Cripes I have no idea what to say about this one – you’re going to think I’ve lost my mind. Basically this is squarely and absolutely not my kind of music, as well you will know once you listen to the songs below. Despite that, and somewhat oddly, there is barely a song here that doesn’t have a really, really catchy hook in it somewhere, and somehow I find myself oddly fascinated by this record.

Given I don’t listen to this kind of music much, I can’t really give you much of a comparison, but I think that if you imagine Starsailor with some actual tunes and more strings where they would use piano then you should be there or thereabouts. Not exactly Toad fare, you would assume. Me too. But either I secretly love this album and am trying to kid myself that I don’t because it’s not macho enough for all my empty posturing, or I have just listened to it so many times that I don’t know what I think anymore.

Whatever the weather, Cornish is not kidding himself that he’s tearing up trees here. Almost the very first lyrics of the whole record are: “I’m not not breaking new ground/ I’m not creating a new sound”, and he’s not. Gentle pop songs, lifted by strings and breezing through the room, it’s all very familiar stuff which is why I was more than a little dismissive at first. But he’s an Edinburgh lad, so I thought I owed it to some odd sense of loyalty to the place to hear him out and properly get to know his album.

Surprising myself, I’ve discovered that it’s really worth putting the time into. It may not be my sort of music but fuck me, he can really write a tune. There’s a little twist in each song that is eminently sticky and eventually I found myself letting the songs slip, one by one, past my normally immaculate angsty indie-snob defences. Now, I guess most of you won’t like this for just the same reasons I mentioned above, but I reckon there are quite a few of my readers who, like me, will find themselves liking this album despite themselves.

So, on the 10th October, I think, this record will be released into the universe. In the meantime, have a sniff of his excellent single This One’s For You, which can be downloaded from iTunes here. I popped it into one of my podcasts a while back, and it is a really good tune.

Am I turning into a Radio2 listener – the latest in a long list of depressing signs of abandoning my lost yoof? Or is this just a really good album and I am being a dick?

Alex Cornish – Counting Chimney Pots
Alex Cornish – The Trouble I Am

website | myspace | buy the single ‘This One’s For You’ from iTunes

Hmm, I was listening to Radio1 the other day and began to realise how few records by current pop people I’d actually ever heard. I heard my first Kate Nash song about three days ago. I know this isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but I could barely name the charts at the moment. I know virtually no music I don’t actively go an seek out. It sounds harmless, but it is a worrying trend, I think.

With virtually all things at the moment, from religious and political debate right through to more trivial things like music, it is becoming easier and easier to refuse to expose yourself to people you disagree with. This is really, really bad news not least because it tends to lead people into an echo chamber that is full of people who only ever tell them that they are right.

How are you supposed to know what you think if you are never challenged on it, never contradicted, never forced to defend your arguments? If you are never exposed to people who disagree with you and can actually out-debate you? What does it do to your convictions if you are out-argued on a point of, say, political ethics by someone else? Well increasingly this is something people just don’t ever have to find out.

I know that as you get older you tend to become more and more entrenched in your beliefs of all kinds, and I know that to a large extent this isn’t just narrow-mindedness it’s what you really think. But in so many ways the fact that we are gathering into communities, particularly online, of exclusively like-minded souls is bad for us. It leads to religious people thinking that Darwin’s theory of evolution is anti-god. Indie kids assuming that all hip-hop is by definition shit. Football fans having no way of disagreeing with one another without it getting aggressive.

Basically, it leads to people plucking their ideas from a very, very small pool and having an inflated sense of their own rightness. That’s not how we learn. We learn from being exposed to new things, things we don’t understand, and trying to come to terms with how they affect our world-view.

In a musical sense it can lead to drifting completely into a single niche and having no idea that, for example, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is not a bad song, despite being a Kylie number. More importantly, it leads to a lack of appreciation of context: of the world into which a song is born. Punk was a revolution not just for being great music, but because it blew away the stodgy pretension of the status quo. If you don’t understand the context of the group, how good do you think the Sex Pistols were?

