If you’ve ever been foolish enough to read more than one review with my name attached here on Ave Noctum, you’ll be aware I’m a big champion of the retro-rock scene, a movement that refuses to go away and provides so many acts to grace the stages of the likes of Freak Valley Festival or Desertfest (see you this year in Berlin if you’re going). Adding to the pool of potential acts is three piece Oakfarm, hailing from Germany with their self titled debut release.
From the off it’s clear that band haven’t just gone shopping for flares at a second hand market and plugged into some old amps and thought that was all that was needed; ‘What If’ frankly sounds like it is some lost recording from the late Sixties dusted off and brought back into the light. Half ballad and half pounding Blues, this could have been recorded at a smoky London club where the band was opening for Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, every note being raw and emotional, and captured without any electronic polishing. Hell, it sounds like it was recorded in one take and done, the three members together, surrounding a single mic. ‘Reason’ continues the unalloyed garage sound, a stomping rocker that doesn’t take itself too seriously, some Kinks like humour being added with a cheeky yawn between the riffs.
Things get a bit more experimental and psychedelic in ‘The Way’, lighter trippy tones and an almost wistful delivery of the lyrics adding more of a hippy vibe to the composition, mirroring the way the scene from back in the day expanded from aping American Bluesmen by expanding both musical and chemical horizons. ‘Sombre Vita’ has a darker feel that matches the title, taking more than a few cues from a certain Azure Shellfish Coven who told us not to be afraid of spectral figures, but delivered in a far more basic and visceral fashion, just guitar, bass, drums and vocals captured with an unembellished immediacy. The band return to a lighter plane with ‘Carry On’, following with a continuing journey away from the bleaker side of humanity with the upbeat and uplifting ‘Friends’, a lightweight toe tapper that despite its comparative simplicity is still threaded through with more heart and emotion than any ten tracks you could cull from the current pop charts.
Everything, however, that came before is merely preparation for the truly epic closer ‘The Melody’, a track that live would allow the band to practice their full Led Zep rock god shtick, its eight-minute length allowing it to ebb and flow from the hard and heavy to almost pastoral and back, before building up into an instrumental jam where the musicians variously play against and then boost each other, a sign of a band in a competitive harmony. If you get the download, that will be your lot, but my CD snuck in a bonus at the end that I would have been willing to swear was a rediscovered slice of Budgie brand proto-Metal.
Oakfarm may be a new band, but it’s composed of three experienced and capable players, each of whom must be steeped in the lore of classic Blues rock that went on to embrace the experimental, fusing a willingness to move away from traditional sounds whilst exploiting the burgeoning progress of the technology of electrified instruments and amps that could handle the pummelling. ‘Oakfarm’ is an album I’m sure that Alexis Korner would have happily spun on his show in the distant days when Radio 1 played actual “Rhythm and Blues” as opposed to the insipid pop that has now stolen the name “R’n’B”.
(8/10 Spenny)
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