Never Mind The Trollops...

I am perhaps guilty here of having more fun with sententious statements than actually reviewing the song.  If so, I shall redress the balance by asking you to listen yourselves, which is all reviewing is for anyway, really: https://soundcloud.com/thedollymops (alright, admittedly it's not up as I type this, but I guess it will be soon).

THE DOLLYMOPS – LOVE GROWS PALE (FourTwenny Records)

Time defuses all offence.  Spend your Sunday re-enacting the Battle Of Naseby, nobody blinks; recreate Bloody Sunday and it’s considered bad taste, but for the people who died they were much the same.  Similar story with The Dollymops, named after a Victorian term for a part-time sex worker.  Seems as though if they were called The Sluts or The Amateur Slatterns, people would rightly call them out as chauvinists, but somehow the quirky Dickensian atmosphere softens the blow.  That’s the band all over, really, skirting lamebrain yob punk and pulling themselves back from the brink with a theatrical flourish and a cheeky vaudeville wink.  This track doesn’t have the spice and storm of their previous new wave kickabouts, but it rattles along in a quieter way, reminding us a little of The Police in their less reggaefied moments, with exercise book poetry which shoots for Elvis Costello but lands at early Brett Anderson.  It’s not their finest work, but raises a smile, rummaging through post-punk like it’s a kids’ dressing-up box (and remember, a pirate outfit is fine, but Boko Haram is best avoided).

Strange Party?

Warm, isn't it?

ODDBALL, Isis Farmhouse, 8/6/19

This week the leader of the free world told us that the moon is a part of Mars.  We laughed at the time, but, spending a day in the colourful whirlwind that is the Oddball festival, suddenly such maverick cosmologies start to seem feasible – after all, we’re gearing up for Iffley lock to become a distant banlieue of Saturn with the Sun Ra Arkestra’s first ever trip to Oxford, and by six pm, a glance into their eyes reveals that a fair percentage of the crowd seem to have taken a psychic trip to Proxima Centauri, even if their physical husks still walk among.

And whilst we’re considering something as topsy-turvy as Commander Trump piloting Spaceship Earth through the inky galaxy, how about having the comedown before the trip?   We’re used to Moogieman making quirky, scientifically accurate new wave, like Robin Ince fronting Devo, but today he and drum machine prodder Stefano Maio turn in a set so bleak and unpsychedelic it’s actually otherworldly.  Imagine a John Carpenter soundtrack playing on a slowly decelerating Victrola whilst razor-honed guitar chords accompany the deadpan pronouncement “Don’t get lost”, and you have a set highlight.  New song “Journey To The East” is pretty much just a squelchy synth ostinato with some sententious metaphysical pronouncements intoned over the top, and is basically the opening to Sapphire & Steel rewritten by a paranoid Gurdjieff.  It’s brilliant, but (ironically) disorienting, and we’re glad we had the beautifully cascading kora notes of Jali Fily Cissokho to ease us into the festival.

There’s an outstanding representation of Oxford acts, from The Elephant Trip’s smoking-is-cool, shades-indoors-at-night Black Angels grooves, to Tiger Mendoza’s suet-fried melding of lysergic hip-hop beats with leather-clad rock guitar riffs, courtesy of Chris Monger from Shotgun Six (surely a shoe-in for Oddball 2020), to grief-pop heroes Flights Of Helios, who tonight get the balance between the band’s Pink Floyd vistas and Chris Beard’s stricken angel vocal spot on.  In fact, the festival’s only poor decision – apart from a few people’s final pint – is the installation of an onsite barber, whom we saw doing no business all day.  Who wants their aerials cut, man?

Whilst the day offers plenty to perplex sonically, perhaps the oddest experience is finding that the pub itself has been inexplicably rechristened the Android Garden, and that behind the bar instead of pint-pourers we find Chief Mixalot DJing some late 90s drum and bass classics - anyone witnessing the rare sight of Nightshift dancing is advised to repair immediately to the Psy-Care healing tent for a lie down.

We come across some new names during the day, Ia(i)n Ross clearly being such a new name that the event’s programme can’t decide how to spell it.  His amniotic synth washes are pleasing, but not as exciting as the old-fashioned hardware techno of ex-Vienna Ditto scamp Nigel Firth debuting as Oxford Audio Archive.  Plenty of acts on today’s bill, especially the spoken word artists, are gnomic, but Nigel’s the only one who’s gnomelike, sitting cross-legged behind a coffee table of teetering gadgets, and giggling quietly like he’s just got the jokes in Alice In Wonderland. His messy, but euphoric electronica has the glowing warmth of Pete Namlook, the ludic lo-fi chutzpah of Aqua Regia, and the sleek insistence of Hardfloor.  It’s enjoyably unpretentious, but when a Bollywood spectre starts to haunt a scrapbook jungle collage, it’s actually rather lovely too.