So I am making a conscious effort to break out of my comfort zone a bit more.

Here are some more songs I got from the splendid Comes With a Smile a few years ago:

Jim White – Cinderblock Walls
Unbunny – Water & the Spanish Tongue (Alternate Version)
Jim Guthrie – Ain’t Got No/I Got Life
Giant Sand – Capitulation Blues

Well, not from hell exactly, just so short it’s terrifying.  I need to meet some mates tonight, which is already arranged, I need to be at work most of the weekend for a presentation next week, we have some friends of ours visiting from Canada and we have to pretty much move out of our house so that builders can take it over for the next two months.  Even if the weekend was four days long I’d still be bloody struggling.

Fucketty doo-dah.  Ah well, at least I have tonight to get well leathered and stagger around all over the place like a six year old who’s been slipped a roofie at a cub scout jamboree.

Oh, and my stats engine for the podcast has finally updated to include the latest one, which has been downloaded loads of times – thanks guys.  Even without the swearing, imagine that!

And don’t ask me what that picture is, I have no fucking idea.  I searched Google Images for ‘too busy’ and that’s what came up on the first page.  Too busy for what I don’t know, but the mind boggles at the thought.  So to show just how too busy I am, here are a pile of groups I have been investigating or will be investigating or just don’t know what to do with yet.  It’s the Harassed Toad Mix Tape, I suppose.  Have a good weekend Toadlings.

Two from bands who sent me demos or albums that I wasn’t that keen on, but definitely liked some of their stuff:
Amasser website | Amasser -  Green Like the Sky
LoveLikeFire website | LoveLikeFire – Unlighted Shadow
Two more Campfires & Battlefields recommendations:
The Prids website | The Prids -  Shadow & Shadow Another group from Portland, would you believe!
Nina Nastasia & Jim White website | Nina Nastasia & Jim White – I’ve Been Out Walking I’ll definitely be buying this one soon, so expect a review to turn up at some point in the near future.
From the ever-excellent Cable & Tweed:
Beat the Devil website | Beat the Devil – Shine in Exile What a voice – like a more menacing version of the Detroit Cobras.
Definitely one for the future:
George Pringle website | George Pringle – Fellini For Prime Minister Odd, but strangely compelling.
And a couple of stray songs I am enjoying and will be investigating further if I ever find the time:
The Amateurs website | The Amateurs – Cool By Me For more, check 17 Seconds.[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/TheAmateurs-CoolByMe.mp3]
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin website | Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin – Oregon Girl The coolest band name for ages and another reference to Oregon![audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/SomeoneStillLovesYouBorisYeltsin-OregonGirl.mp3]

A lot of the circumstances around this album are perhaps more interesting than the album itself. There’s been so much action from the individual Pornographers themselves since Twin Cinema that I find it quite difficult to think of them as the intact group I heard when I bought the previous record. I listen and keep hearing Dan Bejar here, Neko Case there and so on and it makes it an odd listen.

In terms of evolving as a group, it’s more interesting than Twin Cinema, in the sense that it encompasses a broader gamut of atmospheres, from the power pop we all know and love, to angrier songs, to sadder, slower stuff than we’re used to hearing. Actually, the more downbeat songs are the ones I like the best, with the more upbeat stuff sounding a little too familiar for my taste. Neko Case has possibly one of the greatest voices in music at the moment, and the ones where she gets to let loose a bit are the ones I prefer.

Stylistically, it’s a minor evolution really, but the hummability of the new songs perhaps doesn’t quite match Twin Cinema. It’s a harder, more *ahem* challenging record than its predecessor but may well turn out to be better after repeat listens. I’m still digging around in it myself and finding more to like each time I do.

New Pornographers – Challengers
New Pornographers – Adventures in Solitude

Nein!  Verboten!  Zer shall be no more musikenfun auf der internets.  Der heiderblitzen websherrif has mein doggen gefucked und zer shall be kein tunesen mehr. Verstanden?

website | myspace | amazon

What a weird, weird gig this was. Interpol were absolutely, note-perfectly, beat-for-beat immaculate. Honestly, it was barely possible to notice a single difference between what they played last night and the final, mastered, recorded versions you hear on their albums. This is some feat of technical accomplishment, I’d guess. And bloody impressive as it was, it makes for a really pointless gig.

Honestly, it was all so amazingly well-executed that you might just as well stay at home and watch their music videos on a really big telly. What the fuck is the point of shelling out to go to a gig if the band isn’t going to say anything, nor going to reinterpret their songs, nor even cut loose and play with a bit more venom? We got nothing from them all night. Not a thing. Nada. Zip.

To make matters worse, the sound system in the Corn Exchange was embarrassingly bad. I could have turned it up louder on my bloody stereo at home if need be, and a combination of this and the icy indifference of the band robbed the music of its life. Only the guitarist actually looked like he was enjoying playing the songs at all – the rest of them just stood there looking cool. And cool they really are. Honestly, if there are five cooler, trendier, more strikingly dapper gentlemen playing in a cooler band, making cooler music in a really incredibly cool way on the planet today then I will eat my immaculately tailored black Armani suit. They were so cool it was awe-inspiring, – it just emanated from their every pore and pose.

The problem is, for me their music is best played really, really fucking loud. The snarling guitars on Evil, the dysfunctional lament of NYC, the battering rhythms of Stella Was a Diver.. it all sounds best when turned up so fucking loud it makes your ears bleed and your neighbours think twice about calling the police because it might just actually be the apocalypse. So between the shitty sound system, turned down to sensible, and the lack of any real spirit in the performance the whole thing seemed rather tame, and more than a little pointless.

What it did do though was remind me that Interpol have written some of my favourite songs this decade. They didn’t play many of them, but Stella, which can easily be forgotten at the tail end of an album that includes masterpieces such as NYC, PDA, the Obstacles and Untitled, drove itself forcefully back into my brain. What brilliant music they can write when they really get going. I will go home and listen to them on the stereo, turned up as loud as it can manage, and never go to one of their gigs ever again.

Interpol – Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down
Interpol – Evil
Interpol – Pioneer to the Falls

I have to confess – actually I don’t have to; Mrs. Toad would be right on here to correct me if I pretended anything else – that I was a right pussy when I was a teenager. I was still a nice sensitive boy by the time I met my darling girl at fifteen, but I was even worse before that. Even so, even by the time we met, I was still far too soft for a leather-jacket-sporting, drinking, drug-taking party girl who hung out with the school’s rock band to even consider indulging in foolishness with me.  We got on incredibly well and had that sort of unspoken trust that you get sometimes when you click with someone.  So rather, we both considered it – sort of – but in a rare show of good sense for either of us we both knew instantly that it would be an unmitigated disaster, so put that idea to bed for another ten years to mature.

Anyhow, if I was bad then, I was worse in Singapore. I moved back to Vienna from South East Asia at fourteen and it was in Singapore that I first got into genuinely tragic and completely wet teenage heartbreak. Frankly it was, and I’m sure I’m not alone here, just a little pathetic. I look back and I think ‘oh for fuck’s sake man, grow a fucking spine!‘ but t’was not to be. I was a state, a sincere, cowardly sexual retard with another nine years to go before I was to spontaneously and unprecedentedly grow a pair of balls at about age twenty or twenty-one.

Anyhow, want to hear what I cried myself to sleep to after yet another crushing rejection?  Every one to the time-honoured mantra of ‘You’re like a brother to me’ and ‘What we have is so special, I don’t want to ruin it by going out with you’ and ‘But you’re my best friend’ and other such cunning euphemisms for ‘don’t be ridiculous, you dickless wonder’. My friends and I called it ‘the old fuck-off-and-die routine’ because frankly we’d have found being told to fuck off and die more dignified. Lots more dignified.

Anyhow, I’m better now, but I can’t hear these songs without cringing. Worryingly, there may have been worse, but I think my mind has blocked them out, thankfully.

