To Liesel, an Oxford-London quintet, sound an awful lot like Coldplay, but they have a little bit about them, so don’t run away just yet. The instrumental stuff is workmanlike: gnarled and trembly piano, big distorted guitars that come by three-quarters in to signify Epic (you can set your watch by them!) and lots of splashy cymbals. So far, so numbingly generic, but To Liesel’s new wrinkle is that they have stuck a load of reverberant Fleet Foxes harmonies over it all, and the effect is often quite pleasing and even, in places, awkwardly beautiful.

Strongest song on the demo is ‘Dear Jane’, which uses the device of an exchange of comically earnest love letters to pile on the sentiment, but I have to curmudgeonly accept that it probably works-teenagers are like that. The lead vocalist has an undeniably pretty falsetto, and the backup singing is pristine and spacious. A little folkier is the gently lilting ‘My Name is Ocean’, which might be cousin to one of Stornoway’s more mystical ballads.

Less successful is the overlong and turgid ‘Ashes that Stain’, a piece of machine pop lacking the immediacy and pathos of ‘Dear Jane’, as well as the latter’s hooks, which I admit left me guiltily snagged. They really are an odd mix, this lot: instrumentally safe to the point of indolence but vocally expansive and searching. At any rate, it will be fun to see them at the Jericho later in the month (with the excellent Minor Coles) to see if they can cut it live. If so, and if they can wean themselves off their more cloying influences, then Oxford may be graced by some gorgeous choral pop in the near future.

To Liesel Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon

Envelope is Tim Matthews, who takes to the stage with a laptop and an amplified electric guitar, and produces fairly minimal melodic indoor electronica, stylistically somewhere between Plaid and Autechre but with skittering beats which sound not dissimilar to those of Pole, and the whole conjures memories of the Random Number EP on Vacuous Pop. It’s good stuff, not breaking new ground but direct, melodic and interesting. He adds post-rock electric guitar on top which works well, and is occasionally joined by a drummer whose reach slightly exceeds his grasp, and the beats that aren’t quite in time contribute to a sense that the live and prepared parts of the whole don’t quite mesh together. They give the impression that they don’t have a lot of live experience and the music has a tendency to meander, but Matthews has a good grasp of the niche he’s found, and it looks like with time and support Envelope could turn into something very special.

Where Envelope wears his 1990s Warp Records influences on his sleeve, PRDCTV virtually has “Four Tet” stamped on his chest. Another soloist, Alex Lloyd - the man behind Geometric Records - is joined by an entirely unnecessary bass player, and where with Envelope it was unclear what the live parts were adding, with PRDCTV the ramshackle musical interaction between Chima Simpson-Bell on bass and Lloyd on drum kit, acoustic guitar and electronic plinky noises actively detracts from a solid and interesting laptop backing. Electronica artists should always be discouraged from performing on their own behind a laptop, but in this case it seems they’d be better off doing so until they’ve had a lot more practice; Lloyd’s instrumental tinkering is the kind which gives a bad name to multi-instrumentalists and makes you wish he’d just pick one instrument and stick with it. The debt to Four Tet and Fridge is evident, but as with Envelope’s set this is a gig which suggests inexperience and shows a lot of potential, as long as PRDCTV have a chance to work out how best to expand live on their promising recordings. Apologies if this all makes it sound like we’re watching a school band with one or two good songs, as it is much better and more watchable than that -though that could be because their half-hour set is accompanied by Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s immensely compelling abstract film “Der Lauf der Dinge”, whose depiction of Heath Robinson-esque mechanical energy was very much in keeping with the feel of the PRDCTV set.

So a good show for Geometric, a fledgling label with a lot of potential, though we’re confused by the organiser’s assertion that we check out all their other acts as Envelope and PRDCTV are the only two acts they’ve yet released. MOA could well have been the best place to see them as well, at least until some rigorous gigging has toughened them up a bit. The reverential atmosphere of tonight’s audience is certainly not something they can expect at every show - nor is it something they yet deserve, in all honesty - but they’re onto a good thing, and for all its flaws, tonight’s show was a very encouraging start.

By Mark Wilden

`Watership Downs’ sounds like a karaoke take on Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ `Hurt’ with lo-fi back-up from a comatose-drunk Wedding Present. Come `Madeleine’, the karaoke Cash has lightened his mood slightly and The Wedding Present have woken from their booze-induced slumber but forgotten how to play and so they all bugger off to the kitchen to mainline filter coffee, leaving an apparently completely different band to perform `In Your Name’, a spindly, spaced-out piano ballad led by an untrained adenoidal whine that dribbles along in ungainly fashion and without even the good sense of direction to tip itself out of the nearest window. And thus Mr Karoake Cash and his minimalist cohorts stumble back into the room to darken the mood a little, pausing only to rhyme “Beemer” with “Argentina”.
 
