Song, by Toad

Every once in a while an album appears absolutely out of nowhere and fills you with joy – it makes you reach for a huge gin and the volume control with the same purposeful intent and praise the day you lapsed into music obsession.

Now this is not a classic in the Bob Dylan/Tom Waits/Nick Cave sort of sense. It’s just a crazy festival of joyous musical Attention Deficit Disorder that lurched through a circus drunk one night and ended up staying there forever. To a degree, you could think of these guys as a cabaret act, really. They leap theatrically from style to style, taking in old time jazz, sea shanty, bluegrass, poetry, Always Ready sounds almost like a Mazurka, and god knows what else is lobbed in there as well. Actually, you know that comedy film staple where a guy hurtles downhill on a bicycle, completely out of control, and thunders through a clothes rail, emerging draped in a ludicrous selection of every costume on the rack and completely unable to see where he is going? Well this is what this album is like. Sort of like the Squirrel Nut Zippers on acid – far more diverse and far more unhinged.

There are a couple of covers, a musical take on the (excruciatingly bad*) Scottish poet Rabbie Burns’ O Whistle, some traditional stuff and a liberal helping of original material. I just can’t help but grin from ear to ear when this record is on, and I almost want to grab Uncle Moon by the lapels and shake them vigorously until some more music comes out – if only there was a great big back catalogue to pillage.

There are some that don’t quite hit the mark – LumpyCraddyPopo rather irritates me, as I have a pathological hatred of nonsense lyrics, and This Old Town is no better than decent – but just about every other song on this album is taken and run with to its utterly illogical conclusion, with splendid results. Even Willie Nelson’s classic schmaltz-fest Crazy degenerates into a rambling monologue about a mother-in-law who bites off sheep’s testicles (seriously, I kid you not).

Honestly, if you don’t get all excited by the trend in current indie-pop to use antiquated carnival music and exaggerated old-style jazz sounds, then you should probably steer well clear. And for the more conventional amongst you this may also be a little too bizarre. For Mr. Toad, however, it’s all gin and daisies from here on out.

Uncle Moon – Pepper
Uncle Moon – Uta Hagen It’s a slow starter this one, but stick with it. By the end it’s a deranged festival of tribal barking and a murderous violin screech. Uma Thurman? What?
Uncle Moon – O Whistle

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*I may actually end up being run out of town for this one but, really, he’s shit. I know that because he writes in that hugely overblown Scottish acccent of his that the entire nation take this as some sort of pointless statement of national identity, but it doesn’t change the fact that his poetry’s fucking dreadful. So there.

I’ll pack my bags.