Jackson Browne – For a Dancer
Bruce Hornsby & the Range – The Road Not Taken
Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band – You’ll Accomp’ny Me
The Eagles – Desperado

This sunny little indie-pop gem came to me completely and utterly out of the blue. Compared to Billy Bragg and Belle & Sebastian, what I hear more than anything else is Brendan Benson, although with some of the power take out of the pop and hugely satisfying sense of gentle contemplation filling the gaps.

This is by and large a really gorgeous record of perfectly assembled pop songs, and Aaron has interspersed the the roll-along country-tinged songs of Sunday afternoon bliss with some more bittersweet melodies of regret and disappointment which bring perfect balance to the album. A little like Benson himself it is easy to listen to this and dismiss it as just another album of hummable power pop, but that would be a mistake. Ultimately he isn’t breaking any musical boundaries, but he writes absolutely spot-on songs – perfectly paced, every one sticks in your head, and I could barely think of a bad time to listen to this.

It’s officially released some time in early September I think, but you can pre-order a copy here and I thoroughly recommend it. Honestly, there’s not a duff song on the whole thing, and it all hangs together perfectly. This is nothing that will shake the foundations of your universe, but I promise it will leave it a better place.

Aaron Schroeder – What We Don’t Know[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/AaronSchroeder-WhatWeDontKnow.mp3]
Aaron Schroeder – Emmylou[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/AaronSchroeder-Emmylou.mp3]

website | myspace | pre-order the album from his site (official release sometime in September)

There are some more people to vote for in the Digital Music Awards, so get going. If you actually go to the site and see the excruciating list of utter shit listed under ‘blogs’ then you will see why it’s so important to get actual blogs by actual people with actual brain cells voted for on this bastard. Unbelievable, the shit that is listed there – preening, self-important, utterly vacuous and dripping in corporate jism. Fuck them, and the horse they rode in on.

So, vote for me.

And the Growl.
And the Hum.
And the Dance.
And the Rawk.
And the Sex.
And the Sweep.

And the tunes:

As a shameless incentive, I’ve thrown together a wee pile of songs from my first couple of years in Glasgow. I bought loads of CD singles at the time, half of which got pinched, but there was some cracking stuff around at this time, really there was.

The Bluetones – The Fountainhead
Blur – There’s No Other Way
Elastica – Vaseline
Sleeper – Vegas
The La’s – Son of a Gun (No, I checked, and apparently this one is a little debatable. When it’s a plural of a word as a word, rather than the object it represents then you use an apostrophe. So fuck off, smart-arse. Besides, The Las looks like a different band altogether.)

Fresh from an appearance on this week’s Toadcast, Donny Hue & the Colours have released one of those easy going records that rattles and rolls along being at once cheerful music for a sunny evening barbecue, and also enjoyably pleasant stuff you could put on in the evening over a glass of wine without depressing everyone or being too strident – mostly. It’s just a perfectly pitched album of contemplative, folksy rock ‘n’ roll that sways gently between the raucously ramshackle and the meanderingly introspective.

It reminds me of a slightly scruffier version of The Shaky Hands on occasion, although here the piano seems to drive the music forward rather than the bass guitar. The imagery is a little odd, almost evoking Elvis Costello’s Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No. 4 in some ways, slightly surreal and magical, and not always especially obvious. The music is equally enigmatic on occasion, with a brief intro and outro, and a couple of pretty long numbers giving the album a similar atmosphere to some of the more meandering Howe Gelb stuff. It seems occasionally to have lost focus for a moment and wandered off, but it always find its way back.

It took me a while to realise how much I liked this, although I couldn’t tell you why. There’s such a warm, welcoming vibe that it should really pull you in immediately, but oddly I am only realising this now. A lovely album – buy one!

