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I’m going to say it: you can make a case that The Black Hats are the closest Oxford has to Bon Jovi.

It’s not that Nick Breakspear’s ever more accomplished trio sound an awful lot like the New Jersey stadium rockers-they are too punky, too rough around the edges and haven’t been airbrushed into massive-sounding studio perfection. Nevertheless, there is in the swagger of Breakspear’s major-key working class anthems an echoing response to the confident blue collar affirmation purveyed for years numberless by the Tri-State eighties stalwarts.

Their current EP, Magnets, sees the band at their terse, disciplined best, in contrast to their patchy and sometimes repetitive album ‘What’s Not to Understand?’. The eponymous track sets the tone pretty well, with Ian Budd’s jaunty bass line underpinning Breakspear’s genially yobbish rhetoric. He might claim that he is a ‘magnet for trouble’, but you know the sort of trouble he’s referring to is a cuff on the chin by Fozzy Bear, rather than anything more distressing or permanent. Unusually for the Hats, there’s a bit of understated synthesizer squelch in the mix, and in general the record feels bigger, brasher and a bit less garage-bound than previous recordings. Producer Lee Christian is no Bob Rock, but he’s successfully coaxed a more substantial sound from the three, and I think their style of music could do with that.

‘Getaway’ represents prime danceable classic rock, combining swedging beats, Breakspear’s ardent, raspy tenor and some simple but effective harmonies. Better yet is the urgent, angular ‘Just Fall’, my favourite Black Hats song, and featuring one of Breakspear’s finest vocal performances. In the past he’s sometimes sacrificed tone for attitude, but here he is just a great rock singer, with no reservations.

‘Magnets’ is the sound of a band growing in confidence and ambition. After the rather cramped, snappy feel of the album, this is grand, energetic and tune-filled rock, made by musicians who are supremely committed and are finding both their voice and their space.

Clearly, they were not born to follow.

The Black Hats Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.

No-one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that ornate, theatrical pop music would ever be seen again. Whilst Travis was paving the featureless yellow path that led to Coldplay’s ubiquity, the ears of the scene were either tuned to dour, po-faced post-rock expanses in the form of Mogwai and Godspeed or the mumbled introspection of Low and The Tindersticks. And yet, some survived who believed in the power of drama, who revelled in the communicative possibilities of façade and pretence, who felt that musical invention was better shown by intricate, intelligent orchestration than by the portentous length of tracks (or their titles). And slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us.

Whilst cabaret pop hasn’t precisely taken over the world, Borderville’s gloriously over-reaching debut album seems a perfect zeitgeist Polaroid, a record so theatrical it should come with a glossy programme and an unfeasibly overpriced ice cream. And it’s an incredible piece of work, welding Bowie’s cracked actor dramatics to off-Broadway torch songs, with crescendos direct from Queen’s halcyon days. Joe Swarbrick may not have the most agile – or even tuneful – voice in town, but he may well have the most expressive, alternating between stage whisper and Christ-pose rock howl to wring every ounce of emotion from elaborate rock opera opuses. The wonderful “Short Sharp Shock” is a prime example, capturing the whiff of deflated expectations as a band packs up after a show, offsetting some emotive, barely pitched yelps with massed Original Cast Recording backing vocals. Everything about this surprisingly varied LP is overdone to a T, and Borderville have clearly realised that, whilst sincerity and chest-bashing might do the trick, emotions can be far more powerfully expressed if we all realise they’re artificial. The mask is always more frightening once you know it’s a mask.

The rest of the band is also superb, dealing in the wild dynamic variations that can only be achieved with sensitively controlled ensemble playing. Keyboard player “Woody” Woodhouse deserves especial praise for his improbably fluent runs across the ivories, the synth whoops of live favourite “Glambulance”, the tipsy stumbling solo of “Lover, I’m Finally Through” and the jerky mazurka of “Short Sharp Shock” particularly standing out. What’s most impressive about the record is how much variation the band achieves with a relatively sparse sonic palette: it would have been all too easy to drench everything in swooning strings and ersatz effects, but Borderville have retained the sound of a simple rock quartet and pushed it into some intriguing places

No matter how unfair we find it, most of the world considers every damn person in Oxford to be a limp-wristed, pretentious, teddy-clutching silver spoon sucker, honking away about Byron and ponies. A review of Winnebago Deal some years ago in the NME said something like, “What are you lot so grumpy about? Was your 15th century quad not properly manicured this morning?” Yes, even the whiskey-soaked death-grunge hollers of two hairy creatures from darkest Eynsham brought forth plummy images from Uncle Monty’s most rose-tinted recollections. We feel that, if this is how the world sees us, we should embrace it. We’ve already given the world the preppy Bowdlerised art-funk of Foals and Stornoway’s warm-jumpered folk poetry, let’s complete the picture with Borderville’s greasepainted bombast. Cherish them.

