I’ll leave aside any debate as to the ethics and point (or pointlessness) of band competitions, as that’s a dissertation in itself. Instead, I’m wondering why tonight’s Jack FM/107.9FM/SEA/Oxfordshire Music Scene Magazine/Wychwood Festival Next Big Thing final feels less like a gig and more like a Butlin’s Talent Show, with all the attendant forced jollity that suggests, including a Jack FM DJ, Trevor Marshall, as compere and with obvious designs on the Radio 1 breakfast show hot seat.

Mind you, irritating as he is, he’s not a patch on Quadrophobe’s singer, who spends their entire fifteen minute set gurning and mugging like a children’s party entertainer and squawking like a flustered  parrot, while his band kick out a passable but dated funk-rock-cum-ska-pop groove that marks them out as perennial college ball fodder. The brass section and keyboard player give it all a bit of life and muscle but while they possibly see themselves as the meeting point between Dexy’s and Madness, they’re really Jamiroquai fronted by one of the Chuckle Brothers.

By contrast singer/songwriter Beck Lanehart is genuinely funny, with a downbeat patter that involves a joke about funerals. Which she then spends half the rest of her set apologising for and thus ruining the whole effect. She’s got a great voice too, but perhaps too much of the kind you’d expect to hear coming out of the Brit School and with a tendency to over-emote in that Celine Dion way. She leaves her best song until last, but it’s ironic it finds her warbling about being reckless-because-it’s-all-she-knows, when really music doesn’t get much tamer.

Echoboomer and InLight are virtually interchangeable - creatively moribund rock of no discernible character, shape or virtue, just overly-serious arena-indie with occasional nods to Snow Patrol. No, scrap that, Echoboomer sound like Dire Straits and make up in bombast what they lack in actual tunes, while the slightly more epic InLight sound like Keane and rock out with all the off-putting passion of rutting rhinoceroses.

After which, Witches are a class apart. They genuinely rock out. With maracas and trumpet and a chaotic sense of joy that’s been missing all night. In fifteen short minutes they’ve covered bases as diverse as hardcore, Mexicana, alt-country and indie rock with a sometimes ludicrous sense of theatre, like a puppyish mash-up of Sonic Youth, Sparklehorse and Calexico. And then, after an interminable wait, and against the odds and expectations (and wishes) of the majority of the crowd, they’re declared the winners. Which demonstrates a heroic victory of taste and common sense for the judges. And also means the night, which threatened early on to be a triumph of commercially ambitious efficiency over real potential, ends on a high.

By Zoë Herriot

The eighth annual Audioscope festival takes place this Saturday at The Jericho, Oxford. The yearly fundraiser has made more than £16,000 for homelessness charity Shelter since 2001, bringing the likes of Four Tet, Damo Suzuki, Clinic, Explosions in the Sky and Michael Rother to town in the process.

This year’s show kicks off at 1.30 pm and ends at midnight, and the lineup looks like this:

• Kid606
• Boxcutter
• That Fucking Tank
• The Oscillation
• Soeza
• Witches
• Hey Colossus
• The Workhouse
• Sunnyvale Noise Sub-element

Tickets are £12 on the door or £11 from here, and all profits go to Shelter. Find out more about Audioscope over here.

Here’s a clip of Witches performing ‘Dead As A Ghost’ at The Cellar on Hallowe’en. Apologies for the shaky camera work: it will improve, we promise.

Witches’ next show is at Audioscope at The Jericho on 15 November.

Local stars Witches have been nominated in the 2008 Indy Awards. The awards were launched last year ‘to celebrate, reward and recognise the hard work of live music venues, promoters and the talented artists they showcase and help develop’ (it says here), and Truck have nominated Witches as a band to watch for this year. Get involved and cast your vote for Witches before 31st March to send them on their way to the showcase finale in April.

Well, it’s December, and every blog in the known universe is doing their end of year roundups, so for what it’s worth here’s my top ten albums from 2007… what are yours?

1. Parts & Labor - Mapmaker

This came along at just the right time to hit me hard this year. No one else manages to noise sound as uplifting as this - it’s brilliant.

2. El-P - I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead
Good old El-P. Takes him ages to do a record ‘cos he’s too busy making beats for everyone else, but when he does it’s a belter.

3. Holy Fuck - LP

The best live band I saw this year, and matched on record. Some crazy mad-scientist version of krautrock, like nothing you’ve heard before. Well, nothing I’ve heard before anyway.

4. Dalek - Abandoned Language

Yeah, OK, so they’re a bunch of splitters who pulled out of playing Audioscope for the second year running, but I almost forgive them on this count. ‘Subversive Script’ - what a tune.

5. PJ Harvey - White Chalk

Wow, what a great record. Actually quite an unnerving experience for the first few listens, and just amazing to see someone so obviously pushing themselves.

6. Burial - Untrue

7. Sennen - Where The Light Gets In

8. Witches - Heart of Stone

9. Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass

10. Liars -Liars

Ladies and Gentleman, we have a winner. Without a doubt, the finest record to come out of Oxford this year must be Witches’ ‘Heart of Stone’, a record that is alternately and simultaneously beautiful, mysterious, violent, plaintive and wondrous. Four or five tracks could be Radio 1 hits, but the peculiar excellence is the consistency of the vision and near-perfection of the execution.

The band was put together by ex-eeebleee frontman Dave Griffiths, but the musicians he has found create a sound-world far from that band’s anxious electronica. The emphasis now is on traditional instruments, and indeed Witches are regular magpies when it comes to instrumentation, with glockenspiel, harpsichord and trumpet making important contributions to many songs. Production values are high and the producers have been careful to limit the exposure of the more outlandish instruments: these are emphatically genuine songs and not vehicles for experiments in sound.

An example of this control comes in the opening ‘Lost Without’. The first couple of minutes are given over to an attractively wasted guitar-based ballad which then builds steadily into an ecstatic trumpet solo. By holding back the trumpet, the band keeps the interest growing, rather than blowing all their ideas at the start. ‘Josef’s lament’ is a little more uptempo, with a tense electric guitar part which could have come from the Polly Harvey classic ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’. Again trumpeter Benek Chylinski shines, with a striking trumpet riff which Ennio Morricone would have been proud to call his own punctuating Griffith’s hushed singing. Richard Thomas’s percussive harpsichord adds further chills to one of the most potent songs I’ve heard in ages.

‘Putting you back in the ground’ has an almost nursery-rhyme universality and Griffiths’ vocals are superbly bleak and cracked. His is not a voice that everyone will love, but for rendering stories of loss and remembrance I can hardly think of better. His lyrics are not sophisticated: all of that quality has been poured into the music. That said, the supernatural themes of the album are an important unifying feature; they are clearly not of the Halloween, pantomime-devil type beloved of metal monsters everywhere.Griffiths’ ghosts are Ibsen’s ghosts: aggressive elements from the past that invade the present life and try all too successfully to bring it to a halt.

There are many more highlights: the gorgeous ‘Sleep like the Witch that You Are’ sounds like The Band playing The Pixies while the title track offers a lovely melody and even some measured optimism. But to be honest, despite the doom-laden lyrics running through the album, the whole record is a statement of optimism: that even in 2007 pop music can still surprise, inspire and delight.