Like the first snowfall of the year, live looping is a minor miracle that never fails to impress. Theo once again proves how useful a tool an infinite delay pedal can be in his opening bars, twining thick guitar lines together to create a wiry cord of dense riffing. Then he drops the guitar and starts slipping some chunky drums behind the loops. The resulting noise is clinical but remorselessly insistent and effective, something akin to AC/DC tunes under construction on the Cowley car plant’s conveyors. A secret part of us wonders what it might sound like if we could have drums and guitar at once (you know, like a band), and whether there might be another way of ending a piece than simply overloading the pedal and puffing out a hiss of white noise but this ultimately feels like cavilling. Go and see Theo, his music repays the patience needed to watch its genesis.

Adventurous locals might like to think of Action Beat as a cross between The Corvids’ kraut thump and the fuzzed reproach of The Fencott Disaster. The aural density of the thunderous noise initially excites, but the (unreasonably short) set ultimately fails to convince: it was too regulated to be an eviscerating noise, but too messy to succeed through hypnotic repetition. You could have the time of your life watching Einstellung or Ascension, but it appears that they don’t mix well.

Let’s get one thing out of the way before we go any further: Ashley Marlowe, Charlottefield’s drummer, is phenomenal. He powers into the kit with force yet restraint, and the contrast between prog embellishment and punk incision reminds us of Karl Burns’ work on the first Fall album. Frankly, for the first ten minutes of the set we barely noticed the rest of the band. Eventually our senses returned to normal, and we discover that the band make a most pleasant sound, shot through with flashes of Fugazi and tiny flecks of Part Chimp whilst a monolithic bass gels it all together. However, just as we had them pegged as a riotously adept and entertainingly generic alt.rock act, things start to shift. Slowly the music is changing gear, until finally we are left in the midst of endless deserts of guitar tones with deft cymbal flicks dancing above them. After a simply wonderful set, it’s easy to see why Charlottefield are always so welcome in Oxford, and we wonder how we’ve managed to miss them before.

 Charlottefield Myspace

By David Murphy

People generally don’t listen to lyrics. At least not to the verses. Elvis Costello tells stories of late 80’s parents requesting his hit “Veronica” on the radio to celebrate their little princess’ birthday, when it’s actually about Elvis’ Mum going nutty in a nursing home. Ten years later there’s the tale of married couples requesting Baby Bird’s “You’re Gorgeous” at their wedding, despite the fact that even a cursory listen to the seedy storyline would seem to supply a perfectly good reason not to use it as your first dance. (Another being, of course, that it’s shit.)

We can imagine something similar happening to Family Machine’s greatest song, “Flowers By The Roadside”, in which intelligent lyrics probe society’s rituals of remembrance atop one of the catchiest melodies ever produced in Oxford. It even has a bloody whistling break. Is Family Machine - we know it looks stupid without a definite article in front, but that’s how it’s written on the sleeve, and we’re nothing if not anal about stuff like that – trying to smuggle mournful themes into our heads in the disguise of gorgeous pop music? If so, they do a very good job of the disguising: half of this album is heart-breaking melancholy, and the other half is meaningless fluff fun, best seen in “The Do Song”, a nonsensical pop romp which is like a cross between The Wannadies and Francis Lai’s theme to Un Homme & Une Femme.

Opener “Ko Tao” sets the tone, with a lightweight fuzz guitar bounce that recalls T Rex at their least serious. Before we know it, however, we’re immersed in the banjo plucking simplicity of “Burn Like Stars” or the resigned sadness of “Paving Stone Monsters”, which is heart-breaking even though we’re not sure precisely what these ever-present monsters symbolise. Even “Got It Made” undercuts its sampladelic Ninja Tune spy theme air with a widescreen pathos coda that could have come from Ennio Morricone’s most tear-jerking drawer. In fact, it’s only “Lethal Drugs Cocktail” that spoils the mood, coming off as too deliberately matey, like a desperate uncle making bad jokes at a wedding (though we’ll laugh at anything to drown out Baby Bird).

“Did You Leave” is perhaps a summation of the whole album, building an elegiac mood with heavily reverbed melody lines only to suddenly subsume it in bubbly “Ba ba ba” backing vocals. Except that the sadness never quite disappears, even as the grins surface. Maybe Family Machine is saying that melancholia is an undercurrent of even our happiest moments; or maybe the point is that even despair can have a tinge of happiness – it’s joyous to be alive and feel something, even if it’s only misery. Concluding the record with an uncredited lofi instrumental probably indicates that we’re not encouraged to reach definite conclusions about things like this.

