My Cogwheel Dogs interest is turning to love and admiration. I have found that if you play the songs off the latest Cress EP at very loud volume in the car then the vibrations feel wonderful. The song Anti-Coagulant is just glorious when the windows begin to shake. Every band and scrape of the Cello drives itself into your body and the vocals are rich and varied taking the cue to leave any obvious pop mediocrity. And you can download the EP for free by going to www.cogwheeldogs.com and entering your email address. You get a link to download on entering your email address (and can unsubscribe immediately if you are shy).
After declaring The Resonance Association’s Failure OF The Grand Design as the best album of last year I am happy to point out that there is a free download of an EP of re-worked tracks from the album on Burning Shed. The rascals include a track that isn’t even on the album Montag Morgen and found myself bathing in every note of the feedback guitar. Any sane person’s reaction to this world should be wrapping their arms around themselves and rhythmically rocking in a chair - this is a soundtrack to it, but don’t tell your Psychiatrist.
I’m probably very late but I have spotted that at some time in the last year The Studiofix did upload a free EP How I Spent My Summer Vacation. It’s totally different from the debut album where they belted out a Rock/Soul/Indie classic - but it has a very special charm to make your toes turn up in their socks. You can also learn what a “cockblock” is. Download from here
I am not a fan of massed “strings” in rock music but I do love the use of a violin, viola, or cello. This stretches back to first hearing the Velvet Underground and Mr John Cale, and numerous other bands since. There are many ways to use bowed instruments - from the drone of Tony Conrad to a melodic foil to the vocals. But my favourite use of a stringed instrument is when it maintains some of the harshness of a bow scraping against the strings and uses the dynamic range. There are two particularly fine examples of this virtuosity on the Oxford scene at the moment.
The Cogwheel Dogs are a duo consisting of Rebecca Mosley on guitar and vocals and Tom Parnell on Cello. Originally gigging under Rebecca’s name, you can hear from the interplay between the Cello and the vocals why they are now presenting themselves as a band. The Cello adds a certain radicalism to the music to take it into ‘left field’ and away from any folk roots that may have been showing. Intense and interesting are two words that spring to mind.
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Cress (clip)
Joe Allen is a young singer-songwriter at Oxford Brooks University who has teamed up with Angharad Jenkins on violin. He has a penchant for melancholic songs and a very fine voice. The violin adds Pathos to the songs that would just be strummed and sung otherwise. My heartstrings are tugged enough by his delivery but when you add the emotional intensity of the violin to the music, I just gasp in admiration.
Avebury Records are a small record company in California who have released recordings by the stunning Studiofix and Fallopian amongst others. How did they find bands like these? Well, they went out to a lot of gigs of course.
Something they do that I just love, is blog on MySpace about they bands they go and see. Even better is that they post videos of the bands in this blog so you get a taste of the music and the atmosphere. So if you like live music and new bands subscribe to the blog on MySpace. If you are a MySpace conscientious objector then you can just get the videos by going to their YouTube channel and subscribing there.
Following their adventures is almost like having a life.
Normally, as soon as I finish writing a review of a submitted CD, I cast it towards the wall of CDs next to the bed. It has to fend for itself from then on, either snuggling up to fellow unsigned items or attempting to infiltrate the alt-country that dominates my post-vinyl years. The CD’s destiny is to lie there gathering dust and being squashed below all the other CDs that follow.
Given that I suddenly had some time, I began to listen to the past five years of CDs. More recently I even bought an external drive and started to convert my music to MP3 as well as adding a very cheap MP3 player to the car. I now carry a half Gig of selected tracks around with me.
What did I learn? I learnt that the music I have been listening to and reviewing is just as good as anything else I have in my collection. I can mix Scud Mountain Boys and Drunk with The Reverse and Things In Herds and it all equally brilliant and inspiring. As a side effect of this confirmation I also realised that it is not the quality of the music that leads to a band being signed/unsigned famous/unknown. I have no idea what does make that difference but it probably includes a large slice of luck (”that was lucky” said a spectator to Gary Player as he holed a long put. “Yes, ” said Player, “and the more I practice the luckier I get”).
In all of this walking down memory lane, I returned to two albums that sound even better after a little time away from them. repeated listens (out of choice and not duty) now mean I can place them into my personal “Greatest classic albums of all time, ever” list. I think its just a coincidence that both bands are from Los Angeles.
The Studiofix Will Change Your Life (2006). The Studiofix play music that is Indie Rock/Funk/Soul and bring together musical elements from the 60s onwards. Mind you, you could make anything sound good when you are fronted with a girl who can sing like Paco.
Way Down East by Boxing (2003). Sadly split up now. Boxing produced an album of bewilderingly quirky and twisted Indie music that can years later still surprise and energise.
Long day. Full of cold, dosed up on Lemsip and Penicillin (tooth problem). Had to sleep in the M40 services to make it back to Oxford.
I got back and found my copy of The Go-Betweens That Striped Sunlight Sound had arrived. Probably the most wonderful gift I could ever give myself. Robert Forster and Grant McClellan playing the Go-Betweens history on acoustic guitars, talking about the songs and the time they were written. Plus there footage from a live concert where they play Karen - that song is still, for me, the finest moment in the history of pop music.
Then it was down to The Cellar in Oxford and Little Fish playing their ‘Rock’ set. I think I have figured out Little Fish. They are not a band who have ever followed the nuances of the Indie scene. They have the influences of classic 1970s blues and rock - but never, ever come close to copyists. Hearing this harder set made it clear that someone has soaked up the guitar riffs of Cream and added the spirit of Patti Smith without sounding anything like either. Perhaps if heavy metal had never been invented then this is the way that Rock would have developed. There are even moments that take me back to the catchiness of Glam like Mud and Sweet but instead of building a career on it, they form just a small part of a song. Hearing Sweat ‘n Shiver played loud and heavy in a great atmosphere was a revelation and so much more powerful than the demo version. I have hinted at ‘performance’ before. By this I mean the ability to hold the fascination of everyone in the crowd. I remember U2 in the half-full back room of the General Wolfe in Coventry when they were promoting their first single 11 o’Clock Tick Tock. U2 turned out not to be my favourite band of all time but even I knew I was in the presence of something special. The energy and passion that Bono exhibited in that small room was stunning. JuJu of Little Fish more than equals it.
Just in case I’m sounding like a Little Fish fansite I will remind you of the brilliance of Brighton’s Things In Herds. This is a previously unseen video of Always Disappear from the I can Walking and Dancing album that they have just put up on YouTube. It’s a hand drawn cartoon to one of their heart-wrenching songs.
I don’t want to get too attached to Little Fish because I am sure that they will shortly leave my world of unsigned bands, self-produced CDs and wondrous small labels. Anyone in Oxford or London can catch them in a small intimate venue soon - but don’t hesitate because the secret is out and even Gary Barlow (yes, that one, the musical talent from Take That) has heard and recognised he is in the presence of something special.
