Little known to the public and critics, Oxygen Thief are one punk bands from Bristol who has been shaking up the dormant rock scene for years with a sound so brutal and full of powerful people riffhow elaborate and witty. The formation is the author of a series of visceral and unpredictable albums, often similar to the post-hardcore scene, to the industrial metal of Prong, but also to the first Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Leader Barry Dolan has been cultivating a side project called Non Canon for some time, where he combines folk-rock compositions in the wake of artists such as Roddy Woomble, Frank Turner, Bright Eyes and Billy Bragg with always sharp and politically charged lyrics.
Praise goes to the Scottish record company Last Night From Glasgow, which continues undaunted in the recovery of glorious voices from the Scottish and English scene, offering space to artists who did not benefit from the nostalgia effect and the success of Simon Reynolds' book “Retromania”. In Non Canon's music there is in fact very little that is nostalgic or old-fashioned: Dolan is not only a fine author, but also a singer with a harsh and powerful timbre, which betrays not a short experience as a theater actor. The fact that Dolan's penetrating lyrics are inspired by the narrative style of Divine Comedy and Green Day opens interesting perspectives for those who have not yet intercepted his trajectories.
For the third album “Certain Stories”, Dolan made use of many friends and collaborators. Many of the songs are adapted from poems and stories from friends and tour mates, while the stunning cover was painted by an old school friend, Melissa Yates, while she was listening to the songs.
Introduced by a soft obsessive rhythm and the crystalline sound of glockenspiel, “The Curse Of Fatal Death” opens the album with an enveloping rock with acoustic finishes and a fine arrangement, where strings and piano find space. A worthy follow-up is the full-bodied and disturbing “The Last Command”, a dark and enveloping rock noir ballad that does not disdain forays into electronica.
The rhythm guitar is the protagonist of the alienating ballad “Just Me In The House By Myself”, harsh and obsessive enough and not immune to wind raids in a folk-jazz key.
That the brief interlude acoustic-folk of “Wimmelbilderbuch” being chosen as a single says a lot about Dolan's desire to send discordant signals to the listener, trying to draw attention to the work as a whole, rather than to the individual parts. It's an intriguing combination, the one between the rabid poetry-folk marked by the metronome of “New Coke”, the atypical marriage between electronics, chamber folk and jazz of “45496” and the rough pagan folk-rock dance of “Permafrost”: an apparently shapeless sequence that flows like an almost cinematic story, but be careful because in the music of Non Canon nothing is as it seems.
With “Certain Stories” the author continually puts the listener face to face with important choices, such as giving up success and riches in search of harmony (“The Cave Of Treasures”, which not surprisingly uses a delicate female vocal counterpart) or escaping the seduction of advertising and consumerism (the dark fingerpicking of “Pseudonymous”).
For Barry Dolan, happiness is ultimately contained in those human relationships that give us emotions and help us move forward. The few chords of “For Dave Fisher” are enough for him to pay homage to a deceased friend with whom he shared emotions and songs, while in the more robust and carefree “Jools' Annual Hootenanny” the object of reflections are the sentimental relationship and the respect that is the basis of a lasting bond. After all, time, like life, flows immutably, offering impulses and emotions, the same ones that agitate the albeit quiet “The Sirens Of Time” and which mark a powerful and original folk-rock album, a record against the current that deserves to be listened to.
02/17/2026
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
