Murder By Death + Not My Day + The Family Machine, Oxford Academy, 11.07.08
Thursday, July 24th, 2008If The Family Machine were a movie star, they would be Will Smith. They’re impossible not to like, even when they’re doing horrible things; in Smith’s case strangling his pet dog in `I Am Legend’; in The Family Machine’s case singing jauntily about dying in car crashes. Whether it’s the loping country ramble of `Flowers By The Roadside’ or the cheesy, summer-spun `Do Song’, they’re unavoidably cuddly. Recent single, `Got It Made’, paints the band in a more ambitious light, but sadly you know that unlike Will Smith they’re never going to be rich and famous. And that’s the world’s loss.
While Family Machine are genially understated, Not My Day are – superficially at least – bolder and overstated. They’re good-natured in their own way but lacking the warmth, humour and innate sense of melody of The Family Machine. They bang out their set of 60s-styled rock in conveyor belt fashion and prompt some ungainly dancing from a select handful of their gathered mates. Well drilled but riddled with clichés, the memory of them stays with you for precisely the time it takes to walk to the bar.
Having burdened themselves with a name that wouldn’t pass muster at a school battle of the bands competition, Indiana’s Murder By Death are gothic but not goth, dark-hearted southern rock knocked out in the fashion of country rock barflies who’ve ingested a gallon or two of Nick Cave’s biblical blues. They sing about the Devil and shooting a man in the back, frontman Adam Turla’s deep, rasping drawl akin to Stan Ridgeway doing an Elvis impersonation, a fine voice hidden by an extensive beard, while Sarah Balliet’s nonchalantly fevered cello playing adds a tautness and edge of menace to what might otherwise descend into old-fashioned bar ballads and road trip tales, and helps rescue awkward tracks like `My Ball and Chain’.
Overall they’re bigger on spirit and energy than great songs and the cavernous sound they suffer in a quarter-full Zodiac does their sound few favours. Better, perhaps, to experience them in more intimate surroundings, maybe unplugged to bring out the simmering violence. They encore with a song simply called `The Depressing Song’, just in case we hadn’t noticed they don’t do cheerful.
Tonight is the first gig of a European tour and given the band’s low profile in the UK the poor turnout isn’t so surprising, but you feel that with the quality of dark-country bands coming out of the States in recent years, Murder By Death are going to have to do something a bit more special to earn a return ticket.
Zoë Herriot
