Bears are in the news at the moment: in Siberia last month, a bear ate twelve peasants, whereas two weeks ago another Bear ate a third of Georgia. So perhaps the omens are good for the re-release of ‘EP1′, a collection of soothing anti-folk tunes by multi-instrumentalist Jerome Alexander, operating under the nom-de-plume Message to Bears.

The world conjured up by these wordless songs is cloisterish and peculiarly Oxonian, at least to my ears. Think Boar’s Hill at sunrise or New College chapel at dusk. The key qualities are understatement and simplicity, with Alexander’s gorgeously plangent guitar work laying the foundations. Like fellow instrumentalists The Workhouse, he doesn’t play anything remotely outlandish, but the tone of the instrument draws the attention. You come away from the record marvelling at how imperishable the sound of a well-made and expertly-recorded acoustic guitar can be: listen to the hushed guitar duet ‘Good Morning’ to hear what I mean (the following track, ‘Swim’ is just as good).

That said, Alexander has a well-developed liking for sonic devices, and a number of tracks on EP1 benefit from tastefully-applied electronica. With regards to melody, ‘To make a portrait’ is on the dull side, but the track is enlivened by what sounds like reversed, distorted piano, while ‘Found You And You’re Safe’ even has a nervous, scratchy rim-shot beat going under most of it. I find the latter song pretty but a bit mechanical. The addition of that old post-rock staple, indecipherable recorded speech, doesn’t help it either.

But I’ve left the best to last: the wonderful, impressionistic ‘Plane Over Evening Sky’. Again, we get a rapt, concentrated opening statement from the acoustic guitar which then widens almost cinematically with the inclusion of layers of lush guitars. Bells, string washes and even hand claps are subsequently incorporated into the texture to create an almost religious experience.

EP1 is a big success, as there is variety operating within a rigorous artistic vision. The songs all sound like part of a well-defined whole, but most of them work equally well on their own. For those that wish to hear contemplative, other-worldly music played on traditional instruments, this record comes highly recommended.

Message to Bears Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

 Here’s a live clip of Henry Rollins’ spoken word performance from Thursday night at the Oxford Academy. Here, he tackles Mariah Carey. Review to follow on here very soon.

THE WINCHELL RIOTS
EPIC45
HREDA
EDUARD SOUNDING BLOCK

Friday 29 August, The Wheatsheaf, Oxford
7.30pm - 11pm Advance tickets on sale here.

After five years of monthly shows, the final OxfordBands.com monthly gig night is this Friday, so please come down and help us see the shows off in style. 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.

We’re signing off with a belter. THE WINCHELL RIOTS, formed from the ashes of the much-missed Fell City Girl, headline, almost a year to the day after we put on their first gig. We also promoted the first Fell City Girl show, so we’re very happy to sign off our live shows with a band we’ve been with since day one.

Main support are the beautiful EPIC45, whose album ‘May Your Heart Be The Map’ has been the soundtrack to our summer:

“The best English Summer record ever” (Word)

“Beguiling and Beautiful” (NME)

“You’ll feel like you’ve been hearing MYHBTM in your head all your life, and were waiting for someone to record it” (The Sunday Times)

“Gorgeous stuff - highly recommended” (Boomkat)

‘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, without doubt one of the best bands to emerge from the Oxford scene in the past twelve months:

‘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.’ - DrownedinSound

And opening are the twelve-legged beast that is EDUARD SOUNDING BLOCK, formed from the ashes of Suitable Case For Treatment, one of the first bands we championed as OxfordBands.com live.

‘Cramming in everything from Pelican and Fantomas to a couple of passages that sound for all the world like Youthmovies if they’d grown up listening to Carcass, they’re truly monstrous. Special mention, too, to the keyboards, which lift and augment the guitar pyrotechnics with choppy, angular chords reminiscent of Nought. Sure, there are signs that it’s only their third show: some of the changes are a little choppy and can sound forced, and sometimes the vocals adds little to the overall effect, but there’s every sign they’ll easily eclipse the memory of their former outfit (some achievement in its own right). In the future, there will be B-movies along the lines of Godzilla vs. Eduard Sounding Block. I know who my money’s on.’ - Nightshift

Like disjointed bones heaped together in some elephants’ graveyard of song, this EP feels like a jumbled collection of tricks, tropes, riffs and motives thrown together with little thought to the holistic effect. For this is “post-rock” in its slash-and-cut, mix-and-match guise, which is so jerkily unfocused as to come off more like “arock”, if we’re talking prefixes. Not that we’re frightened of challenging, complex music, mind – but simply having lots of little bits doesn’t make something complex; otherwise a bag of pebbles would be complex. At least you could use a bag of pebbles as a weapon, whereas this EP comes off limp and ineffective.

Which is all a terrible, terrible pity, as The Youngs Plan can make a powerful noise live. We’ve seen them twice, and it was well worth the effort. This is doubly impressive, as they’re relatively young musicians (hence the name? Will they hang around long enough for it to become an incongruous embarrassment, like Sonic Youth?), who clearly have a fine grasp of their sound, and who play together with an easy grace that belies their years.

The vocals on the recording are rather reedy and broken, often grasping at the note and dropping back down with the booby prize, but the rest of the playing is consummate at every turn, especially the bass - check the almost funky elisions at the start of “Our Getaway Car”, or the cheeky worms of sound that crawl around the start of “Moths”. Sadly all this playing is going to waste, and every time they click into something interesting, it’s immediately abandoned in favour of a twiddly guitar figure or, worse, a Biffy Clyro wasteland. Sadly, the only time they do stay on target, it’s simply to endlessly chant in Jonquilised non-harmony, the line “the rocks that we threw in the river”, which isn’t a line that becomes more profound with repetition.

They say that bands have the whole of their lives to write their first record, and often a mere few months to pen the follow up, which is why second albums are often disappointing. Well, TYP seem to be crowbarring every idea they’ve had so far into this EP, in an excited jumble; perhaps the next record will be a more spacious, thought out affair in which their talents can shine. It’s disappointing to be so unimpressed with a record by a band so brimming with potential, but this EP feels like a trek down a long and dusty road - it’s a tedious trudge no matter how many arbitrary twists and turns are thrown in.

The Youngs Plan Myspace

By David Murphy

One of my favourite Homer Simpson rants is an impassioned defence of second-tier jeans manufacturers; ” I take my stand with all those brave men who leapt into an overcrowded market, shouting ‘Me, too!’” He’d like The Scholars, who despite many strengths, are emphatically a Me Too band, sounding, alternately, exactly like Interpol, Killers, Editors (they even have a song named after a German city!), Coldplay and probably any other band with a one-word name.

The derivative nature of most of their debut album, ‘Turbulence’ is their most serious weakness, but one which I hope and expect they will grow out of. After all, Radiohead started out as a dodgy bunch of U2-apers, until they found their own voice. So long as the Scholars see ‘Turbulence’ as a departure-point rather than a final destination, they may have a bright future.

Certainly, there is lots to build on. The first impression is that the production values are very much at the high end and that certain songs have a natural home on daytime Radio 1. For example, despite the suspiciously-familar intro, it would be unfair to class ‘This Heart’s Built to Break’ as just an Editors B-side (aside from the fact that with the exception of ‘Munich’, Editors don’t have any A-sides), as it has a good big tune and doesn’t annoy you with moronic lines such as ‘You don’t need this disease, not like that’. Adrian Gillet is a pretty good singer, whose strengths lie in clarity and diction rather than power or dexterity, but like the band in general, he is too much beholden to his influences: the idea that he is Paul Banks of Interpol or Tom Smith of Editors or Brandon Flowers of the Killers rolled into one creates a very strange affectation that generates an almost comical effect. On ‘The Pathway’, for example, he has fallen into an absurdly arch delivery of the verses, like Neil Tennant fronting Coldplay. If the lyrics had a trace of irony or wit it might just work, but they are mostly clumsy singer-songwriter pap:

“Broken dreams lie next to me, their hope left on the floor

I’ll help you up, my friend, and build your courage more”

Gillet is a good deal better elsewhere, to be fair. The opener ‘Birth’ is a pretty refrain in the style of Interpol’s ‘Next Exit’, a repeating four-chord vamp which builds satisfyingly from spacey synthesiser chords, incorporating a cute guitar pick and impassioned singing. The more acoustic ‘Mousetrap’ is Gillet’s best vocal performance, and perhaps not uncoincidentally, sees the band putting some clear blue water between themselves and their previously-mentioned post-punk heroes (although there is a slight resemblance to Echo and the Bunnymen’s ‘The Killing Moon’). ‘Dortmund’ sees the Scholars treading on Coldplay’s toes; the song is put together beautifully, with perfectly-placed organ, synth washes and even the odd bit of rocking-out at the end, but the two main charges stand; the songwriting hasn’t found a home to call its own and Gillet sings as if he has need of surgical removal of a root vegetable from a painful place.

Not wanting to end on a bummer, The Scholars have made an extremely polished, often very pretty record (as an added example, check the glorious harmonies on the chorus of ‘Only You’). Their next tasks include trying to find a more original musical palette, to cut out the adolescent awkwardness of most of the lyrics, and get their potentially-fine singer to take a chill pill. Let’s face it, Paul Banks ain’t all that.

The Scholars Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

Dive Dive are offering local music fans the chance to get discounts on tickets for the upcoming Offset Festival on 30/31 August at Hainault Forest Country Park. To get tickets for £40 (non-camping) or £45 (camping) instead of £45 and £55 respectively, click here and enter ‘Dive Dive’ as the discount code. The festival also features Wire and Gang of Four, as well as Future of the Left, Blood Red Shoes and Oxford’s own Young Knives.

Youthmovies are off on tour throughout November this year in support of a new EP, ‘Polyp’, which will be released on 6 November. The tour, which takes in Oxford on 13 November, looks like this:

Thu 6 Nov - London, Water Rats; Fri 7 Nov - Brighton, Freebutt; Sat 8 Nov - Kingston, Fighting Cocks; Mon 10 Nov - Norwich, Queen Charlotte; Tue 11 Nov - Birmingham, Bar Academy; Wed 12 Nov - Bristol, The Cooler; Thu 13 Nov - Oxford, Zodiac; Fri 14 Nov - Derby, The Royal; Sat 15 Nov - Leeds Cockpit; Mon 17 Nov - Sheffield, Fusion; Tue 18 Nov - Manchester, Night & Day; Wed 19 Nov - Liverpool, Barfly Loft; Thu 20 Nov - Glasgow, King Tuts; Fri 21 Nov - Edinburgh, Cabaret Voltaire; Sat 22 Nov - Carlisle Brickyard.

Tonight starts with a change of line up, with Baby Gravy having to drop out, due to a family bereavement. Thanks a lot to Cat Matador for stepping in and our best wishes to Zahra.

This is my first review for OxfordBands.com, so I have decided to be largely friendly and to close an eye to imperfection and an ear to musical monstrosity. Kicking off, Cat Matador show enormous commitment to their material, an experimental grunge/rock that is quite original, dynamic, catchy and very clever, but not yet fully accomplished. The less-than-good sound did not help either, and I’d love to listen to the band again in a more sympathetic acoustic setup. I particularly liked the unusual touch of Sian’s electric violin in the rock context and the immense power that Christopher’s drumming gave to the dark, intricate musical pattern. In total, Cat Matador is a band with a lot of promising ideas and they will surely emerge sooner or later as yet another amazing Oxford group.

Next, Family Machine hit the stage, and it’s like a ray of sunshine after a storm. Their music is cheerfully beautiful; it just makes you sing, dance and feel good. Drummer Jay is a dream to watch smile, play and sing and with his perfect, minimal style he would be a dream for any producer to deal with, giving power and groove to their catchy sixties sound. A typical Family Machine song is a three-minute condensed mix of emotions that never step too far from your ears nor from your heart. Their music flows effortlessly through the listener’s soul, thanks to great musical ability married to an uncomplicatedly pure song-writing talent that doesn’t try to reach for more than it achieves: beauty.

After the sunshine, it’s time for an earthquake: Little Fish, the band everybody’s talking about. Now, I asked myself several times before hearing them, how can two people be enough to play festivals, win awards and create aggressive yet melodic punk? Well, you just have to see them live to believe all that and more. Singer Juju has been compared to the best female songwriters of the past and present (P.J. Harvey and Janis Joplin on occasions) but that’s all wrong. Juju cannot be compared to anybody else, as her unique, raw, mad, infectious style is something that nobody else has achieved before. Juju doesn’t just sing, she lives the song, with the little melody needed coming from her guitar and all of her soul coming out of her small, twitching body: a true force of nature, a work of art, worth going to see just to have an idea of what a one-off artist with immense vocal gifts can come up with. And Nez: I am a drummer myself, and in my time in Oxford I seem to have been quite unlucky, coming across some dreadful drumming when I have time to go to gigs. I hate to speak badly about fellow sticksmen… well, how could I do that now, when Nez’s ability, vision, dynamic dexterity and sensitivity are just some of his strong points? His rhythms, eclectic approach to the song, solidity and power have a lot to say not only to those drummers who play pubs in front of a few mates, but also to the big stars up there who would need to team up in numbers to match what Nez does naturally and with ease.

To summarize: if you have just heard of Little Fish, it is time to dive into the sea and be ready for the wave.

By Dario Derma Lena

Mental health charity MIND should benefit from a strong bill at the Exeter Hall on Friday August 15. Local soul-folk diva Chantelle Pike headlines, with support from Faringdon-based troubadour Trev Williams, jazzy singer-songwriter Vanessa Lewis and indie rockers Failing to Focus. It’s four quid on the door, starting from 8.00p.m. Visit http://www.trevwilliams.co.uk/ for more information on the acts and the charity.

Sunday morning is usually the preserve of the band who will gently caress your aching head and ease you into the day. Someone obviously has a perverse sense of humour because Mephisto Grande are gracing the main stage. Liam Ings-Reeves’ voice growls from the PA like a terrifying preacher. Augmented by a choir their songs are somewhat larger in scope than normal but no less unnerving. ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken?’ remains a highlight and seems to make perfect sense in the way it is served up as a grizzled dirty gospel song.

Aching heads be damned, we head to the Barn to catch Kyte who had greatly impressed us recently as a support band to iLikeTrains. Delicate soundscapes are Kyte’s stock and they don’t disappoint. The problem with describing bands like this is that terms such as ethereal are all to easy to crank out for the umpteenth time, but they also sum things up succinctly. Kyte begin in wistful mode but each and every slowly-engineered build-up pays off with something approaching majesty. We only wish we could enjoy them outside because it’s all too rare to hear this kind of thing in beautiful sunshine; it’s usually heard emanating from bedrooms with the curtains closed all day.

Back in the Barn and there’s more sonic chaos with The Early Years. Taking their inspiration from Krautrock and Suicide, (their new single is even titled ‘Like A Suicide’) their set is rife with motorik drum beats and swelling crescendos. ‘The Computer Voice’ threatens to be a highlight of the set with its Jim Morrison-styled vocals, before the band give themselves over to the glory of drone and rattle the roof of the barn with thunderous noise.

Over on the main stage Johnny Foreigner have been attacking everyone with their angular metal/punk for long enough, and it’s the turn of Fighting With Wire to provide back-to-basic thrills. They may only be a three-piece but the noise they produce is vast and visceral. Frank Turner will later refer to them in terms of being not dissimilar to early Foo Fighters (and earning a poorly aimed bottle launched in his direction as a result) but he’s not too far from the truth. Big riffs and big choruses and an energetic show might not make Fighting With Wire the most original thing you’ll ever see, but for mindless thrills you won’t go far wrong.

Changing pace completely are Camera Obscura who are somewhat disappointing. It would take a cold heart to dislike their music which is light and fluffy and about as close to pop perfection as you can get, yet there is something missing. Whether it’s in the mix is hard to ascertain, but somehow it just doesn’t translate as well as it should. We remind ourselves to slap Let’s Get Out of This Country on as soon as we get home to restore our faith.

Having heard Ulrich Schnauss‘ name dropped by several cool types recently we deem it worthy a visit to the Barn to take in his electronic genius. Genius it might be, but as a visual spectacle there can be no more tedious sights than a grown man at a computer who might just as well be playing minesweeper than creating music. We resolve to grow a beard and take these things far more seriously in future and head back out into the sun.

Frank Turner will almost certainly never be accepted as cool, yet here he is on the main stage putting in a performance that would set alight a festival several times larger than Truck. Love him or hate him you’ve got to give him credit for being a master showman. His backing band is built from locals Dive Dive, and they provide the drive behind the likes of ‘I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous’ and ‘Photosynthesis’ allowing Turner to relax and force the audience into participation. He’s got the assurance of someone who could be headlining and after years of hard work, his songs are starting to strike a chord too. It’s another contender for performance of the festival.

When the programme promises a spoken word performance from any local band, you’ve just got to check it out. I mean, imagine a reading from Twizz Twangle, or some lovelorn poetry from Richard Walters - excellent. The spoken word performance from Youthmovies‘ Andrew, though, is just painful: a horrible sub-Joycean pseudo-stream of consciousness babbling that erases all memory of his band’s sterling set on the Barn Stage the previous day.

This Is Seb Clarke have some excellent burgundy Beatles suits, and create some decent straight up trio rock that’s a bit like half of The Hives, but the programme had promised us 12 piece horn driven heaven, so we slope off feeling hard done by.

Wouldn’t it be great if a band called The Nuns were an all-girl tribute to sixties garage rockers The Monks, only in nun outfits? Just as well that’s what they are then, and great with it: a rambunctious, good-time party band who are just perfect to loosen up to on a warm festival afternoon, regardless of whether or not you’re familiar with the source material.

A friend of mine has a theory that ska bands are by definition fun. The Drug Squad do nothing to prove him wrong, which is good news for everybody who’s here to dance. The other ska staples are in place too. Hats and sunglasses indoors? Check. Uptempo tunes sandwiches by good-natured banter? Check. The only out-of-place element is the singer, who seems to have wandered out of a completely different genre. The mismatching shirt and tie say ska, but the Cookie Monster growl and the goatee scream heavy metal. Apparently he’s only been in the band for about two and a half hours, so perhaps we’re witnessing an incomplete transformation. Although the songs are highly danceable, there’s no standout track making a bid for classic status. Still, the the band creates a party atmosphere that makes the live performance more than the sum of their tunes.

Luke Smith’s set is delayed because of generator problems. Doesn’t matter, we’re happy just to stand and listen to him talk, seeing as he’s the most erudite and charming man at the festival. The music might well be somewhat derriere garde, stemming from music hall ditties and 70s MOR, but as an extension of Luke’s chummy personality it works perfectly. Nobody else here would pen a tune like “You’ll Never Stop People Being Gits”, ridicule their bassist, take the piss out of audience singalongs, and still come out looking like the nicest man in town.

Borderville are high-energy, high-concept and a lot of fun live. Their theatrical-military look is the perfect fit for a flamboyant but deceptively tight set with their charismatic keyboardist a standout. Their vaudevillian yet hard-rocking set hurtles along all too quickly, and the audience are left yelling for an encore.

Maps hold our attention with some rather pretty soundscapes and layered vocal lines. Unfortunately for them, they go and ruin all their good work by covering Ride’s ‘Leave Them All Behind’ at the end of the set. It’s unfortunate for Maps because everything else they’ve done is blown away by the sheer scale of this one song.

Neil Halstead, from Slowdive, feels somewhat guilty about playing acoustic guitar on the shoegazing bill. “I don’t even have a pedal,” he admits. No matter as he performs lovely smoky wisps of song that keeps the small crowd happy. Nothing onstage to explain why he’s held in reverence, perhaps, but something rather lovely all the same.

Pete Kember, AKA Sonic Boom is one of the big names of the festival, and has made some of the most amazing psychedelic music we own. He begins his performance as part of Spectrum with a slow simple keyboard piece, underpinned by elementary drum machine. It actually sounds rather like Jean-Michel Jarre, in a good way, and draws us into a head nodding state of bliss. Once his rhythm section get onstage, they start doing something that sounds like The Shadows in a wind tunnel, with some slightly unconvincing vocals. Seeing as our indie legends quota hasn’t been good this weekend, we quit while we’re ahead and nip off to see Thomas Truax.

Five years ago we saw Truax play to handful of bemused listeners on this very spot, but now he’s one of the most popular acts on the bill. Thirty minutes isn’t really long enough to get to grips with his Tom Waits on The Great Egg Race marriage of American grotesquerie and homemade instruments, but it’s interesting that one of the biggest cheers is for the bitter sweet “The Butterfly & The Entomologist”, played with a handheld battery fan and a guitar, showing that Truax has songwriting abilities to back up his post-industrial carny routines.

Following some tent dismantling operations, we arrive halfway through YACHT’s set, where two people are taking a bizarre Q&A session. Thankfully this is dispensed with forthwith in favour of a sort of new wave disco rock that sounds like a contemporary electro take on Arthur Russell, overtopped with ranting vocals that remind us of Talking Heads in the way disconnected statements are pushed together to make implausible sense. The statements “I married a doctor”, “It’s better than awkward silence” and “I used to live a in a psychic city” linger in the mind after the show, as if to be decoded like arcane jottings. We’ve seen a million bands who do live vocals over backing tracks, but YACHT are the first act in a long time to marry compositional ability to stage performance successfully: seriously, the robot Pan’s People interpretations of the programmed sounds are beautifully controlled, and probably just as hard to perform as actually playing the music would be. So we go home feeling we’ve seen one of the festival’s best and most unexpected sets.

Is it Ride? No. Is it Slowdive? No. It’s Chapterhouse! Do we care? Not really. We try find a reason to be overwhelmed by this mindboggling reunion but just can’t. It’s time to head off home so we pop Leave Them All Behind into the car stereo and start counting down the days until next year’s festival.

By David Murphy, Sam Shepherd, Stuart Fowkes and Kate Griffin