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)

Oxford filmmaker extraordinaire and Videosyncratic supremo Jon Spira has whipped together an excellent ten-minute highlights package of the best Oxford bands playing at this year’s Truck Festival. It features The Candyskins, Dive Dive, Stornoway, Alphabet Backwards, From Light To Sound, Supergrass and loads more.

Stay tuned for more news on Jon’s feature-length documentary about Oxford music, Anyone Can Play Guitar, which is due for release at the end of 2009.

“Shhhh, the baby’s sleeping”. Thus runs the opening line of the Evil Nine’s ‘Crooked’, and that seemed to be the foremost thought in the minds of the night’s groups, each of which seemed to get progressively quieter than the last. There was quality in all four acts, but the restricted dynamic range made for a muted evening, both literally and emotionally, at least until the final group.

Anton Barbeau is a Californian, now resident in Cambridge and a regular visitor to Oxford. He specialises in fairly mainstream pop rock wedded to a sardonic, slightly laborious verbal humour. Think The Presidents of the USA, with an accent reminiscent of one of the minor Beatles. On this occasion, he was backed by a cloddish backing band which hobbled his best numbers- the light, easy touch of his fine recent album was sacrificed in the cause of by-the-numbers rocking out. He’s better as a solo act.

Surprise of the night was the excellent Ivan Campo, a folky three-piece named, for some reason , after a workmanlike Bolton midfielder. Strengths included pristine tripartite harmony, edgy, unsentimental lyrics and tight, clean, percussive playing. One could see them becoming an English Fleet Foxes without all of the disturbing feyness of the Seattle wonders. Keep an eye out.

Less successful were The Vatican Cellars, another low-voltage acoustic act, this time drenched in Seventies-era country folk. If you liked The Magic Numbers you may like them. The vocalist looks like a young David Morrissey and sings in a croon not unreminiscent of that other Morrissey (you know, the guy from the Smiths). Truth be told, it’s better on record than live. The ultra-laid-back vibe, composed in part of melodeons and cellos, comes across, even in an intimate venue like The Jericho, as dull and lifeless. It didn’t help that the capacity crowd talked loudly throughout the performance. Check their Myspace page to catch them in better form.

In contrast, Stornoway were in tremendous fettle, and why not, given their recent news concerning Glastonbury? Singer Brian Briggs has one of the best voices in Oxford, perhaps the best, and he seems to be permanently tapped into an inexhaustible seam of Celtic folk melody, timeless and deathless. The band is in superb nick, with Jon Ouin shining on cello and keys and brother Adam blowing up a storm on trumpet. A while back, myself and others criticised the group for mixing their most sublime material with superficial vaudevillian numbers such as the execrable ‘Good Fish Guide’ but that’s not a moan that can be legitimately made now. Last night’s set was beautifully balanced, and the quality remained high throughout. Indeed, the established crowd-pleaser ‘Zorbing’ suffered a little compared to new numbers like the lilting, irresistible ‘Fuel Up’. The harmonies by Ouin and Ollie Steadman were to die for. This band is getting even better.

But in addition to the excellence of the writing, singing and playing, Stornoway aren’t backwards about springing the occasional coup de theatre. Halfway through the set, the band unplugged and set up in the middle of the packed audience to perform three numbers without any amplification. At first I thought this was an exercise in redundancy: Stornoway are a low-volume acoustic act, so what’s the point in chucking the amps? The answer is that a greater connection was made with the audience, who promptly shut up during the songs and gave thunderous applause. Not all of it was to my taste: ‘We are the Battery Human’ sounded like a version of ‘Kum Ba Ya’ for atheists, but ‘Gondwandaland’ remains a testament to the band’s sense of awe and wonder, and was beautifully rendered. Oxford is due for another national success: I hope it is them.

By Colin MacKinnon

North Sea Radio Orchestra, The Epstein, Stornoway and Stuti Mehta played at the JdP a week or so ago. Here is a photo of the latter.

More photos can be found over here.

The lead track from Stornoway’s second EP is my favourite song by anyone currently. ‘Zorbing’ finds the band hopeful of finding love, and finding it to a gentle rockabilly folk twang. Brian’s voice is of choirboy quality on this song and juxtaposes wonderfully with the deepest of deep backing vocals. ‘Watching Birds’ has a skiffle beat and psychedelic swooshes before breaking in a chorus that sounds like the Byrds gone psychotic. ‘The End Of The Movie’ manages to be maudlin yet still upbeat, with beautiful swells of strings, while the brief ‘The Old Blind Man’ strolls along at a gentle saunter while whizzing noises pass overhead. Stornoway are probably Oxford’s best-kept secret. I have a feeling they won’t be for much longer.