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)

“What are you here to see?”, asks the girl at the Jericho’s desk. “Just, err, music”, I reply. It turns out that the organisers use this method to calculate how much to pay the performers. Bit depressing, really, isn’t it? A whole system predicated on the assumption that nobody is going to come out on the off-chance they’ll hear some good music looks like a tacit admission that the promoters have already given up on the idea of enticing fresh blood into the venue, and are relying on the acts to bully their friends and colleagues into coming along. What’s even more depressing is that they’re probably right.

Anyway, as the system seems grossly unfair to Samuel Zasada, who is standing in after a change to the advertised lineup, we put our tick against his name. But before we get to Samuel, there’s the unpleasant matter of Luke Keegan’s set to deal with. There he is, strumming away at some forgettable acoustic songs, droning in a voice that’s half pub singalong, and half lax karaoke Bowie, whilst a chap who looks fantastically like a spry Erroll Brown adds some very proficient, but rather disjointed bongo accompaniment. Looking up at one point I see I am one of four people actually listening, three of whom appear to be close friends or family, and the gig begins to feel like an episode of Flight Of The Conchords. “Did you hear about tomorrow?”, sings Luke; yes, it was when I woke up and realised this was a bad and very boring, dream. Thankfully the last song has a bit of drama, featuring the howled chorus “I never had that bloody hammer”, which is either an impassioned defence in a brutal murder inquest, or the sound of petty argument in a carpentry workshop.

When Mr Zasada starts up, we decide that he’s well worth our cover charge support, as his voice is immense: creamy, guttural and melodic, with the breath control to rip into some intriguingly wordy verses. He’s got a real talent, but this set seems deliberately designed to hide this fact. The accompanists don’t help any: a man playing possibly the most uninspired cajon we’ve seen, and a woman who might well be Britain’s top canine ventriloquist, as she seldom opens her mouth, and when she does, the sound is clearly inaudible to human ears. Ignoring this dismal pair, the songs just don’t seem to be quite there. We’d like to see Samuel with a nice tight band at the more literate end of roots pop – say, something in the Counting Crows line – and then we feel we’d have something to get excited about. Once again, the last track is the winner, as the two stooges leave the stage to let Zasada sing a brutal murder ballad, which sounds like Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” rewritten by Travis Bickle. At one point I look up and discover that I’m one of two people actually listening. I’m not sure which is sadder, that the braying horde is not giving this musician a chance, or that he’s not utilising such a great voice to make them sit up and listen.

Jessie Grace’s appearance ups the quality of the night enormously. Put simply, she has a gorgeous voice, and some pretty impressive control to go with it. In the opening number along, which sounds like a version of “Heart Attack & Vine” rearranged by Joni Mitchell, she swoops from sweetly sinister incantation a la mid-period P J Harvey to gutsy rock stridency, with just a hint of soul. She plays the first half of the set on a tiny guitar – is it an alto? – giving just the right amount of garage fuzz to offset her clear, winning voice. Later she switches to a standard acoustic, and the set drifts a tiny bit into Tunstallised neo-folk pleasantries, before the final number (it’s a good night for set closers, evidently), with its playfully lopsided rhythms impresses us once again with Grace’s abilities. I’m reminded of the first time I saw Laima Bite, or Richard Walters: with a voice like this, why isn’t everyone in the room twitching with excitement? But, like Bite or Walters, behind the voice the songs themselves don’t make a gigantic impression on first listening; there are certainly no lyrics that caught the ear. Still, with a voice like that we’re quite prepared to put the effort into finding out whether Grace’s songs turn out to be growers.

When Inlight crank up, the first thought is that there’s been a gross miscarriage of musical justice in this town. They’ve had any number of stinking reviews, but the first tune not only shows a band who look like they’ve been playing together since they were put on solids, but is also an epic piano-led swoon that really isn’t far from A Silent Film’s celebrated stock in trade. The following track only serves to bolster such musings, revealing an instinctive knack for balancing the quartet’s sound, and showing the bassist’s subtle inventiveness.

Sadly, the effect is marred once they get to a mawkish ballad, because not only is the song asinine and vacuous, but the same audience who were literally shouting and banging tables during the previous sets are in rapt silence and serving me a stew of black looks just for having a conversation near the back of the room about how good the band are! Still, you can’t judge an artist by their fans; I’d certainly have to sling the old Wagner records on the fire, if so. Ultimately Inlight don’t quite have the compositions to hold the attention for a full set, and too many songs seem to exist solely because they can play them well. It’d be nice to see some more adventurous writing, and an appeal to something other than the broadest emotions, but we can imagine that on a huge stage in the summer dusk Inlight could be just the ticket. Does the critical reappraisal start here?

By David Murphy

Yes, it is a crummy title for such a good record, but let’s put that behind us. Jessie Grace, a painfully pretty singer-songwriter from Bucks, has made some of the lushest, most beguiling music to come our way in the past half a decade. (Yup, it is that long:keep watching, kids). I don’t want you thinking that I’m becoming a letch (to judge from some of the comments regarding the Winter Warmer, that may now be a forlorn hope), but some of these songs seem so dirty that I could write a Derek and Clive dialogue about them.

Take opener, ‘Beautiful’. It is said that, after buying Radiohead’s ‘OK Computer’, some people took a week to get past ‘Airbag’. In an analogous manner, I struggled to get past the introductory Rhodes and drum machine lick, which is both slightly off-kilter and perfection incarnate. The song proper sounds like a monster Morcheeba hit, up there with ‘The Sea’, and Jessie matches Skye Edwards for winning ease and sleepy sensuality. It’s not perfect- the producer should have insisted on some retakes of the acoustic guitar, which betrays a few fluffed chords, but overall the song is sophisticated, sexy and sets the tone for an album which contains few duds and a couple of real gems.

Jessie’s bluesier, rockier side is displayed on ‘Science Tree’, a mid-tempo Bonnie Raitt chug, enlivened by wispy backup vocals and Grace’s uninhibited sexuality: ‘Can’t get you out of my dirty mind’. Nor thee mine.

Still, this style is not Grace’s forte. It’s too conventional and pales before the more sophisticated numbers, of which perhaps the best is ‘L. O.V. E.’ which boasts another lovely intro, this time based around a cello. The later piano work recalls Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, but Jessie retains her elfin individuality throughout. The melody is brilliantly constructed, a swooping, effortless line with the odd blue note adding a citrus tang if it ever threatens to get too saccharine. Delicious.

‘Firmly down’ is a crunching little rocker, which benefits from Grace’s jazz experience, as the chord sequence occasionally makes clever but comprehensible jumps, stopping it all getting too Suzi Quatro on us. Grace’s manner is sassy and sarky, making as much as she can of some rather adolescent poetry: ‘I’m not taking the rap for your tit-for-tat crap’ won’t be giving Lily Allen nightmares.

Closer ‘Springtime’ is another exercise in flawless melody, Grace swooping, well, gracefully over a prime jazz accompaniment, alternately acoustic guitar, piano and string quartet. Her accent varies alarmingly, like watching three Meryl Streep movies at once. It’s a little syrupy for me (I’m a ‘Deer Hunter’ rather than ‘Mamma Mia’ man), but as a vehicle for Grace’s wonderful voice it’s well worth hearing a few times.

‘Asleep on the Good Foot’ is an excellent debut from a really promising talent. A song like ‘L.O.V. E.’ is clinching proof of how good Grace can be, bringing it all together: smart songwriting, sympathetic production and a delectable voice. And she’s young and gorgeous. Don’t you just hate her?

Jessie Grace Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon