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)

In December last year, Misfit Mod (aka Sarah Kelleher) won Nightshift’s Demo of the Month and the Queen Love Zero EP received a glowing review from Colin Mackinnon on this site this May. Islands and Islands is her first full length release and shows that standards have not dropped.

This is female electro-pop but, joyously, there are few similarities between it and the current crop of unsatisfying fashionistas: its understated assurance is much more attractive than Lady Gaga’s ugly and vacuous posturing and Kelleher’s voice doesn’t suffer from the same biting reediness that makes La Roux so insufferable. Fundamentally, of course, the main difference is that they’re all trying to make you dance while Misfit Mod seems happier soundtracking the morning after than the night before. Stylistically it is perhaps closest to Cat Power’s minimalism with undeniable vocal echoes of Mimi Parker from Low. It feels, like Bon Iver’s debut, to be a very intimate almost confessional album, with ‘Cars (I)’ seeming to be a mantra of self-persuasion and self-chastisement but, perhaps with the exception of Ghost Me, it’s all much warmer than Bon Iver’s ascetic introspection.

In many ways the album sinks or swims on your opinion of the vocals since the backing beats rarely provide more than the most basic of skeletal structures to work from. For me, Kelleher’s voice is beautiful – always languid but at one moment soothing and sultry, at another icily pellucid. On many tracks, the most characteristic element of the delivery is how her voice catches on and slurs around the edges of words, a tendency not helped by liberal use of reverb. Occasionally, as on ‘Tribes’ and ‘First Aid’ where there is nothing sufficiently interesting in the vocals to save the simplicity of the backing from becoming monotonous, this delivery sounds especially forced – as if searching for emotional content which isn’t there. But, more usually, it is effective in helping fashion the album’s wonderfully drowsy dreaminess.

The harsher critics among you might find it little more than coffee-table music, and it certainly is an album you could take home to meet your mother, but the ten tracks aren’t just predictable variations on a single, safe theme. From the comfortable and chocolatey ‘Sugar C.’, through the mantra-like ‘Cars(I)’, and the swooping, verdant ‘Valleys’ to the breathy and unearthly ‘Ghost Me’ it is an album of subtle variety and considerable beauty.

Misfit Mod Myspace

By Daniel Mitchell

Oxfordbands.com has recently been at the eye of one or two internet storms (good- we hate being ignored!), after Zoe Heriot’s review of the Next Big Thing Competition brought the house down, and a throwaway gag by the present writer in the context of an otherwise unremarkable gig review elicited howls of horror from the politically correct brigade. God help them if they ever accidentally clap eyes on a couple of paragraphs by Jeremy Clarkson or AA Gill: they’d probably swallow their own head in outrage.

I doubt that this article will cause anything like the same shemozzle, for the simple reason that it will be overwhelmingly approving. Sarah Kelleher’s Misfit Mod project is a little gem, producing eerily sensual minimalist electronica which is accessible but never obvious.

The opening ‘Queen Love Zero’ is an outstanding example of Kelleher’s artistry. Based on a four chord synthesizer vamp, slaved to an unfussy drum-machine figure, the track is made by Kelleher’s multi-tracked vocals, a mixture of Baby Doll gurgle, schoolyard chant, and absurdly gorgeous harmony. The model is clearly Bjork, but Kelleher sings like a recognisable human being rather than a malfunctioning cuckoo clock.

The EP proceeds with ‘Cars II’, another hynoptically simple, yet unsettling melody: if I were on the NME staff I’d need to invent a new genre on the spot to describe it: ‘Stoned skipping song’ perhaps. The style is ultra-minimalism- just a couple of vocal lines and a drum machine. More pleasing to pop-pickers will be the excellent ‘Pool House’ which reinstates the ancient eighties synths and has a recognisable song structure- it even has a chorus of sorts, which is irresistibly pretty. ‘Wolves/Valleys’ is slightly lusher, using warm string pads to conjure a summery languor, with Kelleher modulating her tone a little, now sounding a little like a young Beth Orton.

It will be interesting to see whether Misfit Mod can help form the vanguard of a little sub-scene of female-fronted electronic pop- there’s some talent in this area kicking around the county at the moment (Camille Baziadoly’s ‘Dear City’ is another outstanding example), and Kelleher’s odd, slightly esoteric art is the sort of thing this city often takes to its heart. Hopefully that’s something on which we can all agree.

Misfit Mod Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon