Tag Archives: O2 Academy Oxford

Banks

O2 Academy 2, Oxford
28th March 2014

The catalyst for the emotional connection between artist and audience takes many forms. Jillian Banks connects with her music by making her listeners feel unsettled, rendering them uncomfortable, then intrigued – and ultimately hooked.

Tonight she opens with “Before I Ever Met You”, in which her slightly untuned voice drifts over a menacing, Massive Attack-y crunchy trip-hop backing, with cymbals creating dissonance. In “This Is What It Feels Like”, her double-tracked octave vocals take a vacant nasal tone and quiver melismatically over a creaking bass and deep orchestral stabs, which, combined with the back lighting on stage and her aloof demeanour, give an air of spookiness.

She does get more chatty, revealing the dark place and insecurities behind the writing of “Goddess” – a somewhat confrontational plea via the medium of low-rumbling r’n’b for every woman to feel like the goddess they are, she says – and how most of her songs start with just voice and keyboard. A stripped down version of “Warm Water” proves that the darkness is nuanced in her voice, tunes and form as much as in the lyrics and arrangements. In the late-night slinky ballad “Bedroom Wall”, a collaboration with Oxford’s own TEED, delicately emotional and repetitive vocals make desperation and isolation palpable.

The thirteen song set includes two covers. She was so nervous when she played her first festival that she played covers backstage to relax her – and “it felt like butter”, so she replays Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody” tonight. Her first time ever touring was in support of The Weeknd, whose sparse and discordant “What You Need” suits and concludes the night’s mood perfectly.

In terms of lugubrious synthy r’n’b, The XX and London Grammar might have got there before and Lorde might have broken through earlier, but Banks is more sinister than all three; if you’ll let her, she’ll get under your skin – and stay there.

From Nightshift, May 2014

Katy B

O2 Academy, Oxford
27th March 2014

Not much is accidental about Katy B’s success, but everything about her demeanour suggests she still struggles to believe it and has no intention of taking anything for granted. The Brit School and Goldsmiths pop music graduate, whose association with London community radio station Rinse FM and its head – her producer and co-manager Geeneus – will no doubt always place her at the “cooler” end of the pop naffness scale, is quick to mention, with genuine gratitude, that tonight’s venue was the location of her first headline gig. Even a collaboration with Guy Chambers – resulting in the exquisite “5am” (her second song tonight – no faffing around here) and “Crying With No Reason”, her performance of which is nuanced and captivating – has slotted in perfectly next to the Route 94 and M.J. Cole productions on her second album, “Little Red”.

The new album’s lyrical matter is naturally more mature and reflective than that of debut album “On a Mission”, but the earlier party-going stuff (such as “Katy On A Mission” and “Lights On”) is musically as self-assured as the later heartbreak stuff. She should be far bigger than, say, Emeli Sandé by now; “Still” would be a far bigger hit for Emeli had she got her mitts on it first, though credit to Katy for not wearing the public out through Emeli-esque ubiquity.

The beauty of Katy’s music is the way that her seemingly delicate, soulful and r’n’b-flavoured voice floats dynamically and majestically over all sorts of dubstep-, grime- and house-rooted arrangements, moulding an electronic dance sound that feels well-established yet is unique to her. Even when it gets a bit grandiose – as in the Kanye-like “All My Lovin'” – you can forgive her.

Tonight Katy B proves proper pop stars needn’t be distant, mystical creatures; sometimes someone you genuinely suspect you could be friends with makes the most effective music.

