Oxfordshire’s music online
Local band 1877 are looking for a new drummer. The band describe themselves as ‘a part instrumental alternative rock band with a love for effects pedals and minimal electronics’, and cite Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Fugazi, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Joy Division and Kraftwerk as their influences. Interested parties can have a listen and contact the band here.
No faffing here: just a pair of impressively-produced post-punk tracks from the Wakefield four-piece with designs on Oxford. ‘That’s a Nice Glove’ effectively combines the disco inflections of fellow-Yorkshiremen Reverend and the Makers, with a bunch of thick string pads The Killers made cool again and trembling high-end guitars a la Editors. The drumming, incorporating a slick cowbell figure at the start is noteworthy and the vocals are focussed and thrilling. The lyrics are a little woolly; less grounded than those of The Makers’ Jon McLure and an even longer way away from the street-realism of the Arctic Monkeys, but it could be worse: apparently Test Icicles are an influence. That particular shower of shit is no more, so I’d advise The Faff to delete any such references in their promo literature. It’s best sometimes to hide youthful indiscretions.
The partner track is the dumbly-titled ‘Parachuting with Pandas’, which combines most of the elements previously described, but leaves out anything approaching a tune. As a four-to-the-floor dancefloor filler it might be OK, but the band will need stronger material than this to conquer the dreaming spires, let alone the world.
By Colin MacKinnon
I spotted two themes tonight: firstly, there were no drum kits (nothing gets past Oxfordbands.com reviewers!) and secondly, all four acts were using stage names or at least causing some trouble for your reviewer when trying to get their monikers right.
For example, the brilliant singer-songwriter, James Bell is also known as James Baldwin, who happens to be the brother of the Evenings’ Mark Wilden. I’ve had entertaining half-hours discussing with friends which of the siblings is the more talented; it always ends up as an honourable draw. James’ set was a winning combination of playfulness (his impersonation of George Formby covering Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ was a hoot) and wry self-appraisal, as on the ingenious ‘Emotional Phases’. The song exemplifies his mastery of the acoustic guitar; displaying a style both baroque but timeless, with the intro in particular sounding like soundtrack music to a Wes Anderson film. His lyrics are educated, sane and shot through with a self-deprecating humour which tends to banish angst, although he writes about love with a bemused detachment, which I find terrifying.
Humour of a different sort was displayed by Charlie Khan, a self-confessed ‘misanthropic bastard’, and by his gorgeous but plastered girlfriend who editorialised this down to the single descriptor, ‘c**t’. The promoters had apparently confused him with a Chinese-American detective, so perhaps his air of aggressivity was justified. Still, his lyrics are among the nastiest I’ve heard (at least until yesterday, when a friend played me Plan B); like the humour of Chris Morris, they seem designed to hurt:
‘ There’s nothing quite so pathetic as a whore who’s long since past her prime… I know it’s cruel but I almost always laugh at those felled by their own hand’
Musically, Khan’s group is intriguing and appropriate (he plays guitar, alongside a trumpeter and a bloke hitting a suitcase). Like The Peanut Albinos, reviewed last month, they exhibit an air of jazzy destitution, moral as well as economical. Although my guess is that Khan is actually a bit of a softy at heart: he runs an independent record label in 2008, for Heaven’s sake, so there must be an incurable optimist lurking under that sneering carapace.
A more enjoyable trio then took the stage, under the banner of Desmond Chancer and the Long Memories (scheduled for the Oxford Punt in April). Desmond is actually former Big Speakers rapper Tomohawk, but in this outfit he eschews the motor-mouth brilliance and gives us thirty minutes of basso-profondo croon, backed by Oliver Shaw’s (sorry Junkfood Jones’) cocktail-lounge jazz piano alongside the glamorous Anna Soprano’s violin and breathy back-up vocals. The songs offer no concession to modernity, which may be no bad thing; the success of Vince Vincent and the Villains suggests that music that could have been performed wholesale fifty years ago can still do well today. The Long Memories’ musical era is perhaps the thirties (one or two of the tunes remind me of ‘Buddy, can you Spare a Dime?), although Chancer’s vocal emotionalism may be closer to the forties and fifties. His favourite subjects are staples of old country music:mistreatment by women, mistreatment of the bottle, and so recall the doleful Hank Williams, but Chancer’s exuberance and bonhomie banish the maudlin; it’s almost as if his inexhaustible Falstaffian cheer is fighting with the gloom of his chosen subject matter- this creates a strange, laddish cabaret that is partly awkward and partly compelling.
The only compulsion I felt when listening to Francis Pugh & The Whisky Singers was to fuck off right sharpish. A downbeat, downhome country act, apparently all their songs are about drinking whisky. That I cannot believe, as the half-hearted, almost forlorn performance suggested something much milder; root beer perhaps, or Ribena. A trio of guitars with a pedal-steel occasionally thrown in felt like overkill and under-strength simultaneously, and the mumbling, nervous singer was dreadful. The best moment occurred half-way in, when the steel guitar meshed with a decent trumpet line performed by the harmonica player. An unusal combination, it created the impression of a novel sound-world for a minute or two, before the set lapsed back into plodding inconsequentiality.
By Colin MacKinnon
The famous Oxford Punt lineup has been announced. The event runs on Wednesday 14th May, showcasing the most promising new groups in Oxfordshire. The finalised lineup is as follows.
Borders:
6.15 Faceometer
7pm Desmond Chancer and the Long Memories
Purple Turtle
7.45International Jetsetters
8.30 Cat Matador
9.15 Elapse-O
10pm Raggasaurus
The Wheatsheaf
8.15 Tristan & The Troubadours
9pm Non-stop Tango
9.45 Alphabet Backwards
10.30 Rubberduck
Thirst Lodge
8.30 Black Skies Burn
9.30 Little Fish
10.30 Sikorski
11.30 King Furnace
The Cellar
9pm Eduard Sounding Block
10pm David K Frampton
11pm 50ft Panda
12 midnight Clanky Robo Gobjobs
Punt passes are available for £7 from Videosyncratic on the Cowley Road or online at http://www.oxfordmusic.net/product.php?link=new&id=1777
This week’s download is from recent reviewees Tie Your Shoes To Your Knees And Pretend You’re Small Like Us, surely the strangest band name in Oxford, with music to match. The track is called ‘Countdown Timer To Centipede Release’ and you can download it here.
As a project, Cogwheel Dogs, the stage name of singer-sonwriter Rebecca Mosley and cellist Tom Parnell can only be described as-oh dear-absolutely barking. Writing a song about a herb growing down the back of your kitchen sink is scarcely the height of craziness, but it provides a solid platform on which to build the edifice of caprice which is encapsulated in this EP. And you know what? Some of it is really great.
The title track can only be described as the lovechild of Polly Harvey and Captain Beefheart, with Shostakovich as godfather. The good Captain also wrote about erratic vegetables, in ‘Big-Eyed Beans from Venus’, but the connection between the artists is above all musical. Specifically, Mosley and Parnell, just like the musical treasure that is Don Van Vliet managed decades ago, seem to have come up with a new take on that most conservative song form, the blues. We are a long way from Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson here, but the flat sevenths and above all Mosley’s husky, soulful voice are suggestive of nothing else. There are moments on Harvey’s 1995 masterpiece ‘To Bring You My Love’ album which are recalled, but Parnell’s cello, deployed using violent, atonal scrapes guarantees that ‘Cress’ sounds like little you’ve heard.
To my ears, Parnell has-oh dear-slipped his leash on the next track ‘Anticoagulant’, which in another world could have been covered by Blink 182 or Green Day. The aggression and busy-ness of the cello on this track renders it simply ghastly to listen to, and I’d much prefer it if Mosley were to perform it solo.
You have to hand it to that design classic, the typewriter, master of the comeback. Not only does it have a starring role in last year’s ‘Atonement’ (that manipulative nonsense which deserved an Oscar, it was so worthy and mediocre), but Mosley and Parnell have pressed it into service as percussion on the suitably-spectral ‘Ghostwriter’. Here, Rebecca reveals her versatility, losing the bluesy edge and singing in a limpid, blanched style redolent of Sinead O’Connor. The voice and cello are back in balance here, and the results are bleakly wonderful.
It will be interesting to see if Cogwheel Dogs has a long future. The duo certainly push at the boundary of what can be classed as popular music, and the extreme oddness of songs like ‘Cress’ will limit the extent of their appeal. That said, I’m glad they are around, and their success on XFM suggests that the punters may not be as fatally addicted to blandness as the doom-mongers imagine.
By Colin MacKinnon
We’re pleased to say we’ll be offering an MP3 for free download from a local band every week on the site from now on, so keep checking back to hear some great new tunes. To kick things off, here’s a free MP3 of ‘Godzilla vs. Kathleen Hanna’ by Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element - click here to download it.
If you’re an Oxfordshire musician and would like to submit an MP3 for OxfordBands readers to download, please email stuart at oxfordbands dot com with details (but please don’t send the actual MP3s for now!) and we’ll get on the case.
Local indie punk types Beaver Fuel launch their latest EP, ‘Doesn’t This Remind you of Kidney Beans?’ at the Bullingdon, Cowley Road on Good Friday (21 March) with support from comedic heavy rockers Beelzebozo and country folk maverick Faceometer. Doors are 8.00p.m and cover is £4.
On the whole, I consider myself to be a credulous man but I can’t shake a deeply held suspicion that this album has been designed with the definite intention of confounding and annoying its listeners, and especially its reviewers – just take a look at that wordcount-defying name and title. The thing is though, that Tie Your Shoes… do this with such a playful sense of humour and at times with such wonderful musical subtlety that much of the album turns out to be a pleasure to listen to; an always provocative, often uncomfortable and occasionally tantamount-to-unlistenable sort of a pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless.
Tie Your Shoes… are an experimental band, and I’m using that term not in the normal, lazy reviewery way for things that sound a bit different, but in a proper John Cage’s mid-50s definition way. In other words, they seem to be focussing on the unforeseen elements of music making. I doubt they had a single clue what many of the sounds were going to be when they flipped them round, cut them up and showered them in delay and reverb, or that they knew what the ‘songs’ were going to be like before they assembled them, and I am certain that they weren’t aiming for any sort of genre aesthetic when doing so. Jesus it’s easy to sound pretentious when writing about this sort of thing. So back to basics, what does it all actually sound like?
Well, starting at the bottom end, the most unpleasant and annoying track is actually the last, ‘Kung Fu Annie’. There is a wilfully annoying beeping sound throughout (somewhere between a reversing lorry, the countdown to an explosion, and some important bit of medical equipment) over pattering drums, and random snippets of both a guitar and flute, none of which bears any resemblance to each other and it simply appears to be lots of different noises played together for no apparent reason. A close second in the maddening-the-listener stakes is ‘You’re A Gas Man’ which sounds like it’s twanged on a ruler and typed on a keyboard at the same time, but with neither having any awareness of the other sound. Extremely unsettling, and listening to it twice in a row just now has made me feel slightly motion-sick.
On the other side of the coin, however, lies the absolutely beautiful ‘A Shiny Sea of Knives’, with its wonderful meandering flute line. It’s the closest they get to a ‘proper song’, and is a surprising and soothing relief in the middle of the album. Better still is the crisper style brought to ‘Countdown Timer to Centipede Release’ and ‘Ghosts With Widely Spaced Teeth’ by centring them around a ukulele. The latter is particularly effective, with looped hand-claps, uke and bass weaving in and out of each other, and in and out of time with each other, creating a barely-controlled, strangely hyperactive mood, reminiscent of a twitchy, glitchy Iberian-style folk song.
So, plusses and minuses as ever - what to conclude? Well, first, that whoever made this album is very talented. Second, that they were probably taking the piss with much of it – from the gentle mockery of Oxford’s trend for over-complicated band names and album titles, through the hammy German SS officer accents in the opening interwoven chant section to the aggravating beep that ends the album. Perhaps they’ll find it very funny that I’ve taken it seriously, but in amongst all the things that seem designed to perplex, there is some thrilling and surprising music.
By Daniel Mitchell
Oxford music photos
