Another Cable & Tweed band makes an appearance on Toad, this time one pinched from this post on The Builders & the Butchers. As per usual, taking musical suggestions from Rich will rarely lead you astray, and this one is another corker.

They have a similar infatuation with old time American folk music to quite a few bands at the moment, but in their case it sits more in the spiritualist gothic camp than some of their contemporaries. It’s nothing like as arch as The Decemberists, nor as gospel as the Howe Gelbs and Jenny Lewises of this world. What this has is a real rattle and stomp rhythm, battered out on banjo, washboard and fiddle. There’s also an impassioned vocal performance that never allows itself to lapse into anything like a comfort zone and fills the music with a kind of desperate urgency throughout.

To an extent they are more to be associated with the sort of dark, macabre folk tales of the Willard Grant Conspiracy, although the music is at once more low-fi and more insistent, rather than the mournful quality of much of Robert Fisher’s output. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant and I really recommend you pop over to CDBaby and buy yourself a copy immediately.

The Builders & the Butchers – Spanish Death Song
The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake

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