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As if to deflect criticism from the off, Bring A Guillotine describe themselves on their Myspace as “like a really bad Joy Division song… but worse”. Such cumbersome faux-modesty should be enough to get anyone’s back up, but then there’s the band’s singer to contend with. I’ve no idea what his name is since the band’s line-up is listed only as “Earth, Wind and Fire” (crazy, crazy people, huh?), but he sings with the mock operatic baritone of a Friday night market town pub Johnny Cash impersonator, digging deep for gravelly country gravitas, something he might almost get away with if he had a single ounce of variety at his disposal.

`Watership Downs’ sounds like a karaoke take on Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ `Hurt’ with lo-fi back-up from a comatose-drunk Wedding Present. Come `Madeleine’, the karaoke Cash has lightened his mood slightly and The Wedding Present have woken from their booze-induced slumber but forgotten how to play and so they all bugger off to the kitchen to mainline filter coffee, leaving an apparently completely different band to perform `In Your Name’, a spindly, spaced-out piano ballad led by an untrained adenoidal whine that dribbles along in ungainly fashion and without even the good sense of direction to tip itself out of the nearest window. And thus Mr Karoake Cash and his minimalist cohorts stumble back into the room to darken the mood a little, pausing only to rhyme “Beemer” with “Argentina”.
 
The shame with all this is that it could have been a lot of fun. The singer is so over the top you want him to really go to town but he prefers to drone on until his foghorn voice starts to remind you of an overbearing, drunken uncle at a wedding reception, while the band seem incapable or completely unwilling to drag themselves up from random shuffle mode and kick some life into the songs. If they know what’s good for them they’ll nip down to HMV pronto and treat themselves to a copy of `The Drift’ by Scott Walker and `The Best Of Morecambe & Wise’; something to prick their musical ambition and something to provide them with some better jokes in future.

Bring A Guillotine Myspace

By Zoë Herriot

 I want to grow up to be

Working 9 till 5

I want to grow up to be

More dead than alive

Samuel Zasada’s latest home recorded EP opens with these lines, and a cynical tale of thwarted youthful aspirations. It’s a nicely put together and surprisingly jolly little tune, and it could be a mixture of Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” and Karel Fialka’s surprise hit “Hey Matthew” as created by Counting Crows. It’s a decent nugget of rootsy rebellion, but it feels more like something that should be placed two thirds of the way through your third album, not as the opening track on a bright new demo.

Luckily, this is soon followed by the best track on the record. “Buried” sounds like some strange Jewish funeral music, with mournful harmonised vocals, the corpse of a klezmer bassline and the slightly saucy sounding line, “Will you part my sea?” Whilst most acoustic singers are sitting around moaning about being a weeny bit lonely, Zasada has cut right to some truly exhausted, lovelorn sentiments here, that are more Thomas Hardy than Damien Rice, thankfully. “Place Your Words In Tune” continues the surprisingly effective dirge-pop mode, with a nice slow build and the most eerie slowly oscillating melodica drone you’re likely to come across. If you slowed this down and put reverb on the reverb it could almost be a lost Michael Gira track.

“Inside A Bomb” is equally bleak, seemingly owing its roots to a Southern prison worksong. It’s another strong performance, harmonica puffing over the top like thick polls of exhaust fumes, and our only criticism is that Zasada’s vocals tend toward a gravelly sincerity that sucks some of the wit and irony out of the lyrics (we’re not entirely sure what’s going on here, but any track this doom-laden that starts with ”I grazed my knee as a little boy” has got to be a little tongue in cheek, right?). The problem is worse on closer “The Blade That You Hold”, on which the vocal is an angst-ridden groan that resembles a maudlin drunk Tom Jones impersonator. Zasada has a powerful voice, but we prefer it when he doesn’t sing as if he’s trying to impress a listless open mike crowd, and tempers his tone to the subtleties of the music. This is all a little too close to Chad Kroeger for comfort, as Zasada constipatedly keens the refrain “It’s where I take delight”. Ironically, Samuel, it’s the only thing we dislike about an incredibly promising and assured recording. Doesn’t sound like he has much growing up left to do as an artist.

By David Murphy

Samuel Zasada Myspace

Decibel Studios in Chalgrove, East Oxfordshire, are offering 20% off any bookings on Fridays for the remainder of 2009. To take advantage of this, please phone David on 01460 221541 or 07885 211279, or email studiodecibel@aol.com, mentioning that you saw this offer on Oxfordbands.com.

Beaver Fuel is a band which many approach with trepidation, largely because the various members are always telling anyone who will listen how shambolic, unlistenable and unpopular they are. This doesn’t stop them gigging their socks off, often stepping into the breach when sappy out-of-towners fail to show, the payoff being that they have earned a reputation as a solid, tight, progressive punk act almost in spite of themselves (they played the Oxford Punt last May, so they have at least one important admirer in town).

Their latest EP, ‘This Allusion’ has plenty of good moments on it, even if the results are a bit uneven. Opener ‘Flopsy’ll be Toast!’, for example, has a rather soulful, bluesy lead guitar intro (it reminds me a little of The Guess Who?), before breaking into a more angular rise-and-fall figure, over which Leigh Alexander sardonically quarter-sings a lyric-as-character-assassination relating to some vacuous ex-girlfriend (or ‘hormonal cyclone’ as he nastily puts it). It’s a bit of a misfire to be honest: the barbs are too esoteric and the vocals are pretty approximate-best just listen to the guitar playing.

More focussed is the self-explanatory ‘Eurovision Political Favour Contest’. Of course, this institution (the gay equivalent of the FA Cup Final) is the softest of soft targets, and the joke has worn thin even for Sir Terry Wogan, but Beaver Fuel unexpectedly squeeze a couple of laughs out of it: think Tom Lehrer fronting Green Day:

“When it’s our turn to award the points, it’s musical merit alone/

No allies, no solidarity, we’re out here on our own/

So maybe we’re just keeping score to see if anyone likes us at all”

I don’t know about you, but I find the evocation of the spirit of Dunkirk allied with that of Millwall FC rather touching as well as amusing. And its great punk rock.

Finishing off, we have the Eric Cartmanesque ‘F*** You, I’ve got Tourettes’, which is as puerile and offensive as it sounds. And quite funny, if you’re in that sort of mood. The song proper is negligible musically, but the instrumental riffing at the end sounds like it could bear the weight of a more elevated subject-maybe they should lease it out to Rage Against the Machine or something.

So, ‘This Allusion’ represents Beaver Fuel in pretty good form. They are no longer a joke band, but are confident enough in themselves to make jokes, some of which actually get off the runway. Although as a frontman Alexander is more Henny Youngman than Henry Rawlins, his puzzled punk shtick is quite fresh: Frank Zappa once asked if humour belonged in music. At their best, Beaver Fuel show that wit can belong in punk.

Beaver Fuel Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.

In December last year, Misfit Mod (aka Sarah Kelleher) won Nightshift’s Demo of the Month and the Queen Love Zero EP received a glowing review from Colin Mackinnon on this site this May. Islands and Islands is her first full length release and shows that standards have not dropped.

This is female electro-pop but, joyously, there are few similarities between it and the current crop of unsatisfying fashionistas: its understated assurance is much more attractive than Lady Gaga’s ugly and vacuous posturing and Kelleher’s voice doesn’t suffer from the same biting reediness that makes La Roux so insufferable. Fundamentally, of course, the main difference is that they’re all trying to make you dance while Misfit Mod seems happier soundtracking the morning after than the night before. Stylistically it is perhaps closest to Cat Power’s minimalism with undeniable vocal echoes of Mimi Parker from Low. It feels, like Bon Iver’s debut, to be a very intimate almost confessional album, with ‘Cars (I)’ seeming to be a mantra of self-persuasion and self-chastisement but, perhaps with the exception of Ghost Me, it’s all much warmer than Bon Iver’s ascetic introspection.

In many ways the album sinks or swims on your opinion of the vocals since the backing beats rarely provide more than the most basic of skeletal structures to work from. For me, Kelleher’s voice is beautiful – always languid but at one moment soothing and sultry, at another icily pellucid. On many tracks, the most characteristic element of the delivery is how her voice catches on and slurs around the edges of words, a tendency not helped by liberal use of reverb. Occasionally, as on ‘Tribes’ and ‘First Aid’ where there is nothing sufficiently interesting in the vocals to save the simplicity of the backing from becoming monotonous, this delivery sounds especially forced – as if searching for emotional content which isn’t there. But, more usually, it is effective in helping fashion the album’s wonderfully drowsy dreaminess.

The harsher critics among you might find it little more than coffee-table music, and it certainly is an album you could take home to meet your mother, but the ten tracks aren’t just predictable variations on a single, safe theme. From the comfortable and chocolatey ‘Sugar C.’, through the mantra-like ‘Cars(I)’, and the swooping, verdant ‘Valleys’ to the breathy and unearthly ‘Ghost Me’ it is an album of subtle variety and considerable beauty.

Misfit Mod Myspace

By Daniel Mitchell

Blur vs. Oasis. Batman vs. The Joker. Guns ‘n Roses vs. Music. Some battles seem as old as time itself. And so it is that Oxford has its own Trojan epic, the tedious exchange of verbal mud pies between Jay ‘Rival’ and Joe of Spiral 25 that never fails to remind me of two children splashing water in each others’ eyes in the bath.

Inter-band warfare aside, you may have forgotten that Secret Rivals occasionally make music too. Indeed, I have before me a two track demo of theirs entitled Break Song/Get Famous, six minutes of frantic pop-punk that sounds like The Buzzcocks at a sherbet-snorting party. That said, Break Song is a pretty inauspicious start. It showcases the band’s style well, but doesn’t offer anything to really get your teeth into. The main guitar riff isn’t bad but the song is scuppered by the clumsy boy-girl vocal duet, and despite lasting only two and a half minutes the over-zealous use of the line “It’s not healthy, it’s not, it’s not ” makes the whole affair feel repetitive and lacking in ideas.

It’s Get Famous where the band really come into their own. With an intro that brings to mind Godzilla stomping all over Tokyo, the Rivals charge along at the speed of a hummingbird’s heartbeat. The raw energy of the Clouds/Jay vocal exchanges feel much more at home amongst Get Famous’s squealing guitars and bombardiering drums. Despite this, a little more finesse in the vocal delivery would really add something to the band’s repertoire; too often melody gives way to shouting, and neither singer has a sufficiently powerful voice to carry this off convincingly.

All in all, this is a decent showing from Secret Rivals. There’s enough in Get Famous to persuade me that the band are moving forwards with their sound, but they’ve still got some way to go before they’re the finished product.

Let the mudslinging begin!

Secret Rivals Myspace

By Alex Lloyd