Floral destruction
"... music that tip toes through the daisies one minute and is slashing at the pretty little flowers with a big spade the next ... [Cogwheel Dogs] are going places."
Review of Cress – My New Favourite Band, July 08
"Beautiful primitivism: a post-punk breakthrough from the underground"
"... primitivism of the most beautiful sort ... it's hard to imagine any other voice than Rebecca Mosley's impassioned and acrobatic intonation. Cress is the song that's been getting these folks all kinds of attention in the UK, and it's everything a good post punk single should be ... but it's the second song, "Anticoagulant," that really shows off this band's strengths. Feverishly strummed acoustic guitars, brushed tom banging, and beautifully distorted cello sweep across abrupt key changes and dynamic shifts, and the effect is pretty dazzling ... Cogwheel Dogs are set to become one of the most exciting bands to come out of the underground in years."
Review of Cress – Junkmedia, June 08
From clamouring and gothic to haunting and lonely
"... gothic cello adds a vague air of threat to otherwise sweetly-natured songs. [Songs range] from the frantic clamouring, Power in Paper to the absolutely gorgeous, haunting Queues – the seven minute stand out track on the demo. Stark, earthy, expansive and lonely ... wider critical and commercial acclaim is sure to follow ..."
Demo of the Month – Nightshift, May 06 (see p26 of pdf)
PJ Harvey + Captain Beefheart / Shostakovich
"[Cress sounds like] the lovechild of Polly Harvey and Captain Beefheart, with Shostakovich as godfather ... a new take on that most conservative song form, the blues. [In Ghostwriter,] Rebecca reveals her versatility, singing in a limpid, blanched style redolent of Sinead O'Connor ... the results are bleakly wonderful."
Esoteric punk rock
"... an extraordinary amount of punk rock spirit ... [Rebecca Mosley] has a beautifully clear and untainted voice ... The arrangement of the music [goes] beyond the realms of standard strum/fingerpick into more esoteric areas, [with] undercurrents of dissonance and atonality ... [Mosley is] absolutely free of pretence and posturing, delivering rich, captivating songs that have the crowd in the palm of her hand ... "
Live Review – Nightshift, Feb 07 (see p16 of pdf)
Obnoxious wheezes and pip-spitting vocals
"Tom's cello scrapes and wheezes obnoxiously around Rebecca's more tenderly-strummed melody ... The vocals too seem desperate to keep up, occasionally spitting lines out like bitter pips ... Like the plant, Cress is an odd little thing at first glance ... and taks a little while to grow on you, but with a little patience the end result is unexpectedly rewarding."
Review of Cress – Nightshift, March 08 (see p6 of pdf)
NME writes ...
(Of Rebecca Mosley) "... songwriters are 10 a penny, especially in quaint middle-class places like Oxford – but wait! – she's good."
Radar/The Buzz – NME, Aug 06
Ferocious and angular
"... initially your reviewer was disconcerted by the violence, not to say ferocity of the opening number: demon cellist Tom Parnell seemed to be playing a Bartok fantasia over Mosley's angular guitar. Mosley's singing style is menacing, bluesy and stylish, sounding rather like Fiona Apple in her glory days."
Live Review – Oxfordbands.com, Sept 06
Other reviews
Noize Makes Enemies (Mar 08), Nightshift (Nov 07, p21), Scribblings with Green Chalk (Jul 08), Cool Noise (Feb 08)