“Yeah, it’s a great start, boys; so, when’s the real singer going to finish it off?”

A smidgen harsh, we’ll admit, but Skirr is an LP that has clearly had lots of thought and expertise poured into its creation, but which falls down for us whenever the vocals start. It’s a praiseworthily varied record, impossible to sum up in a pithy description, but sophisticated electro goth would be the closest we could get to swiping at the truth in a snappy soundbite, and we really, really want to like it more than we do. But we don’t, and sometimes you just have to admit these things straight.

The opener “Null” is a brief burst of Future Sound Of London garnished with a snatch from “Never Can Say Goodbye” for no obvious reason, but thereafter “Exeat” sets the tone for the record, with chubby Eighties bass and a portentous vocal line occasionally exploding into hissing guitars, leaving a slight aftertaste of Psychedelic Furs. Elsewhere “Isthmus” (blimey, Grant, is this a tracklist or a championship game of Scrabble?) is a dark-hearted ballad dusted with synth oboe, loosely recalling Depeche Mode’s Violator, whilst “Acres To Hectares” is an improbable industro-rock rave up from 1990 with a caffeinated baggy beat and some wobbly keyboard squiggles suspended between the first flushes of techno and Radiohead’s Amnesiac, all underpinning a tune that surreally threatens to morph into “It Was A Very Good Year”. This is nothing if not eclectic and adventurous recording!

For the most part the music is highly intriguing, if perhaps evidence of too many dips into the Pick ‘N’ Mix counter of recent rock history, and there are only a couple of truly duff tracks: “Below The Seal” welds outdated guitars onto an Isaac Hayes conga rhythm, something in the manner of a blaxploitation theme as envisioned by the Sounds staff in 1988 - horrible, in other words - and “Shellac Skin” is a heavy, doomy trudge over a finger-in-ear folk club vocal melody about addiction that ought to be blackly imposing, but just sounds silly.

This is a collection of ear-catching oddments crying out for a great voice to bind them together, and if Scott Walker were to add his creamy voice to this grab-bag of neat ideas and production tricks it might really work; if Bryan Ferry were to drape a few louche vocal takes over the top it might be pretty fascinating; hell, even if someone who can’t really sing but who has a grasp of storytelling and drama, such as Jarvis Cocker, were to hove into view we’d love this LP. But, sadly, Grant isn’t any of these - in fact, he sounds much more like Russell Senior’s wayward vocal attempts on Pulp’s misfired second album, Freaks.

Let’s cut some slack, Grant doesn’t have a bad voice at all - you could imagine him fronting some grown up indie band, on Pink Hedgehog Records or somesuch - but he doesn’t have the gravitas or depth to his singing to pull off this rich confection. The closing track, “Scent & Snow” a simple piece of pop euphoria that sounds like the work of a band locked up for five hours with their management shouting “Write a hit!” through the keyhole, perhaps encapsulates the paradox of Skirr: it’s not a particularly good song, although it is bouncy enough, but Grant’s vocals work so much better in this unfettered environment. Just when we’re having fun, the record ends with over ten minutes of a single slowly oscillating keyboard tone, infuriating and fascinating in equal measure. Come to think of it, Pulp did this too, at the end of This Is Hardcore. But they’d learnt not to let Russell sing by that time, of course.

Grant Myspace

By David Murphy

Shuffling sweatily through heat-maddened central Oxford, I had low hopes for a good turnout at this month’s Gappy Tooth night at the Wheatsheaf, (Cornmarket street, hazy and violently simmering in the late-evening sun provided proof positive that sometimes a water-cannon is in perfect order) but in the event, the pull of three local bands ensured that while the showing was modest, it was far from negligible.

Minor Coles are a new one on me, but they are making friends and news at a healthy rate, having secured a berth at the Truck festival recently. The honour is well-deserved, the quartet making punchy, melodic, wide-screen indie rock, and possessing two strong lead singers. It’s actually quite difficult to think of specific bands they sound like: the best I could come up with was Seafood with a dash of British Sea Power noise, while others mentioned the spikier end of The Delgados. In any case, their compact set was highly impressive: for a band that’s been together for a matter of months, everything seems astonishingly well-engineered: the vocal harmonies are note-perfect, the occasional double lead-guitar passages pulled off with ease, and the only imperfections were non-musical: a non-authoritative set-list and a comical onstage argument about the right position for a capo- of course these human blemishes made us like them all the more.

The Sidewinders are likeable for different reasons: their utter commitment to an art which was exhausted long before ‘This is Spinal Tap’ administered the last rites is both amusing and slightly sad. They are what Jeremy Clarkson might call a proper rock and roll band: the bassist looks like he could pack down in the front row for Banbury Town Third XV, the guitarist spends half the gig with his eyes shut and his tongue out, and the lead singer was sporting an extremely hirsute chest- no doubt there’s still a breed of lady out there who finds that sort of thing attractive- perhaps the kind who swoons over DCI Gene Hunt. In any case, they made loud, dumb, hairy rock music very effectively, even if most of the content felt like it had been culled from an obscure AC/DC album circa 1983 (interesting trivia point: AC/DC once wrote fifteen songs in one afternoon, eight of which contained the word ‘Rock’ in the title. What boundless invention!)

Closing the show were Punt stars, From Here, We Run!, who judging from their Myspace page, have an array of clever math-rock tunes. But it was a patchy set. Actually it was near-disastrous. Beginning well with the spiky yet catchy ‘Abdul Jafur Lives to Fight’, the band showed their best qualities: singer Pietke has a strong, slightly husky voice, and the instrumentalists (bass, drums and guitar) are nimble and energetic. But from there, things went awry. The second song train-wrecked, which is no biggie, but the second take didn’t sound a lot better than the first, and the impression soon formed of a band operating outside the level of their technical abilities, and (even worse) suffering internal division. It’s almost as if Pietke wants to be in a melodic, girly, indie band like Sleeper, while the three blokes prefer to ape the time-signature juggling and nutty chord shapes of bands like Youthmovies and This Town Needs Guns. I noticed as the set ended, that the singer jumped off stage before the last song had even ended, with barely a look at her bandmates. Whether this was a pose or not, it felt worrying, and  they need to get it together quick.

By Colin MacKinnon.

Saturday July 11 sees the village of Middleton Cheney play host to the annual Middleton Music Festival, a ten hour festival of back-to-back live music. Apart from the music stage, there will be a funfair, bar, real ale tent and a travelling recording studio, The RockHopper. Most familiar act to Oxfordbands.com viewers will be rock/indie/ska act The Keyz. In addition, the show will feature the likes of local indie heroes The Sirens Call and ceilidh band The Quiet Men. Tickets are now on sale from various outlets in Banbury, (see website) and will also be selling in the Castle Quay shopping centre in Banbury on Saturday 4th July from 9am to 5.30pm (look out for the crew in the fluorescent orange polo shirts).

Earlier in the month, David Saw will be performing at Chalky’s on Banbury High Street at 5 p.m on Tuesday 2 July. Saw is a respected singer-songwriter who has worked with Ben Taylor and Carly Simon in the past. The gig, which is free,  is to promote his new album ‘Broken Down Figure’.

I wonder at what point the 80s went from the decade of Thatcherism and social decay to retrospectively the coolest decade of the 20^th century. Hundreds of Primark kings and queens flooded the streets with the slogan “Born in the 80s” roaring out from t-shirts, and massive square-framed glasses became the coolest thing since Power Rangers. Similarly, the revival of Eighties electro-pop influenced music has been sudden and pervasive; we now have La Roux and Little Boots championing the good ship Indie, captained only a few years ago by the likes of The Strokes and The Libertines.