Perhaps the cream of the local crop, though, are expansive indie psych rockers and tambourine fetishists Knobblehead, who turn in an outstanding set of huge chugging tunes, mixing wild vibing with good honest melodic catchiness, part Brian Jonestown Massacre, part Jefferson Airplane.  At some points the blaring trumpet and tuneful chants even recall James circa Seven.  This is comfortably the best set we’ve seen them play, possibly because it’s the first time they’ve all managed to fit onstage simultaneously.

After all this, The Sun Ra Arkestra is an unusual headliner, but if this isn’t the sort of festival where expectations can be ravaged, nobody here has even tried to power a Moog by plugging into a leyline, and if bandleader Marshall Allen, at 95, hasn’t earned the right to do what the fuck he wants, then we’re from Betelgeuse (NB by this point, we aren’t entirely sure we’re not from Betelgeuse).  Tonight, they mostly eschew the frenzied freedom and synthesised abstraction of much of the back Ra-talogue for a smooth but slightly abstract lounge swing, including a surprisingly straight take on croon classic “Stranger In Paradise”.  Gavin Bryars once tried to capture the music of the Titanic’s band as they sank underwater, but the Arkestra make the sound of a Reno casino band melting into their daquiris, and if they seem to be treading water occasionally – space is the placeholder – and it isn’t the stellar voyage we expected, they sure can Pleaides tunes.

And then, it’s out onto the towpath for a moonlit stumble back to the mundane world.  Should the planets align, and Oddball return next year, we’ll certainly be there at the outset, ready for take-off.  Start the countdown, commander Trump...and smoke me a covfefe, I’ll be back for breakfast.

Jolly Jack, Ta

"Bank holiday comes six time a year, actually it's seven, and there have been occasions where another has been granted for special occasions, eg the millennium".
"Do you want to have another crack at that, Damon, mate?"

Happy bank hol weekend, you rapscallions.

JACK GOLDSTEIN/ MAX BLANSJAAR/ DESPICABLE ZEE, Beanie Tapes, Deaf & Hard Of Hearing Centre, 12/5/19

Despicable Zee’s recent EP Atigheh is likely to be one of Oxford’s releases of the year when the dust settles, but we were interested to see how Zahra Tehrani would translate its chilly introspection to the live stage.  Tonight’s performance is denser and more oppressive than the original recordings, whether that entails adding an insouciant MIA grove to “Counting Cars”, or smothering sample lattices with drums and synthesised skreek drones.  Electronic drum pads add some salad crisp snare tones, but there are one or two moments when acoustic drums overbalance the sound, reminding of us of that early 90s moment when bands like Pop Will Eat Itself explored building rock songs around sequenced backing, generally ending up with clunk-funk rhythms that didn’t quite gel.  This is a minor criticism, though, and it’s impressive that Tehrani has taken such a strong recording, and created a different, but equally intriguing, performance.

Max Blansjaar’s set is less intense, consisting of primary colour poster paint pop, all light bouncy guitar and smiling vocal lines. Imagine rough demos of 1987 hits by Go West or Wax, and you are in the right zone, although there is a choppier Graham Coxon feel to “You’re Always On My Mind”.  As much as we love Self Help and Easter Island Statues, who provide Max’s rhythm section, the strongest track is a solo piece, which resembles “The Girl From Ipanema” rewritten by Lou Barlow, featuring bonus kazoo.  It’s enjoyable stuff, though we do feel that, for a set of pure pop, there could be more euphoria – we want whoops of wild abandon, not quiet, contented smiles.

Although Jack Goldstein seems to balance sweaty pop abandon with the diffuse reticence of an academic at their first conference on Coptic etymology.  After having the organisors make us all stand up he treats us to a long, rambling monologue about pop tropes and presentation.  We’re not sure whether the message is that lofi artists should admit they’re no different from mega-stage pop Pepsinauts and so make a theatrical effort, or that a classic song will work anywhere so keep things simple. It’s possibly both.  What we are sure about is that Jack, leaping round the venue in a camel tracksuit like a life coach on a busman’s holiday, is always a pleasure, and that backing tracks mixing 80s pop, 90s rave and (inevitably) The Beach Boys sound great anywhere.  The campaign for Goldstein Eurovision 2020 starts now!

Your Future, Our Clatter

I'm listening to George Melly reading various poems about jazz.  He sounds wankered.  Good lad.

RATTLE/ FARM HAND/ AFTER THE THOUGHT, Divine Schism, Fusion Arts, 26/3/19

It’s been some years since Matt Chapman Jones performed as After The Thought, but we assume the music has been quietly playing somewhere all the while, the stately melodies and soft, glowing synth pads hiding behind the moon or in the spaces between electrons waiting for him to plug in again and broadcast them.  Wielding a guitar, keyboard and a Tetris endgame block of pedals, Chapman Jones ladles Mogwai noise onto John Carpenter motifs, simplicity taking us by the hand, and bouncing us between fuzzy warmth and isolationist eeriness.  Don’t make us wait so long for the next one.

Another person who would be welcome to come back over the Severn Bridge is Shape Records founder and Islet member Mark Daman Thomas, AKA Farm Hand.  If After The Thought’s palette is relatively sparse, Farm Hand’s is positively digi-Spartan, consisting of loops or tinny backing and vocals that tend to be so smothered in reverb or effects that lyrics are largely indecipherable, although when he tells us the songs are about “summers in rural mid-Wales” or “eating nettle soup”, we believe him.  There’s a playfulness in the performance, Thomas prancing around, cracking jokes and jamming over a recording of himself greeting each and every one of us by turn, but although his set is a cheerful lo-fi joy - a market stall knock-off of Fixers’ cyber-euphoria – there’s also a strangely monastic feel to much of it, like religious rites corrupted into secular games.   Perhaps there’s never much distance between druid and clown.

A scribbled note on the door of Fusion Arts reads “No drumming tonight.  Sorry!!”  But, seeing as Nottingham duo Rattle had dragged a pair of drumkits all the way to Oxford, we guess they decided the ignore the injunction.    In common with the other acts, their music is ostensibly simple, but powerfully hypnotic, repetitive interlocking patterns occasionally decorated by tuneful little chants.  Like vintage techno or even vintager New York minimalism, there’s a shudder of excitement when a chugging groove is punctuated by a new element, a sudden authoritative snare crack or floor tom tattoo (or some sparingly utilised dubwise FX from a gent hunched over a tiny mixing desk).  Rattle sound like a robot Art Blakey playing under some demonic skipping rhymes.  You try keeping that sort of wonder out with a handwritten sign, mortals.

The Zee! The Zee!

Fascinating aside, I agreed with the editor to change "youth worker" to something more specific about The Oxford Young Woman's Music Project, because we weren't sure whether youth worker was an accredited position, like social worker.  I've left the original text here because it's less clunky.

If you don't already, you should support YWMP, they're ace.

DESPICABLE ZEE – ATIGHEH (Self release)

The latest release from local drummer, producer and youth worker Zahra Tehrani has an accompanying book, a rough-snipped 70s sepia collage of photographs of her father after his emigration from Iran to the UK.  The music has a similarly handmade feel, combining fuzzy loops and vocal snippets with the artful looseness of a Kurt Schwitters piece, and also a similar air of parallel pride and melancholy.  The EP feels wonderfully like a low key, dewy-eyed version all your favourite highbrow electro-pop: “We Won’t Stop” is late Bjork without the grandstanding and abstract frocks, “Counting Cars” is The Knife with verdigris tarnishing all the shiny cyborg surfaces, and when the drums kick in on “Sidhe” it’s like a timid, battle-weary Add N To (X). 

“There are holes in our children’s memories”, claims the opening track, and although Atigheh is allusive and mysterious, lyrically and sonically, it may be about what is lost and what is gained as cultures meet and merge.  Whilst the booklet tells of the marriage of an Iranian man and an Irish woman, the low-level police persecution and a hilarious British culinary baptism in a plate of beans on toast, it also tells of the beginning of a new family.  The conflicting statements in “Counting Cars” are that “no matter where we land we always feel alone” and “keep on going, keep on living, keep on striving”.  The booklet states simply “roses grow limes dry up”. Debit/credit.  Regardless of whether this is the message, the EP has a soft, wintry beauty we recommend to anyone who appreciates understated electronica and intelligent pop.  Like a blurred and washed out old family snap, Atigheh is life-affirming and achingly sad at the same time.

All You Can Art Dubuffet

The second consecutive review where I've referenced Stewart Lee.  Perhaps I secretly want to be a comedy reviewer.

ART BRUT/ CASSELS/ HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN & UNCLE PEANUT, Crosstown, Bully, 18/2/19

Here Are The Young Men & Uncle Peanut are very upset with an old review in this very periodical, and have written the song “The Day The Hipsters Stole Our Look”, to prove that they look stupid on their own merits.  In fact, they don’t really look like hipsters, they look like lorry drivers suffering PTSD from a particularly harrowing ghost train.  Sour grapes aside, they’re great fun, each track a garish punk-hop rant rarely breaching two minutes.  Fans of Oxford’s Restructure will find plenty to enjoy, especially in their tale of brash kids who think they’re pop stars cluttering up a perfectly good pub.  Far more amusing than a band with such an infuriating name has any right to be.

