Song, by Toad

Steve Adey – Mississippi Remixed

Steve Adey is an Edinburgh singer-songwriter. We’re not big on rock ‘n’ roll here in Edinburgh, but there are quite a few folksters and acoustic singers, which seems to suit the local scene rather more.

Adey produces atmospheric, desolate folk that reminds me rather more of Adrian Crowley than it does the two legends he covers on his debut album: Bonnie Prince Billy and Bob Dylan. A bit more like Iron & Wine, perhaps. I’ve yet to hear All Things Real, his album, yet but I recently received a copy of a remix of Mississippi which is as good a place as any for us all to start.

It’s the last song on the album and is being released as a single. As part of the release he has made four different remix versions available, which perhaps harks back to his many years’ experience as a sound engineer remixing other people’s stuff. It’s an interesting idea though, as remixes tend to cluster around dancier stuff, or indie stuff being made dancy, rather than this sort of folk material.

The atmospherics are rather haunting and bleak, but this is no barrier to enjoying the song, which has an underlying warmth and sparse instrumentation to it that I like. The album can be bought here for those who are so inclined, and he has a MySpace page on which his epic cover of Dylan’s Shelter From the Storm can be previewed.

Steve Adey – Mississippi (A Marble Calm Remix)

website | myspace | amazon

Adam Balbo – 6 Outta 9 w/ Beats

I am posting this, less as a review because I haven’t heard the whole album yet, but more as a little chunk of excitement because I am really looking forward to it. I’d never heard of Adam before, but he sent me a song as a music submission which I really liked, so I asked for a couple more and loved them too, so I bought the album. The CD itself is still en route, but I thought I’d pass this on.

Imagine if Adam Green was less of a self-absorbed, irritating smart-arse. Ah, what a relief, I hear you say. Well that is pretty much Adam Balbo’s territory. He describes himself as ‘roughly-hewn folk numbers and casio beat anthems’ which is pretty accurate. The casio backing brings a slightly naive, toy-town atmosphere to the music, and the simply strummed acoustic guitar gives the whole enterprise a lo-fi, DIY sound which is deceptively unsophisticated.

Ultimately for me, the big difference is the cleverness of the lyrics. Nice turns of phrase and unusual thoughts pack each song and the wit is never anything like as overbearing or cloyingly deliberate as a certain Mr. Green. In fact, it is the casual amusement and sharpness that makes this record as engaging and rewarding as it is. Go Toadlings: go and purchase!

Adam Balbo – Samba Blues
Adam Balbo – Let’s Make a Porno

myspace | buy from cdbaby

Thunderegg – New Album Approaching

Having spent some time locked in the Sound of Music studios, Thunderegg, who I’ve mentioned before, are approaching the release of their new album, probably some time this Autumn.

Laid back rock sounds, witty lyrics and a really engaging way about their music tend to follow these lads around, so I am assuming we can expect more of the same from the new album. They’ve kindly posted four sample tracks on their MySpace page for us to preview, so pop over and have a sniff.

I liked Long Way From Home so much I put it on this week’s podcast, and I reckon the new stuff sounds really rather promising, which is excellent news. Have a listen – they remind me either of late Men They Couldn’t Hang, or even a little of The Mutton Birds on occasion.

Thunderegg – Long Way From Home

website | myspace | buy from cdbaby

Sebastian Waldejer – Touch of Souls Single & New Album

Sweden has its own particular brand of sunny pop – often slightly cartoonish at times – but I would have no idea what to expect from a Norwegian record. More of the same? Darker? Who knows. Well Sebastian Waldejer is from Norway, and may be the first from that country to weasel his way into my music collection.

Actually, he could be Scottish. I know Scotland is virtually Scandinavian anway *Toad hastily ducks flying Buckfast bottle* so this shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the Scots have a distinct brand of almost-sunny pop that this album could fit nicely into. It’s not as sunshiney as West Coast stuff – there’s a slightly darker edge to it than that – but it has a very laid-back, Sunday afternoon feel to it. You can imagine playing this as the late-afternoon sun streams in through your windows and you contemplate the fact that you’ve not really achieved any of things you promised yourself you would this weekend. And you don’t really care. So if you’d like a large slice of laid-back loveliness in your life, this may well be the man for you!