Donny Hue & the Colors – Humming With the Flowerbirds
Donny Hue & the Colors – Mountain Piece It takes its time to get going but is eminently worth the wait.

website | myspace | buy the album (Officially released on the 28th August)

Ah, talk about a sweaty, drunken night of indie joy. Fucking marvellous. This absolutely brilliant lineup was presented by Jim Gellatly of XFM Scotland, and was every bit as good as I wish the T Break gig had been, despite the thick, men’s changing room aroma of a sweltering Bannerman’s. It was a brilliant evening though, with Rory and Gill from Broken Records and David from Kid Canaveral all coming along to check out the rather elusive Twilight Sad as well.

Mouse Eat Mouse - These lads are mental. Old school rhythms with sax and everything give a sort of ska-punk backing to the deranged stream of consciousness of frontman CD Shade. Genuinely an experience!

website | myspace | Mouse Eat Mouse – Tuim Tattie[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/MouseEatMouse-TuimTattie.mp3]

Dumb Instrument - I first heard about Dumb Instrument from Colin, who writes the wonderful And Before the First Kiss, when he posted their phenomenal track Reverse the Hearse, from debut single Songs, Ya Bass Vol. 1 but I somehow failed to quite guess what they would really be like. A duo in this case, with Alex Walsh-Todd [Edit: it was Mikey Grant actually - sorry] on keyboards and the remarkable Tom Murray on vocals. He looked a bit like a dapper version of George Clooney in Syriana, and produced an inexhaustible stream of wry, snappy Scottish poetry which glided perfectly over the top of Grant’s meandering piano, flavouring it occasionally with a little harmonica. I was quite looking forward to seeing them, completely surprised by what I saw, and yet completely taken with their performance. Keep an eye out for this lot.

website | myspace | Dumb Instrument – Reverse the Hearse[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/DumbInstrument-ReversetheHearse.mp3]

Popup - Quite how the fucking View are famous and this lot aren’t is beyond me. I may not love every song they’ve ever done, but they can bloody well write a tune. They are better than the Good Shoes/Books/whatever, better than The Wombats, and better than a host of other indie-pop disappointments whose pictures adorn the walls of the NME offices, covered in spunk from the feverish masturbation over their imagined genius. The lads write good songs, are excellent live and can actually bloody play. What more can you possibly want from cheery, dancy indie-pop?

Popup – Lucy, What Are You Trying to Say?
Popup – A Year in a Comprehensive

website | myspace

The Twilight Sad - A while ago I wrote a review of Viva Stereo and Mike from Manic Pop Thrills popped over to “confirm that they do indeed rock like bastards”, which has ever since been one of my favourite expressions to describe exactly this sort of gig.

Far more popular in the States, for some reason, than they are over here The Twilight Sad make a ferocious noise when they get going, and James Graham’s impassioned howl is absolutely spell-binding. Honestly, he looks like he’s experiencing some sort of demonic possession as he faces stage left, gazing at the ceiling and lets forth a torrent of Scottish rage. He’s not a talker, apart from half-apologising for not being a talker, but the spectacle of the music as it washes over him in spasms is quite amazing.

Whilst Mark Devine on drums looks like he’s performing a feat of athletic endurance, guitarist Andy MacFarlane rivals only the rather lovely Mia Clarke from Electrelane in terms of looking entirely nonchalant whilst creating an absolutlely phenomenal wall of noise. They both have their eyes closed half the time, and seem to channel their particular brand of cacophonous racket from a place far beyond the stage. Add to that the casual indifference – he could almost be reading the Sunday papers – of bass guitarist Craig Orzel and you have a rather weird but nevertheless wonderful spectacle.

As MacFarlane generates more and more terrifying barrages of guitar onslaught, descending occasionally into a faintly intimidating hum, almost like the sound of an enormous engine ticking over, before cutting loose with venom once more, Graham’s utterly gripping voice takes an absolutely vice-like grip of your heart and the four of them proceed to put you through the mill almost as powerful as that which Graham himself seems to endure.

They do indeed rock like bastards.

The Twilight Sad – That Summer at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy
The Twilight Sad – Cold Days From the Birdhouse

website | myspace | amazon