Borderville Myspace

By David Murphy

Slightly belatedly, here is a non-scientific, but highly alphabetised selection of our favourite records from last year. If you don’t disagree vociferously on the Comments page, we’ll be highly insulted.

Contributors: David Murphy, Colin MacKinnon, Mark Wilden and Alex Lloyd.

Alphabet Backwards: Alphabet Backwards
Gr8 bnd v g pop lol [Send to entire address book] (DM)

A Scholar & A Physician: She’s A Witch
The funnest ball of funny electro fun anywhere in the world this year, from Truck’s production go-to boys. (DM)

Borderville: Joy Through Work
“A band’s reach should exceed its grasp/ Or what’s a heaven for?” – Robert Browning (nearly).(DM)

Les Clochards: Sweet Tableaux
Oxford’s wry Gallic café indie children deliver a blinder.  Sounds like fat Elvis twatted on crème de menthe and blearily stumbling about the Postcard Records’ bordello.(DM)

Grumpily romantic Anglo-French chansons with dazzling accordion flourishes and spookily sweet two-part harmony. (CHM)

Hretha:  Minnows/ Dead Horses
Orthographically frustrating upstarts produce clinical post-rock excellence.(DM)

Jessie Grace: Demo
Silky, sensuous, lounge bar pop from ukulele-wielding Buckinghamshire lass-massive voice, bigger tunes . Paloma Who? (CHM)

The Gullivers: Legerdemain
Bleakly stylish post-punk minimalism, now with added singing. A band to revisit. (CHM)

Mephisto Grande: Seahorse Vs The Shrew
A revivalist hymn meeting seen through Lewis Carrol’s mescaline kaleidoscope.(DM)

Message to Bears: Departures
If the Oxfordshire countryside ever needs a soundtrack, this is it. Resplendent beauty everywhere, with beats, samples and strings expertly combined with pianos and Jerome Alexander’s diamantine guitar. Why isn’t this guy huge? (CHM and AL)

Misfit Mod: Islands and Islands
Sleepily lovely electronica from the talented Miss Kelleher. Dan Mitchell’s review captured her voice in one word: pellucid. (CHM)

Peerless Pirates: Demo
Swaggering, timber-shivering, Smithy indie pop. Smell the rum and smash  the tavern. (CHM)

PRDCTV: It’s Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood

Promising folktronic EP from OxfordBands scribe and recent Ninja Tune signing who’s clearly heard a Four Tet record or two and knows how to put his own stamp on it. (MW)

The Relationships: Space
Beautiful chiming indie pop coupled with the most articulate lyricist ever to have flâneured the Cowley Road; think R.E.M.’s Reckoning crossed with Betjeman’s Banana Blush, record collectors! (DM)

Mr Shaodow: “RU Stoopid”
Serious messages, approachable humour, lyrical dexterity.  His best yet, and that’s some benchmark.(DM)

Spring Offensive: EP
Everyone’s favourite band at the moment, but you heard it here first. Five lads from a rather good South Oxon school, playing highly inventive angular rock- where have we heard that before? (CHM)

Stornoway: Unfaithful
The startled bunnies of lit-pop had a meteoric year.  Let’s be honest, you won’t get long odds on their debut LP featuring in the list next year…(DM)

Tiger Mendoza:The Hope Sick

Vocal-led electronica from former Toy #1 guitarist gone solo and recent winner of the 2009 DJ Shadow Remix Project.  Glitchy and twitchy, warm and chunky – this is an artist worth keeping an eye on. (MW)

To Liesel: Dear Jane
The Fleet Foxes of Oxford? Not now, but later. Ardent musical love letter wrapped in heart-breaking harmony. (CHM)

Vileswarm: Sun Swallows The Stars
An experimental dreamteam of Frampton and Euhedral, offering “doom drone”: does exactly what it says on the tombstone. (DM)

Richard Walters: The Animal

Finally!  The debut Richard Walters album.  Kept us waiting long enough.  Worth the wait, though – delicate and precise, and full of heart.  There’s not a single thing I’d want to change about this record; it’s beautiful from start to finish. (MW)

It was remarked by more than one performer that the annual Gappy Tooth Industries/ Swiss Concrete jamboree had been very unfortunately named, thanks to the Jericho’s sado-masochist central heating schedule, which meant that we were all freezing our nuts off for the first five hours. Bang up job, Mitchell and Butler, you useless chumps.