Sebastian has a new single out tomorrow called Touch of Soul which will be available digitally. Keep an eye on his new MySpace page to purchase it. For his older stuff, including the Porcelain Baby EP from which these two sample songs are taken, you want this page. He has an album approaching shortly if you like what you hear, presumably available via the first of those links.

Sebastian Waldejer – Porcelain Baby
Sebastian Waldejer – If I Could

Toadcast #5 – Woo Hoo JC!

More errant podcastery from your favourite slippery green amphibian. This week I find myself yelling abuse at JC who writes a terrible blog called The Vinyl Villain and is currently stranded in Toronto for a few months, far away from his Glasgow home. JC was pretty much the first blogger to take any interest in Song, by Toad in its formative days and I have always been rather grateful for the encouragement Jim showed me back when I was starting out.

As such I thought I’d play a few songs from his favourite groups, a couple of things he’s brought us in the last few months and some songs about missing folk, seeing as he’ll presumably be pining like a teenager for the lovely Mrs. Villain. Well, that or masturbating himself into a zinc-deficient coma, of course.

Either way, hope you’re enjoying yourself JC. Here’s some bloody songs for ya!

Toadcast #5 – Distant Villainy

1. Belly – Trust In Me (01.54)
2. Maximo Park – Girls Who Play Guitars (08.30)
3. The Doledrums – Midweek Dreamer (12.50)
4. Waylon Jennings – Dukes of Hazzard Theme (15.20)
5. Billy Bragg – Wishing the Days Away (Ballad Version) (18.33)
6. Alex Cornish – This One’s For You (24.28)
7. Adam Balbo – Rock Ballad (31.02)
8. Elbow – Fugitive Motel (36.24)
9. R.E.M. – Half a World Away (41.21)
10. The Doledrums – He Said (47.14)
11. The Meteors – Out of Time (51.21)
12. James – Say Something (55.33)
13. Thunderegg – Long Way From Home (59.50)
14. The Pendulums – Brand New Song (66.52)

Cherchez le Pub!

Ah thank goodness. The weekend, beer o’clock, beverage time, whatever – slipping into the welcoming arms of comatose alcoholic oblivion, no knowing where you’ll wake, next to whom or how many tattoos you’ll have. Marvellous.

The Edinburgh International Festival of Unbearably Pretentious Thespian Twattery commences this week some time and suppressing the Toad instinct for homicidal artistic criticism will be extremely difficult. It is a trying duty, but one which I nonetheless take very seriously, to have to reduce one aspiring performer after another to tears of desolation by relentlessly driving home the fact that what they are doing, rather than opening anyone’s heart to the possibilities of releasing their inner beauty, is in fact just some sort of pestilential form of spasmodic social syphilis. In fact, rather than giving people the opportunity to think differently about their lives what you are in fact doing, sweetie darling, is pissing everybody off, distracting them from their pints and making an utter twat of yourself in the process.

Congratulations. Won’t you be proud of your pointless fairying about, come the final reckoning:
St Peter: “And how spent thou thy precious earthly days?”
Eternal Soul 1: “Well, St Peter, I worked tirelessly on a cure for cancer.”
St Peter: “Splendid my son, on ye go. And your hippy friend here?”
Eternal Soul 2: “Erm, well, see I tried to express challenging thoughts through the medium of interpretive dance and bongo drums.”
St Peter: “You silly cunt.”

Who’s worse – the poncing thesps themselves or the fat fucking American tourists and crinkly old British coffin-dodgers who give them just enough financial encouragement that they somehow do not end up sticking their fucking knobs in a blender by the end of the Festival and thus relieving the gene pool of their weak and flabby genetic material altogether. Gah. Well at least there are some decent bands playing in Edinburgh for a change. Not many mind, but a couple.

I console myself with beer, gin, music and fornication. Breathe in with me Toadlets… and out… and relaaaaax!

Ad Astra Per Aspera – Everybody Lets Me Down
Elvis Costello – Clubland
Mayor McCA – I Love the Summer ‘Cause I Love the Women
Richard Cheese – Rock the Casbah I think this may now be the definitive version of this song.
Talking Heads – Radio Head

Night Jar – The Moth Trap

Just about the best band you’ve never heard of? Well unless you’re fans of the old Toadcast I would say almost certainly. Night Jar aren’t even a band, really, just two mates who locked themselves in their room for a fortnight and came out with a six-song EP that is, honestly, unbelievably good.

Andy Mackay is a friend of mine, assuming he’s forgiven me for being a drunken twat the night we were introduced, and was originally in an Edinburgh Bluegrass group called the Green Mountain Bluegrass Boys. They had a residency at The Left Banke, now Octopus Diamond, shortly to be defunct once more but The Bluegrass Boys decided to pack it in a while back and Andy teamed up with his pal Jack to record these six songs. Subtler than the Bluegrass Boys, presumably partly due to not having to consider the interests of a drunken late night audience, this is still a Bluegrass CD really, but also a terrific exploration of all of the staples of American folk.

Lynchings, lost loves, cowboys, ne’erdowells and small-town dancefloors are all evoked and the music is very much in the traditional vein. Ultimately though, with such strong songs it never sounds like a rote regurgitation of standard forms, just the latest additions to a classic genre from a geographically surprising place. They have no real inclination to try and make a living out of this to the best of my knowledge, and they may not thank me for sharing this with everyone, but I think it’s fucking brilliant stuff and if there are any label chappies out there willing to persuade them to go for it I think we’d all be very grateful.

“This old thing? Oh yeah, just something me and me mate knocked together last week, back at the flat.” There are professional musicians for miles around who’d sell their first-born for songs this good.

Night Jar – The Hanging Tree
Night Jar – Sweet Annie Lee

Night Jar on MySpace

Bob Frank & John Murry – World Without End

Christ this is a bit harsh. No, actually that doesn’t even come close to doing it justice: harrowing is what this record is. And brilliant.

This is the real Murder Ballads. Taking ten songs of murders and deaths from the psychopath to the wrongly executed, Frank and Murry have turned them into deep, dark, portentous country folk ballads with genuine emotional impact. The comparisons are easy: as you might expect they occupy a sort of Williard Grant Conspiracy/Johnny Cash/Nick Cave territory but they also in voice and tempo can remind me a little of British Americana-merchant Lucky Jim’s first album.

The music is surprisingly variable, despite and oppressive air of foreboding throughout, and the adventurous arrangements lift this well clear of the albums of morose balladeering you might fear from the description. Glimpses of Nick Cave’s sinister god, Tom Waits’ deranged carnival and Johnny Cash’s tragic amorality tales drift in and out, adding layers and depth.

If you don’t like your gothic country noir then I guess you’d better steer clear, but honestly if this sounds like it’s vaguely in your territory then buy it. Evocative, paralysing ghost stories swirl around this record and grip you tight. And then you remind yourself, these are not stories, they are histories.

Bob Frank & John Murry – Tupelo Mississippi, 1936
Bob Frank & John Murry – Jesse Washington, 1916

website | myspace | buy from cdbaby

Mancino – Manners Matter

What would have happened if Modest Mouse, The Arcade Fire and all their grand, experimental ilk had gone pop instead of indie? Well Mancino wouldn’t be far off it. They seem to take similar kinds of eccentricities and apply them to the sort of upbeat power pop (I really don’t like this term, but it seems to fit here) that can go so far as to even remind me of the likes of Ben Folds at times. They could even be what Architecture in Helsinki might have turned into if they hadn’t become quite so tense and shouty.

Basically, if you have the Arcade Fire/Architecture in Helsinki lot holding up one side of a bridge, and then the circus barker lunacy of Ice Cream Socialists and Man Man holding up the other, and then parachuted Mary Poppins into the middle of the bridge sporting a colourful, happy ELO-shaped pop umbrella then you may sort of get the picture. Or you may think I’ve completely lost it, either would be fair enough.

It’s not as full-on as any of the aforementioned acts, more a smoother more chilled out appropriation of similar influences, but it still takes a surprising time to get into. I heard the first track, thought I like it, didn’t, had a disappointed phase and then finally settled on really enjoying this. Greatest album in the universe? Well, perhaps not, but it is very good indeed and well worth a listen.

Mancino – Hetchie Hutchie Footchie
Mancino – The Anvil And Me

website | myspace | buy the album

Honey, I’m Home

Well the best man’s speech at my brother’s wedding went off okay.  No fuck ups, no swearing, no colossal faux-pas and mercifully short. Well, two swears actually, but no-one seemed to mind. In fact I was so relieved to get the bloody thing over with without ballsing it all up for everyone I went straight to the gin, poured a couple of extremely generous ones and proceeded to spend the rest of the wedding getting utterly smashed.

I have some culinary points to make about America, two good and two bad, so if you’re a Yank-basher you may be disappointed, but if you’re one of those flag-waving twits who thinks the sun shines out of the arse of all things Yankee-Doodle-etc.. then you may get vaguely irritated as well. Yippee – a post that’ll offend everyone!

Coffee – Unspeakably, undrinkably bad: piss-weak, flavourless, aromaless, lifeless, characterless, spineless fucking dishwater. It’s not that you can’t get decent coffee, but you have to really, really search for it. My brother found us an excellent place in the Italian part of Boston, but virtually every single cup you get everywhere else, even in the coffee houses and decent restaurants, is so thin and weak and grey it is actually impossible to drink. The reason? Well Americans seem to drink gallons of the awful stuff so I suppose if it actually was even vaguely related to actual coffee they’d all be whizzed off their tits on caffeine by elevenses.

Bob Dylan – One More Cup of Coffee (Live 1974)

Beer – You’d expect me to have the same to say about American beer really, wouldn’t you, given the ‘fucking close to water joke’* and the abominations they foist on the rest of the world in the form of Miller and Bud and their flavourless, frat-boy ilk. Well the reason American beer abroad is so utterly dismal is because they won’t bloody well let any of the decent stuff out of the country. While the EU tries to batter the shit out of British micro-breweries with their blanket standardisation laws, America have gloried in their smaller brewers. Most of the local beers in America are an absolute treat – well, in New England anyway – not as heavy as British ones, but good flavour and character, complete with evocative names and natty artwork. Bloody marvellous, no wonder they don’t want to share.

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals – A Kiss Before I Go

Food - Bleuch. The East Coast seafood is excellent in the sense that they do nothing to it whatsoever, and then slap it on a plate with plenty of butter. Sandwiches, for the most part, knock anything you’d get in Europe (outside of France of course) into a cocked hat. And I’m sure the very expensive stuff is just as good as you’d get for lots of money anywhere else. But honestly, absolutely everything in-between is utterly unvarying, served in stupidly enormous quantities and, most importantly, utterly devoid of vegetables. Fuck me, people, they’re not poisonous and no, ‘Freedom Fries’ do not fucking count. Salads, also, do not have to contain bits of fruit to be considered cuisine. Fucking awful. If you want a good meal, go to Australia.

Rich Amino – Chicken ‘n’ Chips
Jeff Foxworthy – Supersize Them Fries

Gin - last and, let’s face it, most importantly by some distance, is gin. Let’s face it, a nation could live in pools of their own faeces and fuck dogs for sport, but as far as I’m concerned if they served a good gin they would represent the pinnacle of civillisation. And do Americans serve a good gin? Ooh, Mummy! Americans pour gin, and indeed every other spirit, with the sort of reckless abandon that makes me fall to my knees and kiss the turf in gratitude. Three quarters gin, a big fat squeeze of lime and if there’s any space left then perhaps some tonic. Fucking marvellous. We may have invented the stuff, but it appears it took our bible-bothering cousins across the pond to figure out what to really do with it. A juniper-laced, lime-kissed alcoholic delight!

Tom Waits – Gin-Soaked Boy

*Q: Why is American beer rather like making love in a canoe?