Painfully young quintet Above Us the Waves were the subject of a lengthy musicinoxford.co.uk dissection a few weeks back, so we’ll lay off them a bit, both for their sakes and our readership’s. They exhibit a quintessential Oxfordshire middle class vagueness that is both infuriating and endearing, exemplified by lead singer  Joe Harrison’s quivering announcement that  ‘this one’s a tribute to Top Gun….sort of…kind of…’ before launching into the sort of ubiquitous post-punk that runs from Editors through Interpol back to Joy Division and beyond. Some of it sounds a bit tired (how many ‘posts’ are we on at the moment? Last time I looked it was post-post-rock, but I may have missed the last post), but AUTW have a got a few good things going for them. Harrison’s alternation between rhythm guitar and violin is deftly handled, and the band, which has a tendency to generate mud, sounds much clearer when he plays the latter (beautifully, I should add).

Joseph Shuttleworth’s drumming is excellent too, especially his more minimalist figures, which allow further sorely-needed breathing room into the music. Harrison’s singing is a mixed bag; when he’s high and reedy and maxing on the vibrato he sounds rather fine; a lonely, romantic figure roaming Utah with his fiddle in his knapsack, but on too many sections he’s singing in his boots, with the instrumentation an undifferentiated wave of noise threatening to crash over the gunwales and send the vessel down with all hands. The songwriting too is a bit disjointed, with too many sections elbowing each other like rapacious housewives at a Primark sale. Still, this band has a fair bit of promise, which can’t honestly be said of either of the remaining bands on the bill. For proof, check the first two minutes of ‘Mind for Business, Body for Sin’ on their Myspace.

The best thing about Small Machine’s set is an increasingly unhinged countup by someone who sounds like a NASA engineer going insane in real time. This piece of sampling (a step down in artistic merit from The Count’s turn on Sesame Street) is certainly more arresting than the music, an unmemorable compound of the very loud and the very bland. Their songs seem to be a series of mostly random chords played loudly and intensely with the usual combination of bog-standard guitar/another guitar/bass/drums, and dominated by ridiculous amounts of barely-controlled reverb and terrible singing. Matey: just because you can scream dumbly into the mike does not make you Dave Grohl! And let’s face it, he just does that as a sop to those old Nirvana fans in denial.

Incontrovertibly, Drunkenstein main man James Serjeant is one of the Oxford scene’s good guys.  A spirited, generous promoter, a highly competent soundman, a more than useful guitarist, you’ll find few who don’t like and respect him. Except in one area. Why on earth do his bandmates let him sing?

As it’s the band’s last hurrah, it’s pointless to be too harsh- after all they did lay on Battenberg cakes for the hefty, mostly-engaged audience and the band certainly sounded pretty fair to me, doing their usual proggy-punky-rocky act thingy. Bassist Snuffy and drummer Tim Lovegrove are both excellent players and if you want to hear melodies at a Drunkenstein gig, you should drill down into the bass, ‘cause that’s where they’ll be. The group always look as if they are having a ball on stage; this came as a blessed relief after the dullness of Small Machine, and they know all the stops and starts of these awkward, twisty, and (being honest) pretty obscure songs. Serjeant’s singing started quite strongly, but then receded into that slightly camp, spidery mutter which many gig-goers can’t take in large doses. He always sings as if it’s Halloween, and he’s telling a tale of mutilation and murder to a troupe of twitchy Boy Scouts round the fireside in Tubney Wood;  in any event,  I didn’t have a clue what he was on about for 90% of the time, and though you don’t expect total clarity at any live gig, to endure whole songs in which you can’t pick up a single word suggests that singer and band are fundamentally mismatched. Still, they have made a decent record, have played some well-received gigs over the months and years, and boast players of verve and individuality, so they end their career in credit. And if you think I’m being a bit sentimental, remember what Dr Johnson said about lapidary judgements.