SubVersion Stop 182: Vienna Ditto + Welcome To Peepworld + Jordan O' Shea @ The Port Mahon, Oxford - 8th March 2013.

Familiar breath and antics brings perfume instead of stench, unless the environment has been plagued back from whence it came. So we at Nightshift are in good spirits for Jordan 'O Shea's opening slot. He plays a new edgy piece tonight called "Spite Me" on banjo, and we find he stretches his vocal tones like the ocean waves to match the progressions he plays.

It's a great interval for the familiarity being breached by Welcome To Peepworld, as we have loved Barney Morse-Brown's Dutotone music for many years, him contributing cello parts to Big Red Sky's eponymous 5-track EP. Three of those cuts, "Charm Offensive", "Fool" and "Help Me" find Fi Mcfall and Bert having a heart to heart with the audience in the sweetest of ways, the pieces conjoining the best parts familiarity holds: humanity, harmony and ability to ham it up musically or poetically, with side swoops of alien lands, such as worry over what comes next, the anxiety connected as such, and the reaching of "Another day I don't know what I'm doing", as on their last entry into Vienna Ditto.

By this fusion-ed point of the night I'm seriously pleased, and with the knowledge of hearing Vienna Ditto's "I Know His Blood Will Make Me Whole" over Xmas, a delightful cover by Hatti and Nigel on MPC synth box, post-dubstep drum machine, keyboard flair and svelt, slippery eel female vocals, the link between familiarity and non-familiarity becomes blurred like a FTSE share. This is undeniably a good thing, and while the film reel plays at the back of the Port Mahon, they greet us with a wah-wah synth splaying like Radioactive Man's "Fed-Ex To Munchen" Techno, then fly through Electronica like a kite on a blustery summer's day. Bands including Little Dragon, Portishead (for that chug-a-chug "Machine Gun"-aping) and even Girls Aloud - I'm not kidding here guys, the "Sound Of The Underground" Drum & Bass stint is most cheekily welcome - but they pull all this off with enough skill and expertise on their mediums that you can't help but be entranced.