OxfordBands.com

Hreda live at the Audioscope/Regal show, supporting Don Caballero, on 10 November 2008 at The Regal, Oxford.

THE WINCHELL RIOTS
EPIC45
HREDA
EDUARD SOUNDING BLOCK

Friday 29 August, The Wheatsheaf, Oxford
7.30pm – 11pm Advance tickets on sale here.

After five years of monthly shows, the final OxfordBands.com monthly gig night is this Friday, so please come down and help us see the shows off in style. Starting in February 2003 with The Young Knives, Intentions of an Asteroid and Jarcrew, we’re happy to have brought the likes of Deerhoof, Mark Eitzel, Part Chimp, Todd, Telescopes, Brave Captain and the otherworldly delights of Taurpis Tula, Hertta Lussu Assa, Noxagt, KK Null, Virgin Eye Blood Brothers and many more to Oxford, as well as all our favourite local bands.

We’re signing off with a belter. THE WINCHELL RIOTS, formed from the ashes of the much-missed Fell City Girl, headline, almost a year to the day after we put on their first gig. We also promoted the first Fell City Girl show, so we’re very happy to sign off our live shows with a band we’ve been with since day one.

Main support are the beautiful EPIC45, whose album ‘May Your Heart Be The Map’ has been the soundtrack to our summer:

“The best English Summer record ever” (Word)

“Beguiling and Beautiful” (NME)

“You’ll feel like you’ve been hearing MYHBTM in your head all your life, and were waiting for someone to record it” (The Sunday Times)

“Gorgeous stuff – highly recommended” (Boomkat)

‘Music that buzzes, drones and sweeps as if the aural mirroring of a ballet dancer giving the performance of their life, the effect is both beguiling and intoxicating. It’s a wonder at times, this album… one of the most gorgeous albums you’ll hear in a long time.’ – Drowned In Sound

Also playing are the wonderful HREDA, without doubt one of the best bands to emerge from the Oxford scene in the past twelve months:

‘For those who have been craving for some technically-outstanding, engaging instrumental guitar music since the
untimely demise of the Edmund Fitzgerald, look no further.’ – Nightshift

‘Their instrumental post-rock sound, grandiose like a heavier and more intricate Explosions In The Sky augmented by the band’s very own cellist is absolutely captivating. Their distorted peaks, battling guitars and swift undulating changes of pace mean the 30-minute set flies by far too quickly. We have discovered something special in this one.’ – DrownedinSound

And opening are the twelve-legged beast that is EDUARD SOUNDING BLOCK, formed from the ashes of Suitable Case For Treatment, one of the first bands we championed as OxfordBands.com live.

‘Cramming in everything from Pelican and Fantomas to a couple of passages that sound for all the world like Youthmovies if they’d grown up listening to Carcass, they’re truly monstrous. Special mention, too, to the keyboards, which lift and augment the guitar pyrotechnics with choppy, angular chords reminiscent of Nought. Sure, there are signs that it’s only their third show: some of the changes are a little choppy and can sound forced, and sometimes the vocals adds little to the overall effect, but there’s every sign they’ll easily eclipse the memory of their former outfit (some achievement in its own right). In the future, there will be B-movies along the lines of Godzilla vs. Eduard Sounding Block. I know who my money’s on.’ – Nightshift

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.

The lineup for the last OxfordBands monthly night is coming together and looks like this.

The Winchell Riots headline, almost a year to the day after we put on their first full band gig.

Main support are the beautiful Epic 45:

‘little Proustian snatches of half-buried brilliance… You’ll feel like you’ve been hearing May Your Heart Be the Map in your head all your life, and were waiting for someone to record it.’ – Sunday Times

‘Music that buzzes, drones and sweeps as if the aural mirroring of a ballet dancer giving the performance of their life, the effect is both beguiling and intoxicating. It’s a wonder at times, this album… one of the most gorgeous albums you’ll hear in a long time.’ – Drowned In Sound

Also playing are the wonderful Hreda:

‘For those who have been craving for some technically-outstanding, engaging instrumental guitar music since the
untimely demise of the Edmund Fitzgerald, look no further.’ – Nightshift

‘Their instrumental post-rock sound, grandiose like a heavier and more intricate Explosions In The Sky augmented by the band’s very own cellist is absolutely captivating. Their distorted peaks, battling guitars and swift undulating changes of pace mean the 30-minute set flies by far too quickly. We have discovered something special in this one.’ – Drowned in Sound

It all happens on Friday 29 August at The Wheatsheaf.

This week’s cocktail hour bagatelle is to imagine a version of 80s teen stalwart The Breakfast Club with Oxford bands recast as the central characters.  We shan’t spoil the fun by making any suggestions, but we do feel that we can envisage a denouement in which acts find unlikely kinship in those from different genres, having spent a few evenings listening to the new Hretha EP.  Judged by their live shows, we’ve always had Hretha (and yes, it is a “th” sound, even though it might look like a “d”, just admit you aren’t as orthographically astute as we) pegged as a straight up post rock trio.  You know the sort: pretty good, lots of instrumental fiddliness, dynamics instead of compositions.  Their intricately cross-stitched guitar skeins have kept us diverted for half an hour here and there, but we’ve never felt them working too deeply into the consciousness.  This EP changes all that with a collection of emotive instrumentals that can only be called wordless songs, and we find that our minds are drifting towards many of our favourite balladeers, even as it throws up the obvious references, such as Mogwai or Billy Mahonie.

“Knowing How To Carry” is a snowy waste of a tune, and buoys you aloft on the swell of a heart-rending melody; in much the same way as Oxford stalwarts The Workhouse do, Hretha manage here to communicate acres of emotion without resorting to verbal communication.  The ‘cello may be something of a post-rock cliché, but the way it’s weary melody pulls against the funerary plod of the drums is quite gorgeous.  We feel honour bound to use words like “glacial”, “shimmering”, “hyperborean” and lots of others we found in a dusty file marked “4AD” in the back of the NME storeroom.  Sadly the rock out payoff is somewhat generic and unsatisfying, but the track still exhibits a delicacy their live shows have never captured.

No such criticisms of “Little Knows (Gino)” which doesn’t spend all its energy trying to be epic, and channels them all into just being a lovely wash of sound, in which wispy net curtains of guitar flap lazily in the breeze and a heavily reverbed elfin choir laments in the background.  Again, there’s a vintage feel to the music, and it could easily be fitted into an odd space between Robert Fripp and Channel Light Vessel.  Featherlight, brief, but far from forgettable.

We’re on more solid post-rock territory with “New Pastures”, which is probably the CD’s low point, even though it’s immaculately played; this is simply because it sounds like so many other bands doing the rounds, especially in the Battles flavoured three note motif at the opening, played in such clipped tines it sounds almost like a harpsichord.   Even here, however, Hretha manage some surprises, as a brief interlude of dumb monolithic thrashing that wouldn’t embarrass local sludge metallers Beard Of Zeuss falls away to reveal a stately undead march, with plenty of tickled cymbal and amp fuzz.  Eventually the density builds up to an overloaded climax that wouldn’t feel too out of place with Brian May soloing over the top before finally dying out to cluster of clicks and chitters (which may be down to a rather scuffed CD, we’ll admit, but it sounds good).

So there you go, plangent threnodies, wordless paeans, and cock rocking, all things we never thought Hretha dealt in until we heard the EP.  “Repays repeated listens” is another cliché we found languishing in the NME vaults; they definitely don’t use that one anymore, they’re too busy trying to get you to throw all your records away and buy new ones every 2 months. 

Hretha Myspace

By David Murphy       

A new compilation featuring several Oxford artists has just been released by French label Rabeat’s Cage, run by former Alesiachair member Jeremy Moors. The album, Premiere Evasion, includes Jonquil, Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element, Hreda and Cogwheel Dogs alongside several French artists, and is available for 12 euros here. The full tracklisting looks like this:

1. Jody Prewett – ‘An Ode to the Morning’
2. Eberg – ‘Antidote’
3. Jonquil – ‘Pattens’
4. Tam Rush – ‘Something to Wish’
5. Azad – ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pour Qui Je Pleure’
6. Sarah W. Papsun – ‘Mouvement 2′
7. Cogwheel Dogs – ‘Cress’
8. Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element – ‘This Far and No Further’
9. Hreda – ‘Knowing How to Carry’
10. Neor – ‘Oneiros’