Oxfordshire’s music online
Tuesday (1 April) sees the launch of new local music magazine Oxfordshire Music Scene - the magazine will be distributed throughout shops and venues across the county and will be available free. The team behind the magazine celebrate with a launch gig at the Jericho on 1 April, featuring first issue cover stars Little Fish, plus Not My Day, The Moneyshots and Baby Gravy.
As part of Foals’ recent takeover of the Guardian music website, former Truck co-organiser P-C Rae has written this piece on how to run a music festival.
Tickets for the eleventh Truck Festival go on sale this Wednesday (2 April). The tickets, priced at £60, will go on sale to local residents before they go on sale to the general public, and you can but them from any of the following outlets:
This year’s festival boasts a range of new stages and collaborations - the Barn Stage will be hosted by Vacuous Pop on the Saturday, with Lovvers and These New Puritans already booked, while Maps headline the Sonic Cathedral-curated Sunday Barn. Fresh Out The Box bring the dance tunes to the Barn on Saturday night, while local electro promoters Abort, Retry, Fail? host the Market Stage, with live music including Robots In Disguise. The Truck Stage has already confirmed acts including Noah and the Whale, Camera Obscura, The Television Personalities, Emmy The Great and Small Faces legend Ian Maclagan. Local acts to have been confirmed so far include Borderville, This Town Needs Guns, The Winchell Riots, Alphabet Backwards, Tristan and the Troubadours, Little Fish, Richard Walters, Morrison Steam Fayre and The Family Machine. For all the latest, stay tuned here and on the Truck website.
Oxford Brookes may be unaffectionately known as ‘Runners-Up University’ to snooty members of the other place, but you can’t deny it has a great track record in getting good musicians together. The meeting-place for bands as strong as This Town Needs Guns and Fell City girl in recent years, it certainly triumphs over OU, which does a good line in barber-shop quartets, but not much else.
Fell City Girl were a big white hope a couple of years back, but imploded almost as soon as they were signed, amid confused reports of personal tragedy, record-company interference and poor health. Fortunately, The Winchell Riots has emerged out of the mess, with singer-guitarist Phil McMinn and drummer James Pamphlion adding a new bassist and guitar player to the line-up.
At first, ‘Histories’ sounds like a bold departure from the sort of wistful balladeering that made people talk about FCG as the successors to Snow Patrol. Certainly, the snappish, syncopated title track sounds like the band is trying to channel the high-end sonics of Editors through the emotionalism of The Rasmus, and they do it pretty effectively. It’s certainly chart-friendly, but doesn’t play to the singular strengths of the band; there are plenty of groups out there making music in this vein, although few will do it as professionally. There is also a ‘bonus’ track on the EP, in which the tune is remixed by Youthmovies, that doesn’t reflect well on either party. Youthmovies achieve the extraordinary feat of turning McMinn into a crap singer, yowling like a New York bagman in a Martin Amis novel. I’m not sure the Winchell Riots even need the intervention of a more famous group at this stage in their career; the collaboration smacks of cronyism to no artistic purpose: the remix has all the dynamism of an octogenarian three-legged race.
Fortunately, the remaining two tracks are in the top rank. ‘The Man Who Mapped the Oceans’ is as gorgeous as anything I’ve heard in months; it has a tense, poised beauty conjured using fairly standard gambits; syncopated drums, delayed guitar picks and McMinn’s engaging tenor croon. The result is as glacially enchanting as a Sigur Ros masterpiece, and enjoys that aura of borderless freedom.
Finally, we have the hushed, marimba-flavoured ‘I’d Lower You Down’ which starts quirkily (McMinn sounds jaunty but plaintive, a bit like he’s auditioning for Oliver!) but builds expertly with the addition of minimalist drums, e-bowed guitar and a legion of choral enforcements, who sing like an army of ghosts. Incidentally, McMinn’s lyrics are extremely strong throughout the record; the following lines stay with the listener for a long time after the music stops:
I constructed a building in memory of your name,
The President cut the red tape, the whole city was still for the day…
A very strong start for the new band, then. A glance at Myspace suggests that they have equally impressive tracks to back up the ones on this record (’In Red Square’ is particularly haunting), so there’s good reason to think that The Winchell Riots can go even further than FCG. Though I would give the chummy remixes a wide berth.
By Colin MacKinnon.
In a rare combination of wit and soft-porn, working-class wank-mag Hustler once used the immortal tag-line, ‘Less Rabbit and More Beaver’ to attract the sleazebags away from the marginally-more-respectable Playboy, with its wholesome bunny-girls and weighty Norman Mailer-penned literary critiques. This week’s motto for Oxfordbands.com might be ‘Less Easter Bunny and More Beaver Fuel‘, with Leigh Alexander’s scuzzy punk rockers’ EP being reviewed (none-too-gently) here a few days ago, and as a second installment, our thoughts on their launch gig at the Bully.
Late-of-Birmingham troubadour Faceometer began proceedings with an uneven set of whimsical acoustic ballads, sung in a strange Tom Lehrer drawl. His take on the life of romantic polymath William Blake delighted the more literary types, but his excursion into spoken word, with a staggeringly dull tale concerning phone-sex workers (is this building up to be the sleaziest review ever on Oxfordbands.com?) was simply embarrassing. The best moment occurred during the closing track with the incorporation of various ad-hoc percussionists extracted from the audience, including a nonchalant Tim Lovegrove (Junkie Brush) who wandered straight from the Cowley Road onto the drum kit and provided the tune with a lovely swinging groove. A hit-and-miss act then, but at least he ended on a high.
Manic rawk-monsters Beelzebozo then took over, providing a good deal of uncomplicated entertainment, not to say decibels. Like their presumed antecedents Spinal Tap they seem to be affectionately sending up the theatrical nonsense that is heavy metal, but there’s an underlying commitment to their music which stops them being as offensively knowing as, for example, The Darkness. They combine a crowd of seventies rock influences with a lead singer who sounds rather like Dave Grohl during the shouty bits of the Foo Fighters, and they are impossible to dislike. There’s even the odd vocal harmony in there, so it’s not all hellfire and sulphur.
So to the EP launchers, Beaver Fuel. Some of the elements in this group are strong; Alexander has a nice line in lugubrious ballads which Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty might have rejected as too otherworldly. Exhibit A is the notorious ‘I Want to Live in Your Buttcrack’, which is mostly excruciating but has undeniable cult appeal. The musicianship is pretty decent too, with the lead guitarist showing on the night that he could produce lively solos on demand, and bassist James Serjeant providing both solid musical support and a bit of stage interest, initiating the first on-stage pillow fight I’ve ever encountered (although I was on the receiving end of a fusillade of paper aeroplanes launched by The Young Knives a few years back).
Still, with all these plus points, it has to be said that the first few songs went for nothing, simply because Alexander’s baritone growl couldn’t cut through the racket of two electric guitars playing punky chords at once. It was noticeable that when the lead guitarist shut up during the vocal sections, you could actually hear some of what Leigh was blethering on about, and in a band that cares so much about the lyrics, vocal audibility should be a top priority. One or two of the quieter songs even reminded me of the Pixies, which is always welcome, although a brief mid-set detour into jazz felt like a trip down a cul-de-sac. Perhaps Alexander needs to sort his songs into material for band and solo treatment, as it’s a shame to hear (or rather, not hear) clever lyrics wandering like orphans in a sonic storm.
By Colin MacKinnon.
This EP sets itself up as a cheap-and-nasty shocker. The cover art hasn’t gained much from printing over being doodled straight onto paper using a biro; the back of the CD also reassures me that having been “mutilated and massacred” by the band, the final musical “turd polishing” happened at Lovegrove Towers. Goodo. As for the song titles, while‘Belgian Surprise’ may conjure up some notion of good taste, the final title, ‘I wanna live in your buttcrack‘ leaves a rather different arrière goût.
However, the music itself is as humdrum as it gets. Plodding rock numbers with a slight 80-s vibe, grungy rhythm guitar, teach-yourself drum parts, semi-spoken tuneless vocals followed by relatively competent noodling. Overall, nothing too taxing, and thus the first three songs pass by relatively harmlessly.
So onto the meat of the matter.
Songs involving references to bums have quite an impressive pedigree. From the superior posteriors of Spinal Tap’s ‘Big Bottom’ (“talkin’ ‘bout mud-flaps, my girl’s got ‘em”) right the way down to Joan of Arse and Frank Zappa’s ‘Illinois Enema Bandit’, bums have been used in myriad ways, to which we can now add living up one.
Far from causing a stir, the song’s regularity, its swift oom-pah lilt, the slight twinge of West Country in Leigh Alexander’s vocals and the uncomplicated joviality with which he is prepared to live up someone’s anus, at most serve to conjure up images of a mildly lecherous rustic bumpkin failing to chat up the local serving-wench. While the musicianship is very passable, especially for a semi-live EP, the song does not surpass pub rock, nor does the level of wit exceed the likes of: “I wanna live in your butt-crack, it looks so warm and snug, if I were to die they could bury me as my grave would already be dug…” As much as I wanted to like it, it doesn’t really cut the mud.
And in answer to the title question: no, as a matter of fact this EP does not remind me in any way of kidney beans. Although it does remind me of Captain Beefheart’s ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’, in which he states, “men should get out their wallets and women their purses, as a man or a woman without a big eyed bean from Venus is the worstest of curses”. But a man or a woman without this EP is no worse off, really.
By B.M.
Cornmarket, Oxford, 22 March. Represented are Easy Tiger, Nine Stone Cowboy, Asher Dust, Jessie Grace, Not My Day, Shakey and the lips, Space Heroes of the People, The Evenings, Toy #1, Echoes Echoes, Hreda, Borderville, Shirley, Smilex, The Black Hats, Desert Storm and Tar the dog (a Shirley fan).
A new compilation featuring several Oxford artists has just been released by French label Rabeat’s Cage, run by former Alesiachair member Jeremy Moors. The album, Premiere Evasion, includes Jonquil, Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element, Hreda and Cogwheel Dogs alongside several French artists, and is available for 12 euros here. The full tracklisting looks like this:
1. Jody Prewett - ‘An Ode to the Morning’
2. Eberg - ‘Antidote’
3. Jonquil - ‘Pattens’
4. Tam Rush - ‘Something to Wish’
5. Azad - ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pour Qui Je Pleure’
6. Sarah W. Papsun - ‘Mouvement 2′
7. Cogwheel Dogs - ‘Cress’
8. Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element - ‘This Far and No Further’
9. Hreda - ‘Knowing How to Carry’
10. Neor - ‘Oneiros’
This week’s MP3 download is an unreleased track from local stars The Half Rabbits, which is currently only available to download from us. The track is called ‘Push Back’ and can be downloaded here.
An Oxford group of the national Love Music Hate Racism campaign has just been set up to promote music events in the city with an anti-racism message and to mobilise support for the national LMHR carnival in London on 27 April. The group are looking for local musicians to get involved with their work, and are holding two fundraising shows at The Ex on 11 and 25 April to run subsidised coaches to the national event. To find out more and get involved, visit the Oxford LMHR website.
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