Indulge in cults, embrace hegemonies:
Amuse your friends! Enrage your enemies!
Sounds a bit like a Hot Hooves lyric. Not equal to the sterling opening couplet to ‘Help Shape The Future’ (“Your overactive thyroid gland/Is pumping like a silver band”), but close enough. And it’s fitting, when you consider how many young, excitable or simply paranoid people believe some shadowy clique controls Oxford music. With a band like Hot Hooves, bringing together veterans from cult local bands like ATL and Talulah Gosh, you almost want to see a bad review to dispel any fears of back room favouritism.
Well, tough luck, chum, because this is a cracking little album (and little it is, ten tracks that never reach the heady prog heights of three minutes). Any gin-soaked old hack who has heard of YouTube and got a deadline looming will tell you that our culture is an embodiment of Warhol’s prediction that “in the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes”; Avoid Being Filmed seems to ask what happens for the rest of their lives. This brief spasm of an album could be read as the memories and opinions of someone who was briefly feted by the music scene some unspecified time ago, an unstable mixture of bile, supercilious amusement and nostalgic fondness for an awkward, illogical industry. A sort of cross between John Osborne’s Archie Rice, and Creme Brulee’s Les McQueen, perhaps. Indeed, the album draws a line from the clarion call of ‘This Is It, This Is The Scene’ to tales of fights, breakdowns and post-gig boozing on ‘The Plot’, euphoria to “artistic differences” in ten short tracks.
But, whilst we aren’t sure if Hot Hooves are saddened, tickled or frustrated by rock music, we know they have a bloody good crack at making it. Each tiny nugget of a tune is a tough alloy of dirt simple rock rhythms and cheekily catchy melodies that is immediately accessible but sculpted with enough pop nous to remain memorable. ‘This Is It, This Is The Scene’ is a bit like ‘Something Else’ swimming at half speed through a vat of custard, and our favourite ‘The Sparks Up Agenda’ barrels along like a schoolyard winger hurtling towards an open goal, unaware that the bell has rung. Occasionally the feel is new wave in inverted commas, and can seem somewhat third hand – ‘The Plot’ veers rather close to Elastica, and the album’s only real misstep ‘Hot Hooves’ sounds like a mildewed old Family Cat record that has been gathering dust under the bed for twenty years – but in general, it’s impressive how visceral and sweatily enjoyable this album is. The tunes Pete Momtchiloff sings are perhaps the best examples of Hot Hooves’ space between the nihilistic romanticism of Guided By Voices and Half Man Half Biscuit’s pub carpet cabaret.
To say that this record sounds like the vibrant work of musicians half Hot Hooves’ age would be patronising. To say you’d be hard pressed to find rock music in Oxford that packs a good old fashioned punch whilst peppering the lyrics with archly acidic little witticisms seems redundantly self-evident. Let’s just say this is a lovely little collection of high quality, scuffed tunes that anyone with an interest in Oxford pop should listen to. Fuck’s sake, it only takes about twenty minutes, what have you got to lose?