After five years of monthly shows, we are sad to announce that we’re ending our regular OxfordBands.com monthly gig nights as of next month.

Starting in February 2003 with The Young Knives, Intentions of an Asteroid and Jarcrew, we’re happy to have brought the likes of Deerhoof, Mark Eitzel, Part Chimp, Todd, Telescopes, Brave Captain and the otherworldly delights of Taurpis Tula, Hertta Lussu Assa, Noxagt, KK Null, Virgin Eye Blood Brothers and many more to Oxford, as well as all our favourite local bands.

The final show will take place on Friday 29 August and will feature some of our favourite bands, both local and from elsewhere - lineup to be finalised shortly. We hope you can make it along and help us wave goodbye to five years of great gigs.

This week’s cocktail hour bagatelle is to imagine a version of 80s teen stalwart The Breakfast Club with Oxford bands recast as the central characters.  We shan’t spoil the fun by making any suggestions, but we do feel that we can envisage a denouement in which acts find unlikely kinship in those from different genres, having spent a few evenings listening to the new Hretha EP.  Judged by their live shows, we’ve always had Hretha (and yes, it is a “th” sound, even though it might look like a “d”, just admit you aren’t as orthographically astute as we) pegged as a straight up post rock trio.  You know the sort: pretty good, lots of instrumental fiddliness, dynamics instead of compositions.  Their intricately cross-stitched guitar skeins have kept us diverted for half an hour here and there, but we’ve never felt them working too deeply into the consciousness.  This EP changes all that with a collection of emotive instrumentals that can only be called wordless songs, and we find that our minds are drifting towards many of our favourite balladeers, even as it throws up the obvious references, such as Mogwai or Billy Mahonie.

“Knowing How To Carry” is a snowy waste of a tune, and buoys you aloft on the swell of a heart-rending melody; in much the same way as Oxford stalwarts The Workhouse do, Hretha manage here to communicate acres of emotion without resorting to verbal communication.  The ‘cello may be something of a post-rock cliché, but the way it’s weary melody pulls against the funerary plod of the drums is quite gorgeous.  We feel honour bound to use words like “glacial”, “shimmering”, “hyperborean” and lots of others we found in a dusty file marked “4AD” in the back of the NME storeroom.  Sadly the rock out payoff is somewhat generic and unsatisfying, but the track still exhibits a delicacy their live shows have never captured.

No such criticisms of “Little Knows (Gino)” which doesn’t spend all its energy trying to be epic, and channels them all into just being a lovely wash of sound, in which wispy net curtains of guitar flap lazily in the breeze and a heavily reverbed elfin choir laments in the background.  Again, there’s a vintage feel to the music, and it could easily be fitted into an odd space between Robert Fripp and Channel Light Vessel.  Featherlight, brief, but far from forgettable.

We’re on more solid post-rock territory with “New Pastures”, which is probably the CD’s low point, even though it’s immaculately played; this is simply because it sounds like so many other bands doing the rounds, especially in the Battles flavoured three note motif at the opening, played in such clipped tines it sounds almost like a harpsichord.   Even here, however, Hretha manage some surprises, as a brief interlude of dumb monolithic thrashing that wouldn’t embarrass local sludge metallers Beard Of Zeuss falls away to reveal a stately undead march, with plenty of tickled cymbal and amp fuzz.  Eventually the density builds up to an overloaded climax that wouldn’t feel too out of place with Brian May soloing over the top before finally dying out to cluster of clicks and chitters (which may be down to a rather scuffed CD, we’ll admit, but it sounds good).

So there you go, plangent threnodies, wordless paeans, and cock rocking, all things we never thought Hretha dealt in until we heard the EP.  “Repays repeated listens” is another cliché we found languishing in the NME vaults; they definitely don’t use that one anymore, they’re too busy trying to get you to throw all your records away and buy new ones every 2 months. 

Hretha Myspace

By David Murphy       

The Winchell Riots are to play a special acoustic show to raise funds for the Accord Hospice in Renfrewshire, Scotland. The show takes place on 8 August at the Port Mahon in Oxford, and support comes from The Half Rabbits, who will also be performing an acoustic set. Tickets are £5 from here. For full details about the show and why it means so much to the band to be playing, click here.

Anyone who has ever heard Rick Danko of The Band sing ‘It Makes No Difference’ or ‘Caledonia Mission’ knows that only Canadians should be allowed to make country music. The Americans, although they invented it, always seem to make it too hokey, too tailored to conservative expectations. To those that doubt me, I have two words: Garth Brooks.

Vancouver’s Miriam Jones recorded her album in Nashville, but has retained a lot of her Canadian attributes. For a start, she seems to have been photographed standing on an ice-floe (not many of them in Tennessee, I believe) and is wearing an exceedingly fetching woolly hat (not the fashion accessory of choice in Knoxville). More pertinently, her voice has a northern, elfin quality which you sometimes hear in fellow Canucks Alanis Morrisette and Aimee Mann, and which gives her album of largely feel-good country pop an interesting twist or two.

I defy anyone not to be charmed by the sheer naturalness of the melodies in songs such as ‘Always Been Between’, or ‘Fancy Free’, both panegyrics to quirky domestic bliss. The former is my go-to song after a day of office traumas (it’s on a lot, these days), as the blissed-out swing of Jones’ faultless backing band married to the artless folk-tune conspire to dissolve away the suppressed ferocities and impotent rage accrued over the previous eight hours. The one thing that can re-ignite them is to read the lyrics; they are the weakest part of Jones’ game and in the following combination of nervously over-reaching imagery and howling inappropriateness she has produced a comedy classic:

‘You are somewhat elfin, forest-friendly yet refined

While an element of mofo keeps you coolly out of line’

To be fair, this is a nadir, and elsewhere Miriam’s writing solidifies, ( ‘Interstate’ for example, is an evocative road movie in song) but in general her lyrics are fussy and overly obscure. The best thing for the listener is to cover the lyric pages in impenetrable marker pen and just listen to her sing. ‘Fancy Free’ is just lovely, a song by a woman in love with creation, with no hint of irony or nostalgia in sight.

The record is not wall-to-wall country: ‘Love Let Me In’ is a well-sung piano and cello ballad which those that quietly enjoy The Pretenders’ ‘I’ll Stand By You’ but can’t take the more full-on experiences offered by such eight-octave brutes as Mariah Carey or Celine Dion might get some pleasure from. Jones’ Christianity, which is worn lightly on ‘Fancy Free’ is large-and-in-charge on the stern but austerely-impressive hymn ‘I Am One’.

I am orphan made daughter, I am a harlot made a wife

I am a poor man called to dinner, I am a stranger recognised.

It will be interesting to see how Jones’ British audiences, who will be significantly more self-conscious about religious testimony than their American counterparts, respond to such songs. The correct response would be to rush out and campaign to make ‘I Am One’ compulsory in all British churches, but perhaps more likely will be shuffling of feet and looking at the floor.

Miriam Jones has had some joy on the Oxford scene already, with airplay on BBC Oxford and gigs at the Jericho. She deserves to be welcomed, so long as she never, ever calls someone a mofo again.

Miriam Jones Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

The Zapfest website has announced in the last hour that the event, scheduled for Saturday July 12 and featuring Youthmovies headlining alongside a host of local acts, has been cancelled. The organiser has declined to give the reason for the cancellation, but has requested all ticket-holders to return to the point of sale to obtain full refunds.