Never let it be said that we don’t enjoy finding new musical experiences, in addition to the usual Friday night down The Sheaf, but who seriously would have thought we’d find ourselves at an all-dayer on a Sunday. In a youth club! Run by a church!! With no bar!!! Once we got over the weirdness of it all, we decided that The Mish, on St Clements, is a rather lovely little place, with a decent sound system and a relaxed, friendly atmosphere. It’s like falling into some alternate universe where The Cellar is clean and comfy, and serves mugs of coffee.

G-Block kick things off with panache, but seem to be suffering from that hip hop epidemic, Crewitis, which causes an uncomfortable swelling of the MC roster. There are so many rappers onstage we don’t even notice one of them till he steps from the shadows to take the mike, and although there’s a wide range of styles on offer, not to mention some real talent bubbling under, the entire set feels unfocused and fragmented, with so many vocalists strung together. A jam on a Fugees rhythm, whilst a little too soft-centred to do them justice, shows what G-Block can do when things are tidied up. Ultimately the set tails off, primarily because one unimaginatively strummed guitar can never take the place of a full fat beat, but there’s more than enough potential here to make it worth remembering the name.

Sadly Vultures don’t reprise their Charlbury set, but instead opt to play in a two guitar, semi-acoustic duo formation that’s relaxing but hardly revolutionary. The vocals are still sweet and catchy, and it sounds not unlike The La’s playing some sort of post-hoedown chill out session, but this is not the sort of set to stuff your Sunday aflame.

The excellent Jon Fletcher revives proceedings with a show that just oozes gigging experience: it’s not just his assured guitar fingering or his loose unhurried vocals that show he’s a past master at this sort of thing, but it’s the off the cuff banter that draws everyone together and manages to make the event feel like an intimate party for the first time that day….which is exactly how a basement full of sofas and hot chocolate should feel on a cold winter’s day. “Hold My Breath” reminds us of Bert Jansch’s unflustered melancholia, and the whole set balances implausibly between introspection and cheekiness in a thoroughly winning fashion.

Excellence of a different sort when event organisers Baby Gravy take the stage, mixing Gang Of Four’s stutter funk with the glorious vacuity of Gwen Stefani’s strip-lit mall pop. There’s plenty of fuzzy early 80s awkwardness here, of the sort you can find clogging the pages of Artrocker, but there’s also an intensity in the performance that other neo-wave poseurs lack (the effect isn’t harmed by the fact it’s bloody loud!). Admittedly the rhythms sometimes stumble when they should bounce, but when the buzzing keyboards stomp inexorably over everything like a giant BBC “B” sprite and the declamatory vocals start thumping at your eardrums, you know that these tiny details don’t matter.

Mr Shaodow pops up unexpectedly to crack out a tune with Baby Gravy, and treat us to his new single, “Grime”. It’s such a pleasure to see that his confidence has grown to match his wordplay over the past couple of years, and where once we saw him stuttering like an inexperienced comedian between tracks, now we see him working a room to perfection - even if that room is mostly empty and enjoying a nice sit down.

Rambunctious punk pop should have been the ideal chaser to this heady double act, but somehow Among The Giants have missed the target. The lumpy, chugging music is passable, but is let down by the horrible vocal foghorn honking all over it. If he really tried hard, the singer could sound like a bladdered trucker offering you a fight on George Street, but at the moment he’s slightly less charming. Still, nice to have something to aim for, eh?

Just as our thoughts are turning longingly to a Sunday roast, The Repeats cap the afternoon off immaculately. Imagine, if you will, a fizzy pop version of Talking Heads, sprinkled with rubbery bass and spindly guitar that could have been borrowed from Battles or Foals, but reminds us more of Ghanaian hi-life and township jive. There are even some unexpectedly jaunty keyboards that could have come from some ancient stadium gig by Paul Simon, 10CC or even Genesis. Admittedly, The Repeats have so many ideas laying around they do occasionally trip over them, and the vocalist could probably push himself a touch harder but the whole effect is as intoxicating as you’d expect an arch indie band featuring a cowbell and clave breakdown to be. A band to actively seek out.

And sadly, here our festival ended, though there were four acts left to entertain the crowd - which never got particularly large, but never lost its friendly atmosphere - and we leave the Mish hoping that our next Below The Belt experience is not too far away. And features some beer, naturally.

