Tonight starts with a change of line up, with Baby Gravy having to drop out, due to a family bereavement. Thanks a lot to Cat Matador for stepping in and our best wishes to Zahra.

This is my first review for OxfordBands.com, so I have decided to be largely friendly and to close an eye to imperfection and an ear to musical monstrosity. Kicking off, Cat Matador show enormous commitment to their material, an experimental grunge/rock that is quite original, dynamic, catchy and very clever, but not yet fully accomplished. The less-than-good sound did not help either, and I’d love to listen to the band again in a more sympathetic acoustic setup. I particularly liked the unusual touch of Sian’s electric violin in the rock context and the immense power that Christopher’s drumming gave to the dark, intricate musical pattern. In total, Cat Matador is a band with a lot of promising ideas and they will surely emerge sooner or later as yet another amazing Oxford group.

Next, Family Machine hit the stage, and it’s like a ray of sunshine after a storm. Their music is cheerfully beautiful; it just makes you sing, dance and feel good. Drummer Jay is a dream to watch smile, play and sing and with his perfect, minimal style he would be a dream for any producer to deal with, giving power and groove to their catchy sixties sound. A typical Family Machine song is a three-minute condensed mix of emotions that never step too far from your ears nor from your heart. Their music flows effortlessly through the listener’s soul, thanks to great musical ability married to an uncomplicatedly pure song-writing talent that doesn’t try to reach for more than it achieves: beauty.

After the sunshine, it’s time for an earthquake: Little Fish, the band everybody’s talking about. Now, I asked myself several times before hearing them, how can two people be enough to play festivals, win awards and create aggressive yet melodic punk? Well, you just have to see them live to believe all that and more. Singer Juju has been compared to the best female songwriters of the past and present (P.J. Harvey and Janis Joplin on occasions) but that’s all wrong. Juju cannot be compared to anybody else, as her unique, raw, mad, infectious style is something that nobody else has achieved before. Juju doesn’t just sing, she lives the song, with the little melody needed coming from her guitar and all of her soul coming out of her small, twitching body: a true force of nature, a work of art, worth going to see just to have an idea of what a one-off artist with immense vocal gifts can come up with. And Nez: I am a drummer myself, and in my time in Oxford I seem to have been quite unlucky, coming across some dreadful drumming when I have time to go to gigs. I hate to speak badly about fellow sticksmen… well, how could I do that now, when Nez’s ability, vision, dynamic dexterity and sensitivity are just some of his strong points? His rhythms, eclectic approach to the song, solidity and power have a lot to say not only to those drummers who play pubs in front of a few mates, but also to the big stars up there who would need to team up in numbers to match what Nez does naturally and with ease.

To summarize: if you have just heard of Little Fish, it is time to dive into the sea and be ready for the wave.

By Dario Derma Lena

Mental health charity MIND should benefit from a strong bill at the Exeter Hall on Friday August 15. Local soul-folk diva Chantelle Pike headlines, with support from Faringdon-based troubadour Trev Williams, jazzy singer-songwriter Vanessa Lewis and indie rockers Failing to Focus. It’s four quid on the door, starting from 8.00p.m. Visit http://www.trevwilliams.co.uk/ for more information on the acts and the charity.

Sunday morning is usually the preserve of the band who will gently caress your aching head and ease you into the day. Someone obviously has a perverse sense of humour because Mephisto Grande are gracing the main stage. Liam Ings-Reeves’ voice growls from the PA like a terrifying preacher. Augmented by a choir their songs are somewhat larger in scope than normal but no less unnerving. ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken?’ remains a highlight and seems to make perfect sense in the way it is served up as a grizzled dirty gospel song.

Aching heads be damned, we head to the Barn to catch Kyte who had greatly impressed us recently as a support band to iLikeTrains. Delicate soundscapes are Kyte’s stock and they don’t disappoint. The problem with describing bands like this is that terms such as ethereal are all to easy to crank out for the umpteenth time, but they also sum things up succinctly. Kyte begin in wistful mode but each and every slowly-engineered build-up pays off with something approaching majesty. We only wish we could enjoy them outside because it’s all too rare to hear this kind of thing in beautiful sunshine; it’s usually heard emanating from bedrooms with the curtains closed all day.

Back in the Barn and there’s more sonic chaos with The Early Years. Taking their inspiration from Krautrock and Suicide, (their new single is even titled ‘Like A Suicide’) their set is rife with motorik drum beats and swelling crescendos. ‘The Computer Voice’ threatens to be a highlight of the set with its Jim Morrison-styled vocals, before the band give themselves over to the glory of drone and rattle the roof of the barn with thunderous noise.

Over on the main stage Johnny Foreigner have been attacking everyone with their angular metal/punk for long enough, and it’s the turn of Fighting With Wire to provide back-to-basic thrills. They may only be a three-piece but the noise they produce is vast and visceral. Frank Turner will later refer to them in terms of being not dissimilar to early Foo Fighters (and earning a poorly aimed bottle launched in his direction as a result) but he’s not too far from the truth. Big riffs and big choruses and an energetic show might not make Fighting With Wire the most original thing you’ll ever see, but for mindless thrills you won’t go far wrong.

Changing pace completely are Camera Obscura who are somewhat disappointing. It would take a cold heart to dislike their music which is light and fluffy and about as close to pop perfection as you can get, yet there is something missing. Whether it’s in the mix is hard to ascertain, but somehow it just doesn’t translate as well as it should. We remind ourselves to slap Let’s Get Out of This Country on as soon as we get home to restore our faith.

Having heard Ulrich Schnauss‘ name dropped by several cool types recently we deem it worthy a visit to the Barn to take in his electronic genius. Genius it might be, but as a visual spectacle there can be no more tedious sights than a grown man at a computer who might just as well be playing minesweeper than creating music. We resolve to grow a beard and take these things far more seriously in future and head back out into the sun.

Frank Turner will almost certainly never be accepted as cool, yet here he is on the main stage putting in a performance that would set alight a festival several times larger than Truck. Love him or hate him you’ve got to give him credit for being a master showman. His backing band is built from locals Dive Dive, and they provide the drive behind the likes of ‘I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous’ and ‘Photosynthesis’ allowing Turner to relax and force the audience into participation. He’s got the assurance of someone who could be headlining and after years of hard work, his songs are starting to strike a chord too. It’s another contender for performance of the festival.

When the programme promises a spoken word performance from any local band, you’ve just got to check it out. I mean, imagine a reading from Twizz Twangle, or some lovelorn poetry from Richard Walters - excellent. The spoken word performance from Youthmovies‘ Andrew, though, is just painful: a horrible sub-Joycean pseudo-stream of consciousness babbling that erases all memory of his band’s sterling set on the Barn Stage the previous day.

This Is Seb Clarke have some excellent burgundy Beatles suits, and create some decent straight up trio rock that’s a bit like half of The Hives, but the programme had promised us 12 piece horn driven heaven, so we slope off feeling hard done by.

Wouldn’t it be great if a band called The Nuns were an all-girl tribute to sixties garage rockers The Monks, only in nun outfits? Just as well that’s what they are then, and great with it: a rambunctious, good-time party band who are just perfect to loosen up to on a warm festival afternoon, regardless of whether or not you’re familiar with the source material.

A friend of mine has a theory that ska bands are by definition fun. The Drug Squad do nothing to prove him wrong, which is good news for everybody who’s here to dance. The other ska staples are in place too. Hats and sunglasses indoors? Check. Uptempo tunes sandwiches by good-natured banter? Check. The only out-of-place element is the singer, who seems to have wandered out of a completely different genre. The mismatching shirt and tie say ska, but the Cookie Monster growl and the goatee scream heavy metal. Apparently he’s only been in the band for about two and a half hours, so perhaps we’re witnessing an incomplete transformation. Although the songs are highly danceable, there’s no standout track making a bid for classic status. Still, the the band creates a party atmosphere that makes the live performance more than the sum of their tunes.

Luke Smith’s set is delayed because of generator problems. Doesn’t matter, we’re happy just to stand and listen to him talk, seeing as he’s the most erudite and charming man at the festival. The music might well be somewhat derriere garde, stemming from music hall ditties and 70s MOR, but as an extension of Luke’s chummy personality it works perfectly. Nobody else here would pen a tune like “You’ll Never Stop People Being Gits”, ridicule their bassist, take the piss out of audience singalongs, and still come out looking like the nicest man in town.

Borderville are high-energy, high-concept and a lot of fun live. Their theatrical-military look is the perfect fit for a flamboyant but deceptively tight set with their charismatic keyboardist a standout. Their vaudevillian yet hard-rocking set hurtles along all too quickly, and the audience are left yelling for an encore.

Maps hold our attention with some rather pretty soundscapes and layered vocal lines. Unfortunately for them, they go and ruin all their good work by covering Ride’s ‘Leave Them All Behind’ at the end of the set. It’s unfortunate for Maps because everything else they’ve done is blown away by the sheer scale of this one song.

Neil Halstead, from Slowdive, feels somewhat guilty about playing acoustic guitar on the shoegazing bill. “I don’t even have a pedal,” he admits. No matter as he performs lovely smoky wisps of song that keeps the small crowd happy. Nothing onstage to explain why he’s held in reverence, perhaps, but something rather lovely all the same.

Pete Kember, AKA Sonic Boom is one of the big names of the festival, and has made some of the most amazing psychedelic music we own. He begins his performance as part of Spectrum with a slow simple keyboard piece, underpinned by elementary drum machine. It actually sounds rather like Jean-Michel Jarre, in a good way, and draws us into a head nodding state of bliss. Once his rhythm section get onstage, they start doing something that sounds like The Shadows in a wind tunnel, with some slightly unconvincing vocals. Seeing as our indie legends quota hasn’t been good this weekend, we quit while we’re ahead and nip off to see Thomas Truax.

Five years ago we saw Truax play to handful of bemused listeners on this very spot, but now he’s one of the most popular acts on the bill. Thirty minutes isn’t really long enough to get to grips with his Tom Waits on The Great Egg Race marriage of American grotesquerie and homemade instruments, but it’s interesting that one of the biggest cheers is for the bitter sweet “The Butterfly & The Entomologist”, played with a handheld battery fan and a guitar, showing that Truax has songwriting abilities to back up his post-industrial carny routines.

Following some tent dismantling operations, we arrive halfway through YACHT’s set, where two people are taking a bizarre Q&A session. Thankfully this is dispensed with forthwith in favour of a sort of new wave disco rock that sounds like a contemporary electro take on Arthur Russell, overtopped with ranting vocals that remind us of Talking Heads in the way disconnected statements are pushed together to make implausible sense. The statements “I married a doctor”, “It’s better than awkward silence” and “I used to live a in a psychic city” linger in the mind after the show, as if to be decoded like arcane jottings. We’ve seen a million bands who do live vocals over backing tracks, but YACHT are the first act in a long time to marry compositional ability to stage performance successfully: seriously, the robot Pan’s People interpretations of the programmed sounds are beautifully controlled, and probably just as hard to perform as actually playing the music would be. So we go home feeling we’ve seen one of the festival’s best and most unexpected sets.

Is it Ride? No. Is it Slowdive? No. It’s Chapterhouse! Do we care? Not really. We try find a reason to be overwhelmed by this mindboggling reunion but just can’t. It’s time to head off home so we pop Leave Them All Behind into the car stereo and start counting down the days until next year’s festival.

By David Murphy, Sam Shepherd, Stuart Fowkes and Kate Griffin

So long, it’s been good to know ya. In a few weeks, Sacramento’s finest, Anton Barbeau returns to the States, but he leaves a host of fans and friends here in his adopted town. And  as a parting gift there is this album, a pleasing mixture of summer-seasoned pop and melodic experimentalism.

‘Staring at the Sun’ and ‘You can Move a Mountain’ exemplify Barbeau’s more chart-friendly side, with strong echoes of Crowded House on the latter and The Travelling Wilburys on the former. His voice is not a million miles away from the late George Harrison’s and if you throw in a producer who knows his Jeff Lynn, some amiably amateurish harmonica playing balanced by Su Jordan’ preternaturally accurate backing vocals you have an almost uncanny reconstruction of that cosmically-unlikely supergroup. ‘Mountain’ is just a little rougher in style and none the worse for that, although the close harmony remains at perfection levels. The Neil Finn influence continues into ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolphins’ which sounds a bit too close to ‘Weather with You’ for comfort, although Jaime Smith’s gentle violin work lifts it into a good place.

Barbeau’s inner hippy is given freer reign on songs such as ‘Poking Myself in the Eye to Spite my Finger’, which with its crazy lyrics about kissing the mouth of volcanoes and Jordan’s Barbie-Doll soprano is as baffling as the title suggests. More successful is ‘I’ve Been Craving Lately’ which starts like a Brave Combo party song (Barbeau is credited, justly, as playing ‘almost accordion’) and then morphs into an exhilarating piece of psychedelic Euro-pop, with a fabulously farty synth-bass bouncing along like an elephant on a pogo stick.

For sheer catchiness, ‘Who’s the Pony Now?’ takes the palm. It’s not really a song at all, more the sort of nursery rhyme the Midwich Cuckoos might have sung in order to drive their primary school teacher potty. In the modern era, it deserves to be taken up by football fans and hurled at the more statuesque opposition centre halves (Richard Dunne of Manchester City would be an obvious candidate) with the word ‘Pony’ replaced by ‘Donkey’.

Hopefully the sense of fun that informs this record has by now come across. Barbeau is a proper musician all right, but like Frank Zappa he knows that humour belongs in music and his album is one of light and life. Catch his few remaining live shows while you still can.

Anton Barbeau Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.

Saturday

Whether it’s because of the washout and hasty enforced rescheduling of Truck last year, or the spate of festivals cancelled or criticised beyond any hope of recovery this summer already, more than usual seems to be riding on 2008 as a critical year for Truck - and by extension for local music, such is the shadow cast by the festival over bands and venues across Oxfordshire. The first critical test is meteorological, and thankfully the festival passes with flying colours - for the most part, the weather is glorious, and few places look better in blazing sunshine than the cornfields of Hill Farm. The second test, rather less prosaically, is musical - previous years have treated us to incredible sights like Battles, Regina Spektor, or a host of as-yet-unheard new favourite bands, so it remains to see how a lineup that looks at first sight not exactly enthralling translates over the course of the weekend.

An inauspicious start to the festival for us, as we take what’s unfortunately the first of many mediocre guitar bands in the form of Lovvers, who are spiky, angular, jerky and all those other adjectives that get used on flyers for the kind of awkward guitar bands listened to by awkward boys. Unfortunately they couldn’t see their way to being remotely interesting.

Having charmed all those who saw them at this year’s Punt, it’s little surprise that Alphabet Backwards are repeating their success at Truck. Playing to a nearly packed Barn (which is unheard-of this early on a Saturday) their cutesy indie pop gets a rapturous reception. Dancing breaks out, as does a flurry of clap-a-long moments and the band are flying.

In diametric opposition to their look-at-me name, Holton’s Opulent Oog supply us with an untroubled, unobtrusive country lope.  Pliant and friendly, perhaps, but with all the chutzpah of a shy 7-year-old forced to recite in Sunday school.  Of course, complaining about country pop at Truck is like shouting for “Born To be Wild” at Glyndebourne, so we’ll just edge away, quietly. 

Over on the main stage, Little Fish are winning a small army of new fans.  Aside from being musically spotless, Juju and Nez are rare in looking as though they were born to be onstage - even on the main stage, it’s rare to see an act that you can’t tear your eyes from.  But, would it be terribly party-pooping of us to suggest that they write some more songs?  There’s some padding in their repertoire, and the world doesn’t need another rock twopiece unless they’re very, very good.  Worries for another day, perhaps, for now it’s another Fish victory.

Martin Simpson treats us to an etymology lesson as he’s tuning up. He explains that “bucolic” literally means “pertaining to cows” and “crepuscular” comes originally from the Latin for “dark” or “obscure”. But, as he points out, both words sound like nasty complaints. So it’s fitting that his first song, murder ballad Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, is bucolic, crepuscular and thoroughly horrible.

Thankfully things lighten up after that. The rest of the set is a joy to hear and watch. Simpson’s guitar-playing skill has to be experienced live to be believed; his dextrous fingers turn the one-man acoustic set-up into something richer, almost as if the guitar was at times a second human presence.

The blues and rock numbers draw cheers and whistles of appreciation, but the highlight of the set is a note-perfect, emotional rendering of Never Any Good, the song that won him one of several prizes at the BBC Folk Awards this year. Martin Simpson is that rare creature: a technically gifted musician with the charisma to make even his soundchecks entertaining.

There’s nothing precisely wrong with Green As A Primary’s melding of Mogwai and Prefuse 73, but this downtempo mood music is so fussily exact that it reminds us of bad cappuccino, polished foyers, overpriced theatre bars and aging bachelors trying to look urban and sophisticated in Stoke Newington.  Could well sell millions, then…

The Family Machine have always looked to us like lovable scamps in a 90s British romcom, around whom everything goes wrong, but who come up affably smiling.  In the midst of some random sound engineering, the unflagging cheeriness of the band makes us assume that Hugh Grant is taking notes in the wings.  After all the problems, it’s a glorious set from some of Oxford’s best songwriters, all lachrymose acoustic laments undercut with a plucky determination - we imagine a video of slow motion clips of missed penalities, fluffed catches and other sports failures to “The Do Song”, intercut with footage of Jamie Hyatt winking from the bleachers.

There are some bands we catch at Truck that we are certain we would hate in any other setting. Dead Kids are one of those bands. Led by Mike Title, a frontman for whom exuberant is not a strong enough word, they grab the attention from the off. Musically, it’s nothing to get to excited about, as they’re an unremarkable kind of disco punk affair (think Black Lace discovering crack), but they are eminently watchable. Lovvers may have scaled the PA, but they weren’t wearing a single black leather glove, a cape and trying to snog the face off a security guard were they? Like most bands where the spectacle is the most important thing, Dead Kids soon outstay their welcome but at least they were amusing for a while.

Was it really less than two years ago since we saw Rolo Tomassi at The Port Mahon as part of a single figure crowd?  In a packed Barn they get a heroes’ welcome.  This is, of course all good and proper, because their maximalist metal constructions are simply amazing, with intricate drums, throat-shredding screaming and even more buzzy keyboards that are only a curry away from being Rick Wakeman, which seems to be a theme of the Barn today.  The dexterity involved in the performance is incredible, but it doesn’t get in the way of the riotous passion on show.  They do a track that sounds like “Eye Of The Tiger” remade by Napalm Death and Goblin.  If you want more than that in your life you are greedy beyond belief.

Some competent folk rock from Texas’ Okkervil River, who know how to do lush and full blooded, their line up including two keyboards and occasional trumpet.  At times they resembled The Arcade Fire without the Biblical bits, but far too often they just passed the time.  We asked three people in the crowd who they sounded like, and nobody could actually come up with a name; this means either Okkervil River are trailblazing geniuses, or forgettably generic. Make your own minds up.

We’re in the last days of a sleaze-ridden Tory government, university education is free and only total geeks use email. Yes, it’s 1996 again; how else do you explain the fact that Dodgy are performing in front of such an adoring crowd?

The chirpy trio are back, and it’s as if the past twelve years never happened. The tent is surrounded by the hordes of fans who arrived too late to squeeze in. The audience are clapping and cheering, and - please tell me I’m imagining things - there is at least one lighter being waved in a non-ironic manner. (Of course, I forgot that we’ve all been transported back to a world where the smoking ban is just a crazy dream.)

The set is shambolic, but the band’s enthusiasm is infectious. They’re obviously delighted to be touring and writing music again. The new material is slower than their early stuff, but the audience seem to enjoy it anyway. They end with Good Enough, which is all over the place musically as well as missing the lift that some live brass would provide. But the rapturous audience cheer all the way through, except when singer Nigel holds the mike towards them and they oblige by singing the chorus. As we shuffle out, I get a hint as to why Dodgy are still so popular. The girl in front of me says to her friend, “They remind me of when I was, like, fifteen.”

As soon as The Lemonheads‘ Evan Dando throws on his guitar you get the feeling he’s not too bothered about turning in a good performance. In fact, this trot through the whole lot of ‘It’s a Shame About Ray’ is barely a performance at all. Omitting ‘Rocking Stroll’, Dando seems to be oblivious to the concept of playing an album in its entirety. Noticeably rolling his eyes, he doesn’t seem remotely interested. Still, it’s great to hear the songs he does deign to play, and that in itself is worth hanging around for.

Back in the tent and it’s fucking cold. So cold in fact we consider going home. Just as we decide to stay, someone breaks out a bull horn right next to the tent. They decide to save some of it for the morning - which is something to look forward to. Elsewhere as the bass from the site rumbles through the ground, revellers are declaring themselves to be Spartacus. What’s that sound? It’s a car door slamming as we head off home to a nice warm bed. We love local festivals.

By David Murphy, Stuart Fowkes, Sam Shepherd and Kate Griffin

Oxford stars The Winchell Riots are The Guardian’s band of the day for 29 July - check out the profile piece here. The band headline the final OxfordBands monthly night on 29 August - tickets are now on sale here for £5. Support comes from Epic45, Hreda and Eduard Sounding Block.

It’s a fine year for festivals in Oxfordshire, and this weekend sees the second Arcane Festival take place at Horsenden Meadow, Tetsworth. The lineup takes in some of the cream of the county’s music, from the usual rock and country to dubstep and electro, and looks like this:

MAIN STAGE: InLight, Witches, The Gog, Nagatha Krusti, Shirley, Souljacker, All These Arms, The Gullivers, Bear in the Air, The Youngs Plan

MYSTIC WOODLAND: Danny & The Champions of The World,Stornoway, Maria Ilett, The New Moon, Osprey, Clare Peecock, Anton Barbeau, The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band, Bethany Weimars, Dave Todd, ICO, Holton’s Opulant Oog, MotionInColour, Mark Wood (of Junkyard Choir), Jimi Alexander, Garron Frith

SQUARE ONE: Dougal (H.T.I.D./Slammin’ Vinyl), Ramos B2B Punch, DJ Fear, Sam Eeles, Matt JB, Gsus MC, MC Brookzy,

PURE ALCHEMY: Hyper, DJ Kyte, Micky Ry, The Eclectric All Stars, Rob Dunstone (Fresh Out The Box), SO

Weekend tickets are £20 including camping, and the show runs from 12pm on Saturday. For more information, including directions and so on, check out the Arcane website.

Leftfield London label Brainlove Records team up with our own Coo Coo Club to host a day of experimental music at the Jericho Tavern.  Oxford’s own Keyboard Choir will be performing alongside artists from all around the UK, including the likes of Team Brick, Retro Spankees and Pagan Wanderer Lu. In addition to the live acts, John Brainlove and guests will be DJing. This sounds like a must for the musically adventurous: showtime is 2.00p.m. on Saturday 9 August with £6.00 entry. 18 and over only.

Lineup: (subject to change)
 
23.00-00.00: Keyboard Choir
22.00-22.40: Pagan Wanderer Lu
21.00-21.30: The Retro Spankees
20.00-21.40: Mewgatz
19.00-19.45: Dead Singer
18.00-18.30: Team Brick
17.00-17.25: Pseudo Nippon
16.00-16.25: Ratface
14.00: Doors - Brainlove 2000&ACE DJs

Captain Beefheart once famously said: “A carrot is as close as a rabbit gets to a diamond”. But he was wrong. “Rabeat’s Cage: Première évasion”, a ten song sampler, elegantly disproves his theory by unearthing some true carrotty gems from the Oxford scene (with some assists from Paris).

At this point I should correct myself. While I just wrote it was a sampler to promote the artists’ work, Rabeat’s Cage is thought out very much like a proper album, rather than a collection of songs. The first three tracks fuse beautifully into each other, sharing not only the same key (slash relative minor) but a melancholic aesthetic that pervades the rest of the album.

The songs are excellently varied, extremely atmospheric and universally eccentric (like Mr Rabeat himself), encompassing electronica, rock, jazz and more. The main interest, and link between the songs lies in the lush harmonic blends created by each different instrumental combination. Piano with strings, guitar, harmonica, keyboards etc all fuse to create as Mr Rabeat says “a bit of magic in the ears”. Whether jagged vocals, abrasive beats or string quartets are your cup of tea or not, the songs all deliver in its particular way, as I shall describe:

First song of note is the hauntingly melancholic ‘Antidote’ by Eberg, where piano and accoustic bass oscillate between chords like a slow pendulum marking time before the singer’s demise. Two voices, one voice with a helium effect, describe a mysterious death/suicide scene between two people for whom there is no hope, as a harrowing refrain of “someone should hold you tighter than I do” floats ethereally in and out of the song. Morose violin (viola?) and electronic beats add texture. In short: artful, powerful, sad, brilliant.

Next up for scrutiny is the excellent ‘Je ne sais pour qui je pleure’, by Azad. The title is an cute pun, meaning “I don’t know who I’m crying about” rather than “I don’t know why I’m crying”. This song lies firmly in the realm of jazz and features clarinet, picked electric guitar and drums with brushes. In a word, this song is the best example of leaving musical space that I can think of. It is leagues apart from the sort of up-its-own-arse jazz, characterised by an endless diarrhoeia of breathless improvisation and incomprehensible noodles. You hardly notice as the song creeps up on you at the outset and at the end as it seeps away into melancholic oblivion. But every note is expertly placed and timed, and does things that regular rock beats can only dream of. Plus, the tune is killer. Simple, extremely elegant, bliss.

Other songs include ‘Knowing How To Carry’ by Hreda, another downbeat number that slumbers edgily along with cello, guitar etc, until a minute from the end, where it suddenly bursts into life with metallic glory, crowning a musical theme that had been building up. In this way it satisfies, unlike Radiohead’s We Suck Young Blood off Hail to the Thief, which fails to follows through. Even within the trio of more electronic-based songs by NeOr, Tam Rush, and Sunnyvale Noise Sub-Element there is a great diversity. Sunnyvale delivers a shower of assorted pick-and-mix beats, combined with electric guitar for extra texture; Tam Rush a stranger, more Mouse On Mars-flavoured effort; and NeOr a spaced-out funk number with a more straightforward beat.

All in all, it’s a treat. The other numbers are just as good, and if the Rabeat has any more time on his hands to dig up some more corkers, as he wiles away his sad, lonely days in his hutch, I would definitely be up for hearing them. Bring on the Seconde évasion. And the troisième…

Rabeat’s Cage Myspace

By B.M.

If The Family Machine were a movie star, they would be Will Smith. They’re impossible not to like, even when they’re doing horrible things; in Smith’s case strangling his pet dog in `I Am Legend’; in The Family Machine’s case singing jauntily about dying in car crashes. Whether it’s the loping country ramble of `Flowers By The Roadside’ or the cheesy, summer-spun `Do Song’, they’re unavoidably cuddly. Recent single, `Got It Made’, paints the band in a more ambitious light, but sadly you know that unlike Will Smith they’re never going to be rich and famous. And that’s the world’s loss.

While Family Machine are genially understated, Not My Day are – superficially at least – bolder and overstated. They’re good-natured in their own way but lacking the warmth, humour and innate sense of melody of The Family Machine. They bang out their set of 60s-styled rock in conveyor belt fashion and prompt some ungainly dancing from a select handful of their gathered mates. Well drilled but riddled with clichés, the memory of them stays with you for precisely the time it takes to walk to the bar.

Having burdened themselves with a name that wouldn’t pass muster at a school battle of the bands competition, Indiana’s Murder By Death are gothic but not goth, dark-hearted southern rock knocked out in the fashion of country rock barflies who’ve ingested a gallon or two of Nick Cave’s biblical blues. They sing about the Devil and shooting a man in the back, frontman Adam Turla’s deep, rasping drawl akin to Stan Ridgeway doing an Elvis impersonation, a fine voice hidden by an extensive beard, while Sarah Balliet’s nonchalantly fevered cello playing adds a tautness and edge of menace to what might otherwise descend into old-fashioned bar ballads and road trip tales, and helps rescue awkward tracks like `My Ball and Chain’.

Overall they’re bigger on spirit and energy than great songs and the cavernous sound they suffer in a quarter-full Zodiac does their sound few favours. Better, perhaps, to experience them in more intimate surroundings, maybe unplugged to bring out the simmering violence. They encore with a song simply called `The Depressing Song’, just in case we hadn’t noticed they don’t do cheerful.

Tonight is the first gig of a European tour and given the band’s low profile in the UK the poor turnout isn’t so surprising, but you feel that with the quality of dark-country bands coming out of the States in recent years, Murder By Death are going to have to do something a bit more special to earn a return ticket.

Zoë Herriot