Beyond all this philosophising, You Are The Family Machine is simply a fantastic relaxed album of semi-acoustic pop, that can make you dance on the tables downing sangria one minute, and slump weeping into your whisky the next. Highly recommended.

Family Machine Myspace

Dates and line-ups for local post-rockers, Flies Are Spies From Hell’s upcoming tour of the South of England with West Country experimental rockers Red Paper Dragon have been announced. The Oxford date is set as Sunday 9 March. For full dates please go to www.myspace.com/fliesarespiesfromhell

The latest contributor to Oxfordbands.com is Kate Griffin, a freelance journalist living in Oxfordshire. Kate edited a music fanzine at university and has since contributed music reviews and arts features to the Welsh edition of The Big Issue. She currently edits Leys News, the community newspaper for Blackbird Leys. At oxfordbands.com, we’re extremely happy to have her contributions and hope you enjoy reading her reviews and thoughts on the Oxford music scene.

The term “singer-songwriter” doesn’t really do justice to the powerhouse known as Juliana Meyer. On Holding Up the Sky, her first album, she plays almost all the instruments (including guitar, cello, mandolin, double bass and glockenspiel) as well as doing the engineering and mixing, in addition to the usual singing and songwriting duties.

            It’s an impressive and polished debut. Meyer’s voice is sweet, strong and clear (although she’s a little more uncertain in the falsetto part of her range). Lyrically, the album is about the standard singer-songwriter fare: relationships, emotional ups and downs, a desire for self expression and so on, with an excursion into politics on ‘Making profits selling rockets’. There are echoes of Joni Mitchell and Alanis Morissette.

            My only criticism of the album may seem like carping: it’s a little lacking in tension, perhaps too clearly the work of an artist working with people she likes. There’s nothing wrong with avoiding spats in the studio, but “creative differences” have produced some of the best work in the music world - think Lennon and McCartney, Morrissey and Marr, Anderson and Butler. A critical collaborator might have given Holding Up the Sky a rougher, more interesting edge.

            But whatever the minor weaknesses of this album are - or perhaps because of them - Meyer is clearly on the verge of joining Katie Melua and Natasha Bedingfield in the pantheon of sweet-voiced young British stars. No aspiring artist ever went wrong by being too easy on the ear; being beautiful, young and multi-talented never hurt anyone’s chances either.  She might “feel like a square inside a circle” sometimes, but Juliana Meyer is going to fit in just fine.

Juliana Meyer Myspace

By Kate Griffin

The town of Wallingford has plenty going for it. The rolling river, the historic markets, the old churches, even a big-up from Jerome K. Jerome. What it doesn’t have is any well-defined music scene, which meant that the Truck organisation took a bit of a gamble in putting on a gig here.

They needn’t have worried. The room was reassuringly full from the start, thanks in part to an excellent bill, including Danny and the Champions, whom I regrettably missed.

The gig didn’t start that well, however. A very nervous Rami gave us four songs of inconsequential and interminable annoyingness, centring on such compelling subjects as The National Lottery, Jack the Ripper and playground bust-ups. They weren’t without the odd line of wit, and Rami’s guitar-playing was perfectly fine, but the set seemed to go on long into the night.

Much better was local four-piece The Family Machine who conjured up tiny little gems of folky-pop melody in the vein of Dodgy, but didn’t feel the need to place them in a very elaborate setting. Specifically, the songs were all too short. It was almost as if front-man Jamie’s endearingly self-deprecating shtick had translated itself into the structures of their songs. Hey guys, you’re good! You’re not going to bore us if you tease that idea out for just another minute or so! Other strengths were the backup singing- a four-piece that can do quadrophonic harmony that well is a rarity. I also liked the lead guitarist, who provided clever, spaced-out sounds to broaden the solid fare of acoustic guitar, bass and drums, but the backing-track I would have left at home. On the one occasion they used it, it emitted a string of bloopy musical non-sequiturs that muddied the sound and reduced the band’s own impact. For a group that have been around a while, you feel that they still need more confidence in their own abilities, which are considerable.

