Elliot Fresh - Now

(Illgotit Records, 2012)

Elliot Fresh is one of the most affable young rappers in Oxford and his Illgotit Records label is blessed with skilled beatmakers who draw from the same soulful, jazz-inspired well as 9^th Wonder, Hi-Tek, DJ Premier and the whole Native Tongues crew. This gives Now, Elliot’s three-years-in-the-making debut album, a cohesive and pleasantly golden-era feel akin to Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.

However, your enjoyment of the album may be dependant on the balancing act between Elliot’s rudeboy-posturing and intelligent rapper personas; songs on the album varyingly focus on immature, almost scatological humour, sexual exploration, social commentary and philosophical/theoretical concepts. There are lyrical gems to be found amidst some of the album’s more vulgar tirades while some of the more awkward-sounding clangers feature in the more positive passages. ‘Respect the Architects’ is a playful, if formulaic, homage to the founding fathers of hip-hop from Kool Herc to Rakim and closing track ‘Oxford’ pays respects to the local hip-hop scene. Elsewhere ‘Born Into the Galaxy’ is a sensitive and thoughtful ode to Mother Earth while in ‘The Jazz Mag Shuffle’ Elliot aims for the Pharcyde’s self-loving sense of humour but comes across more like a dirty old man leering at the top-shelf magazines.

A game of two halves then – sometimes there’s no accounting for taste and whenever the subject matter or a forgettable guest verse threatens to ruin a track the production manages to carry our interest into the next song. Overall though, it has to be said that as a whole package Now is a strong offering from one of the better rappers in town.

[Originally published in Nightshift magazine, issue 205]

http://nightshift.oxfordmusic.net/2012/aug.pdf

Baroness - Yellow & Green

(Relapse Records, 2012)

Yellow & Green, the double-album from Savannah, Georgia sludge band Baroness, is already one of the most talked-about records of the year. It’s barely been out a week but it’s already dividing opinion left and right with some people praising it as a progression from the band’s ballsier but more ragged roots and others calling it a sell-out move towards a more mainstream sound. Other people just hate the idea of a double album because of the sheer audacity and pomposity that has long been associated with the medium. Regardless of where you stand at this point, whatever you thought of Baroness pre-Yellow & Green may well be tested on first listen to Yellow & Green but that’s OK – it’s an album that needs to be listened to repeatedly to be properly appreciated.

Baroness deserve respect for making a double-album in the first instance. In an age when albums can be so easily dissected and torn apart by mp3 player shuffle-functions and file sharing, Baroness have not only created an album that feels like a cohesive, unbreakable whole but they’ve also done one better by expanding their material across two inter-connected records. After repeated listens it becomes clear that the decision to expand the album was out of necessity rather than a conscious decision to distinguish the two sides. In all honesty, there’s not a lot of difference between disc one and disc two musically which leads one to reason that the band probably had too much material to fit onto one record and, given the less-than 80 minute duration of Yellow & Green, not enough to warrant two full albums-proper.

Now on to the more serious charge that has been thrown at Baroness of late – that this is a weaker, more mainstream album than 2007′s Red or 2009′s Blue. Yes, this is not necessarily a Baroness album for old-school Baroness fans. There aren’t many songs on the album that you could call “heavy.” In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, Baroness frontman John Baizley agreed that “it would be an incredible stretch” to call the music on Yellow & Green heavy metal. And it’s true – pick any track on either side of the album at random and chances are you won’t hear a distorted guitar or one of Baizley’s mighty roars. You’re far more likely to hear folk and prog influences and Beach Boys-esque vocals. “Twinkler”, for example, is a delicate acoustic-led number with flutes and lush, layered vocal harmonies which recalls Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” or King Crimson’s “Moonchild.”

But the album is less of a departure than it immediately appears to be. Listen closely and you can hear the same kinds of progressions, breakdowns and dynamic shifts that made Baroness such a hypnotic and powerful band on previous albums. The difference is that the band are now more measured in their approach to making music and rely less on broad metallic stokes and more on fine melodic details. Lyrical themes and musical motifs weave in and out of these songs giving the impression that the band can now deliver a complex musical vision over the course of a body of work rather than allow each individual song to be its own microcosm. And like the Baizley artwork that adorns the cover, the imagery in the lyrics are more evocative than ever before. Take for example the final track on side one – “Eula” in which the protagonist laments: “I can’t forget the taste of my own tongue.” This follows the line: “Oh this apple makes me sick/ Cries the pig upon his stick/ It’s my own blood.” Regardless of what it means, it’s an image that stays with you long after the song fades out, and many of the tracks feature similar lyrical details.

There are some rockier numbers for fans of Baroness’ earlier work but they are more nuanced and sleek than the likes of “Isak” or “Wanderlust”; “Take My Bones Away” is a slab of driving uptempo punk rock, reminiscent of QOTSA or the heavier side of Foo Fighters. The same goes for “The Line Between” which even recalls Muse. But it’s not the heavy songs that really satisfy on Yellow & Green; this is a less instantly-gratifying Baroness album than the ones that have gone before it but it shimmers with a majestic, masterful elegance that the band have long been aiming for.

It may not sound like anything Baroness have released so far but Baroness fans will be doing themselves a disservice if they disregard Yellow & Green for that reason. It’s an album with an oceanic wash of emotional variety and depth of meaning that deserves to be explored and enjoyed on repeated listens. It’s a grown-up record from a band that has learned that it can be just as devastating to express anger and frustration in a calm, elegant manner as it is to express it with brutal noise. Baizley has always hinted that Baroness’ albums could be roughly summed up by their colours – Red was anger, Blue was depression but what Yellow & Green symbolise is up to you to discover.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 25/07/2012]

http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/b/baroness-yellow-and-green-2cd-2lp-dd-2012/

Process of Guilt - Fæmin

(Bleak Recordings/Division Records, 2012)

As I write this the United Kingdom is in the process of flooding; in my home town of Oxford we’ve just had a month’s-worth of rain in 24 hours. Some towns in Northern England have had to be evacuated as the deluge threatens to burst riverbanks and cause sewage to flow into people’s houses, ruining their possessions, upturning lives in the process. For a bit of perspective I checked the weather in Process of Guilt’s native Évora, Portugal; thirty-one degrees. You’d think such a sunny clime would inspire a happier disposition in a band but Fæmin, Process of Guilt’s third album, is the perfect soundtrack to an apocalyptic British summer.

Fæmin is a pretty fully-realised album – on the one hand there’s not a huge amount of variation on these five songs, all of them following a similar blueprint for heavy, oppressive sludge; on the other hand this is one of the album’s greatest strengths. Process of Guilt play a sludge-doom hybrid; they are too tight to be lumped in with many sludge bands and too visceral and dynamic to be compared to most doom bands from either end of the spectrum (from Sabbath to Sunn O)))). Instead the band strike a balance between a sludge sound, a doom atmosphere and an underlying post-rock, math-intelligence which recalls the likes of Neurosis.

The band work on the principle of creating tension and then allowing it to spill over in bursts of controlled aggression – an ebb and flow of bitter, seething emotion which runs its course over the duration of the whole album. Indeed the album works best a whole and the songs are even linked by overlaps of distortion giving the impression that Fæmin is almost one long, angry song.

The tense rhythmical chug of guitars and toms on opening track “Empire” soldier on like gathering storm-clouds for six minutes before the clouds burst and a rain-cloud of aggression is unleashed, singer Hugo Santos letting rip like a wild boar on a rampage. And if “Empire” sounded like a storm, second track “Blindfold” sounds like licks of fire falling from the sky; frenetic, serrated guitars form a bed of noise which are counteracted by the swaying rhythm of the half-time drums and Santos’ vehement, venomous roar. But it’s not all bombast – penultimate track “Cleanse” is an atmospheric slow-burner and most of the songs have moments where the storm lets up, even for a brief gasp of air, before the sheer swamping humidity of the riffs threaten to suffocate you again.