And so we come to The Response Collective’s new album Dark Is The Light. Every track on here is rooted firmly and immovably in the Eighties. But I don’t mean the good Eighties, with The Smiths, the last embers of Joy Division and the electronic genius of Severed Heads; I mean the Eighties of flaccid electro-gyration by the likes of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. The album gets off to a bad start in the opener Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, which tries to pull off an ambient soundscape in the vein of Brian Eno, but is blighted by a mundane, five-note guitar riff, which is repeated beyond the point of tedium. Things pick up slightly with the album’s title track, which sounds like New Order crossed with Dire Straits; the singer has a decent voice and the tune isn’t bad, but the whole thing is steeped so deeply in cheese that it would pose a genuine health hazard to the lactose-intolerant. There are some good ideas on show in the next few tracks; Follow Me Forever Sea features female backing vocals reminiscent of the ethereal Enya, while Moment Of Profanity is built around a dark hip-hop bass line that shows some interesting flexibility in TRC’s songwriting capabilities. However, these moments are often lost in an orgy of awful synth and utterly superfluous scratching. The contributions of the band’s resident “Turntablist,” the eponymous “Fireproof Skratch Duck,” are best likened to flies buzzing round your head (although he is surely a shoo-in for the most fantastically bizarre name on the Oxford music scene).

The album does have its redeeming features. Graham Pushed It throws out the lame synthwork for an upbeat guitar-driven sound that recalls The Cure’s In Between Days, while down-tempo number Turn It Out’s epic chorus borrows from Muse’s Megalomania and even perhaps the beginning of Bohemian Rhapsody. There’s some genuinely good stuff going on here. However, it’s difficult to look past the simple fact that Dark Is The Light is dated. Horribly dated. So dated you can almost hear the Zimmer Frame creaking in the background. It’s awash with self-indulgent guitar solos, tinny synthesized drums and cringe-worthy analogue soundscaping that make a mockery of the band’s claim that “Our mission is to provide new innovative music.” If this was an open homage to a bygone era of pop, that would be forgivable. But to dress it up as “innovative” is a different matter. Frank Zappa would be turning in his grave… 

The Response Collective Myspace

By Alex Lloyd

Sunday

What could be more Gallic than a stripy top, an accordion and a Jacques Brel cover?  Except for singing in like, French, and Les Clochards do that too.  But even if you’re semi-bilingual, like us, there’s tons to enjoy here, from the intimate vocals to the tight, buoyant drumming, to the rich chocolaty bass, which wraps round us on “Lavinia”.  Like The Relationships, a band with whom they share a close history, Les Clochards show that you don’t have to be like Tristan & The Troubadours, and fill your lyrics with death, ravens and black portent to be poetic, a well phrased piece of story telling can cut right to the quick.  Pound for pound Sunday’s lineup wasn’t a patch on Saturday’s, but Les Clochards quietly turned in one of the sets of the weekend to a smattering of listeners.

Oh, fuck off!  Look, we like covers bands in principle, we like ska and punk, we even like fun every once in awhile, but the repugnantly named When Alcohol Matters come from that horrible school of non-thought stating that a complete absence of talent and ideas are instantly justified by putting on some silly clothes.  So, here we go, one of WAM is wearing a red beret and a kilt. Wild.  The new wave era tunes they play are generally fine - “Geno”, “Too Much, Too Young”, and so on - and the dual saxes aren’t bad, but the rhythms are sluggish and the vocals are just terrible.  Talk about a paucity of ideas: simply playing songs you quite like doesn’t make you a good band, especially if you don’t play them very well.  Still, a kilt.  Just imagine.

Anyway, if you really want to know when alcohol maters, talk to some of the revellers about their attempts to smuggle it onto the site!  Some were successful, but Banjo Boy, our homebrew proffering chum form last year, was stopped at the gate with four cans of beer, so he just stood there in front of the entrance and drank them one after the other.  Before lunch.  You have to admire that sort of behaviour…unless you’re a hepatologist.

Over on the second stage young Chipping Norton outfit Relay may not be laden down by new ideas, but they’re worth a hundred WAMs.  Most of their songs are lean and poppy jaunts very much on the vein of Arctic Monkeys, but when they strip things down they have quite a subtle touch, and Jamie Biles has the beginnings of a pleasant indie croon. 

“Hi, I’m Judi, and I’m fourteen,” says Judi Luxmoore of Judi & The Jesters.  And then she says it again.  It’s either an apology in advance, or an attempt to make your friendly neighbourhood hatchetman reviewer look deep into his dark soul.  And, no, we’re not in the business of destroying the dreams of nervous teenagers who have bit the bullet and climbed onstage, so let’s get this over with. The Jesters play dirt simple lightly countrified songs, that are part Kitty Wells, and part “The Wheels On The Bus Go Round & Round”, and once she gets warmed up Judi has a pleasing voice.  There’s a huge amount of potential here, but let’s be straight, at the moment that’s all there is, and Judi’s presence on the bill is something of an indulgence.  Worth investigating in a couple of years, perhaps, and definitely worth investigating if the alternative is WAM.

A walk back to the main stage really brings home how very different in size the two stages are.  We wonder how many festival goers never even get past the toilet block over the weekend.  Anyway, Alan Fraser is getting the benefit of the excellent PA on the main stage, and his jazz sax floats across the crowd with crystal clear sound.  His tone is amazing, so pure and smooth, but the set itself is a real old West Coast jazz dawdle, like Stan Getz locked in an old folks home store cupboard and half buried under discarded surgical trusses.  As the set progresses Fraser starts to bring out some interesting low end honks and rasps, and a decent swipe at Miles’ “All Blues” mean we almost let him get away with it, until his sanctimonious sign off, “Thanks for listening, those of you who were listening and not just hearing“.  And there we were waiting for you to start playing, and not just making the right sounds.  Supercilious old trout.

We’ve got a bit muddled, but we think the band we drop in on back at the second stage briefly is Man Make Fire.  How about Man Throw All Your Instruments On It Whilst He There, if the limp soggy rendition of “Purple Haze” is anything to go by.  Time for a swift exit.

Back To Haunt Us, Part Four:  billypure make mention of our review of last year’s festival during their main stage set, and our allegation that they want to be The Waterboys.  Well, that’s not quite what we meant, but they do knock out the same Waterboys cover version and unless we misheard, it sounds as though they actually got their name from the lyrics, so we reckon they’re being a bit defensive.  Anyway, the song actually sounds lacklustre amongst some of their own, and their arrangement of “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy” is a searing folk rock delight.  It’s a chirpy, chunky set, with some useful fiddle parts, and we enjoy it enormously.  Does remind us a little of another band, though…oh, what are they called again…

Rob Stevenson from A Silent Film is firmly in the same breed as Juju from Little Fish, he looks so relaxed prowling around on the huge stage you’d think he was born and raised there.  They play a textbook set of wide-armed emotirock (featuring a genius reworking of Underworld’s “Born Slippy”), Rob’s warm, falsetto-happy voice twining gorgeously around his keyboard lines (a synth in the body of a parlour upright piano, nice touch).  No offence meant to the man, but our favourite track is the opener during which the guitarist is busy trying to sort out his hardware, and we get a spacious marimba led tune, as some of the music felt clogged and overly rich.  And that’s our only criticism: ASF are like Inlight - although clearly so much better - in that their songs are all huge and simple, as if they’re trying to create music that can be seen from space.  Look, we’re just over here, a few feet away, no need to telegraph the emotions, just let them happen.  When the scale is brought down a peg or two, this band is disarmingly impressive.

Next up, Ginger Toddler Rucksack Headbutt.  No, not the latest Poor Girl Noise booking, just a thing that happened whilst we were laying back watching Two Fingers OF Firewater.  And, hey, it’s a festival, if you want to express yourself by bashing our bag about, feel free - decent soundtrack to do it to, as well.  We could talk about Two Fingers’ dry humour, their contempo-country lope, their chiming pedal steel or their ‘60s rock touches (we heard the odd waft of Love in the climax), but all we can think about is their wah-wah mandolin.

The Epstein has long been a favourite of ours, and it’s been a long while since we saw them, but at first our rendezvous wasn’t too joyous.  The opening two numbers just didn’t grasp us, and seemed overly polished and polite after Two Fingers.  Thankfully, “Black Dog” gets things back on track, Stefan Hamilton’s electric banjo scuttles drawing us in, and Oli Wills’ easy, fruity vocal grasping us by the hand and leading us down some dusty mesa.  Even if it’s not their finest set, their encore was the track of the weekend, despite an awkward false start, a monolithic sonic surge creating valleys in its wake. 

And after that, Liddington were a disappointment, to put it mildly.   All the things that have been alleged about Inlight, and against which we have (partly) defended them, ring clear and true of Liddington: empty, vacuous stadium pop, with no discernible character and a vocal that is drab and lifeless just when the music is crying out for something, anything, to lift it out of the slough of over-amped indie balladeers swamping our nation’s musical profile.  And, yet again, we feel bored stupid by the giant gestures that the music is trying to make: what’s wrong with you lot?  Are you so concerned that your point won’t get across that you have to make it as big and obvious as possible?  What are you, a pop band or air traffic controllers?  After all, you don’t find us standing dead centre of the stage miming an elaborately theatrical yawn to show how little we’re enjoying the set, do you?  OK, OK, Liddington aren’t the worst band of the day (no kilts, see), and a few of the keyboard sounds were well chosen, but by this time we really need something to engage us, and not a whole bunch of vapid honks that sound like old Huey Lewis tunes left out in Chris Martin’s allotment for twenty years until every glint of colour has been bleached out, and nothing is left but the clumsy shell.

But, this brief concluding burst of rage notwithstanding, this has been an excellent festival.  It’s our third Riverside, and the first at which we’ve felt that the two stages have been equally interesting.  Once again, the effort of putting on this event for free is an astonishing thought to contemplate, and whilst we wish that the organisers could try paddling outside of their safety zones, we’re always happy to roll up our trouserlegs and join them for a dip.  Book us in at Diplomat’s Coffee, we’ll be there as soon as the doors open in 2010.

 By David Murphy

Just as you should never judge a book by its cover, you shouldn’t judge a band by the amount of time they spend spouting rubbish on internet message boards, although there’s always a feeling that spending that time practising rather than bickering might be more productive.

Secret Rivals are particularly verbose in this department, but listening to these three songs, you start to understand why - even their music sounds like they’re having a furious argument. `Point Of Subtraction’ finds the boy-girl vocal pair tripping over each other to have the last word. He’s breathless and slightly effete; she’s strident and tends to squeal but it tends to work okay in a messy kind of way since Secret Rivals seem to be all about punk attitude over melody or musical proficiency. A simplistic Buzzcocks pop thrash fizzes beneath the duelling pair but maybe they should grab themselves a couple of Prolapse albums and see how a bit more space between the protagonists might actually accentuate the sense of chaos.

`Moscow’ sees Secret Rivals dip into prettier, poppier territory, singer Clouds taking sole vocal duties over that trademark guitar fizz. Unfortunately the mix means she’s barely audible, never mind decipherable and the overall effect is like the awkward, slightly wayward first offering from a lost 80s jangle band.

Back to the kinder-core scrapping for `Break Song’, which offers a better glimpse of what Secret Rivals are aiming for (ostensibly the first Sonic Youth album), but equally demonstrates how much they need to tidy up their act and expand their horizons if they want to get there. Still, enough promise from a band whose energy levels alone keep your attention from wandering.

Secret Rivals Myspace

By Zoë Herriot