‘I can’t quite imagine Oscar Scheller fighting the class war, but who knows‘ – Niall McGuirk on Oscar Scheller’s Cut And Paste, out now on Wichita Records
Wichita don’t do bad records. Better get that out at the start. Well, maybe they do. I haven’t heard them all.
Cherry Red don’t do bad records. Better get that out a bit after the start. Well maybe they do, I just haven’t heard one. I did listen to a lot of records on Cherry Red off shoot El Records. They featured the bright pop sounds of upper class England and French aristocracy in a time when Britain felt part of rather than apart from the rest of Europe. It was clean guitar tunes with a little keyboard and no trappings of rock’n’roll. It was the sounds of the June Brides singing about every conversation being the same or of the monochrome set casting their long shadow.
Setanta Records didn’t do bad records. Well, maybe they did but The Divine Comedy were pretty cool. I remember the first time I heard Blur. I enjoyed them. I was on their fake side in the phony war against Oasis. They had that Britishness to their sound that was hard to describe and ended up ultimately just being called Brit-pop.
Oscar is a cut of all of the above. Clean pop songs with a distinctly British feel. I can’t quite imagine Oscar Scheller fighting the class war, but who knows – I have been wrong many times in the past. I can imagine him sitting in a large apartment playing some melodies while the class war goes on below, wondering what is going on down there, and would they not be better off listening to the Beach Boys?
It seems that this debut album has been released twice. Like all good stars out to make their first impressions last he tries it on the double. It didn’t quite have the anticipated effect in 2014, maybe the sun wasn’t shining.
It is now.