There was no lack of confidence from The Epstein, who were magnificent throughout a superb set. Drawing mostly on their fine album, “Last of the Charanguistas” (reviewed elsewhere on this site), they gave us yearning, haunting, nostalgic country music, with heart but also with that crucial lack of self-pity which is the best thing about the genre, but also the most elusive. Olly Wills’ voice epitomises this; he can project profound emotion, but there is also a lack of sentimentality, of playing to the gallery, which is so important. Because this band is walking a tightrope. If they were ever once to betray a maudlin, indulgent, she-done-me-wrong mentality, then they could fall into that demo-monde of Stetson-wearing saddoes, faking Nashville accents in dodgy clubs up and down the country. What keeps them away from that is the sheer life of the performance- despite having four guitarists everyone is needed, everyone is vital. And they have songs to die for; one of my favourites is “Nothing changes in the Old Town” which didn’t even make the album. “That Dress That She Wore” and “Dance the Night Away” (with Joe Bennett blowing up a storm on trumpet) were transcendent glories and make you think that the Epstein could indeed rewrite musical fashion in Britain 2008.

Family Machine Myspace

The Epstein Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

 Despite various reservations, I find all three songs on local singer-songwriter Maria Ilett’s latest CD charming, and in one case, absolutely adorable. The style is a little hard to pin down, being a compound of folky pop in the vein of the late Kirsty McColl or Beth Orton, but with a big role played by low-fi programming and analogue synths. In general, these two elements sit nicely together, but less happy is Ilett’s vocal style, which invokes the two superb  artists mentioned above, but is also contaminated by the chavvy affectation of Lily Allen and Kate Nash, particularly on the opening ‘Sit On the Sun’. The strengths of this track are centred on the excellent production values, which expertly combine acoustic guitar, strings, synthesisers and multiple vocal lines. Ilett has an outstandingly pretty voice, which really doesn’t need to be Estuarised for the sake of the Croyden tower-block market. The glottal stops which disfigure such already poor lines as ‘When I went away from here, I left you for granted’ are annoying and alien, and Ilett wisely cuts back on them on the other two songs.

Next up, ‘Hit the Blue’ is marvellous, laid-back but oddly funky. The production here is centred on one of those rhythm sections so confident that they can leave a whole lot of stuff out-check the massive gaps in the bass during the verses, which really allow the layered vocals space to breathe. The deliberately out-of-tune guitar sounds like it is being played out of a telephone speaker, but I like the audacity of the idea; guitarists should be kept in their place. Ilett’s performance is warm, intuitive and beguiling.

Good as this, the outstanding number is the closing ‘Stars’, the transfiguring daydream of a bored secretary yearning for her weekend trip to Barcelona. For some reason, the feel of the song recalls that of the disturbing video to the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Golden Path’, in which an overstretched office worker is driven mad and transmigrated via his photocopier into some sort of hippy Eden, full of colour, light and love. The magic is conjured by a perfect combination of eternal melody, brilliant use of programmed drums, which seem to propel us (along with Ilett’s protagonist) into the air, and various strings and synth-pads which act to blot out the prosaic reality of working life. The piano coda at the end,as the dream disintegrates, is heart-breaking.

Excellent as Maria Ilett’s songs are, and lovely as her voice is (when she’s not in thrall to the already-dated Nash/Allen style), the real star of this record is the producer, who has helped her create something new and wonderful. ‘Stars’ in particular will haunt my mind for a long time.

Maria Ilett Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

Enon at the Cellar, 9 Feb 2008 - a packed Vacuous Pop night. More photos over here.

North Sea Radio Orchestra, The Epstein, Stornoway and Stuti Mehta played at the JdP a week or so ago. Here is a photo of the latter.

More photos can be found over here.

It’s time for our first live show of 2008, which takes place at The Wheatsheaf in Oxford on Friday 29 February. We’re very proud to be able to bring our own personal musical revelation of 2007 back to town in the form of Birmingham’s krautrock panzer division Einstellung. If you missed them at Audioscope last year, make sure you get down for this one. Plus there’s brilliant light-themed local support from schizophrenic hardcore fiends Xmas Lights and chopped up guitar noise from City Lights Just Burn. More nearer the time, but here are a few good reasons to come along, courtesy of Nightshift:

‘Awesome (in capital letters, underlined, twice) krautock-inspired noisemongers outta Birmingham who tore the Academy a new exit hole with their stunning set at Audioscope last year. Panzer-heavy, pressure cooker-intense wall-of-noise motorik rocking that sounds very much like Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ being played by Hell’s own house band. We heartily recommend you attend.’