Until now Process of Guilt have not made much of a name for themselves outside of mainland Europe but Fæmin could well be the album to make them known far and wide. So as the rain continues to fall and the sun only occasionally manages to break through the clouds here in the UK, it’s hard to think of a more suitable album to be the soundtrack to another ‘wonderful’ British summer. Consider Process of Guilt honorary Brits.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 12/07/2012]

http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/p/process-of-guilt-faemin-cd-digital-2012/

High on Fire - The Art of Self Defense

(Southern Lord, 2012)

There’s no escaping those Sleep boys this year, is there? With rapturous receptions of Matt Pike’s new High On Fire record, Al Cisneros’ new Om record and of course the long awaited re-release of Sleep’s magnum-dopus Dopesmoker, 2012 will surely be the year that Sleep defined. On that rather grandiose note, here comes a reissue of the original (and occasionally-out-of-print) High On Fire record, The Art of Self Defense, courtesy of Southern Lord. Completely remastered by Brad Boatright (who must be doing something right, having been responsible for the remaster of the aforementioned magnum-dopus) and featuring two bonus 7” tracks (including a Celtic Frost cover) and their original three-track demo, this is a reissue how it should be done – it gives the record a facelift and throws in a few extras to help illuminate the band’s humble beginnings.

After the frustrating limbo that Sleep found themselves in with the whole London Records vs Jerusalem/Dopesmoker debacle, the band slowly fizzled out and eventually broke up. It was this which prompted Matt Pike to start High On Fire in 1998 as a way of “putting his life back together.” His new band was a marked departure from Sleep’s laid-back stoner groove; of course, the Matt Pike guitar tone was still a thing of crushing beauty, but from the offset High On Firewere an altogether more hostile, brutal beast than Sleep ever were. It’s hard not to compare the differences between Sleep’s two axe-men and the opposing paths the two men took after Sleep broke up; the quiet, retiring, shy Al Cisneros formed the philosophical and theological Om while the slightly brash, party dude Matt Pike formed High On Fire, a band whose very name signifies a kind of reckless outlook on life. And the music reflects the name to a tee.

The Art of Self Defense is the perfect blueprint for High On Fire’s career and opening track “Baghdad” can be seen as the archetypal High On Fire song. The song’s driving momentum is propelled by Pike’s dirty guitar and even grittier voice, more Lemmy than Ozzy and infinitely more menacing. The opening bass riff of “10000 Years” soon mushroom-clouds into a monstrous fallout shower of bombastic metal and psychedelic blues, a theme continued on “Lost.” Elsewhere, “Blood from Zion” is like High On Fire’s own “Ace of Spades.” The downward spiral of riffs on closing track “Master of Fists” are as pummelling as the title suggests – each chord feels like the band are dropping sandbags on your head from a great height. In short, the album is as devastating now as it has ever been – a trailblazing stoner-punk delight.

Now for the extras: the two 7” bonus tracks had previously been included in Tee Pee Records’ 2001 reissue of the album so most people will probably be familiar with them – “Steel Shoe” fits the mould of the album and could easily have been an album cut while their cover of Celtic Frost’s “The Usurper” is a nice addition and a pretty spot-on homage to the original. The demo versions of “Blood From Zion”, “10000 Years” and “Master of Fists” are more for High On Fire completest than anything else. In fact the most interesting thing about them is how well they are recorded, how fully-formed the songs are at the demo stage and how little they vary from the more well-known album versions.

It’s still a fantastic record and the extras are an added, if inessential, bonus, an insight into the band’s genesis. Once again Brad Boatright has done a fantastic job in revitalising an old classic, giving the murky record a brighter, heavier sheen. This year’s De Vermis Mysteriis has already made quite an impression on fans and the critics alike and so revisiting their debut album at this point in time is a good reminder of how far they’ve come, even if their core dynamic hasn’t changed all that much over the course of six albums. This is a badass album that signalled to the stoner world that there was indeed life after Sleep. Pike once defined heavy music as the soundtrack to a pissed-off warlord chopping off a dude’s head with an axe, and it doesn’t get much more badass than this.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 10/07/2012]
http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/h/high-on-fire-the-art-of-self-defense-reissue-cd-lp-2012/

Komrad - March of the Robot Men

(Big Red Sky, 2012)

On their dizzying and long-awaited debut, Komrad have delivered an album that shares the restless energy of their live performances and which perfectly captures their oddball, angular, shape-shifting sound. Anyone who has seen the band in a live capacity will know that they are capable of dividing a crowd (some would argue that they are merely separating the wheat from the chaff) and this is because a) their style is essentially a brutal form of hardcore punk-metal and b) they are wilfully schizophrenic musical tricksters. You won’t find a song on this album that follows a conventional verse-chorus-verse structure for example; instead what you get is an opening blast followed by a series of what-the-fuck time signatures, Zappa-esque prog breakdowns and post-rock ambience. And the odd cowbell solo.

