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.

Hreda live at the Audioscope/Regal show, supporting Don Caballero, on 10 November 2008 at The Regal, Oxford.

The Keyboard Choir live on the 4Talent stage at Gigbeth, Birmingham, 8 November 2008.

A month or so back, a friend kindly lent me a CD devoted to ‘Modern Folk’, which turned out to be a tedious disappointment. Although the record had a couple of gems on it (Final Fantasy’s ‘Ballad of Win and Regine’, an odd psychological contemplation of the couple behind The Arcade Fire, was slight but lovely), the record was mostly unspeakably dull (with Anthony and The Johnsons’ contribution as numbingly somnambulist as the enemies of folk music would have you believe). But what struck me about it was that despite all the plinky acoustic-ness, strange accents and reverential hush of it all, there was almost no feeling that this was folk music in any meaningful sense at all. Folk should all be about suppression of the individual ego and the celebration of community spirit, and this polished, artful compilation was completely free of anything of the sort. It was essentially boring rock music, played really quietly.

I mention all of this to set up the contrast between the pristine deadness of ‘Modern Folk’ and the scratchy vitality of We Aeronauts‘ beguiling little record. Everything about it is rough-hewn: the drums are sometimes out of time, the lead singing is often approximate and the mix sounds like it was carried out by an amiable wally who has knocked it off in hour after overdosing on the scrumpy.

And the correct response to all this should be: Who Cares? Because the Aeronauts have written some infectious old-timey songs, they play their instruments with gusto, and above all, they sound like they thoroughly like each other. The sheer spirit of good feeling that comes billowing out of the stereo is reason enough to buy this record, particularly in these clammy, snappish times.

‘Boatswain’s Cry’ is a romantic sea shanty which breathes the same salty air as Dylan’s ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, with the end of the return journey more in the narrator’s mind than his destination. Piano, accordion and fiddle all jostle good-naturedly for space and Anna Wheatley’s spirited, wandering backup vocals are a joy.

‘The House on Ash Tree Lane’ has an insistent backbeat reminiscent of The Teardrop Explodes ‘Reward’ and the trading of lead vocals, sometimes within the space of a line, is a clever, original touch. Extra colour is provided by some gloriously ill-disciplined trumpet and the chorus melody is now on continuous play in my head, and has been for a week.

Centrepiece of the record is the splendid ‘Chalon Valley House Band’ an almost painfully nostalgic hymn to getting it together in the country. I love the almost washboard twang of the bass, the cheek of the melodeon and contrasting shyness of the banjo, which peeks out from behind the sofa from time to time before going AWOL for bars on end, like a nervous moggy. Heck, I love it all. It’s not so much about the details of the soujourn, lovingly described though these are, but rather a celebration of the intense friendship and discovery the musicians clearly experienced there. Like Jean de Florette, another wanderer in the French countryside, they have cultivated the authentic.

We Aeronauts Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

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.

It completely amazes us that so many people turn away from folk music as boring - you just have to listen to the lyrics for a generous serving of murder, rape, bargaining devils, and lashings and lashings of real ale.  Like Nick Cave before them, The Dirty Royals seem to have taken inspiration from old folk broadsides for their sterling crime ballad, ‘Josephine’, which tells us what a scrape the eponymous heroine has got herself into with her nefarious activities, and the narrator poses the only rational escape plan - a suicide pact.  Fantastic stuff.  Musically it’s a bit of a treat too, bundling excitable drums behind supple Rickenbacker-like guitar and clear vocal harmonies that spring from the politer suburbs on the outskirts of psychedelia.  A slightly tasteless, if technically proficient, bit of wailing guitar does stick its oar in when not needed, but otherwise this is a tune with a pretty righteous shimmy, and we’re definitely admirers.

‘Back For More’ opens with a similar guitar sound, that could well be Peter Buck on an early R. E. M. record, and also has some pretty winsome close harmonies, but is a somewhat more restrained affair and has just a bit too much of an anodyne college rock kick to it, and The Dirty Royals lose points for putting us in mind of Hootie & The Blowfish, after an all-too-brief decade of blissful amnesia.

We’re back on track with ‘Cover Up The Sun’, however, and we wish our stereo had surround sound, so we could sneak round the back of the guitar part and see if it has “Property of The Byrds, do not remove” stamped on it.  What the hell, it’s a pretty harmless bit of borrowing, and the tune has a devil-may-care sixties US pop bounce to it that puts us in mind of The B-52s and locals Shirley, when they’re having fun and aren’t trying to be all grown up on us.  In all honesty, it’s easy to imagine this tune soundtracking a montage in an early 90s rom-com in which the hapless yet lovable hero has to tidy up his frat house, in order to make it look like a snug restaurant, to charm the Dean’s strait-laced daughter.  If that sounds a bit glib, hell, it’s pretty glib music, airy, light and infectious, and we give it a goofy smile and a thumbs up.  We can also imagine it all being a bit of a blast live.  Uh oh, the Dean’s coming, we’ve got to run off and hide the stuffed moose head we stole from his office to win a keggers bet.  All good harmless hi jinks; are you ready with the music, Dirty Royals?