From Nightshift, May 2014

2014

La Roux – O2 Academy, Oxford – 15th November 2014

Tiger Mendoza and David Griffiths – Along Dangerous Roads EP – November 2014

Amy Simpson – Fairy Tales, Stories & Myths EP – July 2014

Banks – O2 Academy 2, Oxford – 28th March 2014

Katy B – O2 Academy, Oxford – 27th March 2014

Foxes – O2 Academy 2, Oxford – 28th February 2014

Foxes

O2 Academy 2, Oxford
28th February 2014

Foxes has spent quite a while getting to a place that feels as if it doesn’t exactly fit her. This very week “Let Go For Tonight” has given Louisa Rose Allen her first solo top ten single, two years after her first release; she’s spent the intervening time floating around the blogosphere, warbling with – among others – Fall Out Boy and collaborators du jour Disclosure, winning a Best Dance Recording Grammy with Zedd for the soaring “Clarity”, explaining her fashion style on Vevo and presumably being groomed to within an inch of her life by Sony.

Tonight the Southampton chanteuse pirouettes around with neither nerves nor arrogance; the rumbling drums and piano of her two musicians remind me of Bastille, and for all I know they might actually be in Bastille, for all that band’s radio-friendly pleasant-indie-by-numbers sterility.

Her better-known songs are the anthemic exhilaration of “Let Go For Tonight” and the advertiser’s dream, “Youth”, but it’s her less showy ones – the isn’t-the-world-a-difficult-place-to-believe-in-yourself winsome electro-pop of stuff like “Beauty Queen” and “Holding Onto Heaven” – that seem to reveal the truer, more contemplative her. Her forthcoming album’s title track, “Glorious”, is, she explains, about not giving up and believing there’s beauty in the world; it could be banal, but she’s not pretending it’s deeper than it is.

The Swaythling songstress is Cath Kidston to Katy Perry’s Topshop, and her “people” need to be unashamed about it. The marketing image gives her a Charli XCX or Sky Ferreira vibe, but it’s stripped her of Marina-style quirk; even if this is the way she’s naturally musically developing, the whole currently somewhat mismatched package feels commercial for commercial’s sake, a last-ditch attempt to thrust a talent into a bloated market. It’s what it’s taken to get her to a wider audience but also might be what leaves her stranded.

From Nightshift, April 2014

Jessie Ware

O2 Academy, Oxford
11th March 2013

South Londoner Jessie Ware’s debut album, Devotion, was a pop album that popped up in many critics’ best of 2012 lists – no mean feat. All the while, I hadn’t been able to shift the fact that she reminds me of mid 80s Stock/Aitken/Waterman-backed pop-soul chanteuse Princess. Great as Princess’s voice was, her material didn’t exactly set the world alight, and Jessie’s voice had hitherto unmoved me, too; it seemed too measured, perhaps without the depth promised.

However, on tonight’s evidence her voice seems to have matured, and it’s stunning. Her brand of pop/soul/R&B – to which she graduated successfully via the now requisite urban/dance collaborations, most notably with SBTRKT and Sampha – recalls such exemplars of the genre as Sade; Sweet Talk is basically a faster Your Love is King with fuzzy guitar instead of saxophone. She’s still restrained and subtle – there’s no superfluity of either notes or feeling – and as such, she far more effectively conveys lyrical meaning than the melismatic foghorns the charts are stuffed with these days. Her voice has convinced me that I’ll be her Night Light, there when she goes to sleep; I don’t have many doubts that in her and her baby’s Wildest Moments, they could be the worst of all.

While her vocal performance is stronger than her recordings led me to believe it might be, her aura – her stage presence – doesn’t quite match it for me. It’s not the chat – she is as charming as Adele between songs, dedicating songs to her brother and cousin, and giving shouts out to her mum and aunt on the merchandise stand – or her poise; I just feel, tonight at least, that she hasn’t found the perfect balance between these and the elegance of her voice yet, but it’s quite exciting that it’ll develop as her stature grows, and that there’s more to come.

From Nightshift, April 2013

Major Lazer

O2 Academy, Oxford
2nd May 2013

MAJOR LAZER MAKE SOME NOISE! A thwunk as I am hit in the face by sweaty naked torso. Repeat. For me, that’s how tonight ends. And starts. And it’s pretty much what happens in between too.