Fun not being something Cassels are supposed to be.  They’re all math-grunge settings of 5000 word essays on neoliberalism and voting habits in the Cotswolds, aren’t they?  Well, yes, but tonight, they find time for a few jokes and a surreal discussion on relative drum popularity (snare for the square, rack tom for the maverick).  Also, angular as the songs might be, they no longer seem to be played by the sort of hyperactively awkward kids who get holes in their blazer elbows before the first week of term is out, but by a couple of riff-sucking rock heavies with a taste for both Sabbath and Shellac.  This feels like a new version of Cassels.  We really like them both.

“Popular culture no longer applies to me”, intones Eddie Argos toward the end of Art Brut’s fascinating set, a return to touring after 7 years, and nearly twice that since they were famous.  The question is, what does someone clearly in love with the magic of pop do when then they lose track of it entirely, and what does an absurdist do when our media landscape is more absurd than any fantasy.  The answer is, just admit it, play everything twice as loud and for twice as long and see what happens.

With their spoken and barked narratives and chugging, minimal rock, Art Brut are The Nightingales without the Beefheart abstraction, The Blue Aeroplanes without the well-thumbed paperbacks, Ten Benson without the Wire write-ups, and a comedy band without any jokes.  In fact, the best parts of this set are two long wayward monologues that are purest Stewart Lee (“You think I’m improvising this, but you can buy a CD of me saying the whole thing...even that bit, about the CD”).  Let’s be honest, a lot of the songs are pretty crap, but the experience as a whole is irrepressibly gleeful, and, at the end of the last song, as we all raise our hands as one to a bit nicked from “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”, suddenly it’s all oddly moving.  How did that happen?  Wasn’t this all a joke?  Does it matter that Argos and Emily Kane are now Facebook friends?  When did the hipsters steal out look?  Where the hell did all those years go so quickly? 

Improv/Comedy

This was about the most fun a review has been to write since some of the old Truck shakedowns.  I'm amused that it requires specific knowledge of two quite different, but equally obscure, cultural byways - it's a bit like a sketch I wrote the other day which hinged on the listener knowing about both Borges's influential literary techniques and Lennie Bennet's Lucky Ladders.  Never to be performed, I fear.

THE BOHMAN BROTHERS, Oxford Improvisers, Old Fire Station,15/1/19

There’s a doctorate to be written about the crossover between leftfield comedy and improvised music.  There are high profile fans, of course – Stewart Lee got air time for an improv duo through his Comedy Vehicle series, as well as facing the Celebrity Mastermind third degree on avant-guitar trailblazer Derek Bailey, whilst Vic Reeves snuck an Evan Parker solo onto a top 20 album (“Pack it in, Parker!”) – but there is also a partly shared outlook.  Perhaps it’s because both stand-ups and improvisers are often relegated to the sort of pub corners and dysfunctional function rooms that the lowliest of toilet venue rockers would sneer at, perhaps it’s that both art forms always make the most sense in an intimate live environment, or perhaps it’s just that in both cases the unexpected is rarely regretted or ignored, but embraced and incorporated into the show. 

The Bohman Brothers combine the absurdity of the oddest comedy with the most dadafiedimprov.  They have the classic comic double act dynamic, one uptight and starchy in his collar and tie, the other relaxed and wayward in a potting shed sweater.  It’s Morecambe and Wise, Bert and Ernie, ego and id.  An introduction in which welcoming platitudes are haltingly and exhaustingly mumbled over a recording of car crashes has the surreal mundanity of vintage Ted Chippington, a feeling bolstered by the fact that the duo make their close-miked scrapes and percussive skitters, not from catgut and drumskin, but from rubber bands, classroom geometry sets and a couple of fetching old-school toast racks. 

We’ve sat through self-conscious art music trying not to laugh before now, so it’s wonderful tonight to see guffaws invited with such deadpan hilarity, and cut-up texts - think Burroughs meets Mark E Smith meets spam emails - are delivered impeccably: after all, timing is a key concept in both music and comedy, and The Bohman Brothers’ strange, yet strangely ordinary, performance embodies both.  Coincidence, perhaps, but we are overjoyed that the final word enunciated, in a hilarious exchange of contrasting extracts from an old guide to tree frogs and a medical Mills & Boon novel is “mother-in-law”.  Fluxus?  They’ve only just met us!