But where other bands would struggle to weave together such a seemingly disparate assortment of ideas (without the results sounding clunky and thrown-together), Komrad manage it seamlessly. In this respect, much of the pressure falls on drummer James Currie who holds everything together admirably through every time signature, every whimsical twist and turn that the rest of the band throw at him, while bassist Dave Cranwell provides interesting counter-melodies and rhythms on songs like ‘Cowley Neck Tie’. Likewise, singer James Green has his work cut out adding vocal melodies to these songs but he injects them with his larger-than-life personality and actual hummable tunes throughout proceedings (as well as some of the best song titles in Oxford).

But one of the true joys of hearing these songs in their recorded forms is being able to pick out some of Jimmy Hetherington and Russ Blaine’s slightly more insane guitar lines which normally get muddied in the mix live. Anyone who has followed any of Jimmy’s previous bands (Ivy’s Itch, Suitable Case for Treatment) will know that he’s not content to make things easy for himself or those unfortunate to be around him but Komrad might be the most technical band he’s been in; Russ and he often sound like they’re locked in some demented Guitar Hero battle, each harmonising with one another and throwing in little guitar spasm twiddles to throw the other off course.

Musically the band are a unique synthesis of various artists – one can hear glimpses of Faith No More, Dillinger Escape Plan, King Crimson, Yes, Melvins, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band to name a few – but Komrad genuinely sound like no other band I’ve ever heard. Primarily bombastic, some of the best moments on the album are the airy, atmospheric breakaways (see ‘Mirror Mirror On the Wall’, ‘Staring Through Leonard Nimoy’s Eyes’) but they are few and far between in the band’s characteristic metallic prog chug. ‘Cowley Neck Tie’ may be their most perfectly formed song, pitching complex beginnings against a simple, almost crowd-pleasingly rollicking, triumphant ending. By contrast, almost-title track ‘Here Come The Robot Men’ sounds like a circuit breaking. ‘Blowing Up a Rubber Doll Does Not Make You a Martyr’ (see what I mean about song titles?) is the most explosive track, touching upon several genres but then again most of the tracks do.

Ultimately, a track-by-track commentary is pointless, the results could fill a final year thesis. Suffice to say, March of the Robot Men is a debut album so absolutely bursting with bat-shit crazy ideas that it really needs to be heard to be believed.

[Originally published on Music in Oxford, 05/07/2012]

http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2012/07/05/komrad-march-of-the-robot-men-big-red-sky-records/

Overlord - Overlord EP

(Self-released, 2012)

Overlord, a new stoner rock band in Oxford, were recently turned away from a local venue they were booked to play at by the management. Not because they had showed up too late, not because they had set fire to the backstage area. They were turned away for being too damned fresh-faced and young.

It’s a shame that age restrictions in venues prevent young talent from being able to play to audiences outside of the youth centre circuit because Overlord are really rather good. There’s still a sense that they’re very much the sum of their influences, but they pull off their pastiches so fantastically well that it doesn’t bloody matter. Opening track ‘Crawl On’ sounds like a catchy combination of Sleep and Electric Wizard, with a chorus so slyly infectious that I found myself singing it two, even three days after I’d first heard it.

‘What The Hell’ is an amalgam of Desert Storm’s southern-style stoner rock and Mother Corona’s sand-swept desert grooves with a few prog and cock-rock guitar flourishes thrown in for good measure. On ‘Blind’ the band bring in some mellow Chili Peppers sections to provide some contrast in the otherwise stonerific (it’s a word) sound of the EP. Likewise, closing track ‘The Valley’ begins with a lengthy chorus-effect guitar intro that could only signify that you’re in for an epic trip to the ‘valley of the damned’, singer Tal Fineman ringing out like Jimi Hendrix on top of the mix.