Dirty Royals Myspace

By David Murphy

Anyone for some crunchy three-piece instrumental metal? Then read on.
This week, I was mostly getting down to Dr Slaggleberry’s new E.P, fresh from their crisply-recorded live XFM set, released on Crash records. With all the precociousness of Frank Zappa plus more turnarounds of tempo per minute than Biffy Clyro, Dr Slag delivers three tracks packed with mosh-tastic metal nuggets. Just like those voting for Senator Obama tomorrow, the tunes tick all the right boxes: abrasive, discordant, rhythmically-contorted, and featuring three musicians who are tight as the proverbial gnat’s rear quarters.

The EP kicks off with ‘Extra Strength Grandma’. Like a raging bull, Dr Slag charges full tilt from one idea to the next. He turns on a sixpence before changing direction completely. The ferocious drumming patterns accelerate, inflect, double-back and stagger sideways, the guitars and bass following in their wake. However, a few minutes in after a pretty glorious start, you get the creeping suspicion that something is not quite right. What’s missing? Well,  continuity. Development. All too quickly we realise we are facing fifteen minutes of artful snippets rather than proper songs. Were the Slags to chop the ‘Tails Of The Blind Donkey’ up into its eighteen constituent pieces, reorder them and stick them back together again, we would be none the wiser and none worse off

.
And one ploy is revisited time and time again: The Segue Splurge. Dr Blaggleberry delivers volley after volley of arhythmic notes to segue from each theme into the next. ‘Lead Rabbit’ suffers the most from this, lurching perilously close towards teenage navel-gazing bedroom noodles at times.

But for all my over-academic misgivings, you can’t put this one down. Your head just starts moving - I defy anyone to prove otherwise. It’s not the steady up and down AC/DC headbang: more of a psychotic lurch, but hey.  If you like it, then good on you. But if the segues to no-where get the better of you, then go look up Zomby Woof (live version) by Frank Zappa to see how it should be done.

 Dr Slaggleberry Myspace

 By B.M.



Jonquil at The Regal, 3 November 2008 from thespiderhill on Vimeo.

Some gigs are just ill-starred from the outset. The trick is to pull them around so you remember them for the right reasons.

Tonight is a prime example - first, the show underwent an enforced last-minute move from The Regal to The Wheatsheaf, missing the local music listings in the process. And second, the scheduled headliners Xmas Lights were forced to pull out at even shorter notice. All of which meant an audience of fewer than twenty, including support act, soundman and promoter, turned out to see Pulled Apart By Horses.

Boy, did the rest of you miss out - they’re easily one of the best live bands we’ve seen this year (and we’ve seen a lot of bands this year). What Pulled Apart By Horses delivered wasn’t just a stunning performance, but rather a salutary lesson to all bands on how you play to a room of ten people. The mirror image of the poseur band who get a bit of hype from NME, then can’t be bothered to perform unless there are more than fifty people in the audience, PABH take the opportunity to crank their amps up even louder and shove their set right down your throat. Guitarists Tom Hudson and James Brown are everywhere: on top of the speaker stacks, mounting their guitars on the venue floor, crashing into one another on stage, as if they’ve discovered that kinetic energy is a cure for cancer.

Oh yes, almost forgot the music. In short, it’s a majestic blend of Unwound-esque post-hardcore aggression combined with the exuberance of early Fugazi: they may just be the natural successors to the much-missed Cat On Form, before they downed tools and Steve Ansell hit the big time with Blood Red Shoes. In places, it’s almost - almost - like watching Nation of Ulysses in a tiny bar in some backwoods town in 1992, and we can offer little higher praise than that.

Next time this band play in Oxford, get a front row seat.

Pulled Apart By Horses MySpace

Bicester’s ‘Modern Clichés‘ certainly win the Arthur Pewty Most Boring Name Award for 2008, but is the music any livelier than the label? The answer is: not massively. Their speciality is pitched somewhere between mild-mannered punk and unfunky funk-pop, but all the same, they do it quite pleasingly at times.

‘You Don’t Know what You Want to Be’ is a punky put-down song directed against some annoying rock-star wannabe. Phil Warson may actually be a touch too tuneful a vocalist to carry this sort of song off, which should sear rather than spar but occasionally, even from this reluctant pugilist, a punch connects:

“Think it’s OK cos you say you’re a rock star/Well that’s tonight, most other nights you work behind the bar”

Musically, the three-piece band is tight, tuneful and well-produced, with Andy Payne’s nimble, cheeky drumming a standout. Less impressive is the EP’s dreary title track, which detours towards Chili Peppers territory to no great effect, the lyric being some opaque expression of suburban discontent, complete with fake plastic smiles. Closer ‘Exactly the Same as Always’ is about as exciting as the prospect of a threesome with Janet Street Porter and Aggie from ‘How Clean is Your House?’, but it is a little more melodically sophisticated than the other two, with a nod to The Lightning Seeds’ ‘Pure’.

‘Modern Clichés’ are by no means a bad band, but they suffer from a pronounced lack of direction. If they’re going to be a punk band, they could do worse than head down to the Junkie Brush Halloween gig to hear the beast red in tooth and claw. If they want to do pop, they’ll need to find more interesting subjects to write about than Bicesterian rock-star fantasists, and steer clear of the half-baked funk.

Modern Cliches Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon