Song, by Toad

I was out quaffing lagers with a pal last night and once again Friday arrives with that faintly queasy, furry-tongued sensation we all know so well.  Blech.  Still, nothing a fine meal of fish and a couple of pints at the King’s Wark can’t solve I am pretty sure.  I have yet to meet the hangover their fine lunches can’t defeat.

Tonight I am off to act as arm candy for Mrs. Toad at a client dinner with the Dastardly Finance Corp for which she works.  Me, my black eye, a scruffy beard and a grudgingly-worn suit – not quite like the braying public school fat-tongues who tend to dominate these sort of events.  Maybe if I act arty enough they’ll think I’m some sort of creative genius.

We’ve already had some interesting situations with this sort of thing actually, because a lot of the posh Edinburgh people we’ve met seems to have a very acute awareness of which school one attended and what job one does and therefore which of you needs to kiss the other’s arse.  Because Mrs. Toad and I don’t seem all that posh they tend to start out quite optimistic, too.  Then they find out we met at school in Vienna, which both worries and confuses them – it sounds posh but they don’t know the school, so they can’t be sure – oooh, what to do?

And then my job confuses them too.  They know the company Mrs. Toad works for, and that’s quite legit, so they can kind of peg that one to their ladder, but of course they tend to assume that her wage is probably about two thirds of mine or less because that’s how these things tend to work in the world of finance.  So when I tell them that I’m an industrial designer and that I actually make fuck all they get really confused.  Am I just lying?  Am I a maverick creative guru and just playing it down?  Can they actually condescend to us like they sort of want to?  Or am I from such a wealthy family that I simply don’t have to work?    But what if they misjudge it and act superior to the wrong person?  Aaagh, too many options, does not compute…  head explodes!  It’s quite funny.

Although to be fair, Mrs. Toad’s worky social events aren’t really like that actually; in fact they tend to be pretty friendly, to be fair.  I got distracted and started nattering about another occasion entirely just there, sorry.  Umm… so er, please do take advantage of the Friday de-lurking amnesty and chip in with your Friday Fives.  As Christmas gets closer and closer I would imagine that less and less work is being done in the offices of the nation anyway, so you might as well.

1. Your worst-behaved plus-one moment.
2. The worst plus-one moment your other half has inflicted on you.
3. How do you subversively rebel when asked to scrub up to impress folk?
4. Do you love or loathe your other half’s colleagues? (And are you free to answer that question honestly?)
5. In the company of people you are supposed to behave in front of (colleagues-in-law, the other half’s family, your parents friends etc..) how scooshed do you actually get?

The five songs this week are new things which have found their way into my inbox recently.  That’s a new Eels song from a recently announced album, which is good news, and ditto for Stanley Brinks.  Tune Yards is someone just signed to Matador, and of whom they have high hopes in the new year.  It’s weird, but I like it.  Naughtily, I’ve had that Ravens & Chimes song for ages, so their album might actually be out already – if it’s as good as the last one that is very good news.

Eels – Little Bird

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Ravens & Chimes – Hearts of Palm

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Tune Yards – Hap-B

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Stanley Brinks – End of the World

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The Chord & the Fawn – Love, Sex and Rock ‘n’ Roll

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It was No Music Day on… Saturday I think.  I tend not to pay any attention to these things as I find them a little gimmicky and not really something I really can be arsed thinking about.  Their wee poster is there on the right – just click the image to enlarge, assuming you speak a little German of course.

Their tagline is also a little gimmicky (”There are many reasons – find yours”) but for some reason this year it kind of struck a chord with me.  I put a lot into this little Toadly enterprise as you all know, and my last holiday was in June.  Basically, I’m fucking shattered.  I’m also over-musicked.

Fortunately no-one really releases much around this time of year, so the demanding emails from PR people are abating somewhat, and I can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel for the label and the blog’s yearly tasks.  One Toad Session to edit, and one to record.  A little more PR work for the Meursault singles, and the last colour printed on Maxwell Panther albums.  Distribution to a couple of Scottish independent music shops to organise.  And then, I think, that should be just about it, thank God.

I think when I go home over Christmas I am going to play as little of my own music as possible.  I’ll probably even encourage Mum to play her dinner party jazz pish or whatever classical Christmas garbage it is that she’s latched onto this year.  I genuinely don’t care, but what is not going to happen is me listening to anything or reviewing stuff or whatever the hell else I might ordinarily be doing.  Never mind No Music Day, I am going to have No Music Week.

I remember a girlfriend ages ago asking me if I had ever thought about becoming a music writer and I laughed at her and said ‘Why would I want to turn a hobby into a job?  It would take all the fun out of it.’  It turns out that this is somewhat wrong, because it really hasn’t taken the fun out of it, but it has obliterated every last sliver of my leisure time.  I am the kind of person who needs something to be obsessed with though, something to really launch myself into, and as soon as it became clear here at proper job that there was really no need for me to become any more senior than I already was four years ago, all that manic energy had to go somewhere, and it went into Toad.

Set about anything with that kind of drive though and you will from time to time just burn up all the fuel you have in your reserves.  I was getting that way before our two weeks in Italy in the Summer, and I can feel myself getting somewhere like that now.  I was frazzled as hell in the Summer, but now it’s more just a sensation of being worn out and needing to recharge.

I think one of the reasons I get on really well with Jamie from Broken Records is because he has that same kind of manic glint in his eye – we both recognise that capacity to work at something relentlessly until it works, either by itself or by sheer force of determination.  And one of the reasons I get on really well with Bart from eagleowl is that he doesn’t do that.  He’s stubborn as fuck in his own way of course, but more like a coal fire than a phosphorous flare, and there are times, like this particular morning, when that seems something to be really rather envious of.

eagleowl – Blackout

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Yes, it’s Fresh Air time again, and Ruth is back from the bring of death and ready to chatter away once more.  This week we have Russell from Mammoeth playing live in session for us.  He has an album out on Mini50 Records some time in the relatively near future, so we may try an weasel a preview out of him if we can.

We’ve also got some interesting new stuff – Eels released a new song from their forthcoming album just the other day, and we’ll be playing the phenomenal new eagleowl single as well.  We are recording a Toad Session with them in December, which is also really fucking brilliant news.

On air 7pm-8.30pm GMT – listen live here.

This week’s playlist:
1. Modest Mouse – Float On
2. Taken By Trees – Anna
3. Mammoeth – Latin Scribe (Live in Session)
4. Dr. Dog – The World May Never Know
5. Mammoeth – Scramble Eggs (Live in Session)
6. Brian Eno & David Byrne – Strange Overtones
7. Belle & Sebastian – She’s Losing It
8. Arthur Russell – Love is Overtaking Me
9. Mammoeth – Writing on the Walls (Live in Session)
10. Fleetwood Mac – Everywhere

And as always we have last week’s session below the fold – it was with the Pineapple Chunks, and we have downloadable mp3s, and interview podcast and four live videos for you to check out. (All our videos can be found on our Vimeo page.) Read the rest of this entry »

I know it’s the run up to Christmas and the New Year, but there will be no Best of the Decade lists on this blog, no sir.  The reason?  Well, for fuck’s sake, I’m just far too fucking lazy!  Christ almighty, no disrespect to the people who have the energy to do it but I wouldn’t even know where to begin raking back through all the albums released in the last ten years, never mind starting to filter them into some kind of sensible order.  Madness!

So if anyone wants to ask me I’ll shrug and say ‘I dunno, fuck it, probably Kid A or A Ghost is Born or Funeral or Lyre of Orpheus or summat like that I guess’.  Probably.  I think.  Perhaps.  I mean, I find it hard enough to balance my year end lists as it is, trading off the immediate glow of enthusiasm still retained by albums released in the last month versus the more distant memories of those out in January.

Spread that over ten years and Christ Al-fucking-mighty what a task.  I mean, I was a totally different person back in 2000.  And again in about 2002, and 2004.  I moved up here halfway through the decade and suddenly became not just a fan but a reviewer and a promoter as well – fuck’s sake my whole relationship with music has been completely changed over the course of the decade.

The albums I listened to whilst working in a shitty gangster nightclub in Manchester in 2000 did something totally different for me than the ones I listened to in the giddy excitement of my first days with Mrs. Toad where I was thinking ‘fucking hell, this really is it, isn’t it’.  Imagine comparing Withered Hand’s superb Good News, which has been in existence for a mere handful of months, to a record like And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out by Yo La Tengo, which I have listened to in good times and bad for the last ten years.

I know this is the case over the course of a single year as well, but the magnitude of it seems a little more manageable.  It also seems less grandiose a statement, too ‘my favourite album this year’ seems a little more hedged and modest than ‘the best album of the last decade’, which seems like it should be in capital letters or italics or have a load of bloody exclamation marks after it or something.

I know that’s missing the point somewhat, of course.  Lists are just for fun, really, and largely for the entertainment of the people writing them, although also to a lesser extent for other people too. It’s just a bit of fun, and kinda fascinating to look at how, say, Wilco’s A Ghost is Born and the Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Regard the End would probably be on my list, despite never being an ‘album of the year’, whereas Nux Vomica by The Veils might not make the list at all, despite being my top pick in 2005.  It’s also fascinating to try and figure out where albums by your friends, like the Meursault record for example, might stack up when held up against the likes of Kid A or The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats or Clem Snide’s Your Favourite Music.  How do you even make that comparison fairly?

I don’t mean to criticise anyone who has compiled such a list of course – Euan has done a fascinating one over at the Steinberg Principle for example, and fair bloody play to him (page 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5) – but I genuinely don’t think I would even know where to begin.  I have my lists of course, but what about the records which didn’t make those lists?  I think I may just have to write off the last ten years as the decade in which I became the person that I am today, which had a lot of good music, and which will forever remain in a memory rather than a list.

Eels – Guest List

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I often struggle to write about Art Pedro, because I never quite know how to phrase exactly what it is I want to say.  Basically, I almost always find myself thinking ‘okay, lots of good stuff going on, not quite sure I’d say it was entirely clicking for me, but I like a lot of the ideas happening here’.

When I interviewed Jamie from The Japanese War Effort for Fresh Air Radio the other week he talked about how much work he would produce early on – throwing around ideas, sketching out songs, and generally just working through exactly what it was he was trying to do.  Art Pedro had a very prolific period a couple of years back which seemed to be to be a little similar: very prolific, but really quite patchy.

A year or so ago Pete Mason announced that he was retiring from music altogether, which he has a habit of doing from time to time, apparently, but you can’t keep a good mentalist down and he’s just recently come back to me with a whole album of new material.

Anyone with the foresight to invest in a cellist farm in the last few years would now be a very rich individual indeed because pretty much every damn band in the world seems to have one at the moment, and there’s one on this as well.  It’s all added with a pretty subtle touch though, I have to say, so it’s hardly all that obvious most of the time, generally just bringing a comforting warmth to the songs in question.

Art Pedro’s songs tend to come across as the inner monologues which meander around inside your head late at night as you stare at something on your desk you’re supposed to be doing but can’t face starting.

The extra time spent over this album has been well worth it, though, I’d say.  It has the right combination of a melancholic mood with little hooks and twists which spread themselves around enough to make this sound like a whole album, rather than a collection of ideas which just got trapped in the same place by accident.

Art Pedro – Nothing Happened

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Art Pedro – Abiosis

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Art Pedro on MySpace

I discovered Beat the Devil, Shilpa Ray’s previous band, through the brilliant Cable & Tweed, which sadly no longer covers an awful lot of music these days but used to be pretty much my number one source for new music on the internet.

