Some gigs are just ill-starred from the outset. The trick is to pull them around so you remember them for the right reasons.

Tonight is a prime example - first, the show underwent an enforced last-minute move from The Regal to The Wheatsheaf, missing the local music listings in the process. And second, the scheduled headliners Xmas Lights were forced to pull out at even shorter notice. All of which meant an audience of fewer than twenty, including support act, soundman and promoter, turned out to see Pulled Apart By Horses.

Boy, did the rest of you miss out - they’re easily one of the best live bands we’ve seen this year (and we’ve seen a lot of bands this year). What Pulled Apart By Horses delivered wasn’t just a stunning performance, but rather a salutary lesson to all bands on how you play to a room of ten people. The mirror image of the poseur band who get a bit of hype from NME, then can’t be bothered to perform unless there are more than fifty people in the audience, PABH take the opportunity to crank their amps up even louder and shove their set right down your throat. Guitarists Tom Hudson and James Brown are everywhere: on top of the speaker stacks, mounting their guitars on the venue floor, crashing into one another on stage, as if they’ve discovered that kinetic energy is a cure for cancer.

Oh yes, almost forgot the music. In short, it’s a majestic blend of Unwound-esque post-hardcore aggression combined with the exuberance of early Fugazi: they may just be the natural successors to the much-missed Cat On Form, before they downed tools and Steve Ansell hit the big time with Blood Red Shoes. In places, it’s almost - almost - like watching Nation of Ulysses in a tiny bar in some backwoods town in 1992, and we can offer little higher praise than that.

Next time this band play in Oxford, get a front row seat.

Pulled Apart By Horses MySpace

Bicester’s ‘Modern Clichés‘ certainly win the Arthur Pewty Most Boring Name Award for 2008, but is the music any livelier than the label? The answer is: not massively. Their speciality is pitched somewhere between mild-mannered punk and unfunky funk-pop, but all the same, they do it quite pleasingly at times.

‘You Don’t Know what You Want to Be’ is a punky put-down song directed against some annoying rock-star wannabe. Phil Warson may actually be a touch too tuneful a vocalist to carry this sort of song off, which should sear rather than spar but occasionally, even from this reluctant pugilist, a punch connects:

“Think it’s OK cos you say you’re a rock star/Well that’s tonight, most other nights you work behind the bar”

Musically, the three-piece band is tight, tuneful and well-produced, with Andy Payne’s nimble, cheeky drumming a standout. Less impressive is the EP’s dreary title track, which detours towards Chili Peppers territory to no great effect, the lyric being some opaque expression of suburban discontent, complete with fake plastic smiles. Closer ‘Exactly the Same as Always’ is about as exciting as the prospect of a threesome with Janet Street Porter and Aggie from ‘How Clean is Your House?’, but it is a little more melodically sophisticated than the other two, with a nod to The Lightning Seeds’ ‘Pure’.

‘Modern Clichés’ are by no means a bad band, but they suffer from a pronounced lack of direction. If they’re going to be a punk band, they could do worse than head down to the Junkie Brush Halloween gig to hear the beast red in tooth and claw. If they want to do pop, they’ll need to find more interesting subjects to write about than Bicesterian rock-star fantasists, and steer clear of the half-baked funk.

Modern Cliches Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

The first two tracks of EP Dumbstruck are mixed by Chris Sheldon, whose CV reads like the track listing for an indie rock compilation album. That’s an excellent clue to what The Dacoits are all about: indie rock in the Nineties/early Noughties style.

Lazy reviewers will immediately seize on the resemblance between PJ Harvey and fragile-looking frontwoman Carrie Rossiter, but Harvey is just one of many interesting influences thrown into the Dacoits mix. The chunky basslines of opener ‘Home by twelve‘ recall the Pixies, one of the many bands Sheldon has worked with, while elsewhere it’s possible to hear echoes of Nirvana, the Smashing Pumpkins and other grunge heavyweights.

The dark undertones of ‘Dumbstruck’ also owe a lot to Garbage, and it’s no accident that the Dacoits invite comparison with other bands catapulted into the spotlight by charismatic women: Portishead and Sonic Youth are just two that spring to mind. It’s inevitable that Rossiter will be the focus of attention as the band becomes better known, which might mean that the rest of the band is unfairly overlooked.

Overall, the sound is an exciting return to the days when indie was genuinely alternative. The Dacoits might just be the band who can rescue indie rock from the Coldplay clones. The debut album is due for release later this year, and I’m very excited about hearing it.

The Dacoits Myspace

By Kate Griffin

As part of a slightly-bizarre series of gigs called ‘Homecoming’, The Young Knives will perform at the Oxford Academy on Sunday 21 December. According to Academy Events, the shows see established musicians ‘paying homage to their roots and crafting a bill of live music from their stomping ground’ - it will be interesting to see which Oxford stars will be picked out by TYK for the show, which goes on sale this Thursday (23 October). Oxford gets the best end of the deal, with Liverpool getting The Rascals, and Dogs being chosen to represent London for some unfathomable reason.

Do we need another James Blunt? I don’t personally, but pre-pubescent girls are always with us, as are the sort of people who buy all their music from Tesco’s, so I guess there’s a need for soppy balladeering by non-threatening middle class boys implicit in modern society. Adam Barnes, a.k.a. Motion in Colour fits the bill with terrifying exactness. Does he actually exist, or is he, like The Archies, a sinister Music Industry construct designed to denude the readers of Smash Hits of their remaining readies?

All right, I’ll confess I find his ‘Airplanes’ rather pretty, with a piano and strings intro reminiscent of that of the Crash Test Dummies classic ‘Mmm, Mmm, Mmm’. Barnes’ singing is sweet, vulnerable and note-perfect, and the production is perfectly decent, if of the freeze-dried variety. Like every sixteen-year old, his lyrics aren’t much cop, though I’m not sure his target audience would appreciate ‘Thou hast conquered, O Pale Galilean” or “I can show you fear in a handful of dust” smuggled into their pop confectionery. Still the flood of self-pitying clichés can get cloying.

We’re into Fotherington-Thomas territory (”Hello clouds, hello sky!) with ‘Ballad of A Little Bird’, which isn’t quite as excruciating as the title suggests. It’s actually a mid-tempo shuffle that’s quite pleasing musically, although Barnes overdoes the ‘Take wing, and fly the nest” blandishments.

The remaining tracks are unremarkable solo-acoustic tunes, with the best specimen being ‘It’s Not the End of the World’. Without the full-band treatment, Barnes is revealed to be a competent rhythm guitarist, and his singing is undeniably natural and accomplished. Still, the end result is a bit of a bore.

The scary thing is that at the age of sixteen, Barnes seems to be the finished product. I can’t think of any way that he could improve ‘Airplanes’, because it fulfils the brief (namely, write a three and a half minute pop song that will make teenage girls go weak at the knees) so perfectly. Against that, the song is largely wafty, sentimental claptrap and we should want even schoolkids to be immunised against that. Shouldn’t we? Or am I being a pompous ass again?

Motion in Colour Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

Breaking the habit of a lifetime, this month’s GTI gig happens on Friday 24^th at the Wheatsheaf, rather than the usual Saturday. Maria Ilett, with her cool new horn band, open the evening (8.45), indie stalwarts Footsteps and Voices (9.40) are on next, followed by controversial rapper Tay-G (10.35).Door is 8.00, £4.00 cover, with a quid knocked off if you order here.

An intriguing Coo Coo club weekender coming up. Headlining on Saturday 25 October at The Jericho Tavern are Dublin synth-popsters Fight Like Apes with local punk acts Baby Gravy and The Scarletts in support. Doors are 8.00p.m and tickets are available for five pounds here.

