Oxford stars The Winchell Riots are The Guardian’s band of the day for 29 July - check out the profile piece here. The band headline the final OxfordBands monthly night on 29 August - tickets are now on sale here for £5. Support comes from Epic45, Hreda and Eduard Sounding Block.

It’s a fine year for festivals in Oxfordshire, and this weekend sees the second Arcane Festival take place at Horsenden Meadow, Tetsworth. The lineup takes in some of the cream of the county’s music, from the usual rock and country to dubstep and electro, and looks like this:

MAIN STAGE: InLight, Witches, The Gog, Nagatha Krusti, Shirley, Souljacker, All These Arms, The Gullivers, Bear in the Air, The Youngs Plan

MYSTIC WOODLAND: Danny & The Champions of The World,Stornoway, Maria Ilett, The New Moon, Osprey, Clare Peecock, Anton Barbeau, The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band, Bethany Weimars, Dave Todd, ICO, Holton’s Opulant Oog, MotionInColour, Mark Wood (of Junkyard Choir), Jimi Alexander, Garron Frith

SQUARE ONE: Dougal (H.T.I.D./Slammin’ Vinyl), Ramos B2B Punch, DJ Fear, Sam Eeles, Matt JB, Gsus MC, MC Brookzy,

PURE ALCHEMY: Hyper, DJ Kyte, Micky Ry, The Eclectric All Stars, Rob Dunstone (Fresh Out The Box), SO

Weekend tickets are £20 including camping, and the show runs from 12pm on Saturday. For more information, including directions and so on, check out the Arcane website.

Leftfield London label Brainlove Records team up with our own Coo Coo Club to host a day of experimental music at the Jericho Tavern.  Oxford’s own Keyboard Choir will be performing alongside artists from all around the UK, including the likes of Team Brick, Retro Spankees and Pagan Wanderer Lu. In addition to the live acts, John Brainlove and guests will be DJing. This sounds like a must for the musically adventurous: showtime is 2.00p.m. on Saturday 9 August with £6.00 entry. 18 and over only.

Lineup: (subject to change)
 
23.00-00.00: Keyboard Choir
22.00-22.40: Pagan Wanderer Lu
21.00-21.30: The Retro Spankees
20.00-21.40: Mewgatz
19.00-19.45: Dead Singer
18.00-18.30: Team Brick
17.00-17.25: Pseudo Nippon
16.00-16.25: Ratface
14.00: Doors - Brainlove 2000&ACE DJs

Captain Beefheart once famously said: “A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond”. But he was wrong. “Rabeat’s Cage: Première évasion”, a ten song sampler, elegantly disproves his theory by unearthing some true carrotty gems from the Oxford scene (with some assists from Paris).

At this point I should correct myself. While I just wrote it was a sampler to promote the artists’ work, Rabeat’s Cage is thought out very much like a proper album, rather than a collection of songs. The first three tracks fuse beautifully into each other, sharing not only the same key (slash relative minor) but a melancholic aesthetic that pervades the rest of the album.

The songs are excellently varied, extremely atmospheric and universally eccentric (like Mr Rabeat himself), encompassing electronica, rock, jazz and more. The main interest, and link between the songs lies in the lush harmonic blends created by each different instrumental combination. Piano with strings, guitar, harmonica, keyboards etc all fuse to create as Mr Rabeat says “a bit of magic in the ears”. Whether jagged vocals, abrasive beats or string quartets are your cup of tea or not, the songs all deliver in its particular way, as I shall describe:

First song of note is the hauntingly melancholic ‘Antidote’ by Eberg, where piano and accoustic bass oscillate between chords like a slow pendulum marking time before the singer’s demise. Two voices, one voice with a helium effect, describe a mysterious death/suicide scene between two people for whom there is no hope, as a harrowing refrain of “someone should hold you tighter than I do” floats ethereally in and out of the song. Morose violin (viola?) and electronic beats add texture. In short: artful, powerful, sad, brilliant.

Next up for scrutiny is the excellent ‘Je ne sais pour qui je pleure’, by Azad. The title is an cute pun, meaning “I don’t know who I’m crying about” rather than “I don’t know why I’m crying”. This song lies firmly in the realm of jazz and features clarinet, picked electric guitar and drums with brushes. In a word, this song is the best example of leaving musical space that I can think of. It is leagues apart from the sort of up-its-own-arse jazz, characterised by an endless diarrhoeia of breathless improvisation and incomprehensible noodles. You hardly notice as the song creeps up on you at the outset and at the end as it seeps away into melancholic oblivion. But every note is expertly placed and timed, and does things that regular rock beats can only dream of. Plus, the tune is killer. Simple, extremely elegant, bliss.

