Paul Vickers and the Vicarage – Oom-pah!

There are some releases that even the most determined of pedants couldn’t pigeonhole and with Oom-pah’s trauma-inducing collision of avant-garde synth, vaudeville theatrics and grave-black humour it’s definitely resting in that slippery niche. Paul Vickers has created a piece that will work as an impromptu soundtrack to his forthcoming cabaret Twonkey’s Castle, but also manages to have it serve as storytelling companion through numerous spoken word interludes of fairy tale bleakness.

The narrative sections do have their own bizarre charm, loaded as they are with sarcastic stream-of-subconsciousness bewilderment, but they often seem heavy handed when placed alongside the gentle upstream flow of Making Robots’ acoustic strains and electronic bleeps and tweets, or the folk-leaning classical guitars of The Demons of Mr Ivy. Taken individually, both Vickers’ cultish ramblings and his eclectically beautiful compositions have plenty going for them, but this flip-flopping between the two perhaps isn’t the ideal way to gauge either.