Moving to The Holywell Music Room on the following Monday, the headliner is world-renowned Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds and his band, with stellar support from Finn and Richard Walters. Door is 7.30 and tickets are available for a tenner here.

A bouquet of roses to Three Blind Mice, who succeeded in putting together an excellent lineup of varied but compatible acts on their first night as promoters. Dead flowers through the mail to the Port Mahon toilet attendant, who failed to note a coil of barbed wire in the toilet bowl of the gents (wouldn’t an ‘Out of Order’ sign have been sufficient?) and then compounded his error by presiding over an occupation of the same room by a posse of female physiology students who wanted to do their make-up. Let’s get to the music and banish these traumatic memories.

The combined age of Tristan & The Troubadours seemed to me in the murky Port light to be about seventy. So far so unremarkable, but you should know that there are seven of them, floppy haired hobbits enthusiastically banging percussion, scraping violins and blasting out fat organ chords. The style is hard to pin down (good), but the vocalist has obviously heard of Robert Smith, David Byrne and Win Butler, and certainly the band, with its often bombastic combination of folk instruments, spidery keyboard riffs, surges of guitar noise, and that vocal yelpiness (which will be an acquired taste for many) bring us into Arcade Fire territory-check their rather wonderful ‘Venice Ghosts’ on Myspace for a prime example. At other times in the set there lingered the aura of the after-school youth club- at one point the drummer and percussionist changed places, which demonstrates versatility, but to what effect? At the moment, I see T and the T as stem-cell talent, undifferentiated, uncommitted, but full of nervous life. What will they become?

Perhaps the next We Aeronauts, who rather despairingly admitted that ‘We’re f***ed, basically’ due to half the eight-piece folk-rock band’s taking up residence on other continents. Still, with various ringers on board they gave us a satisfying if far-from-perfect set. The strengths are in the effortless excellence of the songwriting: ‘Boatswain’s Cry’ is a worthy successor to Dylan’s ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ as the cool person’s sea shanty of choice and ‘99 Days’ was a spirited, singalong stomp with more than a nod to Mercury Rev. ‘Fleet River’ (the famous subterranean Other London River- Tom Baker’s Doctor Who once caught a salmon in it and shared it with The Venerable Bede, who adored fish) is charming on record, full of tremulous guitar atmospherics, but was on the shambolic side tonight. I hope they get their lineup sorted out soon, because songs like these are too good to lose.

Another band to recently undergo extensive re-tooling is Maria Ilett’s. Last year, she produced an excellent little CD which was all sunny folk-pop married to subtle electronica. That’s all gone now and in it’s place is drums, guitar, sax and trumpet, as if Mark Ronson were running the show. A song like ‘Sit on the Sun’ from that record doesn’t really work with this band, as the horns drown out Maria’s low notes. In contrast, they actually improve ‘Hit the Blue’, a scuzzy little charmer on record but transformed here into an exhilarating anthem. Even better is ‘You Play These Games’ which reminds me of that long-forgotten time back when Amy Winehouse could sing. The discipline of the staccatto Motown-style horns and drumming, together with Maria’s fine voice combine to superb effect.

So, well done everyone. Good music, good turnout, well-publicised (there were three local music journalists in the audience) and free white chocolate mice to all payers. What’s not to like? Oh, I remember, the bogs. If you’re coming to the next show, best bring a bottle. An empty one.

By Colin MacKinnon

Old school punk favourites Junkie Brush continue their return to action with a Halloween Night bash at the Exeter Hall. Also on the bill are Beelzebozo, EXP and The Crushing. Don’t expect too much piano-led MOR at this gig. Doors at 7.30p.m., £4 cover.

Local punk tearaways Smilex have teamed up with youthful film-maker Edward Shackleton, resulting in an animated video for their song ‘Xplode’ from their recent album ‘7′. The video can be watched on YouTube here.