Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element guitarist Giles Borg has written and directed a feature film ‘1234′, about a fledgling band struggling to make it, which debuts at the London Film Festival on 17 October and features a cameo appearance by Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element. Two songs from The Half Rabbits, ‘Man Down’ and ‘These Rumours’, have been selected to appear on the soundtrack. More details on the film at www.1234themovie.co.uk and London Film Festival at www.bfi.org.uk/lff/1_2_3_4

 The only dispiriting thing about last night’s more-than-decent Gappy Tooth Night was the Incredible Rotating Audience. Now I understand that a few people will always be gormless enough to shell out four quid to see their mates’ band and then scarper, but it felt like the entire audience for Outcry bogged off after their set, which could have been demoralising for the other acts, and represents a lousy investment for the culprits who missed a lively indie band and a bona-fide guitar genius due to their precipitate departure. Hey, people! There’s a credit crunch out there! You paid for three bands-get your money’s worth!

Rant over: Bicester’s Outcry is an ambitious four-piece who deliver a strange but wholesome confection pitched midway between Interpol and Elton John. The former are evoked principally in Joe O’Neill’s downstrummed guitar picks and the latter in Mark Robert’s solid if unspectacular low-end piano playing. To be fair to him, the absence of a bass player forced him to take this role so that the bottom didn’t drop out- to be honest, I could see no legitimate artistic reason for dispensing with the bassist- for a band clearly intent on mass appeal, they need to fill this hole.

The fact that Outcry have it in them to conquer Radio 1 (or more likely Radio 2) is largely down to their muscle-bound frontman David McMahon, whose voice evokes everyone from the previously-mentioned bespectacled national treasure to Robbie Williams and Fine Young Cannibals’ Roland Gift. He’s even a decent rapper, so far as I could make out: the Wheatsheaf’s sound system turned most of his spoken output into so much aural sago. Still, he has presence, range, control and strength and with all that, I expect Outcry to get a good deal bigger in the future. One last thing: a cabal in the audience (I’m guessing MAGS: Mums and Girlfriends) applauded through the intros as if it really were Elton or Robbie up there rather than four nervous newbies from North Oxon. Sweet.

Following the stampede of wallies to the exit was the appearance of the excellent Jake Morley, the genius I was telling you about. He’s an acoustic guitar player and singer, but that ain’t the half of it. By laying the guitar on his lap, fretting and picking at the speed of light and giving the body a thump every half a second or two, he can effectively provide rhythm, lead guitar and percussion, and thus create, all on his own, a sound world that would need three mere mortals to achieve. He sings rather well too, sometimes sounding like a more human Newton Falkner.

All this talent is wedded to a winningly self-deprecating personal style (introducing one of his tracks as ‘a gay little love song’) and some hummable tunes, with the ambivalent love song to London, ‘This City’ being a standout. I’d hope to see him on Jools Holland within the year. A final thought: in this recessionary era, the most secure job in England must be Jake’s guitar maker. He does give it a fearful belt.

Then We Take Berlin were good to their word and brought an army of fans, most of whom caught most of Jake Morley. This created a slight nervousness in the headlining act, the lead singer wondering how they were going to top what they’d just heard. To be honest, they didn’t have much of a hope, purveying a pretty basic brand of indie pop, at its best combining the shambling energy of the Libertines with yelpy vocals rather in the mould of Dive Dive’s Jamie Stuart. They have some decent, fun tunes: ‘Forever Endeavour’, for example, sounded like above-par Kaiser Chiefs, although the constant changes of drum pattern prevented the tune from ever being in danger of rocking. ‘Wednesday’ was amiable yob rock, played with a solidity and conviction missing from their Myspace demos. A not unpleasant experience all round, but there was nothing to grab you by the lapels and demand your imminent return.