Fortunately, the event started brilliantly, with a superb, danceable set from Space Heroes of the People, a duo creating groove-laden tune-filled Kraftwerkia. Tim Science is an extremely gifted programmer, but he is the antithesis of the heads-down boffin, singing, banging a Linn Drum and making self-deprecating jokes in between tracks. Jo Edge’s sinuous double bass lines add welcome warmth and make for a more organic feel than if it were all down to the Intel. New tracks like ‘Modernist Disco’ sit snugly alongside established classics, like the wonderful ‘Groovy Dancer’ and the campest of the camp ‘Barbie is a Robot’. The only criticism is that if Tim wants his socially-aware lyrics to be heard properly, he’d better back off on the vocoder.

The Saturday was undoubtedly damaged by the withdrawal of a number of bands and their hurried replacement by singer-songwriters of variable quality. One of the better ones was The New Moon’s Matt Sewell who showed a good deal of stamina in even being able to fret his guitar, given the bleak midwinterness of the setting. He is earnest, sardonic and clever, sounding often like Crowded House’s Neil Finn, and he has a nice line in gloomy one-liners (“Time will devour you like a Mexican god”) a quality he shared with many acts on the bill.

Another no-show was Motion in Colour, who left their frontman Adam Barnes to deliver a lachrymose set of X-Factor-friendly ballads. Barnes has a high, keening voice which makes him sound unavoidably like Tracey Chapman, but he has a couple of strong tunes and one can see him selling a bunch of records so long as he isn’t torpedoed by Rage Against The Machine (the fate marvellously befalling the blameless Joe McElderry).

“Germane, Will You Marry Me?” Thus runs a piece of counter-feminist mischief from a couple of overgrown student japesters, Project Adorno. It’s very Kit and the Widow, very Flanders and Swann and very wonderful. There’s lots of inexcusable facial hair, Disco Dad dancing and more laugh-out-loud moments than in entire series of certain BBC sitcoms (Big Top, anyone?). Musically, their only prop is an acoustic guitar and a mini-disk player churning out ironic little rock and roll riffs, but the music isn’t really the point. Wit is King.

Superman Revenge Squad turned out to be equally adept verbally, but this was laughter in the dark. SRS is a nonchalantly talented acoustic guitarist, who seems to be permanently tormented by the threat of the imminent revelation of his own mediocrity. His targets are sometimes a bit soft (stadium rock is indeed heartless, artificial and stupid, but it needs no Superman to tell us this), but when he gets it right he can be both funny and moving. In one song, the sounds of a masturbating teenager heard through the walls of a suburban semi  is transmogrified by a father’s imagination into the wailing of a dragon, desperate to return to its proper dimension. This is sung with a Richard Walters-like seriousness, so that our response is one of humane sadness, rather than ribald laughter.

If SRS was able to squeeze good wine out of the bitterest of grapes, Joe Allan delivered a cloyingly awful concoction, as unpalatable as an Oz Clark ‘Christmas Tipple’ (typical recipe: ale, egg yolk and bull bollocks).  Joe has recently lost his band, and seems at a loss on his own. He boasts arguably the best voice of the event, high, keening and agile, but suffers from the weakest songs. Everything in the performance was overwrought, fussy and lame, but his interminable, arrhythmic rendering of Dylan’s exquisite ‘A Simple Twist of Fate’ turned a lousy set into a car-wreck. Come back Angharad, even if you have to commute from New South Wales.

At last, the event was able to offer a genuine, no-foolin’ band, in the form of folk-rock four-piece The Yarns. It wouldn’t be surprising if they turned out to be a clutch of final-year PPE students, such was their donnish, bookish style (one of the songs dealt with post-colonial guilt in sub-Saharan Africa) and the music was equally smart . The singer/guitarist (Jeez, I hope this is the last time in this article I need to use that phrase!) had a detached, laconic style, and was backed by an inventive, slightly smug-looking trumpeter (to be fair, he had a good deal to feel smug about-he hit all thehigh notes), and all was underpinned by a sprightly rhythm section which seemed equally adept at Paul Simon/ Vampire Weekend Afropop and laid-back ska. Playing to a merry, appreciative audience, they were the first act where the phrase Winter Warmer didn’t sound like an ironic joke. Bravo.

