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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 

Chambers of the Heart, eh? Could go two ways, I thought. It’s either Grey’s Anatomy, and we should expect a cold, clinical, ultra-rationalist German miserablism, or it’s Catherine Cookson and we should be primed for excruciating power ballads, probably sung by Alexandra Burke. In the event, COTH turned out to be four earnest progsters jamming away for thirty minutes without a break, blissfully unaware of any obligations towards a paying audience-they barely acknowledged our existence. To be fair, they covered a fair bit of stylistic ground: classic rock riffing, a Madchester nostalgia trip, relentless disco pounding and avant-gard noise were all mixed up in there, punctuated by the odd more lyrical moment (though that may just have been them taking a breather). The concept felt rather Seventies, as if I’d wandered into ‘The Rotter’s Club’. Indeed, I half expected some bearded apostle of the band to grab me by the arm and tell me not to leave because, “in ten minutes it starts to get more accessible”. The band is pretty accomplished, as you might expect from a group containing members of International Jetsetters and Spiral 25, but it’s ultimately a bunch of musos jamming on the same chord for an age. If I need that I’ll dig out my copy of Das Rheingold.

Another band which failed to connect was Vultures,  playing for only twenty minutes and looking scared out of their wits. They are a supposedly spiky three-piece, making unremarkable youth club pop-rock. Lead singer and guitarist Cameron Grote will be familiar to fans of the long defunct Warhen: he was the drummer back then, and a very brilliant one too. Why drummers feel the need to don guitars is an interesting psychological question- don’t they feel loved back there?- but Grote did not reveal any great untapped talent: his voice is small, yelpy, not very tuneful and lacks any presence or emotional depth. The band itself was tight but sounded too often like a cut-price Kinks or Supergrass’s me-too kid brother. And again, perhaps because of nerves, there was no connection with the still-healthy audience. I mean, cripes, even Jedward puts on a show.

Ah yes, that audience. There were, in Bugs Bunny’s immortal words, quite a lot of homely dames in it, and all was revealed when headliners Barbare11a took to the stage. Imagine Eddie Izzard fronting The Velvet Underground, with the front row of the audience camping it up as much as the band, and one can explain the vast over-representation of transvestites in the room. Still, at least Barbarella made an impact, after the studious neglect of COTH and the rabbit-in-the-headlights terror of Vultures.

Musically, the set started poorly, with a piece of plodding widdly-guitar classic rock, but they hit their stride on the second number-a slice of savvy Depeche-Mode electro-rock and continuing with what could only be called Weimar cabaret funeral music. The band has a weary, ramshackle feel, as if it thinks it is soundtracking the end of a chapter in civilisation. (What with the widespread collapse of trust in political institutions, endless war and ever-more-apocalyptic warnings about The Warming, maybe it is). They rather ran out of steam on the second half of the set, revived by a version of Cab Calloway’s ‘Minnie the Moocher’, and the suspicion lurks that they need a few more good tunes before making the next step up. A thought: if I were their manager I would be cultivating Joe Swarbrick and co. at the moment, because a Borderville UK tour backed by these guys would be quite an event. And no doubt the touring van, as it swung around the circle, would be constantly pursued by a rapacious pack of Avon Ladies.

Barbare11a Myspace

Vultures Myspace

Chambers of the Heart Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

The underground café at Modern Art Oxford provides an excellent space for intimate live music performance, and tonight has attracted a very different crowd to the usual gigging faces, which I suppose is what you get when beer and sweat are replaced by tea and wine, and the “Oxford pasty” of vacant standing room in front of the stage is replaced by an even spread of occupied tables and chairs. A high-brow, almost reverential atmosphere then, for the first sit-down pure-electronica bill of local Oxford acts that I’ve yet seen. Both acts are solo laptop composers who have each brought a friend to embellish their live show, a move which hasn’t really done either of them many favours tonight.

Envelope is Tim Matthews, who takes to the stage with a laptop and an amplified electric guitar, and produces fairly minimal melodic indoor electronica, stylistically somewhere between Plaid and Autechre but with skittering beats which sound not dissimilar to those of Pole, and the whole conjures memories of the Random Number EP on Vacuous Pop. It’s good stuff, not breaking new ground but direct, melodic and interesting. He adds post-rock electric guitar on top which works well, and is occasionally joined by a drummer whose reach slightly exceeds his grasp, and the beats that aren’t quite in time contribute to a sense that the live and prepared parts of the whole don’t quite mesh together. They give the impression that they don’t have a lot of live experience and the music has a tendency to meander, but Matthews has a good grasp of the niche he’s found, and it looks like with time and support Envelope could turn into something very special.

Where Envelope wears his 1990s Warp Records influences on his sleeve, PRDCTV virtually has “Four Tet” stamped on his chest. Another soloist, Alex Lloyd – the man behind Geometric Records – is joined by an entirely unnecessary bass player, and where with Envelope it was unclear what the live parts were adding, with PRDCTV the ramshackle musical interaction between Chima Simpson-Bell on bass and Lloyd on drum kit, acoustic guitar and electronic plinky noises actively detracts from a solid and interesting laptop backing. Electronica artists should always be discouraged from performing on their own behind a laptop, but in this case it seems they’d be better off doing so until they’ve had a lot more practice; Lloyd’s instrumental tinkering is the kind which gives a bad name to multi-instrumentalists and makes you wish he’d just pick one instrument and stick with it. The debt to Four Tet and Fridge is evident, but as with Envelope’s set this is a gig which suggests inexperience and shows a lot of potential, as long as PRDCTV have a chance to work out how best to expand live on their promising recordings. Apologies if this all makes it sound like we’re watching a school band with one or two good songs, as it is much better and more watchable than that -though that could be because their half-hour set is accompanied by Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s immensely compelling abstract film “Der Lauf der Dinge”, whose depiction of Heath Robinson-esque mechanical energy was very much in keeping with the feel of the PRDCTV set.

So a good show for Geometric, a fledgling label with a lot of potential, though we’re confused by the organiser’s assertion that we check out all their other acts as Envelope and PRDCTV are the only two acts they’ve yet released. MOA could well have been the best place to see them as well, at least until some rigorous gigging has toughened them up a bit. The reverential atmosphere of tonight’s audience is certainly not something they can expect at every show – nor is it something they yet deserve, in all honesty - but they’re onto a good thing, and for all its flaws, tonight’s show was a very encouraging start.

By Mark Wilden

Posh is the new Black. Witness the puerile, catastrophic decision by Labour activists to dress up and parade around as Lord Snooty at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election last year, effectively trebling the Conservative majority. Karl Marx and Arthur Scargill could have told them wearily: class war doesn’t cut it in England.

Which is good news for all of the acts on tonight’s bill, as there are plenty of cut-glass accents on display, and in one case, a charming haziness about where the M40 leads (“Oh, somewhere in the North”). I’m not sure any of the acts would be totally at home in King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow, but fortunately we’re at the Wheatsheaf, with most of the audience sat expectantly on the floor, as if they’re waiting on the latest instalment of Prince Caspian from a fluffy primary school teacher.

First up is a nervous, spectacled, studenty singer-songwriter called Max, who performs as King of Cats. But he has an ace in the hole: a second microphone hooked up to a ring oscillator, which turns his gentle, slightly effete singing voice into a Clanger-ish hoot. He is comically unable to control the pitch, but who cares when you’re getting Big Laughs? Every time you do it!

As a songwriter, his style reminds me a little of the short-story writer Saki: there’s a vein of misanthropy and waspishness lurking under the studious John Major mildness:

“Replace a wife with a dog. You don’t need to listen to what a Labrador says”

The King hooks up profitably on one song with the Queen of the Mountain Parade, Roxy, and I’d like to hear more of this, as the sound they get, while retaining simplicity, is deeper and sweeter than when he plays on his own. Altogether, the set was a nervous, eccentric triumph, with at least two promoters in the audience keen to book him.

Tamara Parsons-Baker has caused a certain amount of spilled ink on this website recently, due to a middling review of her debut demo a month ago. Tonight’s performance was equally divisive, with one scenester whom I respect snorting about ’standard singer-songwriter fare’. I quite enjoyed the set, but I’m not sure that solo performance is really her medium.

First thing is to say is that Parsons-Baker’s voice is superb. She is not one for dull naturalism, performing with a restless, operatic delivery, at times almost hectoring, at others glassily pure. It’s almost as if she isn’t a singer-songwriter at all, but rather a Grace Slick rock chick awaiting the backing band of her dreams. The acoustic guitar, played perfectly effectively on numbers like ‘To Possess”, is sometimes almost inadequate as a foil for her stormy vocal rhetoric.

Her lyrics are like mines in a meadow. For the most part, they are pleasant but unmemorable but then some neuronal explosion gives us the vision of some insane poet (must be Swinburne- he was a total nutter) “stabbing a be-titted figurine in the groin with a pin”. Now either this is the worst line ever written, or a breath-taking work of staggering genius. Whatever it is, it has no place in the repertoire of a nice, well brought up singer-songwriter. Which is why we’ll keep watching her.

