Wow, double label-spam in one day. Outrageous! What has the internet come to.

Anyhow, next week we will be announcing the result of the great Beer vs. Records face-off, but we have a couple more tunes to put your way first. This is from Le Thug Lager and is available on the download card which comes with the 4-pack of beer, which you can still get in The Good Spirit Co. in Glasgow, any branch of Vino in Edinburgh and I think possibly Rough Trade East in London. The beer is bloody lovely, but this tune is absolutely something else. I remember after we recorded these guys all of us just sitting down saying ‘fuck me, was that as good as I think it was’ to one another, generally followed by ‘yes, yes I think it bloody was’!

You can, of course, get the Split 12″ here. And it too is fucking ace!

Never have I been more grateful to be out of town than when this was being filmed. Whilst it is pretty damn great to have a video on the label which involves George Bush and Tony Blair in knickers and suspenders, as well as a lingerie-clad David Cameron flicking the Vs at Alex Salmond, a lot of my pals were roped in to ‘appear’ in this one, and I was able to avoid this entirely by being in a different country. Phew.

Anyhow, it’s turned out brilliantly, so a massive thanks to the team who put it together. As you can see, it’s far above the usual production standards of the DIY shite we tend to cobble together, which gives me an odd sense of both pride and awkwardness. Does that mean we’re professional now? Nah.

Anyhow the album, Murderopolis, is out on Monday and we are what is technically known as very fucking excited. The band have a got a wee tour at the end of June to support the release and will be going on a bigger one in the Autumn, so don’t miss out on your chance to see them – they really are excellent live.  All the dates are here, so have a look for when they’ll be nearest your place, and keep an eye on their site for the September tour dates too, once we start confirming them. Oh, and of course, don’t forget to go here and buy the album – it’s all about the money, after all. Cough cough.

I can’t think of a much more poignant song for an astronaut to sing than David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Knowing that the final verse about drifting off into the void is in fact an actual possibility rather than a vivid fictional picture gives the song a whole new level of meaning.

Chris Hadfield from the Canadian Space Agency did just that, however, whilst on board the International Space Station. It’s a daft version, but being sung by an actual astronaut gives it a certain degree of pathos, and the video is really rather cool as well.

Hadfield himself seems like an absolutely brilliant guy, as well. Whilst on the ISS he made a series of over seventy videos of various things, including the rather brilliant one below, answering a question from a bunch of school kids about what happens when you wring out a flannel in space.

 If you think I didn’t know Lab Coast all that well, another artist I saw at The Great Escape this year about whom I knew very little ended up producing precisely the opposite reaction: I wasn’t immediately struck the first couple of times I heard his record, but live on stage he really was captivating. It helps, I suppose, that at the time we arrived to see him he happened to be playing an omnichord, one of those instruments which can make me bypass almost all critical faculties and just file everything it touches under ‘awesome’!

There aren’t really a lot of high profile musicians out there who produce this kind of supremely sad, fragile sounding piano music – or at least, not that I listen to anyway – so I suppose Stuart is probably sick of hearing the name Perfume Genius bandied about by now. I have limited reference points however, I am afraid, so I am going to have to drop it in as well. And maybe a nod towards a slightly less uplifting take on John Grant too.

Ham-fisted comparisons aside, this was a really good show. He was hardly an extravagant showman, spending most of the time hunched over his piano, but the timorous delivery on the record was gone, and in its place something more bolder and more lovely. It’s hard to say what grabs you about an album where a gentle rise and fall of the mood is more prominent than directly hummable melodies and choruses, but there was something about this which really was lovely. Even Mrs. Toad, who tends to dismiss most of the downbeat music I listen to as ‘moaning pish’, really enjoyed it, and that’s really saying something, believe me.

We didn’t catch enough of the set for me to say anything more about this really, but it has certainly sent me back to listen to his latest album again. In fact on his Bandcamp page you can listen in full to both of his full album releases, and the latest is for sale on vinyl via Faux Discx.

 These guys are another of the bands I tipped when I wrote my Ones to Watch post for The Great Escape this year. And, a little like Glass Animals before them, I found them good live, but no better than that, which was a little disappointing.

Recorded, their tunes are strong and hummable, and the laid back stylishness of their guitar sound has a certain retro swagger to it which I really like.  They are an unhurried, confident-sounding band though, and a little like Glass Animals again, I suspect that what makes their recordings so enjoyable to listen to might be the thing which took the shine off the live performance for me a little. Simply put, the laid back, slightly disinterested nature which so appeals to me on record seemed to rob the performance of the kind of charisma which makes a good live show.

You don’t have to ramp everything up to ten to address this of course, and I am not saying that they should have just played faster and louder, but there was a lack of intensity and engagement in the performance, or so it seemed to me, and suddenly what was stylish and laid back just felt a bit flat. They still write eminently hummable tunes of course, and please don’t get the impression that I didn’t enjoy their set, because I did, I just kept waiting for it all to click into place for me, which it never did.

It would have helped, of course, if I had a better knowledge of the band’s back catalogue. I heard about them because of their CMYK 7″ series release with the brilliant Faux Discx, but they have an extensive back catalogue of tape and split 7″ releases, some of which contain some absolutely cracking pop tunes – like this and this for example – and I have to confess I am not as familiar with it all as I could be, which often doesn’t help when you’re at a live show. Neither does being with restless companions, I suppose, so maybe I should just put this down as one of those occasions where you just don’t quite click with a band and move on. I still like their records though, so maybe I should go back through those a little more carefully before seeing them play live again.

 The Hundredth Anniversary weren’t officially on the Great Escape bill anywhere, but being a Brighton band they still found somewhere to play anyway. When I made my way out to Brighton Electric Studios – a taxi ride away from the centre – I was very much reminded of the way the Edinburgh Festival seems so very much to be a collection of imported acts put on at great expense for the benefit of an imported audience and the profit of people like Magners. At least from a musical point of view that’s seems to be the case anyway, I can’t talk for the other arts.

Seeing all these Brighton musicians playing in a small live room of a ramshackle but nevertheless excellent-looking studio, to an audience of their pals, while the UK’s music industry charged around the town centre hoping their delegate passes would get them in to see the latest buzz band from Manchester or Brooklyn reminded me of the only other Brighton musicians I interacted with over the weekend: over beers in a pub far from the festival. So whilst the Great Escape is good for the industry, and it’s definitely great for us to come down from the opposite end of the island to finally meet people we largely know only through Twitter, it seems to be of little benefit to the music scene in the host city itself.

The irony of that is that of all the bands I saw this weekend which gave me that buzz – that sense of excitement you get at seeing something genuinely good and a little bit unexpected – then it was this. Their music is gorgeously thrummy guitar indie – too ethereal to be shoegaze and too heavy to be dreampop. You might not get that from these recordings, and the others on their Soundcloud page, but live was a different prospect.

All those guitars you hear thrumming away in the background became loud and BIG, and the vocals had to be that bit more strained and edgy just to make themselves heard. It was a cacophonous racket, and way, way nastier than I was expecting. And I think you know me well enough by now to know that this was no bad thing. There were times when the melodies seemed a little overwhelmed by the sheer racket, however, and a lot of the subtleties from the recordings were lost.

That may have just been an inevitable consequence of the size of the room and the nature of the sound system of course, but Eleanor has a gorgeous voice, and there were times I would have to preferred it to be a little less overwhelmed by everything around it, but those are minor quibbles. In general they were excellent, and probably the most exciting band I saw all weekend. They have a single out on Tiny Lights Recordings, and I look forward to seeing where they go from here.

 Ed Harcourt was not, actually, one of the artists I mentioned amongst the five to watch out for I sent to the Hype Machine when they asked, but by the time I actually went to Brighton he was certainly amongst the five artists I was most excited to see.

That fact that the gig took place at this church certainly helped matters, and with the interior lighting it was much more impressive on the inside than on the out, and a hell of a lot bigger too.

With Harcourt perched behind a grand piano, the image was impressive, even if the venue lent a rather disorientatingly heavy reverb to the vocals when they were at their loudest. Nevertheless, once I acclimatised my ears, the effect was gorgeous.

I was late getting there, arriving to a grand piano accompanied by a solo violin player who also provided occasional and lovely female vocal backing vocals. It was a beautiful combination. The violin player, who I think might have been Harcourt’s wife, actually, reappeared from time to time and each time the effect was gorgeous.

In fact, Harcourt’s ability to dramatically change the timbre of the performance was one of the highlights of the show. He played synth, acoustic guitar and piano, sometime with violin, sometimes with backing vocals and sometimes unaccompanied, and with each the feel of the songs was subtly varied, although each in its own way suited the charisma of the setting all the same.

Perhaps the moment which most encapsulated this for me was when, after a couple of songs of bold piano, violin and forceful vocals bouncing thickly around the church Harcourt unplugged everything and sang a song unamplified, to a rolling, gentle acoustic guitar refrain.  It was gorgeous, and the sudden change in the volume of the sound and the near-vanishing of the smothering waves of natural reverb brought a remarkable change in the feel of the performance. Suddenly, instead of being grand and impressive, it was fragile and lovely.

And pretty much the best gig of the weekend.

