My dearest Toadlings it is with enormous pleasure and brimming pride that I present the light of my silly life, the bright and shining star at the centre of my universe and the bad tempered little Scottish strumpet to whom my every waking hour is devoted.  That sounds sarcastic, but it isn’t.

She treats the music I play with a sort of contemptuous indifference and has some truly shocking stuff in her rather limited collection.  But she has a punk side, she loves Bob Dylan and has taken to some unexpected groups recently, like The Sequins, The Builders & the Butchers and Grandaddy.  It slowly started to dawn on me that actually, Dolly Parton aside for the moment, she could probably put together a better playlist than I could, and I was absolutely mortified to be proved absolutely right.

So I thought I’d get her along to co-present too, which seemed like it might be fun.  It was a bit odd at first, but we warm up a bit by the end and it turns slowly into what I think it a pretty decent podcast, all told.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to talk her into doing this too often, but if it proves a success I promise to do my best.

Toadcast #13 – The Mrs. Toadcast

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01. Lambchop – Dallas Theme Song (00.00)
02. Sham 69 – Borstal Breakout (03.10)
03. The Clash – I Fought the Law (06.49)
04. Stiff Little Fingers – Alternative Ulster (10.53)
05. Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Enough (16.18)
06. The Cure – Just Like Heaven (19.50)
07. Ennio Morricone – The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (26.14)
08. Nirvana – Sliver (33.02)
09. Guns ‘n’ Roses – Get in the Ring (38.32)
10. Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue (48.21)
11. Eels – Fresh Feeling (53.58)
12. The Von Bondies – No Regrets (61.31)
13. The 63 Crayons – Spoils For Survivors (66.16)
14. Honeytrap – Andy the Freefaller (71.15)
15. The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses (76.11)
16. Night Jar – Poor Man’s Son (81.46)
17. The Indelicates – Waiting For Pete Doherty to Die (89.54)

I remember reviewing Bonnie Prince Billy’s last album, The Letting Go, and being hugely relieved that someone I’d always found far too hushed to quite grab me before seemed to have loosened up, let go a bit, and written some really arresting songs.  And like Will Oldham before him, Sam Beam has here accomplished a similar feat without having to abandon the loveliness for which he is most loved.  The true fans and purists might not be delighted, but I am suddenly able to enjoy someone I had struggled to get into previously.

Now, I don’t know his back catalogue very well, so it’s possible I just picked the wrong record to start with, but there’s a very gentle 70s style Western rock ‘n’ roll permeating this latest album that is really quite gorgeous.  The harmonies and eager piano lift it well above any of the other stuff of Beam’s that I am at all familiar with and I find myself really enjoying it.  It’s possible that there will be people who find this hippy alt-folk style a little too close to the kind of dreamy 70s West Coast easy going stuff that Midlake occasionally get criticised for emulating, and I can sort of see that.

Ultimately though, the gently distorted vocals and gentle rise and fall of the emotional base of the song have made an album that for me is just awash with loveliness.  I should perhaps consider making a more concerted effort to get into Beam’s early stuff if this is what he’s capable of.   And, as an aside, I absolutely love the artwork for this record, and the single which accompanies it as well.

Iron & Wine – Carousel
Iron & Wine – Resurrection Fern

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Well my little Toadlings, I thought I was going to be at work until the wee hours, but here I am at 2am ready to go home, having been entirely successful.  This calls for a celebration, and I have cracked open a beer and will write a quick post before I go home.

The post in question – Ringo Deathstarr.  Despite the name I either think is genius or slightly stupid depending entirely on what day of the week it is, the music leaves no such questions.  My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze, with driving guitars a-plenty, this is the kind of music that usually takes ages to grab you.  Usually, the brain adjusts to this new brand of racket, and then slowly starts to filter through the noise, and so the core of the melody is slowly and satisfyingly teased out.

Not so here, this was candy right from the beginning.  It’s music to be played loud – really, really fucking loud, so that it all just shakes its way through your skeleton as you stand there trembling slightly and wondering if music this loud is actually physically safe.  Ah, fuck the neighbours.

The whole EP can be bought here for an enormously generous £2, and they’ll apparently be touring with the Dandy Warhols shortly, and if they can replicate this kind of wall of sound with any sort of aggression on stage, that should be well worth catching.

Ringo Deathstarr – Swirly (Edit) For the full album version, you’ll have to buy it.
Ringo Deathstarr – Starrsha

Apparently this lot are not just buzz, they are uber-buzz. Mind you, it was a publicity agent that told me this so it is just barely conceivable that they may perhaps be exaggerating slightly. Joe Lean himself was apparently the Pipettes drummer until quite recently, and they were utterly dreadful, but I can promise you there is a bit more life here.

I have a six-track demo and for all it’s absolutely familiar, bog-standard NME Next Big Fucking Thing indie pop, there are nevertheless some very satisfying moments to be had. Sleazy Hughes is the obvious one to pick out, but the rest of it is old-fashioned punky indie tunes with a hint of rockabilly about them here and there. It’s good, and I am definitely enjoying listening to their stuff, although I can’t confess to being anything like overwhelmed. I don’t know what to expect from this lot, but they seem pretty decent from what I’ve heard and could be alright.

Then again, they could just be the NME’s latest favourite masturbation fantasy…

Their new single Lucio Starts a Fire is out on 8th October and can be pre-ordered here. Certainly one to consider for the more youthful indie poppers amongst my audience.

Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong – Sleazy Hughes
Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong – I Ain’t Sure

website | hype | buy the single

This was quite simply one of the best gigs I’ve been to in a very, very long time. Christ almighty this lot batter it out when they get going. I had the extremely good fortune to be able to interview them before the gig – something I’ll be writing up shortly – and the bizarre sight of these five thoughtful, rather intellectual and unfailingly polite and friendly young lads stepping up to the stage and going absolutely fucking mental was something to behold. They, in the no-nonsense words of Mrs. Toad, know how to rock out.

Their music is a brooding brand of post-rock (I think that’s the term, don’t hold me to that) that starts out with a sort of dark menace to it, and which builds and builds until quite frequently all five of them are going rabidly berserk and producing the sort of blistering wall of sound that most people can only dream of creating.

Live, they are also accompanied by Ashley Dean’s wonderful animations, which are designed to illuminate the often slightly obscure historical stories that comprise the narrative of virtually all their songs. It’s a weird twin spectacle, but when you’ve had a few beers the touching and untold stories they tell are driven home so much harder by the swirling malevolence of the music. Seeing iLiKETRAiNS is basically an emotional experience – the poignancy of the animations and the power of the music are something you have to simply immerse yourself in and let wash over and through you.

Ultimately, you go to a gig to get something out of the music you can’t get from a studio album, and this you do. Whether it be the emotional impact of the storytelling being so much stronger for the background animations or whether it be the visceral joy of one of the best nights of howling, raging guitar battering you’ll hear. Terra Nova was just fantastic. Building and building until there was simply no more noise to be wrung from their instruments, it was a phenomenal blast, and symbolised the whole night for me: it was powerful and emotional and left you just slightly giddy when it was over.

iLiKETRAiNS – Victress
iLiKETRAiNS – Terra Nova

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This review comes your way courtesy of new podcast (sorry, they’re a radio show, I know, but I listen to the podcast) The Waiting Room.  I heard this on their show a couple of weeks back and bought the album.  Smart move.

Although at times it can be a little bit too country for me, this is nevertheless a terrific album.  There’s an old time jazz songstress wrestling the country crooner for supremacy too, which puts this record somewhere inbetween Eleni Mandell, Jenny Lewis and Holly Cole’s album of Tom Waits covers in terms of sound.   The scraping violin is just about my favourite part of this album, and is faintly burlesque in some ways, a tendency hinted at by the be-sequined gun LaVere holds on the album cover.

The stories tend to be either grotesques or cliches, based on all the old classic staples of country music – true love, infidelity, drink and murder.  It’s a theatrical record, one full to bursting with every aspect of old-fashioned music that can be taken and cranked up just that little bit extra, to create an album that is at once the slightest of parodies and also a devoted homage.  So if you can take this level of country, I’d definitely give this one a go.  Gorgeous.

Amy LaVere – Overcome
Amy LaVere – Pointless Drinking

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A girl I went to school with, who is a bit of a star-fucker, has been moping around all things rock ‘n’ roll since god was a boy. Mrs. Toad’s boyfriend when she was 16/17 always used to make her feel bad about not being as ‘cool’ as this girl, because she was so hip and trendy and he had a thing for her. I am a defensive bastard so my relationship with this lass has gone from a casual tolerance to vitriolic malevolence because she IS NOT HALF THE WOMAN MRS TOAD IS AND NEVER FUCKING WILL BE. I hate the bloke for daring to make my darling girl feel inadequate, and I detest this girl for any feeling of inferiority Mrs. Toad may ever have mistakenly harboured.

It’s all the bloke’s fault, I hear you saying, how can you blame this innocent lass? Well it may be all the bloke’s fault, but this girl is the sort that whenever you talk to her you get the impression she is looking over your shoulder every once in a while to make sure there’s no-one cooler she might be talking to instead. Now, when we were casual acquaintances this is the sort of thing I just didn’t care about, because her approval didn’t matter a jot to me, and she was generally nice. But when this sort of status-merchant is compared in any way favourably to someone as utterly superior to her in terms of brains, wit, strength of character, appearance, and just plain desirability as my young lady, then my blood fucking boils.

So imagine my delight at finding out that having hung around second-rate wannabe rock stars her whole life because she thought they were cool, she is now in a band herself. And they’re absolutely woeful! Ah hahahaha hah haaaa! Embarrassingly, amusingly bad. Tremendous! It gladdens my heart, it really does.

Art Brut – Formed a Band
Ben Folds Five – Underground

I am not going to link to any of this, because I think that would be hugely mean and I don’t really want to make this personal. I do, after all, know I am being totally irrational here. That said, I will email you a link if you are really desperate…

We have the splendid Campfires & Battlefields to thank for this one.  He emailed an mp3 of Vice Rag a while back which I loved so much I posted it immediately and also stuck it straight in a podcast.  I went straight out and bought the album too, and I’ve been listening to it for a while.

There is absolutely nothing new here.  Monsieur Bondy occupies pretty standard low-fi Americana territory, with only the sparest application of anything as rock-related as an electric guitar.  At times he sounds almost Dylanesque, at times more like Willy Vlautin of Richmond Fontaine.  You will listen to this album and hear nothing you haven’t heard a thousand times before.

That said, for some reason it is very satisfying.  Vice Rag may still be the standout song, but the whole first half of the album prickles with songs about the American psyche, taking on patriotism, tribalism, religion and all the other themes most artists would never have the balls or wherewithal to tackle.  And he does it with lovely tunesmithery, a rich and cosy atmosphere, and a deft touch with his arrangements.

Maybe the familiarity of the musical territory leads you to underestimate this album.  You don’t really notice it when you put it on, but once it sinks in there is tremendous depth to enjoy, and you will find the darker atmospheres start to grow and ultimately envelop your understanding of it.  He talks of a lot of dark places, does Scott Bondy, and he doesn’t rush himself doing so.

A.A. Bondy – Killed Myself When I Was Young
A.A. Bondy – Vice Rag

myspace | hype | buy the album

If a bright slice of beguiling folk-pop is what you’re after then look no further.  Given the recent associations of being a Sheffield band, this lot come as something of a break from the norm, although within the wider context of English music as a whole it is a little easier to place.  Generally I would say this album fits within the quite wide swathe of delicate, charming and generally playful folk music being cut across the nation’s music scene at the moment.  A good deal of it is from in and around London, but Monkey Swallows the Universe certainly seem to have far more in common with this particular movement than they do with anything more local, although I am open to correction on that.

The record itself is often very gentle and very beautiful, and a good deal of it is highly reminiscent of Everthing But the Girl’s Acoustic album of about fifteen years ago.  In fact Nat Johnson’s voice is very evocative of Tracy Thorn, but I’d take this lot over that bunch any day!  The fiddle, cello and recorder (Recorder?? Yes, recorder.  This is rock ‘n’ roll, bitches.) add the traditional touch, but it is the touchingly personal songs that really make this for me.  Underpinning the jaunty acoustic folk-pop and the wistful melancholia equally, are gently and carefully told personal anecdotes delivered with a touchingly plain honesty.

Surprisingly enough, for such an unassuming band, they had a pretty devoted following at the End of the Road Festival, so we could just have a satisfying little success story on our hands here.  Richly deserved too, I’d say.

Monkey Swallows the Universe – Sheffield Shanty
Monkey Swallows the Universe – Jimmy Down the Well

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As noted in my End of the Road podcast, Yo La Tengo finished their Friday night headline slot at the festival with this, which has always been one of my favourite of their tunes.  Thing is, at the festival they announced it as a Sandy Denny song, which was the first I had ever heard of it.

I know most of you likely to be reading this are music obsessives the same as me, and need no introduction to Sandy Denny, but I thought I might as well explain who she is in the off chance you don’t know.  She worked briefly with Strawbs, before joining Fairport Convention in 1968.  She sung the lead on their legendary Liege & Lief album, but ultimately buggered off to do her own thing, until her considerable appetite for drugs and alcohol destroyed her relationships with pretty much every musician she worked with.  In ’78 she died of a brain haemorrhage.

So a sad little story really, but she had a truly glorious voice and By the Time it Gets Dark is just a gorgeous song.  If ever there was a short, poignant definition of what being in a family is all about it is this: the weariness with the outside world, and the desire to spend some time together doing not very much; the simple happiness of being with people you care about.  Fair brings a tear to my eye, so it does.

Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark
Yo La Tengo – By the Time it Gets Dark