The melodic popsters will be ably supported by Oxford’s own expansive pop botherers We Aeronauts along with the finely-monikered Moustache Of Insanity, who apparently ‘uses Casio keyboards, an iPod, a Game Boy, guitars and stuff to make bleeps and booms’.

If that sounds like it’ll float your boat, doors will open at 7.30 pm and the live music will run until 10.45 pm. Tickets are £8 in advance, and available here.

The photographs were taken by Vince Mo, who has many more available on his website.

First track ‘Hang My Picture’ is one of Tamara’s better-known songs, a song seemingly destined for radio play with its timeless emotional sentiment and powerful, musical simplicity. This is in fact a re-recorded version of the song and it benefits from Tamara toning down the in-your-face emotion in her voice to a more palatable and realistic lament; it’s as if she has realised that she’s only competing with herself and so has chosen to compliment her compositions rather than try to outdo them. ‘Crying Wolf’ falls into a similar category, sharing the same tone but with some interestingly fast-paced and wordy lyrics which speak of a relationship breaking down in spite of itself. Along with ‘Get Him Out’, a song which becomes more complex and ambiguous the more times you hear it, these songs are well written, heartfelt and intimate.

The two other songs take things in a decidedly different and unexpected direction. EP highlight ‘I Stuck It Out’ is a chamber-pop murder ballad, with a slightly Medieval chord progression and excellent cello and harpsichord accompaniments. The chilling conviction in the low notes of the lyric “So I took your children instead” recalls Nico’s deadpan vocal delivery, while the overall tone of the song beautifully balances the sombre subject matter with the flights of fancy and madness at it’s core. It’s easily one of the best songs written by an Oxford artist in the past year.

If anyone was ready to write Tamara off as a typical singer-songwriter they should listen to final track ‘Lover’ which purposefully subverts the sappy piano ballad, beginning with the lyric: “I can tell he cries / Into his tablet at night / Stabbing a titted figurine in the groin with a pin / For all the wrongs he thinks I’ve done him.” What could have been a cloying, optimistic end to an EP full of hurt turns out to be a story of damaged masculinity, presented with all of the violence that the topic suggests.

When one hears that a singer-songwriter has released an EP called ‘Lover’, one tends to fear the worst – but Tamara has written five subversive songs about love gone wrong, either by neglect, infidelity or madness. Tamara Parsons-Baker: not your average double-barrelled Oxford singer-songwriter.

(Note: although I’m not normally one to do a plug, I must mention that the artwork was done by the excellent, one-of-a-kind Toni Le Busque. Check out her work here – show an artist some love).

Tamara Parsons-Baker / Big Red Sky

By Tom McKibbin

Here’s the full track listing for the show. You can listen to it from 9.00 pm on Sunday 5 February at BBC Oxford.

05/02/2012
Family Machine — ‘Quiet As A Mouse’
Trophy Wife — ‘The Book Of Right On’
Lewis Watson interview
Lewis Watson — ‘#3′
Music news
Mr Shaodow — ‘R U Stoopid!?!’
China Rats — ‘N.O.M.O.N.E.Y’
Colour Change For Camouflage — ‘Emeralds Exotics’
Deer Chicago — ‘Lantern Collapse’
Gig guide
The Gullivers — ‘In Orbit’

Unsurprisingly, their thick, spiritual beat gravy always works better on record. Their immense soundscapes take you on a trip, and you can get lost in their music. Headphones on, eyes shut, and you are in their strange world. A Wu-Tang album – or one of the better solo spin-offs – is like a film on its own; a long and strange trip that somehow never quite works as well live.

GZA is a brilliant and gifted rapper, but the sheer size and scale of the music that he is presenting makes performing it live a tough call. This gig works okay with one man, a few random crew members, a mic and backing tracks delivering a sound that is loud and rowdy. GZA’s constant trips behind his crew members is distracting and tiresome, and he unfortunately does not have the stage presence of Meth or Ghostface Killa. But to be fair to him, not many MCs do.

Consequently…

As hip-hop shows go, this was very atypical. It only rose above the average because of the quality of the tracks from Liquid Swords. It’s not that it was a bad show, it’s just that Wu-Tang is a trip, and a very personal manga movie that shows in your own head. Maybe, perhaps, it’s best approached in a different context live, and enjoyed for what it is. As a massive Wu Tang fan, this scribe is happy to concede that my expectations were too high. GZA delivered an enthusiastic, old school rap set in a packed and hyped O2; the atmosphere was electric, and the performance was good. But very far from great.