 Glass Animals were one of the bands I was most looking forward to seeing in Brighton. I first wrote about them years ago, when there was no more than a couple of songs on their MySpace page (yes, that long ago), but they’ve been distinctly slow-moving since then. An EP was digitally released a year or so ago, but they were so quite overall that I have to confess, I thought they were just one of those bands which was slowly giving up on the idea of being a band at all.

Not so, it seems, and I was genuinely surprised to see them on the bill at The Great Escape this year, and even more so to hear whispers that they have signed to a really rather serious record label. They play what I have previously described as muffled disco, and a friend of mine suggested that it’s possible the fact that they sound a little like Alt-J had something to do with the label’s interest in a band who’s relatively unprolific and low-profile habits might otherwise dissuade A&R types.

I have never heard Alt-J so I have no idea if this rather offhand observation has any merit, but I have to say that it sounds depressingly like classic A&R behaviour, despite the fact that I can really only think The Lumineers who have made anyone all that much money recently by being a bit like someone else.

In any case, that doesn’t matter to me, as I haven’t heard any Alt-J anyway, and in any case the reason I was excited to see these guys is because I really like their recorded material, so I was really curious to hear what it sounded like live. It was, sadly, a bit disappointing, however. What makes them exciting to me in recorded form – the slow pace and muffled beats – just seemed to prevent the music generating any real energy live.

It’s possible I was in the wrong frame of mind, and it’s possible they aren’t all that practised as a live band, as I haven’t seen much evidence of them being out and about that much – although I could be totally wrong about that. Either way, despite being very specifically excited to see these guys in the flesh, I have to confess this didn’t grab me as much as I had hoped it might. It wasn’t bad, by any means, it was good. I just wasn’t thrilled, which is a shame.

 Hmm, given I have to spend some time writing up the half a dozen bands I saw at the Great Escape who I want to tell you about I suppose it’s good that there doesn’t seem to be all that much going on in Edinburgh this week, from a live music perspective. At least, I can’t see all that much which would be up my street, which is what this post is about, so let me know if I’ve missed anything obvious, because I usually have.

Still, after the damage done to my liver by £300 bottles of wine (more of that later) in Brighton, I think a quiet week is a good idea, particularly as we are firmly in the midst of the Silly Season as far as the music industry is concerned: Wide Days, GoNorth, SXSW, Great Escape, the beginning of festival season… it all turns into a gigantic mess around now, and the liver and the sanity tend to bear the brunt of the damage.

Anyhow, the only gig I can see this week which looks like it would be up either my or your street  is one which I rather annoyingly cannot attend, which is ever the fucking way, but you should go if you can: Kid Canaveral, The Last Battle & Randolph’s Leap are at The Caves on Thursday night. The gig is free, but on a first come, first served basis, so don’t be too late and still expect to get in. It will be a night of indiepop, tinged with folk, and should be full of irreverent fun.

Other than that… well as I said, let me know if I’ve missed something obvious because it would hardly be the first time.

 Hello again from Brighton. Ian and I are down at the Great Escape again this year, and will be joined later in the week by Mrs. Toad.

I like The Great Escape. Brighton is an awesome place to be, which is important if you’re going to try and lure Mrs. Toad to a music festival.

In some ways I prefer it to SXSW, because they don’t really focus on big-name headliners here, meaning that it really is all about new music and up and coming bands. At least, that makes it more fun for me personally, anyway, because that’s generally the kind of bands I am excited to see.

Anyhow, this year The Hype Machine asked me for five picks of bands to see at the Great Escape this year, and I thought I would pass them on before the chaos begins…

Glass Animals – I don’t like to play the ‘heard it here first’ card, but I genuinely wrote about these guys miles before pretty much anyone else. Not sure what else to call this, apart from muffled disco.

Temples – A touch of one-song syndrome here. Shelter Song was absolutely brilliant, but I am not so sure about their new tune (below). Time to go and see them live and find out for sure, I think.

Eagulls – Ian and I saw them on the end of Brighton pier last year and they were brilliant. Epic, nasty guitar rock and a lead singer who prowls the stage like he’s looking for a fight.

Lab Coast – These guys are eminently hipster-friendly, as you might guess from noting that they are signed to the effortlessly cool Faux Discx. It’s stylish, laid back, lo-fi guitar music, and very good it is too.

Mac DeMarco – This stuff is rather stylish too, but in a very different way to Lab Coast. Mac DeMarco also play hipster guitar music, but in more of a lounge-style, laid back, ‘I will have sex with your daughter’ kind of a way.

And just because the last two were rather unimaginative – you know full well already that I like these two bands, after all – here’s a band whose manager got in touch with me when I registered, to promote the band. Generally I sniff at that – not for any good reason of course, it’s just a rather dumb reflex – but this lot actually sound rather good, and I think I will go and see them. Meet Keebo: