OxfordBands.com

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

Here’s a snap of Little Fish from Truck this weekend – lots more photos are coming in now and are up at the Oxford music flickr group.

Tuesday (1 April) sees the launch of new local music magazine Oxfordshire Music Scene – the magazine will be distributed throughout shops and venues across the county and will be available free. The team behind the magazine celebrate with a launch gig at the Jericho on 1 April, featuring first issue cover stars Little Fish, plus Not My Day, The Moneyshots and Baby Gravy.

Tickets for the eleventh Truck Festival go on sale this Wednesday (2 April). The tickets, priced at £60, will go on sale to local residents before they go on sale to the general public, and you can but them from any of the following outlets:

• OXFORD: The Scribbler, SS20, Music Box, Videosyncratic (Cowley & Summertown)
• ABINGDON: Mostly Books 
• DIDCOT: Baby John’s/Windjammer
• WALLINGFORD: Toby English Books
• WITNEY: Rapture
• READING: Guitar Works 
• HIGH WYCOMBE: Counter Culture
  

This year’s festival boasts a range of new stages and collaborations – the Barn Stage will be hosted by Vacuous Pop on the Saturday, with Lovvers and These New Puritans already booked, while Maps headline the Sonic Cathedral-curated Sunday Barn. Fresh Out The Box bring the dance tunes to the Barn on Saturday night, while local electro promoters Abort, Retry, Fail? host the Market Stage, with live music including Robots In Disguise. The Truck Stage has already confirmed acts including Noah and the Whale, Camera Obscura, The Television Personalities, Emmy The Great and Small Faces legend Ian Maclagan. Local acts to have been confirmed so far include Borderville, This Town Needs Guns, The Winchell Riots, Alphabet Backwards, Tristan and the Troubadours, Little Fish, Richard Walters, Morrison Steam Fayre and The Family Machine. For all the latest, stay tuned here and on the Truck website.

‘Bands, those funny little plans that never work quite right.’ So runs the line from a Mercury Rev song, and on Friday I knew what the writer was moaning about. My own group runs to a seven-piece and getting them all together, even without the Oxfordshire weather getting Biblical on our ass, is as easy as herding cats. Confound the confusion with suspicious spouses, musical differences, smelly rehearsal rooms and picosecond soundchecks and you occasionally wonder if it’s all worthwhile. So the attractions of a two-piece, on purely logistical terms, are obvious and unanswerable. Thankfully, the boy-girl combination, Little Fish, offer much more than just convenience: above all, they make excellent, taut rock music.

The band consists of Juju, a versatile singer-songwriter in the Polly Harvey/Patti Smith mould and Nez, once the drummer with Vade Mecum. They have gigged hard over many months, culminating in a performance at this year’s Glastonbury and the record is appropriately tight and urgent-sounding. The opening ‘Devil’s Eyes’ starts with a swinging tom-tom figure not unadjacent to the one in ‘Golden Retriever’ by the Super Furry Animals, soon reinforced by Juju’s muscular electric guitar playing. Credit should go to the producer, Richard Aitken, who has conjured up an incredibly beefy sound from a single guitar using multiple amp techniques, but the highlight of the track is definitely Juju’s vocal performance, particularly the howling, spine-tingling chorus. ‘Am I Crazy?’ is a more uptempo, straight-ahead kind of tune, with a spiky, punky, panicky vocal. Here Juju is closest to PJ Harvey and although the performance is superb, the melody and progressions are rather conventional and not very memorable. Harvey, although a living legend, is guilty of many tracks where the the energy of her rhetoric is not matched by the level of musical invention and this seems to be the case here. There is a return to the heights of ‘Devil’s Eyes’ with ‘Sweat and Shiver’, whose onomatapoeic chorus is again maddeningly hummable. In this one, Aitken’s iron grip relaxes a touch to allow some male back-up vocals, but as always the guitar, drums (augmented cleverly by an insistent cowbell) and voice could carry the track alone.

Juju’s previously-mentioned versatility is highlighted on the closing ‘Error in Your Sunrise’, a surprisingly melting ballad which sees her move from rangy rocker to edgy white soul singer, with more than a touch of Sinead O’ Connor in her delivery, perhaps due to an unusual mixture of emotional brittleness welded to technical perfection. The track itself has the druggy dreaminess of a great Pink Floyd track and brings to a close a largely superb EP. Bring on a full-length album.