Outcry Website

By Colin MacKinnon

“Ghost Town” by The Specials. “Paperback Writer” by The Beatles. “Breakout” by Swing Out Sister. We all have our pantheon of perfect pop songs, three-minute nuggets of joy that cannot be bettered one iota, but just as exciting and cherishable are mysterious records, tracks that don’t quite make sense, songs that never entirely resolve themselves into something solid. Amongst the great music that never fully reveals itself - Robert Johnson, Erik Satie, Lee Perry, The Fall - we might find nestled our very own Ally Craig, as his new single is intriguing, mysterious, and somehow sparse and complex simultaneously.

 We open with a plucked, clockwork chicken guitar, that sounds for all the world just some disco pants and a voodoo doll away from funk legends The Meters. This one note stroll suddenly tumbles into an odd descending figure, and sets the tone for the rest of the track as “lopsided”. As the song develops it fattens up with some chunky guitar and drums, yet never loses the awkwardness of its central rhythm, until it sounds like a pompous rock epic crumpled up and condensed like discarded notepaper. The lyrics don’t give much away either, the narrator wondering whether he could become a cyborg, and graduating eventually to mindlessly playing computer games (err, we think). In between he informs us, “I find my beauty in/ Bridges and cities, and/ The angular spirals we/ Both draw.” Who is this comic book urban wastrel, and what should we think about him? Oddly, we’re reminded of James Joyce’s pretentious genius Stephen Dedalus, whose sententious statements (”History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”) seem in equal parts risible and philosophical. Before we know it, a hesitant guitar plays the descending figure again, like an uncertain question, and is inaudibly answered by a muffled drumroll. The end.

If “Angular Spirals” is an enigma, flipside “You Gets What You Pays For” is completely impenetrable, with more clucking pullet plucking (is this a side effect of Craig’s unusual perpendicular playing technique?), fat guitars like Shellac at a mild canter, obscure lyrics about can openers, and a sax that sounds like a punchdrunk wasp. The whole tune appears to be an excuse to develop an eerie little motif that resembles a suspense cue from Perry Mason. Believe us, we’ve listened to this single a lot, and we still find ourselves asking the same questions: What are these tracks about? Why are they shaped so unostentatiously strangely? Why are they so amazing? Why doesn’t Ally step up his release schedule, because he has it in him to make one of the great Oxford albums? Answers on a postcard.

Ally Craig Myspace

By David Murphy

After a number of injuries and suspensions, the lineup for Saturday’s Gappy Tooth Industries night at The Wheatsheaf has been finalised. Headlining are Then We Take Berlin, raw indie pop, despite being named after a Leonard Cohen line. They are derived from Indika, for fans of that recently disbanded group. First on is Vodaphone Live Music Awards-nominated popsters Outcry, and in between is singer and guitar virtuoso Jake Morley. Door is 8.00, Outcry at 8.45, Jake is on at 9.40 and TWTB at 10.35 (Gappy Tooth stage times are famously/notoriously reliable- don’t be fashionably late!). Its 4 quid on the door, less if you go to Wegottickets.

This is a mysterious four-track, twenty minute demo CD from the enigmatically/frustratingly-named Prdctv, which arrived without much information beyond a scribbled note. A quick investigative delve into the internet reveals that ‘Prdctv is the stage name of Oxford-based Alex Lloyd,’ and that he composes music on, like, computers and that, but has real live humans assisting him when playing live.

Now, the music here falls broadly under that convenient ‘electronica’ tag, but it leans slightly towards the more techno/rhythm-based end of things rather than snoozing ambience, cavernous dubstep, jump-up two-step, or whatever ridiculous phraseology you might like to attach to these things. On display here is a pleasing refusal to conform too closely to traditions of arrangement and simplicity, with both ‘Paradise Gone To Waste’ and ‘The Choirmaster’ dissolving into strange, acoustic instrumentation with mumbled vocals - or mumbled vocal samples - respectively. Seeing that these tracks start out as a cut-up hands-in-the-air rave classic on one hand, and an organ-drenched epic KLF jam on the other, they make for interesting listening. Following these two, ‘Fuego’s Run’ is scuppered by the use of the all-too-familiar robotic ‘Fitter… Happier…’ robotic sample (surely a mistake to do this in Oxford, of all places?), and ‘Hello Bruno’ has a touch of the face-punchingly smug Lemon Jelly about it with its warped do-do-do vocal line, but they complement the other tracks in that they’re worlds apart from them - there are a lot of types of sound at work here.

My modern reference points for this stuff are few, unfortunately - so forgive my obviousness in suggesting Aphex Twin (circa Selected Ambient Works Volume 1), Orbital and Future Sound Of London as potential influences or, at least, artists that are definitely echoed on this demo. It’s rhythmic, inventive, organic-sounding music that mixes acoustic instrumentation with the electronics to create a rich and human whole. I still find it hard to get past that name, though. They’re playing the Jericho Tavern on 31 October - how are people going to tell people who they’re going to see?

Prdctv Myspace

By Simon Minter

Jeez, this doesn’t cut it, even as a guilty pleasure. Simon Davies, an admittedly accomplished acoustic guitarist, has put together an interminable suite of passionless tangos, dance-free rumbas and charmless English folk. It’s the dullest record I’ve had to review for many a month, so with a spirit of brevity sorely lacking on ‘For Utter Beauty’s Sake’, I’ll try and get it over and done with before we all drop off.

The key idea in the album is to try to fuse Latino song forms with an almost parodic English self-consciousness. No-one seems to have actually asked why this combination should have a remote chance of working or whether anyone would want to hear it . To be fair, such seemingly arbitrary combinations can sometimes be revelatory- no-one would have rationally designed the pairing of Paul Simon with a bunch of Soweto pop musicians, but the resulting ‘Graceland’, that eternally-odd fusion of fussy New York poetry bubbling through sun-drenched accordion music, turned out to be a masterpiece. Sadly, Davies is no Paul Simon, and none of his tunes is remotely memorable.

It doesn’t help that he sings like a bit of a wally, a queasy combination of Sir John Major and Mr Bean. His excruciating performance of ‘English Rumba’ is as clumsy as his protagonist, some repressed Hugh Grant nob who wants to dance with a generic South American beauty but can’t pluck up the courage. It should be light and charming but comes over instead as dreary, patronising and out of date.

As mentioned, Davies can play, and he is often supported by good instrumental contributions from collaborators Jon Fletcher on harmonica and Jane Griffiths on strings. In addition, he is capable of the odd zingy couplet, as on the pleasantly jazzy skivers’ anthem ‘No way Jose’:

“Though the work is never-ending, I’ll go walking in the park

My workload’s pending but sod that for a lark….”

Still, the album as a whole is very hard going, and leaves you feeling exhausted and middle-aged just having it on the stereo. Why doesn’t this bloke take a long samba off a short pier?

Simon Davies Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.

This weekend’s Winkstock festival on Saturday 13 September, slated as an all-dayer at the Port Mahon, now takes places over two venues. The first show runs from 4pm until 9pm at the Port Mahon on St. Clements, and features Chops (8pm), You’re Smiling Now But We’ll All Turn Into Demons (7.10pm), American Gods (6.20pm), House of John Player (5.40pm), Joey Chainsaw (5.00pm) and Clara Kindle (4.20pm). The second part of the all-dayer runs at The Cellar off Cornmarket from 9.00pm through to 3.00am. The bands line up like this: Manatees (11.45pm), Gentle Friendly (10.45pm) and Elapse-O (9.45pm), with DJing thereafter. Entry to the Port Mahon show is £7, which includes free entry to the Cellar show, while a Cellar ticket alone will cost £5. For more information, hit the Permanent Vacation page.

It’s an iron law of nature that no two species can occupy precisely the same niche. In practical terms, this means that if the red squirrel eats the same grub, lives in the same place and suffers from the same spectrum of diseases and parasites as it’s pesky grey competitor, then eventually one will render the other extinct. As the grey is bigger, randier and possesses that American can-do spirit it will eventually win.

