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 promoting business is a doddle. Hundred and fifteen payers through the door on a wet January evening, nae probs. What is everyone moaning about?

That, at least, must be the attitude of the promoter of Reading’s ‘Monkeysuit’ night, making his debut in Oxford at the Jericho. The room filled slowly and then explosively throughout the evening and must have brought a healthy profit for all concerned. As I left the venue, I warned him not to expect the same results in August.

Kicking off the evening were acoustic ultra-miserablists Ute, who have moved from a guitar and harp duo to a more classifiable but less distinctive guitar-bass-drums trio. At first, the consensus among my group was that they were terrible, offering nothing but sludgy sub-Hail to the Thief rock dirges and oceans of self-pity. The low point was the intro to the third or fourth song, which featured the bass player clapping away arrhythmically, as the singer caterwauled his way through some tortured vocal formulation-my mate described it as ‘Ryan Adams locked in a seal enclosure’. To be fair, the band picked up in the second half and showed some gift for close harmony, particularly on a couple of wordless choruses, but the set as a whole was a chore.

Far better were Peerless Pirates, another guitar trio, but one with little in common with the previous act. The first song sounded like the Muppets theme tune played by The Smiths, and it got even better after that. Suddenly, the audience realised that they may be allowed to have a good time after all.

The Pirates’ sound is a mixture of Johnny Marr jangle-pop with dashes of rockabilly and classic rock (Their excellent ‘Bring Out Your Dead’ sounds initially like a hidden gem from Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing it All Back Home’ album and ‘High Seas Love Affair’ could have been the product of Long John Silver fronting The Stooges). Blackbearded vocalist Cliff clearly knows his Morrissey, and has a bit of the poseurish drawl, but jettisons the ennui and the foghorn delivery (Truly was it spoken that Morrisey “has the voice that saved a thousand ships”) and occasionally sounds closer to Neil Tennant. The band were on effervescent form and even had the earnest post-rockers jigging along at the end. Above all, their songs were laden with killer hooks, which is appropriate, given their profession.

Closing the evening were Reading post-rock collective, A Genuine Freakshow. It took a while to figure even that little bit out, as they had quite important parts for male vocals, and featured a string section as well as sporting a trumpeter. The Arcade Fire are a convenient starting point for their sound, with four-to-the-floor drums, high, reedy vocals and wintry, romantic violins. It’s all very accomplished, with care being taken to find space for the brass and strings among the dense guitar textures. What is missing is the odd genuinely memorable singalong tune which would crown all that obvious musical intelligence and the set began to plod in the last third.

Still, another brilliant, profitable night for the Jericho: the catastrophic, indefensible decision to abandon live music at the end of the nineties is now a distant memory and hopefully it will sail on indefatigably through the coming choppy waters. A bit like the Peerless Pirates.

By Colin MacKinnon

“This music is designed to have you oscillating wildly.” And so Oxon-Bucks three-piece Peerless Pirates give their game away. Which is at least something, since their Myspace offers precious little by way of information other than a few annoying hints that they might be real pirates.

But of course they’re not. They’re Smiths fans, albeit pretty chipper Smiths fans, which I guess is something different. They can summon up a lively jangle-pop canter, that’s undeniable, but those not-so subtle reference points are unavoidable, from the singer’s bold, poetic delivery, sense of doomed romance (especially on `Where Is Michael’) and occasionally arcane language (although “Unhand me, you swine” could just as easily be Russell Brand, himself a shameless Morrissey devotee), through the guitarist’s intricate jangle, right down to the harmonica on `Random Shags or Regular Kisses’, which is ripped wholesale from `This Charming Man’. Elsewhere `Those Fashion Stakes’ pillages `Still Ill’, while, in a slight shift in style, `Bring Out Your Dead’ adopts a sprightly rockabilly stance, something a certain Stephen Patrick has been known to enjoy on occasion.

Not that Peerless Pirates are hopeless copyists, and their scrappy, jangly take on classic indie fizz and froth is more than passable, with a welcome feeling of melodrama. Their tales of `High Sea Love Affair’ aren’t as swashbuckling as they’d probably like to think they are, but against a backdrop of contemporary English guitar pop’s parochial dying embers, they offer a reminder of more bountiful times.

Peerless Pirates Myspace

By Zoë Herriot