Finally, to The Mountain Parade, our favourite octet of work-shy English students, purveying heavenly little nuggets of Belle and Sebastian feyness, held together loosely by their new drummer, and singer Roxy’s all-conquering niceness. Although they still need to do a whip-round for a tuner, they are considerably tighter than the amiable duffers who turned up at last year’s Winter Warmer, and the songs seem more substantial than before, with their paean to fictional explorer Shackleton Beaulieux a singalong standout. The band, a jazzy gaggle of trumpeters, ukulelists (sp?), fiddlers and cellists have learnt the art of playing sympathetically behind a frontwoman with a very small voice (what she lacks in decibels, she makes up for in charm and bonhomie)-this is one of the hardest things to do when there are so many of you, so plaudits all round. I’d like to hear the cellist play a bit lower and a bit louder, as the whole thing is a bit top-heavy, but the fact is that when you leave a Mountain Parade gig, you feel that the world is a slightly sweeter place than when you came in. They’re playing with We Aeronauts at the Sunday Roast later in the month. Though I pity the soundman, that’s going to be a hot ticket.

The Mountain Parade Myspace

Tamara Parsons-Baker Myspace

King of Cats Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.

What is psychedelia? My somewhat reductive answer is that it is four or five blokes in beards standing around playing the same chord for twenty five minutes. However, Gappy Tooth Industries oddly shoehorn Bristol’s winning three-piece Schnauser into the genre, despite the fact that their act is cerebral, satirical (with songs celebrating the charms of Westward Ho! and Noel Edmonds among others) and terse, none of which is usually associated with practitioners of the art of Jerry Garcia, Phish etc. Still, it’s a good show whatever it is, with all three musicians exuding effortless excellence. Guitarist and vocalist Alan Strawbridge is the focal point, a brilliant, inventive player and an equally clever writer. Actually this cleverness will not be to everyone’s taste: the songs are a bit too glitchy and unsettled for mine. There’s so much restless chopping and changing of times and feels, that one is left with the impression that the band has a short attention span at best and are overly facile, superficial japesters at worst (they have a song called ‘I Wuv You, Mommy’). Still, great bands have faults that lesser bands don’t have room for, and Schnauser are a great band.

Strawbridge then proved equally adept when playing drums for Anton Barbeau, with McIntosh continuing on bass. The collective is known as Dog Party, although many of the songs will be familiar to fans of Anton’s solo act. Last time I heard Barbeau backed by a group, he achieved the astonishing feat of turning Stornoway, the best band in Oxford, into sludgy, stodgy chord sheet-reading third-raters, but Dog Party, no doubt benefiting from some serious rehearsal, were hard-wired into Anton’s antic disposition, and gave thrilling impetus to previously laid-back hippie musings such as ‘You Can Move a Mountain’ and ‘Drug Free’. I loved Holly’s sense of benign perplexity at Anton’s freestyle ramblings- it was as if we were watching a saintly schoolteacher coaxing a gifted but hyperactive pupil away from the box of matches and the can of petrol.

Rounding things off in style were precocious heavy rockers Dial F for Frankenstein. They purvey pretty uncompromising, riff-based rock with more than a nod to The Foo Fighters, especially in the singer’s gravelly, Grohlish growl. Behind him there is all sorts going on, with the bassist in particular a study in whirring hands on the fretboard and ceaseless industry. There may not be sufficient quality tunes yet to fight the Foos for the post-grunge crown, but give ‘em a couple of years. They could be contenders.

By Colin MacKinnon

Everybody, and I mean everybody, is at the O2 tonight watching TynchyStrider. It’s probably the safest place to be, and frankly they don’t miss anything from openers Secret Rivals. Their MySpace demos whizz past with no great focus or attention to detail, and the live show is pretty reflective of that attitude. Yelpy shouting of empty slogans meets one-dimensional high speed pop punk fuzz. I’m sure the kids of today love this kind of stuff and find some deep meaning in it somewhere, but it left me feeling devoid of any attachment or feeling. There’s nothing wrong with simplicity in music, but simplicity needs to be backed up with something else that gets the attention – hooks, aggression, carefully crafted arrangements, smart lyrics, a great vocalist, stage presentation, something, anything. Sadly, the Rivals are shown up by their lack of ideas and underdeveloped songwriting, but at least they have the youth and enthusiasm on their side to change that.

The Wookies are altogether a different squid. Ostensibly they’re more or less straight-up guitar pop, but they have a nice line in waltzy arrangements, cheekily dropping in odd time signatures and hooky guitar and synth lines. Crucially, every instrument is adding something that both supports the song and is also interesting and creative on its own, something the previous band could learn a lot from. Standout member tonight is the bassist, who breaks a string early on, swiftly grabs the Rivals bassist’s instrument (presumably with the latter’s permission) and carries on. He’s got a mighty tone and is both dextrous and tasteful. The four vocalists aren’t quite balanced in the PA, which detracts slightly from the harmonies and different lead parts, but the anthemic “In the Forest” ends a strong set.

By Scott Haynes