OxfordBands.com

Slightly belatedly, here is a non-scientific, but highly alphabetised selection of our favourite records from last year. If you don’t disagree vociferously on the Comments page, we’ll be highly insulted.

Contributors: David Murphy, Colin MacKinnon, Mark Wilden and Alex Lloyd.

Alphabet Backwards: Alphabet Backwards
Gr8 bnd v g pop lol [Send to entire address book] (DM)

A Scholar & A Physician: She’s A Witch
The funnest ball of funny electro fun anywhere in the world this year, from Truck’s production go-to boys. (DM)

Borderville: Joy Through Work
“A band’s reach should exceed its grasp/ Or what’s a heaven for?” – Robert Browning (nearly).(DM)

Les Clochards: Sweet Tableaux
Oxford’s wry Gallic café indie children deliver a blinder.  Sounds like fat Elvis twatted on crème de menthe and blearily stumbling about the Postcard Records’ bordello.(DM)

Grumpily romantic Anglo-French chansons with dazzling accordion flourishes and spookily sweet two-part harmony. (CHM)

Hretha:  Minnows/ Dead Horses
Orthographically frustrating upstarts produce clinical post-rock excellence.(DM)

Jessie Grace: Demo
Silky, sensuous, lounge bar pop from ukulele-wielding Buckinghamshire lass-massive voice, bigger tunes . Paloma Who? (CHM)

The Gullivers: Legerdemain
Bleakly stylish post-punk minimalism, now with added singing. A band to revisit. (CHM)

Mephisto Grande: Seahorse Vs The Shrew
A revivalist hymn meeting seen through Lewis Carrol’s mescaline kaleidoscope.(DM)

Message to Bears: Departures
If the Oxfordshire countryside ever needs a soundtrack, this is it. Resplendent beauty everywhere, with beats, samples and strings expertly combined with pianos and Jerome Alexander’s diamantine guitar. Why isn’t this guy huge? (CHM and AL)

Misfit Mod: Islands and Islands
Sleepily lovely electronica from the talented Miss Kelleher. Dan Mitchell’s review captured her voice in one word: pellucid. (CHM)

Peerless Pirates: Demo
Swaggering, timber-shivering, Smithy indie pop. Smell the rum and smash  the tavern. (CHM)

PRDCTV: It’s Never Too Late To Have A Happy Childhood

Promising folktronic EP from OxfordBands scribe and recent Ninja Tune signing who’s clearly heard a Four Tet record or two and knows how to put his own stamp on it. (MW)

The Relationships: Space
Beautiful chiming indie pop coupled with the most articulate lyricist ever to have flâneured the Cowley Road; think R.E.M.’s Reckoning crossed with Betjeman’s Banana Blush, record collectors! (DM)

Mr Shaodow: “RU Stoopid”
Serious messages, approachable humour, lyrical dexterity.  His best yet, and that’s some benchmark.(DM)

Spring Offensive: EP
Everyone’s favourite band at the moment, but you heard it here first. Five lads from a rather good South Oxon school, playing highly inventive angular rock- where have we heard that before? (CHM)

Stornoway: Unfaithful
The startled bunnies of lit-pop had a meteoric year.  Let’s be honest, you won’t get long odds on their debut LP featuring in the list next year…(DM)

Tiger Mendoza:The Hope Sick

Vocal-led electronica from former Toy #1 guitarist gone solo and recent winner of the 2009 DJ Shadow Remix Project.  Glitchy and twitchy, warm and chunky – this is an artist worth keeping an eye on. (MW)

To Liesel: Dear Jane
The Fleet Foxes of Oxford? Not now, but later. Ardent musical love letter wrapped in heart-breaking harmony. (CHM)

Vileswarm: Sun Swallows The Stars
An experimental dreamteam of Frampton and Euhedral, offering “doom drone”: does exactly what it says on the tombstone. (DM)

Richard Walters: The Animal

Finally!  The debut Richard Walters album.  Kept us waiting long enough.  Worth the wait, though – delicate and precise, and full of heart.  There’s not a single thing I’d want to change about this record; it’s beautiful from start to finish. (MW)

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