I was a bit gutted when Beat the Devil packed it in a couple of years ago, but it was made clear pretty much immediately that this was just a tactical shift for Shilpa Ray herself, rather than a retirement, so it basically became a case of waiting and seeing. I covered all this on this week’s podcast actually, but I did manage to do just a little too much waiting.  Basically, I took my eye of the ball quite a bit with this release, which actually came out back in July, although that’s just inevitable from time to time I guess.

This feels significantly different to Beat the Devil, certainly. It’s really fucking rock ‘n’ roll in many places, for example.  I’m Not Frigid is a fearsome little ditty, and one with lyrics which prompt that brilliant ‘hang on, she didn’t just sing what I thought she sang did she?’ double take.  Coward Cracked the Dawn is another ballsy one, and fucking great with it, but there are times when the more upbeat moments (Woman Sets Boyfriend on Fire for example) don’t really capture my imagination quite as well – too much shouting, and not enough of that brilliant combination of menacing accordion and Shilpa Ray’s stunning voice.

Nevertheless they keep the pace varying nicely, which is crucial for any record, and works very nicely here.  The sequencing is restrained though.  This is a band who always give you the impression that they could go completely mental, but they generally don’t which makes it all the more of a release when they do, and gives a distinct smoulder to the rest of the songs.

This stuff reminds me of all the female-fronted garage blues bands which were simmering away in Detroit around the time the White Stripes emerged – bands like the Detroit Cobras who played really old-fashioned music with the roughness and vitality of modern garage punk.  Although this is a little more rock ‘n’ roll influenced, I supposed, than the blues and soul which drove those bands, but there’s not much in it.

Ultimately, influences aside, I think it’s probably a combination of the power of Shilpa Ray’s voice and the pace of the music, which switches from tense to raging in the blink of an eye, which gives this record its emotional charisma.  Really good.

Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers – Beating St. Louis

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Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers – Coward Cracked the Dawn

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Website (buy from here too) | More mp3s

I’m assuming that this album must be post-something, because stuff that’s kind of difficult to describe is usually called post something or other, although buggered if I know what.  It was passed to me by Ruth from the Bowerya month or so ago and I’ve listened to it a lot since then.

I suppose if you started at early Smog and intead of moving to more melodic territory from there you continued to snap your guitars, keeping the sound really bassy and maintaining an aura of disquiet.  It’s as if these guys take a few more of their aural cues from punk, I guess, although I would never say that this music sounded punky, just that at times it sounds like they’ve been listening to a lot of it.

I suppose the reason I’m finding this a little tricky is that at heart it’s a lot like a lot of other things I listen to.  The band are largely a boy-girl duo – David Trenaman and Colleen Collins – and Collins’ voice has that flightly indie-folk female character to it which has been so popular in the last few years at the more spectral end of the alternative scene.

The music is dominated by acoustic guitars and , but when it breaks it does so in a much more aggressive indie-rock style than I find myself expecting.  The female vocal in particular harks back to some of the shrill early 90s vocal styles of the likes of Tanya Donnelly and Kristen Hirsch, as does the guitar work.

Then there are the synths, which are not used in the electro style of the Animal Collectives of this world, and also have more of an early 90s rock sound to them.  So it’s not that the music doesn’t sound largely familiar at its core, more that the details used to embellish it move in a different direction to those which a lot of the album might suggest.

So this ends up being not the album I have loved the most over the last few months, but certainly one of the ones I find the most fascinating.

Construction & Destruction – The Scaffold

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Construction & Destruction – B-Flat

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MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from Zunior

Given how mental it looks like December is going to be for gigs, the last week of November looks as thin as I wish I still was.  There are a couple of things knocking around though, so bear with me.

On the subject of touring, incidentally, it’s really not a cheap undertaking so as an alternative Candy Claws – who are on my friend Kevin’s label, Indiecater Records – are doing a virtual tour.  This means that each day for a couple of weeks a new blog in a new place will host one of their videos, thus allowing them to play to audiences in lots of different places in much the same way a conventional tour does. List of remaining dates at the bottom of the page.

Erm, so here are the only gigs I could really dig out for the week.  There’s not a lot, but then, giving the liver a rest in the week before the Christmas mayhem really kicks off is no bad thing.  Song, by Toad Christmas part and the last night at the Bowery on the 12th, remember.

Tuesday 24th November 2009: Dawn Landes & the Last Battle (I think) at Sneaky Pete’s.

Dawn Landes is a very lovely American lady singer-songwriter.  I don’t mean to be flippant, but there’s really not much else you need to know.  I think The Last Battle may be supporting, but I’ve managed to lose the email telling me one way or another, so I’m afraid a suspicion is all I can give you.

Dawn Landes – Picture Show

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Saturday 28th November 2009: Drums of Death at Sneaky Pete’s.

Oddly, I am going to have to confess to not being an enormous fan of Drums of Death, but whether or not this was a thin week I’d still be recommending him.  I saw him at Wickerman this Summer and despite the thumping, dirty doosh-doosh-doosh music not being my bag, it was still a really impressive performance, so I’d definitely recommend seeing him if you think you are even slightly likely to like it.

Candy Claws virtual tour dates:

12/8 – Liverpool – The Devil has the Best Tuna
12/9 – Ireland – Asleep on the Compost Heap
12/10 – Norway – Eardrums Music
12/11 – Germany – Das Klienicum
12/12 – Scotland – Song, by Toad

12/14 – Switzerland – Music of the Moment
12/15 – Huggerland – mp3hugger
12/16 – Venezuela – Gopher Illustrated
12/17 – Philippines?
12/18 – Surprise Finale!

Yes indeed, I don’t care about your actual opinions, all I want you to do is vote for my friends, thank you very much.

It is time for the Contrast Podcast’s annual Festive Fifty vote, and you have until the end of Monday to get your votes in, and there are a couple of local gentlemen who you might want to assist in scoring as highly as possible: Withered Hand and Meursault, both of whom are nominated more than once.

Music bloggers from around the world have nominated songs, from which Tim has created a shortlist, which I am including below the jump because it’s rather long.  All you have to do is read the list, pick your top ten in order and email them to Tim before the end of tomorrow, Monday 23rd December at: contrast.podcast *at* gmail.com

In case you don’t know any of the songs in question, Tim’s also put together a handy player so you can have a listen, which can be found here.  Read the rest of the post for the full list of songs, and please do vote. Read the rest of this entry »

The Excast is so named because I am playing a lot of people’s former bands.  There’s Shane MacGowan’s Nipple Erectors, Phil Chevron’s Radiators, Shilpa Ray’s Beat the Devil and Billy Bragg’s Riff Raff.

I concentrate so much on new music these days that I often decide whether or not I like a band on the basis of a handful of demos, maybe a single, sometimes a debut EP, stuff like that.  And of course, bands don’t stumble into the world fully-formed, it takes some of them ages to become brilliant, and a lot of the time the initial forms of a band can be really strange, presumably because the people in question were still casting around a bit for their sound.

So there’s a bit of that here, but it’s not all that rigid a theme, and the playlist is a bit messy but, erm, well never mind.  There are some great songs, so enjoy!

Toadcast #96 – The Excast

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01. Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers – Beating St. Louis (04.07)
02. Beat the Devil – Plea Bargain (11.09)
03. Bright Eyes – Neely O’Hara (19.56)
04. Richard Hawley – Naked in Pitsmoor (26.16)
05. The Young Republic – The Alchemist (33.20)
06. Construction & Destruction – The Signal (41.24)
07. The Nipple Erectors – Nervous Wreck (48.34)
08. The Radiators – Walking Home Alone Again (50.39)
09. The Pogues – Lorca’s Novena (56.37)
10. Riff Raff – You Shaped House (63.33)