Shuffling sweatily through heat-maddened central Oxford, I had low hopes for a good turnout at this month’s Gappy Tooth night at the Wheatsheaf, (Cornmarket street, hazy and violently simmering in the late-evening sun provided proof positive that sometimes a water-cannon is in perfect order) but in the event, the pull of three local bands ensured that while the showing was modest, it was far from negligible.
Minor Coles are a new one on me, but they are making friends and news at a healthy rate, having secured a berth at the Truck festival recently. The honour is well-deserved, the quartet making punchy, melodic, wide-screen indie rock, and possessing two strong lead singers. It’s actually quite difficult to think of specific bands they sound like: the best I could come up with was Seafood with a dash of British Sea Power noise, while others mentioned the spikier end of The Delgados. In any case, their compact set was highly impressive: for a band that’s been together for a matter of months, everything seems astonishingly well-engineered: the vocal harmonies are note-perfect, the occasional double lead-guitar passages pulled off with ease, and the only imperfections were non-musical: a non-authoritative set-list and a comical onstage argument about the right position for a capo- of course these human blemishes made us like them all the more.
The Sidewinders are likeable for different reasons: their utter commitment to an art which was exhausted long before ‘This is Spinal Tap’ administered the last rites is both amusing and slightly sad. They are what Jeremy Clarkson might call a proper rock and roll band: the bassist looks like he could pack down in the front row for Banbury Town Third XV, the guitarist spends half the gig with his eyes shut and his tongue out, and the lead singer was sporting an extremely hirsute chest- no doubt there’s still a breed of lady out there who finds that sort of thing attractive- perhaps the kind who swoons over DCI Gene Hunt. In any case, they made loud, dumb, hairy rock music very effectively, even if most of the content felt like it had been culled from an obscure AC/DC album circa 1983 (interesting trivia point: AC/DC once wrote fifteen songs in one afternoon, eight of which contained the word ‘Rock’ in the title. What boundless invention!)
Closing the show were Punt stars, From Here, We Run!, who judging from their Myspace page, have an array of clever math-rock tunes. But it was a patchy set. Actually it was near-disastrous. Beginning well with the spiky yet catchy ‘Abdul Jafur Lives to Fight’, the band showed their best qualities: singer Pietke has a strong, slightly husky voice, and the instrumentalists (bass, drums and guitar) are nimble and energetic. But from there, things went awry. The second song train-wrecked, which is no biggie, but the second take didn’t sound a lot better than the first, and the impression soon formed of a band operating outside the level of their technical abilities, and (even worse) suffering internal division. It’s almost as if Pietke wants to be in a melodic, girly, indie band like Sleeper, while the three blokes prefer to ape the time-signature juggling and nutty chord shapes of bands like Youthmovies and This Town Needs Guns. I noticed as the set ended, that the singer jumped off stage before the last song had even ended, with barely a look at her bandmates. Whether this was a pose or not, it felt worrying, and they need to get it together quick.