Overlord aren’t doing anything new just yet, but give it time and I’m sure these guys will continue to grow into a force that local stalwarts like Desert Storm and Mother Corona will lose sleep over. They have a few great songs here (particularly ‘Crawl On’) and some more live experience will lend more conviction to the vocals and more confidence to the band as a whole. This EP is an impressive opening gambit from this young band – hopefully on future releases they will begin to tone down the pastiche and come up with a sound that is all their own. With the Overlord EP the foundations have already been set.

[Originally published by Music in Oxford, 04/07/2012]
http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2012/07/04/overlord-overlord-ep/

OM - Advaitic Songs

(Drag City, 2012)

OM's discography is a beautiful thing – with each album you can hear the band become more refined, more mature and more imaginative without losing any of their core meditative force. Their 2005 debut, Variations on a Theme, had all the hallmarks of the band as we know them now (the long track times, the repetition, the almighty groove) but in retrospect it sounds like a continuation of Sleep's stoner legacy. Obviously, Sleep are unfuckwithable but listening back with fresh ears, Variations on a Theme was not as revolutionary a departure from the old ways as it seemed at the time. Moving along a few albums, Pilgrimage saw the band begin to tone down the distortion to make way for more moments of introspection and peace, although the balance was still very much in favour of a bludgeoning fuzz trance. With Advaitic Songs, OM have, quite simply, produced the best album of their career to date and they've finally found the perfect balance of loud and quiet, noise and meditation.

The band have also expanded their musical palette, implementing a wide array of instruments to give this 5-song suite a cinematic quality that the band never accomplished purely as a duo. When opening prayer “Addis” floats in you can almost picture sunrise in Jerusalem, the silhouettes of minarets and steeples framed against the hazy morning mist as the call to prayer rings out. A sweeping cello is accompanied by the water-drop effect of the tabla drum, the Arabic prayer continues in counter-rhythm to the subtle groove of Al Cisneros' bass and Emil Amos' percussion, strings and isolated piano chords weave in and out of the mix to create a piece of music that is so evocative you can almost smell the dust and the incense.

The album is amazingly awash with such fine instrumental and compositional details – where the band had once written a huge, cyclical riff and simply varied between playing it loud and quiet, now they allow the core 'riffs' (if they can be called that) to flow organically between instruments. For example a riff that had been played by the bass will later shift focus to the cello or a piano to give the music an interactive dimension, like a call and response (see “Gethsemane”). If you'll excuse the OM pun, the band present many variations on the same theme in much the same way classical composers do.

OM have never sounded so masterful or elegant as they do on these songs, eschewing conventional notions of what constitutes “heavy music” to create an underlying, album-long sense of spiritual heaviness that can hardly be justified with words. Anyone who has enjoyed the most recent Earth albums, for example, will find plenty to enjoy on tracks like “Sinai” and “Haqq al-Yaqin”, and they will likewise appreciate that the suspension of distortion is often more powerful than the distortion itself. Indeed, there are very few moments on this album where the band let rip and stomp on the pedals - even the mammoth riff of “State of Non-Return” is ultimately short-lived in favour of a more subtle and restrained approach which does the band credit.

Advaitic Songs is, quite simply, the best OM album to date and illustrates that they have achieved a level of compositional maturity that very few of their contemporaries have reached. Back in his Dopesmoker days Al Cisneros and his Sleep cohorts sounded like a band wildly veering off towards the Holy Land fuelled by a combination of weed and idealistic good intentions. More than a decade on, Advaitic Songs sounds like an older and wiser pilgrimage altogether, Al having made the most of his time in the Holy Land, soaking up the atmosphere to create something far more indicative of Nazareth and the Holy Mountains. There isn't a heavier topic on earth to address than spirituality and with Advaitic Songs OM have proven that you don't always need to sound heavy to be a heavy band.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 03/07/2012]
http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/o/om-advaitic-songs-cd-lp-2012/

[Later reposted by Roadburn Festival as their 'Album of the Day', 03/07/2012]
http://www.roadburn.com/2012/07/album-of-the-day-om-advaitic-songs/

Scott Kelly, Steve Von Till & Wino - Songs Of Townes Van Zandt

(Neurot Recordings, 2012)

If you were going to ask for an album of Townes Van Zandt covers, you couldn't ask for a trio of more gravel-voiced, road-weary troubadours to fill in for the late, great outlaw singer than Scott Kelly, Steve Von Till (both of Neurosis) and Wino, could you? For those unfamiliar with the man, Townes Van Zandt was a Texan country singer whose songs have been championed by everyone from Bob Dylan to Mudhoney to Mark Lanegan but whose own renown was hindered in his lifetime by his battles with drink and drug addiction. His songs were made famous by various country singers (Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard) but very few covers were able to match the raw power of the originals. Until now.

Drawing primarily from the singer's late-sixties and seventies work, the songs here also span Van Zandt's entire career right up until his final studio album No Deeper Blue. Some of his most notable songs are absent here (“Waitin' Around to Die” and “Pancho and Lefty” may be untouchable) but with such a wealthy songbook to choose from every track is a gem, particularly in the hands of these three men who each contribute three tracks of primarily straight acoustic covers.

Steve Von Till takes the most layered approach of the trio, adding a warm electric guitar to opening track (and Van Zandt classic) “If I Needed You” while giving “The Snake Song” an ambient overhaul, the guitars more of an afterthought. That being said, Von Till's take on “Black Crow Blues” is a beautifully honest rendition, his deep voice lending an added sense of weariness to the lament. Indeed, Von Till's voice, the deepest of the three men, seems to add the most gravity to Van Zandt's words and the contrast is particularly interesting on “If I Needed You” which is one of the more vulnerable songs on the album.

Wino's contributions, “Rake”, “Nothing” and “A Song For”, take fewer liberties with the originals but are no less enjoyable for it. In fact it's Wino's slightly higher voice that shares the most with Van Zandt's own and as a result his covers come across more like 'alternate' versions. He neither borrows Van Zandt's delivery and inflection completely nor does he stray too far from it – it's a reverent performance from the St. Vitus man that will probably please the hardcore Van Zandt fans the most.

Finally, Scott Kelly seems to flit between the approach of Wino and fellow Neurosis man Von Till; “St. John, the Gambler” has very few embellishments apart from a distant, bellowing guitar but on “Lungs” Kelly introduces a dramatic distorted guitar, a gritty texture which lends a certain credence to the opening couplet “Won't you lend your lungs to me?/Mine are collapsing.” But Kelly's rendition of the tragic “Tecumseh Valley” is a straight-forward and beautiful one – he has rarely sounded so emotive as he does here on one of Van Zandt's most beloved songs, a prime example of the man's brand of plain-speak poetry.

The most immediately striking thing about this album is the respect that Kelly, Von Till and Wino treat Van Zandt's songs with; their renditions vary between being pretty straight-up covers, the likes of which you might have heard Van Zandt himself playing live, and slight variations that add textures which aid the mood of the songs. The distortion on Kelly's version of “Lungs” adds a layer of dirt that compliments the sentiment in the lyrics, and Von Till gives “The Snake Song” a shifty ambient treatment that benefits the feel of the song. But the true stars here are the songs themselves which are not only as poetic and poignant as ever but which also sound amazingly contemporary, especially in the hands of musical innovators like these three men. The song selection has ensured that there is something here for fans of all of Van Zandt's work but it will also serve as an excellent introduction to those less familiar with his catalogue. A covers album is a strangely appropriate tribute to an artist whose songs always seemed to gain a wider audience when sung by other musicians. Hopefully this album will open the ears of a new generation to a talent that has been cruelly underrated and whose influence has probably already found its way onto their mp3 players.

[Originally published by the Sleeping Shaman, 26/06/2012]
http://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/album-reviews/s/scott-kelly-steve-von-till-wino-songs-of-townes-van-zandt-cd-lp-digital-2012/

The Cellar Family - Jumbo

(Self-released, 2012)

The Cellar Family have quickly made a reputation for themselves as the freakiest gaggle of deviants making music in Oxford and have won themselves a deservedly large number of fans as a result. “In the Garden” immediately sets Jumbo apart from last year's Flab EP – this is the terrifying nightmare to that bizarre daydream. Singer Jamie Harris has clearly lent his inner demons a voice and they've gone on a bit of a bender with it, sounding, at times, like an unhinged, nasal version of the Young Knives' Henry. Elsewhere he makes the kind of sounds you generally only make when you think no-one else is listening. Once again, it's hard to avoid making comparisons to Mclusky, Pixies, the Young Knives et al but there's now more noise a la Liars, Big Black and Shellac to add texture and complexity to the queasy stew. Jumbo is a demented punk-racket gem.

[Originally published in Oxford Music Scene magazine, issue 19]
http://www.oxfordmusicscene.co.uk/images/oms_issue19.pdf

Kill Murray - A Drug to Shake You Up

(Self-released, 2012)

A group comprised of former members of sorely missed local bands (Dial F for Frankenstein, Olid, 50ft Panda and Phantom Theory), Kill Murray have obviously been tarred with that annoying supergroup brush but closer inspection reveals a band that really has tried to amalgamate their past sounds and forge something new. Coming across like a mature Dial F clashing with Interpol, Kill Murray are sleak but a little rough around the edges, catchy but with hooks that are embedded in a rhythmical stew.

Indeed, the rhythm section is pretty special; drummer Chris Hutchinson (formerly of Olid and 50ft Panda) is exceptional and brings significant clout to this EP while former Dial F bassist Scott McGregor seems to have learnt a few tricks from Carlos D. Together they form a funky backdrop to Gus Rogers and Aaron Delgado's post-grunge guitar racket. Opening track “Laser” is a moody start to the EP and one that is largely characterised by the interaction and counter rhythm of the stop-start bass line and finicky drumming. The track presents the greatest argument for Kill Murray being a brand new beast, not sounding entirely like any one of the members' previous bands but bringing elements of each band together.

“Detroit”, the most immediately catchy song on the EP, is pure Dial F however. It's true that there has been a distinct gap in the local music scene for a while now, a gap that Dial F for Frankenstein once filled with their simple, melodic songwriting and on “Detroit” you can hear glimpses of Dial F's “USA” and also some of the Electric Soft Parade's early material. “Superman” is another classic Gus Rogers song – an accomplished, catchy amalgam of grunge, glam and Britpop with a few electro touches. The electro influence (ie. the keyboards) continue into final track “Miracle, Man” which closes the EP in a similarly moody fashion to opening track “Laser.”

This is a good, solid debut EP from Kill Murray; there is huge potential here but there is also plenty of room to grow (you don't want to peak too early do you?). Gus is a talented songwriter and his fellow bandmates are all excellent musicians but A Drug to Shake You Up is not quite as addictive as you may have been hoping it would be. Not as immediately catchy as Dial F, not as fuzzy as Phantom Theory and not as heavy as Olid or 50ft Panda, Kill Murray are nonetheless at the start of a journey that will hopefully see them come into their own on future releases.

[Originally published on Music In Oxford, 24/06/2012]
http://www.musicinoxford.co.uk/2012/06/24/kill-murray-a-drug-to-shake-you-up-self-released/

Recent OMS cover stars Kill Murray have unleashed their debut EP of infectious pop-rock. Gus Rogers has always had a way with melodies, but in this new format the catchy songwriting is somewhat buried beneath layers of icy keyboards and off-kilter indie rhythms. Moody opening track “Laser” and “Detroit” both bring to mind Interpol, particularly in the interlocking musicianship of drummer Chris Hutchington and bassist Scott McGregor – a formidable rhythm section. The power pop of “Superhuman” recalls Weezer and Idlewild, while “Miracle, Man” sounds like fellow Oxford indie wunderkinds Wild Swim in the remarkable way that moods and textures are woven together effortlessly. This early in their career it's not clear exactly how Kill Murray will set themselves them apart from the rest of the pack – their sound is unmistakably Oxford but not unmistakably Kill Murray just yet. A jolly good EP that has stirred my interest if not quite shaken me up.

[Originally published in Oxfordshire Music Scene magazine, issue 19]
http://www.oxfordmusicscene.co.uk/images/oms_issue19.pdf