musical shallows. The drummer made things mildly interesting with some carbonated fills, but the vocals were honked out as if by a bingo caller trying to communicate across a Swiss valley.
More foghorn vocal subtlety from Crackerdummy. They’re a capable post-grunge trio who remind us of average Irish act Mundy. They playing is good, and it’s all well put together, but only in the way a small brick wall is. A small wall where you were hoping to find a bouncy castle and bourbon jacuzzi.
Remember David Oates’ functional blues growling? It starts to feel like a halcyon era once Stuart Turner starts his rubbish gravelly groaning. It sounds as though he’s trying to scare an errant toddler, not entertain adults. Pity, as The Flat Earth Society are a good band, spinning a nice sticky rockabilly web, and capable of a John Lee Hooker style boogie chug. We live in a frustrating world in which most post-rock instrumental bands sound half finished, but where most blues bands are ruined by duff singers.
Last year Diplomat’s Coffee kept us awake for the weekend. Sadly, this year we’re forced to buy our brew from a drunk man selling Mexican food, who was frankly fortunate not to have burnt his fingers off or inadvertently stabbed himself with a potato wedge at any point over the weekend. On one visit he mumbled something impenetrable about Mary Whitehouse and pronounced “hot chocolate” with one syllable, and at the next he blessed our coffee, even though we doubt he’s taken holy orders.
If Music For Pleasure hark back to R.E.M.’s Green, David Celia immediately reminds us of Around The Sun. Wrong choice, Dave. But we give him a chance and although the music is a little grown up for us, he has some a warm voice with decent Neil Young flourishes and some nice delicate keyboard parts, so we’ll give him the thumbs up.
Saturday, 17 July 2010
4AD A1 CD
Oh dear. I've listened to too much music today, and eaten too many cruisps and Haribos, so I've gone a bit funny. Still, I'm druinking mint tea and spinning some Szymanowski in an attempt to calm my jangly mind.
Anwyay, chilli con carne, that's a funny one, eh? It means "chilli with meat", I'd imagine, yet most chilli has meat, and in my experiecne what it really means is "chilli with kidney beans". Babelfish tells me this would be chilli con las habas de riñón, but I suspect that's not idiomatic. Ho hum.
STORNOWAY – BEACHCOMBER’S WINDOWSILL (4AD)
Always, the guilt comes. Nibbling the conscience, a small internal voice insidiously queries our sense of proportion: are the local acts we love fully deserving of praise, or is our shelf lined with rose tinted CD cases? In short, do we hope for greatness so hard, we begin to imagine it?
Well, we’ve listened to this new Stornoway LP repeatedly, and although we want them to succeed because they’re local heroes and delightful boys to boot, the fact is that this record is astonishing, doubtlessly the most exciting collection of cerebral English joy-pop since The Divine Comedy’s Promenade. Take that, paranoid interior monologue! Most of the songs will be familiar to locals, but the recordings are perfect, beautifully constructed, yet never overegged, making Stornoway superior to Mumford & Sons, the act with whom they’re most often compared. Like some of the best pop, Beachcomber’s Windowsill is epic and intimate simultaneously.
And with that the review can only become a list of favourite moments. The melancholic life story of “Fuel Up”; the lush porch song ambience of “We Are The Battery Human”, like Charlie Poole rewritten by The Daintees; the opening of “On The Rocks”, in which Simon & Garfunkel get lost in a strawberry mist before being lifted away on God’s own cymbals; “Long-Distance Lullaby”’s ultra-clean horn section that make us think of Tanita Tikaram for no reason we can fathom.
This is a world class collection of songs deliciously presented. Of course there are tiny imperfections. Despite the high esteem in which it’s held, we’ve never really been excited by “The End Of The Movie”, at least until the wistful conclusion. Also, the lyrics to “The Coldharbour Road” are somewhat clunky – can you really defend the schoolboy clumsiness of “I am a seabird, you are the Arctic Ocean”? Oh, and we’re not convinced you can really have an exclamation mark after an ellipsis, which counts against “Here Comes The Blackout...!”. Can you tell we’re grasping at straws here? We bloody love this record, and to balance these minor peccadilloes we have wonderfully subtle touches in the arrangements, especially the mournful pier end organ on “Fuel Up” or “Zorbing”’s Red Army Choir backing vocals.
The tagline on Stornoway’s Myspace has been “A living breathing Mark Twain novel” for quite some time, but we don’t hear the blustery, satirical, knockabout carnival of Samuel Clemens on this album, we prefer to think of the band as a hushed yet hopeful British poem, the introspective halfsmile of Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop”, perhaps. The record ends with a tale of waking up someone just for a tipsily emotional phone call, and the chance to say “Goodnight, soulmate”. Companionship, honesty, pop music: Stornoway certainly know what the good things in life are.
Anwyay, chilli con carne, that's a funny one, eh? It means "chilli with meat", I'd imagine, yet most chilli has meat, and in my experiecne what it really means is "chilli with kidney beans". Babelfish tells me this would be chilli con las habas de riñón, but I suspect that's not idiomatic. Ho hum.
STORNOWAY – BEACHCOMBER’S WINDOWSILL (4AD)
Always, the guilt comes. Nibbling the conscience, a small internal voice insidiously queries our sense of proportion: are the local acts we love fully deserving of praise, or is our shelf lined with rose tinted CD cases? In short, do we hope for greatness so hard, we begin to imagine it?
Well, we’ve listened to this new Stornoway LP repeatedly, and although we want them to succeed because they’re local heroes and delightful boys to boot, the fact is that this record is astonishing, doubtlessly the most exciting collection of cerebral English joy-pop since The Divine Comedy’s Promenade. Take that, paranoid interior monologue! Most of the songs will be familiar to locals, but the recordings are perfect, beautifully constructed, yet never overegged, making Stornoway superior to Mumford & Sons, the act with whom they’re most often compared. Like some of the best pop, Beachcomber’s Windowsill is epic and intimate simultaneously.
And with that the review can only become a list of favourite moments. The melancholic life story of “Fuel Up”; the lush porch song ambience of “We Are The Battery Human”, like Charlie Poole rewritten by The Daintees; the opening of “On The Rocks”, in which Simon & Garfunkel get lost in a strawberry mist before being lifted away on God’s own cymbals; “Long-Distance Lullaby”’s ultra-clean horn section that make us think of Tanita Tikaram for no reason we can fathom.
This is a world class collection of songs deliciously presented. Of course there are tiny imperfections. Despite the high esteem in which it’s held, we’ve never really been excited by “The End Of The Movie”, at least until the wistful conclusion. Also, the lyrics to “The Coldharbour Road” are somewhat clunky – can you really defend the schoolboy clumsiness of “I am a seabird, you are the Arctic Ocean”? Oh, and we’re not convinced you can really have an exclamation mark after an ellipsis, which counts against “Here Comes The Blackout...!”. Can you tell we’re grasping at straws here? We bloody love this record, and to balance these minor peccadilloes we have wonderfully subtle touches in the arrangements, especially the mournful pier end organ on “Fuel Up” or “Zorbing”’s Red Army Choir backing vocals.
The tagline on Stornoway’s Myspace has been “A living breathing Mark Twain novel” for quite some time, but we don’t hear the blustery, satirical, knockabout carnival of Samuel Clemens on this album, we prefer to think of the band as a hushed yet hopeful British poem, the introspective halfsmile of Edward Thomas’ “Adlestrop”, perhaps. The record ends with a tale of waking up someone just for a tipsily emotional phone call, and the chance to say “Goodnight, soulmate”. Companionship, honesty, pop music: Stornoway certainly know what the good things in life are.
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