News
Discography by Jim Love
We will soon have pages for:
- Links and contacts
- Other bands
- reviews
- interviews
- pics
- lyrics and tabs
- history
Did you snap this photo? Let me give you credit!
I'm always happy to get photos of the Oysters!
Oysterband and Oysterfans
Hey! C'mon in. Who are you? And how'd you find this corner of the Web?"Rise Above" is out in Europe and the US!
Photo by Robert Staedter
Who's the Oysterband?
They're a UK band playing kickass endorphin-inducing voltage-overload folk-based music that'll blow out your brain if you resist the urge to move with it. The band's got a rare mix of skill, sweat, balls, and brains. At gigs, the band wrings music from the instruments and the dancing crowd ferments it into something like aural sex. Up on stage, there's John Jones (very vocal, accordion), Chopper (bass guitar, cello, acoustic guitar, vocal), Lee (drums, percussion, vocal), Alan Prosser (acoustic guitar, Stratocaster, mandolin, violin, vocal), and Ian Telfer (violin, concertina) sweating testosterone. The fans are down on the dancefloor: Howard's kicking the stage in Cardiff and Gandolph's polka-ing (to some unknown beat) in Exeter and Hilda'n'I are slamming barefoot in a Providence biker bar. Ecstatic, cathartic.They went acoustic, and came halfway back. Word is that they are just as shattering without the mosh pit. Minus the wall of sound, you can still hear achingly well crafted tunes and excellent playing. (Ian Telfer's fiddling is holy.) The words are simple and literate, the emotions are complex, often dark -- it's not pop and it's not plastic-and-sugar coated. The Oysterband has a social conscience and a sense of place that pegs them as a British band. Got roots.
News
As of late September03
Links related to Rise Above:
Two online reviews at very cool
sites: my
review at Green Man
Review (To nobody's surprise, I spent many words saying that I like
it.)
Philip Daniels's
review at Folking. While
you're there, check out the photos!
Two print reviews (ie, not
on the web that I know of) are in fRoots (www.frootsmag.com/) and
Songlines (http://www.songlines.co.uk/).
A 14 Nov 2002 gig review by
Fred Hall at Netrhythms
25Nov02
Goodies
The coolest thing here is Jim Love's amazingly detailed Oysterband
discography. This is the 2003 version!
Other places you should know about
Fans congregate on the Net in a couple places. In particular, the low-volume oysters list (to subscribe, send mail to oysters-owner @ blowfish.com), and the lively yahoo list.Plus, of course, check out the official Oysterband site.