The shame with all this is that it could have been a lot of fun. The singer is so over the top you want him to really go to town but he prefers to drone on until his foghorn voice starts to remind you of an overbearing, drunken uncle at a wedding reception, while the band seem incapable or completely unwilling to drag themselves up from random shuffle mode and kick some life into the songs. If they know what’s good for them they’ll nip down to HMV pronto and treat themselves to a copy of `The Drift’ by Scott Walker and `The Best Of Morecambe & Wise’; something to prick their musical ambition and something to provide them with some better jokes in future.

Bring A Guillotine Myspace

By Zoë Herriot

Working 9 till 5

I want to grow up to be

More dead than alive

Samuel Zasada’s latest home recorded EP opens with these lines, and a cynical tale of thwarted youthful aspirations. It’s a nicely put together and surprisingly jolly little tune, and it could be a mixture of Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” and Karel Fialka’s surprise hit “Hey Matthew” as created by Counting Crows. It’s a decent nugget of rootsy rebellion, but it feels more like something that should be placed two thirds of the way through your third album, not as the opening track on a bright new demo.

Luckily, this is soon followed by the best track on the record. “Buried” sounds like some strange Jewish funeral music, with mournful harmonised vocals, the corpse of a klezmer bassline and the slightly saucy sounding line, “Will you part my sea?” Whilst most acoustic singers are sitting around moaning about being a weeny bit lonely, Zasada has cut right to some truly exhausted, lovelorn sentiments here, that are more Thomas Hardy than Damien Rice, thankfully. “Place Your Words In Tune” continues the surprisingly effective dirge-pop mode, with a nice slow build and the most eerie slowly oscillating melodica drone you’re likely to come across. If you slowed this down and put reverb on the reverb it could almost be a lost Michael Gira track.

“Inside A Bomb” is equally bleak, seemingly owing its roots to a Southern prison worksong. It’s another strong performance, harmonica puffing over the top like thick polls of exhaust fumes, and our only criticism is that Zasada’s vocals tend toward a gravelly sincerity that sucks some of the wit and irony out of the lyrics (we’re not entirely sure what’s going on here, but any track this doom-laden that starts with ”I grazed my knee as a little boy” has got to be a little tongue in cheek, right?). The problem is worse on closer “The Blade That You Hold”, on which the vocal is an angst-ridden groan that resembles a maudlin drunk Tom Jones impersonator. Zasada has a powerful voice, but we prefer it when he doesn’t sing as if he’s trying to impress a listless open mike crowd, and tempers his tone to the subtleties of the music. This is all a little too close to Chad Kroeger for comfort, as Zasada constipatedly keens the refrain “It’s where I take delight”. Ironically, Samuel, it’s the only thing we dislike about an incredibly promising and assured recording. Doesn’t sound like he has much growing up left to do as an artist.

By David Murphy

Samuel Zasada Myspace

Their latest EP, ‘This Allusion’ has plenty of good moments on it, even if the results are a bit uneven. Opener ‘Flopsy’ll be Toast!’, for example, has a rather soulful, bluesy lead guitar intro (it reminds me a little of The Guess Who?), before breaking into a more angular rise-and-fall figure, over which Leigh Alexander sardonically quarter-sings a lyric-as-character-assassination relating to some vacuous ex-girlfriend (or ‘hormonal cyclone’ as he nastily puts it). It’s a bit of a misfire to be honest: the barbs are too esoteric and the vocals are pretty approximate-best just listen to the guitar playing.

More focussed is the self-explanatory ‘Eurovision Political Favour Contest’. Of course, this institution (the gay equivalent of the FA Cup Final) is the softest of soft targets, and the joke has worn thin even for Sir Terry Wogan, but Beaver Fuel unexpectedly squeeze a couple of laughs out of it: think Tom Lehrer fronting Green Day:

“When it’s our turn to award the points, it’s musical merit alone/

No allies, no solidarity, we’re out here on our own/

So maybe we’re just keeping score to see if anyone likes us at all”

I don’t know about you, but I find the evocation of the spirit of Dunkirk allied with that of Millwall FC rather touching as well as amusing. And its great punk rock.

Finishing off, we have the Eric Cartmanesque ‘F*** You, I’ve got Tourettes’, which is as puerile and offensive as it sounds. And quite funny, if you’re in that sort of mood. The song proper is negligible musically, but the instrumental riffing at the end sounds like it could bear the weight of a more elevated subject-maybe they should lease it out to Rage Against the Machine or something.

So, ‘This Allusion’ represents Beaver Fuel in pretty good form. They are no longer a joke band, but are confident enough in themselves to make jokes, some of which actually get off the runway. Although as a frontman Alexander is more Henny Youngman than Henry Rawlins, his puzzled punk shtick is quite fresh: Frank Zappa once asked if humour belonged in music. At their best, Beaver Fuel show that wit can belong in punk.

Beaver Fuel Myspace

By Colin MacKinnon.