Other songs include ‘Knowing How To Carry’ by Hreda, another downbeat number that slumbers edgily along with cello, guitar etc, until a minute from the end, where it suddenly bursts into life with metallic glory, crowning a musical theme that had been building up. In this way it satisfies, unlike Radiohead’s We Suck Young Blood off Hail to the Thief, which fails to follows through. Even within the trio of more electronic-based songs by NeOr, Tam Rush, and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element there is a great diversity. Sunnyvale delivers a shower of assorted pick-and-mix beats, combined with electric guitar for extra texture; Tam Rush a stranger, more Mouse On Mars-flavoured effort; and NeOr a spaced-out funk number with a more straightforward beat.

All in all, it’s a treat. The other numbers are just as good, and if the Rabeat has any more time on his hands to dig up some more corkers, as he wiles away his sad, lonely days in his hutch, I would definitely be up for hearing them. Bring on the Seconde évasion. And the troisième…

Rabeat’s Cage Myspace

By B.M.

If The Family Machine were a movie star, they would be Will Smith. They’re impossible not to like, even when they’re doing horrible things; in Smith’s case strangling his pet dog in `I Am Legend’; in The Family Machine’s case singing jauntily about dying in car crashes. Whether it’s the loping country ramble of `Flowers By The Roadside’ or the cheesy, summer-spun `Do Song’, they’re unavoidably cuddly. Recent single, `Got It Made’, paints the band in a more ambitious light, but sadly you know that unlike Will Smith they’re never going to be rich and famous. And that’s the world’s loss.

While Family Machine are genially understated, Not My Day are – superficially at least – bolder and overstated. They’re good-natured in their own way but lacking the warmth, humour and innate sense of melody of The Family Machine. They bang out their set of 60s-styled rock in conveyor belt fashion and prompt some ungainly dancing from a select handful of their gathered mates. Well drilled but riddled with clichés, the memory of them stays with you for precisely the time it takes to walk to the bar.

Having burdened themselves with a name that wouldn’t pass muster at a school battle of the bands competition, Indiana’s Murder By Death are gothic but not goth, dark-hearted southern rock knocked out in the fashion of country rock barflies who’ve ingested a gallon or two of Nick Cave’s biblical blues. They sing about the Devil and shooting a man in the back, frontman Adam Turla’s deep, rasping drawl akin to Stan Ridgeway doing an Elvis impersonation, a fine voice hidden by an extensive beard, while Sarah Balliet’s nonchalantly fevered cello playing adds a tautness and edge of menace to what might otherwise descend into old-fashioned bar ballads and road trip tales, and helps rescue awkward tracks like `My Ball and Chain’.

Overall they’re bigger on spirit and energy than great songs and the cavernous sound they suffer in a quarter-full Zodiac does their sound few favours. Better, perhaps, to experience them in more intimate surroundings, maybe unplugged to bring out the simmering violence. They encore with a song simply called `The Depressing Song’, just in case we hadn’t noticed they don’t do cheerful.

Tonight is the first gig of a European tour and given the band’s low profile in the UK the poor turnout isn’t so surprising, but you feel that with the quality of dark-country bands coming out of the States in recent years, Murder By Death are going to have to do something a bit more special to earn a return ticket.

Zoë Herriot

The August issue of local music magazine Nightshift, which features a full rundown of all this summer’s Oxfordshire music festivals including Truck,  is out now, and is available to download from right here on OxfordBands.com - just click here: August 2008 issue of Nightshift

Echo Boomer are a passable jangly guitar band whom you could have sworn made an appearance in the I-remember-them-from-the-90s round of your local pub’s music quiz night. Despite the nostalgic references in their songs, they are a newish outfit with a self-titled mini-album that I’m guessing is their first effort.

On first listening, a couple of good opening tunes swiftly make way to mid-album mediocrity. Waking up with a jolt for Child, you realise you were dozing through the three previous tracks. Treehouse provides a brief coda before the CD player buzzes to a halt, announcing the end of the album. Well, it was decent, but it didn’t really come to life, flick the switch or make me horny. Golden Boy and Suburbia showed flashes of brilliance. Nifty guitar work and Neil Finn-esque vocals remind you how good Crowded House were. But while the songs are all crisply recorded with polished performances, I feel somehow short-changed.

The clue, you could say, is in the title. As many of their melodies are as sluggish as North Oxford’s finest elderly Sunday drivers, and in the absence of a naturally outstanding voice, Echo Boomer have to heap loads of reverb on Jonny Race’s vocal to carry over each note. Indeed, like an overdose of make-up, Firefly’s ‘booming’ vocal compensates for the absence of interest underneath.