Seemingly a collective since American producer Diplo shed his original partner, British producer Switch, tonight Major Lazer comprises two very enthusiastic dancers, an MC who loses his top very early on but not as early as a good part of the audience, another DJ, and Jeremy Renner lookalike Diplo, whose clambering over the DJ booth/set looks precarious at best.

Their most recognisable collection of beats and squealy top line, Pon De Floor, the one sampled by Beyoncé, gets at least two airings. Some of their other collections of beats and squealy top lines may well have had more than one airing too, but my attention span is too violated by the frenetic activity to have caught them all. The overexcited mixes are carefully composed from stuff that was often originally far more mellow, like the new album’s first single, Get Free.

I’m pretty sure that DJ sets used to consist of longer tracks than one per minute and reminders of the act’s name far less often than every three seconds. This is a rampaging melange of toasting, horns, dancehall, dubstep, flags, horns, samples, “Everybody touch the roof!”, Harlem Shaking, drops, reggae, throwing shirts on stage, reggaeton, soca, crowdsurfing, “A message from Snoop Lion!”, a dripping ceiling, confetti and ska.

I leave not quite believing that they’ve finished and feeling I’ll be unable to do anything but build myself up to a drop every thirty seconds for at least the next few days. Or maybe I’ve been doing that all my life already. It’s hard to tell.

OXFORD HOW YOU FEELING? Pretty exhausted, thanks.

From Nightshift, June 2013

Marina and the Diamonds

The O2 Academy, Oxford
15th October 2012

Marina Diamandis’s PhD thesis would be on the relationship between surface and substance, with special reference to American society. Her medium would be her remarkable voice, blessed with a beguiling mix of Kate Bush, opera and the histrionics of a couple having an argument. Her conference papers would cover the various personas manifested on her second album, Electra Heart, all of which are present tonight: the regretful Teen Idle, the unapologetic, lock-twirling Homewrecker, the Primadonna, and the trapped-in-suburbia Su-Barbie-A from the nihilistic Valley of the Dolls, a nod to the themes of fame, success and self-destruction of the 60s novel and film.

It seems appropriate that to deliver Electra Heart she’s plunged more fully into what is often said to be the most ephemeral and transient mode of music: pop. It’s a bit odd to pepper this concept album it with the earlier, more new wave stuff; she covered similar themes on a lot of her Family Jewels-era songs, such as Hollywood and Oh No! (albeit from a somewhat more cynical outside viewpoint of celebrity culture), but she still leaves the out-and-out bangers – the Calvin Harris-esque metaphor-flogging Radioactive and latest single, How To Be A Heartbreaker – until later.

Given the many layers steeped in the obsession, it’s a relief to see her paraphernalia limited to a bit of set decoration (neon signs, an old TV) and a few props (like a veil, a negligee and the toy dog, Marilyn, from the Primadonna video); mock castles and hordes of dancers would have been overwhelming.

It’s an overtly confident performance, even when the lyrical content is more vulnerable, as in I Am Not A Robot; whereas Lana del Rey seems to trade on being a victim of the American dream, absorbed and confused, Marina examines it from different sides, from Power and Control to Fear and Loathing.

From Nightshift, November 2012

Blue

O2 Academy, Oxford
25th October 2013

Earlier this year, two years after their modest showing at the Eurovision Song Contest, Blue released their “comeback” album, Roulette, named after their gamble in releasing it themselves. Unfortunately, by that point, the Blue credibility ship had sailed (though some would argue it was never in harbour in the first place).

It’s certainly not their voices; tonight Duncan says no other band except maybe perennial revivalists Backstreet Boys has the harmonic spread, and he’s got a point. It’s not necessarily the genre, either; boybandry might have moved on to guitars and floppy hair (again), but soul and r’n’b are still going strong in various forms elsewhere. They just weren’t around long enough, popular enough in their heyday or away long enough to draw on the level of nostalgia the reformed Take That did. The age range of the (almost exclusively female) crowd tonight is wide, but Blue have just got Radio 2 written all over them now, and it’s odd that the newer stuff they play tonight isn’t more in keeping with that demographic.

Their intermittent dance routines are unexpectedly energetic and slick – I was expecting far more “we sit down, we stand up, we lean”, as Simon so masterfully put it in The Big Reunion. Simon’s naff raps and the odd “remix” bits – which seem to be a live addition – delight the audience but don’t fit; songs like the otherwise flawless All Rise really don’t need them.

The members are easy to pigeonhole – the cool one, the ridiculous one, the one off the lottery, the one who mistook a cashpoint for a toilet – and perhaps having more personality in their hair than the whole of The Wanted have works against them, as, vocally at least, Blue are stronger together than apart, and they need to get back the momentum they lost.

From Nightshift, December 2013

Lianne La Havas

O2 Academy 2, Oxford
9th March 2012

Lianne La Havas is adept at honesty. Tonight, the singer and guitarist – the guitar forming as much of her performance as her voice – is easily convincing her captivated audience that she means every word; she seems charmingly overwhelmed by all the adulation she’s getting in return.

It helps that her subject matter is relationship-based and confessional. Both an ex and her apparently current partner are covered. In Age, she channels a jazz-tinged Nina Simone insouciance into asking “Is it such a problem if he’s old as long as he does whatever he is told?” No Room for Doubt documents a blip with this older chap, her delicate yet selectively powerful voice betraying the despair and eventual resolution of the episode. In the effortlessly smooth Au Cinema, she could be Catherine Deneuve strolling with her beau down the Champs-Elysees into the end credits.

She’s so careful with her bitterness that even when she lets herself go a bit – as on Forget, her upbeat way of telling the ex to get lost – it still seems polite. Yet when she loses the guitar to finish the story of the “delightful ex” in the piano-backed Gone, she’s visibly moved.

Soul is too narrow a definition; Don’t Wake Me Up is probably her most commercial offering tonight but she still manages tight Imogen Heap-esque harmonies with her band, and forthcoming album title track Is Your Love Big Enough? has some great African-style guitar. Her voice has gentle soul inflections but not so much melisma that tune is obscured and subtlety lost (take note, Jessie J).

Few singers would be so gracious in making an audience feel like they’ve been reading her diary. It’s almost as if she’s grateful that she could bend our collective ear; relieved she had someone to sing it all out to.

From Nightshift, April 2012

Rizzle Kicks

O2 Academy, Oxford
8th March 2012

Rizzle Kicks are energy personified. The 20-year-old Brighton duo of Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule spar verbally with complementary synchronicity; Jordan does more of the rapping while Harley does more of the singing (and even plays guitar at one point). With the same soul record-plundering sample modus operandi as Fatboy Slim (who produced that matrilineal exhortation to dance, Mama Do The Hump), they seem to be aiming hip hop at a pop level. Less brash and gaudy – and less related to Berry Gordy – than LMFAO, they’re simultaneously T4-friendly and naughty (they do swear a lot).

Their live show is the kind of disjointed affair that might have naturally progressed from originally impromptu bedroom jams, PAs and support slots. Tracks from their debut album, Stereo Typical, are sometimes incidental to jamming and rapping over random tunes, which range from the Inspector Gadget and James Bond themes to Seven Nation Army and Hot in Herre.

They’re into questions. What Jordan’s saying doesn’t seem as important as the act of engaging the crowd; queries about whether we’ve heard of James Brown and the film 8 Mile get as much of a cheer as Ed Sheeran’s Brit Awards success and an announcement that the pair smoke (their “hip hop jive” Miss Cigarette is a nicotine analogy, you see).

When I Was a Youngster samples The Clash’s Revolution Rock and is their most obvious connection to that mariachi/ska/reggae element. This fusion could sound like a mess, but they keep it light, making every track sound distinctively Rizzle Kicks, be it from their early Hadouken-style vocal patterning or the trumpet (present throughout, as you might hope for an act whose breakthrough hit was Down With The Trumpets). While their live presence doesn’t hold together as well as the recorded music does, you can’t fault their exuberance and enthusiasm.