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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 

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

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

You may remember from a few years back Mitch Benn and The Distractions’ seminal hit ‘Everything Sounds like Coldplay Now’. This spot-on (if rather obvious) satire was intended to chuck a spanner into the workings of that pitiless machine that endlessly grinds out a stultifying succession of sensitive, wafty, piano-based stodge for the undiscerning Tesco Mum. Sadly, pop music seems immune to satire: hair rock and metal survived Spinal Tap, and the Coldplay clones endure: The Feeling, The Kooks, Snow Patrol, and the whole troupe of worthy old carthorses continue to plough their furrow, to the sound of squeaks of ecstasy from the likes of Fearne Cotton, the silly old mare.

To Liesel, an Oxford-London quintet, sound an awful lot like Coldplay, but they have a little bit about them, so don’t run away just yet. The instrumental stuff is workmanlike: gnarled and trembly piano, big distorted guitars that come by three-quarters in to signify Epic (you can set your watch by them!) and lots of splashy cymbals. So far, so numbingly generic, but To Liesel’s new wrinkle is that they have stuck a load of reverberant Fleet Foxes harmonies over it all, and the effect is often quite pleasing and even, in places, awkwardly beautiful.

Strongest song on the demo is ‘Dear Jane’, which uses the device of an exchange of comically earnest love letters to pile on the sentiment, but I have to curmudgeonly accept that it probably works-teenagers are like that. The lead vocalist has an undeniably pretty falsetto, and the backup singing is pristine and spacious. A little folkier is the gently lilting ‘My Name is Ocean’, which might be cousin to one of Stornoway’s more mystical ballads.

Less successful is the overlong and turgid ‘Ashes that Stain’, a piece of machine pop lacking the immediacy and pathos of ‘Dear Jane’, as well as the latter’s hooks, which I admit left me guiltily snagged. They really are an odd mix, this lot: instrumentally safe to the point of indolence but vocally expansive and searching. At any rate, it will be fun to see them at the Jericho later in the month (with the excellent Minor Coles) to see if they can cut it live. If so, and if they can wean themselves off their more cloying influences, then Oxford may be graced by some gorgeous choral pop in the near future.

To Liesel 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