You may be asking what this has to do with a more-than-decent Oxford rock band. Well, like The Scholars last month, The Elrics are a group which sound, at least on first listen, to be terribly derivative, with entire passages sounding as if they have been cribbed directly from the songbook of Oasis, Green Day or even The Beatles. However, when they get it right, they don’t quite occupy the same niche as these elder statesmen, and are therefore worth hearing, because a new generation of music lovers have probably never heard of, say, ‘Taxman’ and won’t spot the obvious similiarities to The Elrics ‘Sleeplessness Creeping In’. In other words, the Elrics may occupy the same space as their heroes, but not the same time.

Less complicatedly, the record rocks. ‘She Doesn’t Exist’ may have the same whiny singing as much of ‘American Idiot’, but it has a winning bounce and confidence that is pure Iggy Pop and should sound fantastic down the Cellar with Jimmy Evil opening up the throttle at the desk. I even like the minimalist guitar solo at the end, tossed off with quiet nonchalance. They know they have something good here, so no need to shred. Production, by The Candyskins’ John Halliday is big, beefy, unfussy and right.

Much less strong is the Oasis B-side wannabe that is ‘Nothing Truly’. Or at least we have the requisite lazy, mid-tempo strummed electric guitar and by-the-numbers guitar solo patented by those ubiquitous Britrock dinosaurs. The only things missing are a Manc sneer and the lyrics ’say what you want to say’ to complete the dismal paradigm.

The band snap back into focus on ‘Sleeplessness Creeping In’. George Harrison isn’t around to complain about the liberties taken with his hymn to rock-star selfishness, but Halliday has taken advantage of the fact that the Elrics’ drummer isn’t Ringo, and given him a mighty sound which transmits to the whole thing enormous energy and groove. The lyrical theme borrows from earlier Green Day (think ‘Basket case’), with its apparent emphasis on mental derangement,  but the whole sounds as fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.

I think I like the Elrics best when they are brash, bold, long-haired and grooving. Hearing them isn’t a life-changing experience, but the unaffected youthfulness of their best songs, even when they are appealing to songs recorded in 1966, remind you of why you liked rock in the first place, rather than jazz, rhumba or Mongolian throat chant. Rock isn’t dead: like Judge Holden in ‘Blood Meridian’ it will never die.

The Elrics Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.

You might have heard people talking about Henry Rollins‘ spoken word shows. They might have told you how surprised they were at how genial, clear-sighted and hysterically funny he is as a speaker. They may even have told you that the former Black Flag singer is a match for any stand-up comic on the circuit. But you probably won’t believe them until you see it for yourself.

To look at Henry Rollins (and indeed, to listen to anything from his back catalogue, from Black Flag to his later eponymous band), you’d never imagine that behind the bulging muscles, US Marines-style crew cut, tattoos and bulbous eyes there lies a true raconteur (passages about masturbation notwithstanding, of course). But this is inspired and inspiring stuff, centring around an infectious enthusiasm for discovering all the hidden pockets of global civilisation for himself. It’s enough to make you want to explore central Baghdad on a weekend break the next time a bank holiday comes around, and we’d put money on more than a few members of the audience booking themselves plane tickets to somewhere obscure and dangerous the second they got home.

As is to be expected given These Times In Which We Live, much of the material is given over to scathing attacks on US foreign policy, starting with a reprise of Bush’s difficulties with the English language, which Rollins covered on his 2004 world tour in some detail, but which provides such a rich vein of comic potential that he has a second go at it here. Elsewhere, there’s everything from airport security searches to an extended sequence about Van Halen fans that’s worth the entrance fee alone.

Rollins’ delivery throughout is breathless - rattling through a two-hour set of rants, invective and old-fashioned guess-what-happened-to-me anecdotes without pausing for even so long as to mop his brow. More impressively, he has that rare skill of making everyone in the room feel like he’s talking to them and them alone, effectively taking 500-odd people down the pub to tell them stories about his holidays. Except for Rollins, his holidays include tours of Cambodia’s killing fields and central Afghanistan, and his anecdotes happen to include bumping into David Lee Roth and Cat Stevens.

Hilarious, thought-provoking and utterly absorbing, in places this feels like the closest thing to the late Bill Hicks currently doing the rounds, and we can barely offer higher praise than that.

By Robert Hansen.