By Andrew Jones

Mustard And The Monocle are the least obviously rubbish act on tonight, and also the least enjoyable. They’re young and very talented musicians, with the drummer in particular showing an ease and skill that eludes many touring bands, but they seem to be saving their energy for nights with bigger turnouts. Their set of whimsical country-folk indie reminds us of locals like The Yarns and The Epstein and does show a lot of promise, but their performance lacks spark, and with a couple of exceptions the songwriting is unremarkable. Their inter-song banter betrays a lethargic disappointment that they aren’t playing to a fuller house, which is always a turn-off for those who have come to watch; much as the most expensive boutiques stay in business by treating every customer as if they were a millionaire, these guys would do well to treat every audience like potential converts, no matter how small their numbers.

Umair Chaudhry is one of our scene’s most interesting and prolific musicians, whose Blindsight Records label has released many projects in the ambient/metal spectrum and whose latest release is represented tonight by the doomy goth-electronic duo Abandon. As with Umair’s Fault Finders project there is a lot of promising stuff here that’s let down by what seems to be either laziness or restlessness; the production and presentation seem unfinished and the slow, atmospheric, 80s goth sound is let down by underwhelming drum programming and Umair’s voice, which does hit the notes but only on its rather meandering way somewhere else. It’s hard to engage with what we assume to be the desolation of the human condition when watching a lonely-looking laptop in front of two men who look like they’ve wandered upstairs from the pub, and while we’d be loathe to suggest that presentation should trump integrity we do suspect that this would have been absolutely spellbinding with the addition of a live drummer, two more guitarists and a smoke machine the size of Didcot power station. By the time all that is assembled, though, it seems likely Umair will be off on his next project – doubtless also at the dark end of the
musical spectrum, also flawed and also interesting.

Topping tonight’s pyramid of rubbish we have The Jon Cohen Experimental: a Montreal-based solo performer, formerly of The Dears and The Social Register but now touring on his own, and it’s not hard to see why. The set begins with Cohen, tall, bald and dressed in red trousers, red shirt and red tie, looking like The Addams’ Family’s Lurch on Valentine’s Day, standing in front of two microphones and an assembly of dismembered electronic drum kit, persuading the Wheatsheaf into silence so he can begin the show with a couple of bangs on his electronic gong. This, to be charitable, is unconventional behaviour, and he’s started as he means to go on: we have backing tracks from a laptop over which awkward jiggling beats are looped from the electronic drums, bizarre howling mantras are bawled into the two mics and an assortment of harmonicas, pennywhistles and oddball dancing accompany the occasional burst of bass guitar. It should be awful – and it is, of course – but the jittery trance-like performance belies an unexpectedly controlled set, and the improvised mayhem is never discernably out of Cohen’s control. Loop pedals have been done to death on stage but this is honestly the most original and effective use of them we’ve seen since Duotone’s delicately layered folktronica. The stage setup and mad professor schtick suggests a Buddhist Thomas Truax, but he has the outsider sincerity and total commitment – and genuine insanity – of Twizz Twangle as well, with the is-it-supposed-to-be-this-funny humour of Animal Collective’s set to a nearly-empty Wheatsheaf in 2003. It’s as odd a brand of repetitive, whimsical, earnest semi-improvised lunacy as we’ve seen on stage, and half the venue is entranced. The other half, it has to be noted, are less than impressed, with one friend commenting that having seen “some god-awful, wrist-slittingly bad gigs in [their] time… this one is by far taking the biscuit”. It’s also been astutely observed that if he was fifteen years younger and had an artful fringe, the ultra-fashionable Blessing Force collective would be all over him. By most conventional measures of music most of this is dreadful, but his charisma, enthusiasm, sincerity and obvious delight to be performing is utterly infectious; combine that with a performance that is genuinely original and music that is intermittently bewitching and we have an absolute winner, exactly the kind of gig that Gappy Tooth and the Wheatsheaf exist for, because there is huge cultural value in this and you could never find it on television, on radio or at the O2 Academy. When people say you should support your local gig venues, this is what we’d lose if they were gone. Most wouldn’t weep if it was lost. I, and the regulars at Gappy Tooth Industries, certainly would.

By Mark Wilden