NON CANON - Certain Stories

Little known to the public and to critics, Oxygen Thief are a punk band from Bristol who have spent years shaking up the dormant rock scene with a sound as brutal and packed with powerful riffs as it is intricate and clever. The band has produced a series of visceral, unpredictable albums, often close in spirit to the post-hardcore scene and to Prong's industrial metal, but also to the early Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Frontman Barry Dolan has long nurtured a side project under the name Non Canon, where lyrics that remain as sharp and politically engaged as ever are paired with folk-rock compositions in the vein of artists like Roddy Woomble, Frank Turner, Bright Eyes and Billy Bragg.

Praise be to the Scottish label Last Night From Glasgow, which continues undeterred in its mission to rescue glorious voices from the Scottish and English scenes, giving space to artists who never benefited from the nostalgia wave and the success of Simon Reynolds' book “Retromania”. Indeed, there's little that's nostalgic or backward-looking about Non Canon's music: Dolan is not only a fine songwriter but also a singer with a raw, powerful timbre that betrays no small amount of experience as a stage actor. The fact that Dolan's penetrating lyrics draw on the narrative style of Divine Comedy and Green Day opens up interesting prospects for anyone who hasn't yet caught up with his trajectory.

For the third album, “Certain Stories”, Dolan called on a number of friends and collaborators. Many of the songs are adaptations of poems and stories by friends and touring companions, while the striking cover artwork was painted by an old school friend, Melissa Yates, as she listened to the tracks.

Introduced by a muffled, obsessive rhythm and the crystalline sound of the glockenspiel, “The Curse Of Fatal Death” opens the album with an enveloping rock sound built on acoustic touches and a fine arrangement that makes room for strings and piano. A worthy follow-up comes with the dense, unsettling “The Last Command”, a dark, immersive noir rock ballad that isn't afraid to dip into electronics.

Rhythm guitar takes center stage on the disorienting ballad “Just Me In The House By Myself”, harsh and obsessive just enough, and not immune to bursts of folk-jazz horns.

The fact that the brief acoustic-folk interlude “Wimmelbilderbuch” was chosen as the single says a lot about Dolan's intention to send mixed signals to the listener, trying to draw attention to the record as a whole rather than to its individual parts. It's an intriguing puzzle, the one built from the furious, metronome-driven poetry-folk of “New Coke”, the unusual marriage of electronics, chamber-folk and jazz on “45496”, and the rough pagan folk-rock dance of “Permafrost”: a seemingly shapeless sequence that flows like an almost cinematic tale — though beware, because in Non Canon's music nothing is quite what it seems.

With “Certain Stories”, Dolan continually confronts the listener with important choices, such as giving up success and wealth in search of harmony (“The Cave Of Treasures”, which fittingly features a delicate female vocal counterpoint) or resisting the seduction of advertising and consumerism (the dark fingerpicking of “Pseudonymous”).

For Barry Dolan, happiness ultimately lies in the human relationships that give us emotion and help us carry on. A handful of chords are all he needs on “For Dave Fisher” to pay tribute to a departed friend with whom he shared feelings and songs, while on the sturdier, more carefree “Jools' Annual Hootenanny” the focus shifts to romantic relationships and the respect that underpins any lasting bond. After all, time, like life, flows on unchanged, bringing bursts of feeling and emotion — the same ones that stir the otherwise quiet “The Sirens Of Time” and mark out a powerful, original folk-rock album, a record that swims against the tide and deserves to be heard.

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17/02/2026