By David Murphy

If they are The Repeats, whom are they repeating? The cheeky answer, which happens to be about ninety five per cent accurate, is The Strokes.Yup, and if, like your reviewer, you harbour a passing nostalgia for the talented NY poseurs, then there’s plenty to enjoy in this demo. I like both Tom Northey’s boozy wail, lustily channelling Julian Casablancas (who himself made a career of aping Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde-era amphetamine angel) and Julian Bacharach’s inventive combination of ancient Hammond organs and big, stupid eighties-synth washes. On the other hand, the drumming and general time-keeping of the band is atrocious- we don’t want Phil Collins predictability in every band, but on a song like ‘Hot Shower, Cold Shower’ the train is teetering queasily on the rails and the emergency services are on red alert.

The songwriting is highly derivative of course, but it has a good-tempered goof-off easiness which neuters criticism. ‘Shiver’ is a cranky old grid, as Molesworth might say, but as late-night material for ecstatic, sozzled caterwauling it could scarcely be bettered, and the performance is shambolic but spirited. (As an aside, shouldn’t there be a law against kids so tender in years writing ‘When I was young…’ in their lyrics’?) The disco experiment of ‘Comfort Call’ is a qualified failure, as the big tunes which make ‘Hot Shower’ and ‘Shiver’ instantly memorable have been left behind in the cloakroom, although to be fair the rhythm section has created a decent, danceable groove.

So, The Repeats are swaggering, puppyish, ill-disciplined and personable. If you go and see them live (and do) don’t expect to stroke your chin at any point in the evening, but expect to serenade the moon and the neighbours with their warmly alcoholic anthems on your way home.

The Repeats Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

Here’s a clip of Kid606 headlining this year’s Audioscope at the Jericho on 15 November.

The eighth annual Audioscope festival takes place this Saturday at The Jericho, Oxford. The yearly fundraiser has made more than £16,000 for homelessness charity Shelter since 2001, bringing the likes of Four Tet, Damo Suzuki, Clinic, Explosions in the Sky and Michael Rother to town in the process.

This year’s show kicks off at 1.30 pm and ends at midnight, and the lineup looks like this:

• Kid606
• Boxcutter
• That Fucking Tank
• The Oscillation
• Soeza
• Witches
• Hey Colossus
• The Workhouse
• Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element

Tickets are £12 on the door or £11 from here, and all profits go to Shelter. Find out more about Audioscope over here.

Hreda live at the Audioscope/Regal show, supporting Don Caballero, on 10 November 2008 at The Regal, Oxford.

The Keyboard Choir live on the 4Talent stage at Gigbeth, Birmingham, 8 November 2008.

A month or so back, a friend kindly lent me a CD devoted to ‘Modern Folk’, which turned out to be a tedious disappointment. Although the record had a couple of gems on it (Final Fantasy’s ‘Ballad of Win and Regine’, an odd psychological contemplation of the couple behind The Arcade Fire, was slight but lovely), the record was mostly unspeakably dull (with Anthony and The Johnsons’ contribution as numbingly somnambulist as the enemies of folk music would have you believe). But what struck me about it was that despite all the plinky acoustic-ness, strange accents and reverential hush of it all, there was almost no feeling that this was folk music in any meaningful sense at all. Folk should all be about suppression of the individual ego and the celebration of community spirit, and this polished, artful compilation was completely free of anything of the sort. It was essentially boring rock music, played really quietly.

I mention all of this to set up the contrast between the pristine deadness of ‘Modern Folk’ and the scratchy vitality of We Aeronauts‘ beguiling little record. Everything about it is rough-hewn: the drums are sometimes out of time, the lead singing is often approximate and the mix sounds like it was carried out by an amiable wally who has knocked it off in hour after overdosing on the scrumpy.

And the correct response to all this should be: Who Cares? Because the Aeronauts have written some infectious old-timey songs, they play their instruments with gusto, and above all, they sound like they thoroughly like each other. The sheer spirit of good feeling that comes billowing out of the stereo is reason enough to buy this record, particularly in these clammy, snappish times.

‘Boatswain’s Cry’ is a romantic sea shanty which breathes the same salty air as Dylan’s ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, with the end of the return journey more in the narrator’s mind than his destination. Piano, accordion and fiddle all jostle good-naturedly for space and Anna Wheatley’s spirited, wandering backup vocals are a joy.

‘The House on Ash Tree Lane’ has an insistent backbeat reminiscent of The Teardrop Explodes ‘Reward’ and the trading of lead vocals, sometimes within the space of a line, is a clever, original touch. Extra colour is provided by some gloriously ill-disciplined trumpet and the chorus melody is now on continuous play in my head, and has been for a week.

Centrepiece of the record is the splendid ‘Chalon Valley House Band’ an almost painfully nostalgic hymn to getting it together in the country. I love the almost washboard twang of the bass, the cheek of the melodeon and contrasting shyness of the banjo, which peeks out from behind the sofa from time to time before going AWOL for bars on end, like a nervous moggy. Heck, I love it all. It’s not so much about the details of the soujourn, lovingly described though these are, but rather a celebration of the intense friendship and discovery the musicians clearly experienced there. Like Jean de Florette, another wanderer in the French countryside, they have cultivated the authentic.

We Aeronauts Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

Here’s a clip of Witches performing ‘Dead As A Ghost’ at The Cellar on Hallowe’en. Apologies for the shaky camera work: it will improve, we promise.

Witches’ next show is at Audioscope at The Jericho on 15 November.

It completely amazes us that so many people turn away from folk music as boring - you just have to listen to the lyrics for a generous serving of murder, rape, bargaining devils, and lashings and lashings of real ale.  Like Nick Cave before them, The Dirty Royals seem to have taken inspiration from old folk broadsides for their sterling crime ballad, ‘Josephine’, which tells us what a scrape the eponymous heroine has got herself into with her nefarious activities, and the narrator poses the only rational escape plan - a suicide pact.  Fantastic stuff.  Musically it’s a bit of a treat too, bundling excitable drums behind supple Rickenbacker-like guitar and clear vocal harmonies that spring from the politer suburbs on the outskirts of psychedelia.  A slightly tasteless, if technically proficient, bit of wailing guitar does stick its oar in when not needed, but otherwise this is a tune with a pretty righteous shimmy, and we’re definitely admirers.

‘Back For More’ opens with a similar guitar sound, that could well be Peter Buck on an early R. E. M. record, and also has some pretty winsome close harmonies, but is a somewhat more restrained affair and has just a bit too much of an anodyne college rock kick to it, and The Dirty Royals lose points for putting us in mind of Hootie & The Blowfish, after an all-too-brief decade of blissful amnesia.

We’re back on track with ‘Cover Up The Sun’, however, and we wish our stereo had surround sound, so we could sneak round the back of the guitar part and see if it has “Property of The Byrds, do not remove” stamped on it.  What the hell, it’s a pretty harmless bit of borrowing, and the tune has a devil-may-care sixties US pop bounce to it that puts us in mind of The B-52s and locals Shirley, when they’re having fun and aren’t trying to be all grown up on us.  In all honesty, it’s easy to imagine this tune soundtracking a montage in an early 90s rom-com in which the hapless yet lovable hero has to tidy up his frat house, in order to make it look like a snug restaurant, to charm the Dean’s strait-laced daughter.  If that sounds a bit glib, hell, it’s pretty glib music, airy, light and infectious, and we give it a goofy smile and a thumbs up.  We can also imagine it all being a bit of a blast live.  Uh oh, the Dean’s coming, we’ve got to run off and hide the stuffed moose head we stole from his office to win a keggers bet.  All good harmless hi jinks; are you ready with the music, Dirty Royals?

Dirty Royals Myspace

By David Murphy

Anyone for some crunchy three-piece instrumental metal? Then read on.
This week, I was mostly getting down to Dr Slaggleberry’s new E.P, fresh from their crisply-recorded live XFM set, released on Crash records. With all the precociousness of Frank Zappa plus more turnarounds of tempo per minute than Biffy Clyro, Dr Slag delivers three tracks packed with mosh-tastic metal nuggets. Just like those voting for Senator Obama tomorrow, the tunes tick all the right boxes: abrasive, discordant, rhythmically-contorted, and featuring three musicians who are tight as the proverbial gnat’s rear quarters.

The EP kicks off with ‘Extra Strength Grandma’. Like a raging bull, Dr Slag charges full tilt from one idea to the next. He turns on a sixpence before changing direction completely. The ferocious drumming patterns accelerate, inflect, double-back and stagger sideways, the guitars and bass following in their wake. However, a few minutes in after a pretty glorious start, you get the creeping suspicion that something is not quite right. What’s missing? Well,  continuity. Development. All too quickly we realise we are facing fifteen minutes of artful snippets rather than proper songs. Were the Slags to chop the ‘Tails Of The Blind Donkey’ up into its eighteen constituent pieces, reorder them and stick them back together again, we would be none the wiser and none worse off

.
And one ploy is revisited time and time again: The Segue Splurge. Dr Blaggleberry delivers volley after volley of arhythmic notes to segue from each theme into the next. ‘Lead Rabbit’ suffers the most from this, lurching perilously close towards teenage navel-gazing bedroom noodles at times.

But for all my over-academic misgivings, you can’t put this one down. Your head just starts moving - I defy anyone to prove otherwise. It’s not the steady up and down AC/DC headbang: more of a psychotic lurch, but hey.  If you like it, then good on you. But if the segues to no-where get the better of you, then go look up Zomby Woof (live version) by Frank Zappa to see how it should be done.

 Dr Slaggleberry Myspace

 By B.M.