MK Stop 8: From Here, We Run! + Tristan And The Troubadours + Stone Saloon @ The Jericho Tavern, Oxford (July 9 2009)

There are lights, cameras and action, and then there are smiles, hollering and tomfoolery. Such is the setting of the Jericho Tavern for From Here, We Run!, a band collating demo of the month accolades from Oxford's monthly music magazine Nightshift, and wooing the audience over with a math-pop backdrop, one that calls to mind Warp's Battles if they were straddled through a forest of sweet-natured melancholy. Like playing in a garage with a door open, letting passing traffic occupy an impermanent space for enchantment of their sticky, sultry myriad, as such, Pieteke's almost reclusive balladeering germinates amongst warbling guitar melodies and Alanis Morrissette-esque zest, singing "If this is a war of the worlds, I don't wanna be a part", and offsetting tumbling drum sections with an alluring, but decidedly detached rigour. She makes a montage of these lyrics with a commanding sense of presence, pulling the curtains on my listening, the night after with "Waiting", saying "The little things you say and do, it all dissolves like a sugar cube". Let's hope their name doesn't sink from the spotlights any day soon.

Opening with a grunting chord fluctuation and fuzzy, glitter-ball synths, Tristan And The Troubadours violin lifts proceedings amongst floppy percussion duets and edgy roleplay. Sounding like the lovechild of A Silver Mount Zion and Joy Division, they deliver sonic postcards to implant a partial emotive permanence onto the setting, "reel to reel". Swaggering like a swinger on heat, when a life becomes too controlled, there bides less and less life to control, and TATT understand this notion by implementing sparkling keys as an overlay to the soaring violin, that begins to poke its head to the forefront by the second half.

For those who longed it out, Stone Saloon stole the show. Commencing, ironically with "Down To Jericho", Ben Lee's voice stops you in your tracks like a red traffic light. A cross-breed of Michael Stipe and Bruce Springsteen. rather like a bubble in the side of a tyre, eventually, as the tyre evolves and heats up, as does the crowd, the pressure behind the bubble intensifies, as does the band, causing it to grow and grow until it explodes! Releasing all their inner content, his personhood is not bereft of a wink to the stars, as should Stone Saloon's status in the forthcoming months.

From Here, We Run!: MySpace
Tristan And The Troubadours: MySpace
Stone Saloon: MySpace