Onto the lyrics, which are humorous, being as they are only too appropriate. Jonny Race sings mostly about suburbian monotony and longing after past success, flawlessly reflecting the pedestrian, middle-aged nature of the actual music. Have they missed the killer irony, or are they just playing to their target audience? Either way, in Golden Boy the opening couplet “I’ve been hiding underground / I’ve been making different sounds” is a sitting duck for sarcastic sniggers all round.

But where there are opportunities, they are not always seized, as the pop idiom reigns supreme. In this regard, Sam Race on lead guitar should be feeling most short-changed. At the lines, “I wanna smash it up / I wanna break it down” on Child, his guitar is permitted an underwhelming squelch.

Echo Boomer are at the very least a ‘safe choice’ for a decent band-night down your local. They will not knock you for six, nor ruin your quiet Sunday evening with unannounced weirdness. Slurping on your pint and applauding politely at the appropriate moments, you will be gently lulled along by their comforting but far-from-unpredictable guitar nuggets, before returning home to dig out your Crowded House collection.

Echo Boomer Myspace

By B.M.

Here’s a snap of Little Fish from Truck this weekend - lots more photos are coming in now and are up at the Oxford music flickr group.

We’ve only ever seen Inspector Morse a couple of times.  We didn’t live in Oxford when it was first broadcast, and so were denied the pleasure of solving the show’s real mystery: how the hell he managed to drive from Barton to Jericho in under 90 seconds.  One episode we do recall was centred around clubbing and Ecstasy - in the haze of memory we recall it being somewhat melodramatic in those Leah Betts days, but we do remember a scene in which Morse pays a visit to a rave producer’s impossibly palatial abode.  Not finding what he’s after, John Thaw takes a listen to the musician’s latest work in progress and is horrified to find a sample of Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion (or somesuch), spitting out disgustedly, “This is magpie music!”

Well, the poor old detective would have had trouble with the new CD from Thame duo Fee Fi Fo Fum, which is magpie music par excellence.  Pretty much all five tracks on the (rather crappily named) EP seem to be created out of tiny offcuts from various moments in the history of rock, loosely bolted together.  The truly amazing thing is how cohesive and intriguing the result turns out to be.  Opener, “Lord Of The Pool” quickly jumps from an insectoid clicking to what we might call the “rockless riff”, and the piece sounds like a whole bunch of AC/DC tunes chopped up on a stuttering train, simple rock heaviosity laid bare without any of the balls and bolshiness or rock heroics.  Not that’s it’s arid and knowing, either…in fact, the playing is endearingly loose, coming on like the inverse of 50 Ft Panda’s clinical high speed canter through rock stances.  FFFF go for the fold and tear approach, rather than the guillotine’s slice, and this is what stops their music turning into a scholarly introvert mess, a maximalist bedroom rock fantasy for sub-Zappa misfits.

Take “Wisdom Soup”, for example.  Within the first 30 seconds the guitar style has leapt from a Graham Coxon mega-delay effect, to a chiming neo-African chime, to a Southern fired rock fuzz.  You couldn’t call it a desperately neat composition, but neither does it feel arbitrary - the image that comes to mind is one of a designer flipping through swathes of material, searching for exactly the right texture. 

It’s a fascinating release, and it’s hard to say how exactly it works so well: it sounds neither rehearsed nor improvised, neither dumbass nor arch, neither punk nor prog.  Time will tell whether there’s anything further to be mined from this seam (there are only so many things one can do with guitar and drums, and FFFF seem to have done most of them within 21 minutes), but for now enjoy a quality release that seems to be outside of any local school or trend.

Oh, and if you’re asking, we’ll have Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and Tenor Saw, thanks.

Fee Fi Fo Fum Myspace

By David Murphy

The lineup for the last OxfordBands monthly night is coming together and looks like this.

The Winchell Riots headline, almost a year to the day after we put on their first full band gig.

Main support are the beautiful Epic 45:

‘little Proustian snatches of half-buried brilliance… You’ll feel like you’ve been hearing May Your Heart Be the Map in your head all your life, and were waiting for someone to record it.’ - Sunday Times

‘Music that buzzes, drones and sweeps as if the aural mirroring of a ballet dancer giving the performance of their life, the effect is both beguiling and intoxicating. It’s a wonder at times, this album… one of the most gorgeous albums you’ll hear in a long time.’ - Drowned In Sound

Also playing are the wonderful Hreda:

‘For those who have been craving for some technically-outstanding, engaging instrumental guitar music since the
untimely demise of the Edmund Fitzgerald, look no further.’ - Nightshift

‘Their instrumental post-rock sound, grandiose like a heavier and more intricate Explosions In The Sky augmented by the band’s very own cellist is absolutely captivating. Their distorted peaks, battling guitars and swift undulating changes of pace mean the 30-minute set flies by far too quickly. We have discovered something special in this one.’ - Drowned in Sound

It all happens on Friday 29 August at The Wheatsheaf.