By Colin MacKinnon 

Oxford has a proud history of periodically throwing up musical gems for the mainstream to embrace in its fickle bosom. Ride, Supergrass, Foals, Radiohead; we’ve had some gudd’uns. Now Stornoway seem set to join that illustrious list, if their undoubted talent and the BBC’s benevolent gaze are anything to go by.

With such successes to pat ourselves on the back for, it’s easy to overlook Oxford’s diverse and vibrant musical subcultures. Andy Cartwright and his Seabuckthorn project is a torchbearer for the style of instrumental, guitar-lead composition that is fast becoming a local speciality, centred round the Bucks-based label Dead Pilot Records (home to the likes of the brilliant Message To Bears).  Distant Summer Storm, Seabuckthorn’s fourth release, sees Cartwright widening his horizons from previous outings. While the influence of twisted folk Americana is still evident, the scope and range of this album is altogether more ambitious and experimental.

It’s the sheer diversity of Cartwright’s songwriting capabilities that really impresses on Distant Summer Storm. Opener Galloping Into Thin Air throws us into a melee of clattering guitars and gunshot snares, giving way to a beautifully harsh sea of resonant synth and pensive fingerpicking; it almost sounds like Yorke et al.’s Bodysnatchers in parts, and that’s no lame compliment. The title track is a tribal boiling pot of relentless congas, ruthless bass pulses and wailing strings, climaxing in waves of frantic chimes and echoing flutes that conjure up vivid images of the unforgiving beauty of the African savannah. It really is a standout moment on an album riddled with highlights.

Next, Cartwright moves from the savannah to the buffalo plains, with Somersault of Thought and Between Dreams neatly showcasing Seabuckthorn’s Americana influence; neither song would sound out of place as the soundtrack to a Wild West showdown. Not content to rest in the comfort of familiarity, Cartwright begins a delicate exploration of the boundaries of electronica in the second half of the album.  After a brief sojourn into ambient territory with the flowing synth soundscape of (Untitled) come two tracks that owe more to the early work of Four Tet than the American West. Cartright has the wonderful and rare ability to paint vivid and powerful pictures with sound; at times listening to this album feels almost like watching a film without the pictures. Don’t expect to see Seabuckthorn following Stornoway to the BBC hot-tip lists any time soon; but this is one for Oxford to treasure nonetheless.

 Seabuckthorn Myspace

By Alex Lloyd

Being a Christian, I always had a mild downer on Wire Jesus’ choice of name, but that didn’t stop me enjoying the Reading-based group’s output, an easy, unfussy brand of non-threatening psychedelia. Emerging from their recent-ish break-up (no divine intervention need be posited) is Amy’s Ghost, a five-piece fronted by Amy Barton, who was previously slightly overshadowed as a vocalist by the excellent Mike Murray. Judging by new single ‘Lullaby’ she is thoroughly enjoying her new, more prominent role.

There is a bit of overlap between the new and old groups, both in personnel (Tim Perkins’ baroque cello is as important as ever) and style. ‘Lullaby’, like several old WJ tunes, is smart piano-led pop, heavy on spectral, syncopated drums and contrapuntal, multi-tracked vocals. Barton’s singing is charismatic and urgent, with a hint of the kind of anxiety Natalie Imbruglia conjured so unexpectedly on ‘Torn’.

There are other promising things dotted around their Myspace page. ‘Afraid’ effectively showcases Amy’s glistening soprano over a sparse background of dusty-basement pianos and distant, thuddy beats. In the debit column, Barton’s philosophical musings on the consolations of faith aren’t very original and the arrangement needs more work to keep the punters interested, but the core of the song is solid. ‘Turn to Run’ has a little of that hippieish Bat for Lashes pseudo-Celticism I usually dislike, but Barton’s close harmonies are inventive and unforced.

In summary, I feel that the new band doesn’t yet have the quality in the songs to match the likes of Wire Jesus’s wonderful ‘Six Foot Crow’ , but Amy’s Ghost is already a good deal more than just a sequel. Talking of sequels, perhaps they can take inspiration from the New Testament: St. Paul didn’t turn out so badly.

Amy’s Ghost Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon