Song, by Toad

EP or mini-album, whatever, this is really rather good.  It’s all about their newest album Paper the Walls at the moment, but I didn’t want to skip over this one because I’m really enjoying it.  From Hush, based in Portland, the same label that nurtured The Decemberists, it is all too easy to note that Ritchie Young and Colin Meloy have vaguely similar voices.  Given that, and the fact that they’re an indie-folk act, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the similarities run deeper.

Well they do, but only sort of.  Lyrically Loch Lomond can veer close to the other lot, close enough that when you first start to listen it raises half an eyebrow. But where the Decemberists tend towards bawdy tales of taverns, Loch Lomond employ the more curious imagery of magical fairytales.  Sufjan Stevens springs to mind, although without the intricate orchestration this is more a folk album than a baroque one – some of the basic rhythms recall Fairport-era English folk.  You get the idea.

They play with delicacy for the most part but lift it into a more full-throated delivery at perfectly judged moments.  The loveliness is almost the stabilising undercurrent that allows the occasionally upped tempos, the few howls of vocal and the odd guitar snarl to hit home to perfection.  I am really glad I bought this, and I’m now listening to the new one with great hopes.  A lovely example of slightly magical indie-folk.

Loch Lomond – Bird & a Bear
Loch Lomond – Spine

website | hype | buy from hush

I was in two minds as to whether or not to actually review this record, but I think I’m going to.  See, I don’t actually think I like it, as a whole… not entirely.  Or, to put it another way, despite the fact that I am yet to really click with Reichenbach Falls, there has been something oddly compelling about it that has kept me coming back again and again to this album to try and figure out just what it is that I seem to find so strangely intriguing.

The music is good, but I was expecting something else.  Perhaps it was the sample mp3s I was sent by the promo company, or perhaps I was just in Never Never Land, but whatever it was I was quite taken aback when I heard this album for the first time.  Instead of the delicious Americana I had oddly anticipated, I was hit by a direct and enigmatic pop album owing more to the New Pornographers than anyone else.  There’s elements of that gorgeous chiming piano in there too, a little like White Rabbits use.

It’s a real album too, not a collection of songs.  It urgent, it’s emotional.  There’s something I love but I just can’t quite put my finger on it.  It’s almost like those hidden picture things that were so popular in the 90s, but in this case the core of the album drifts in and out of your field of vision.  There’s a dark unhappy soul flitting around in there, difficult to pin down, and the moments of musical clarity are almost as elusive.  The interludes and atmospheres break occasionally into superb pop songs, then switch just as quickly back into something more painful and introspective.

It’s odd, I can’t decide if I really don’t like it at all or if I love it, but one thing is for sure: it is genuinely intriguing and there are some great moments here.  Peculiar.  More listens needed I guess, but I’ve thought that for a while and I’m still no clearer.  So, back to the beginning, why do I say I don’t think I like it?  Well maybe that’s a bit false.  I somehow get the impression there’s something beautiful to embrace in there, but that I frustratingly keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye and not quite ever laying eyes on it directly.

What an utterly uninformative and unhelpful review for you all – sorry about that.

Ravens & Chimes – Eleventh St.
Ravens & Chimes – General Lafayette!  You Are Not Alone

website | hype | amazon

You have to love this one.  I get contacted from time to time by publicity companies wanting to send me bits and pieces.  I often think it’s a bit of a waste actually, because it’s so hit and miss and seems a waste of a precious freebie.  Ah well, their decision I guess, it’s not like it’s in any way difficult to find out what kind of music I like.  I mean, there are times I think that blogs are really just a mass of free market research.

Anyhow, I was contacted yesterday by an nice lass called Natasha from Joanna Burns PR asking the standard questions about an address to send things through to.  Interest piqued,  I clicked on the link to the homepage and nearly spat coffee halfway across the office – just look at their clients!  Celine Dion, Lemar, Delta Goodrem, Santana..?  What in god’s name are they thinking?  Look at that Sergey chap, really honestly do, it’s just hilarious.  Did they know what prompting me to write about Celine Dion, or indeed any of these poor bastards was liable to result in?

I was nice about it, I really was, politely suggesting that perhaps their efforts might be better spent pursuing other avenues.  It’s just possible that there might not be the natural synergy between our respective goals that they might think.  Anyhow, Natasha was genuinely nice about it and said that, although it wasn’t an obvious fit, they had some new projects in the new year approaching that might be of interest and not to worry, I wouldn’t be flooded with an avalanche of cheese.

So I now wait with bated breath.  I’ll honestly give something a fair listen if they send it, and fair play if they want to branch into the indie sphere, but looking at that front page really really did make me laugh, and I felt I just had to share the joy.

Some hits from Joanna Burns PR – see, I really am making an effort:

Jeff Finlin – Sugar Blue Too
Leonard Cohen – Sisters of Mercy
Leonard Cohen – Last Year’s Man
Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time
Jackson Five – Lookin’ Through the Windows

After my post a few days back about pilfering in pop a certain DC (½ of Drunk Country, the man responsible for this abomination) popped up in the comments and started slinging scurrilous accusations around… no well actually, that’s nonsense.  He just mentioned some rather striking similarities between Sonic Youth’s Silver Rocket and Supergrass’s superb Richard III.

Well I’ve listened to the songs and to be honest I can’t hear it.  I mean, as DC rightly points out, the similarities are obvious, but the riff in question is just not all that complicated. It’s effective, but it’s so simple that I personally find it highly plausible that they could have independently hit upon the same thing.  I would certainly be surprised to hear Gaz Coombes come out and admit to having pinched it.  Ultimately rock ‘n’ roll draws on enormously formulaic structures and very few combinations of notes.  The variations on these things must be pretty narrow, particularly when it comes to writing a basic rock riff, so actually I would be tempted to suggest that, if anything, it’s a surprise that this doesn’t happen more often.

DC’s response to my denial was as follows: “bleh” from which I think it is safe to extrapolate some sort of disagreement, but honestly, I just don’t think there’s enough there to warrant any sort of conclusions of pilfering.  Thoughts?

Supergrass – Richard III
Sonic Youth – Silver Rocket

I tell you what, any band that can defeat this utter shitbox of a venue and show you a fucking good time anyway must be bloody good because, as crappy industrial warehouses guaranteed to swallow even the largest of sounds go, the SECC is one of the worst.   It didn’t help that I had only been able to get tickets in the seating area way off to one side of the stage, but ultimately it was like watching them play through bloody binoculars.

This all meant that the gig started very slowly for us indeed, with songs like Black Mirror and No Cars Go failing to bridge the considerable gap, and the clumsiness of the sound engineering not being sufficient to make the music that enjoyable a listen either.  I don’t know how or when it changed, but eventually it did.  The Arcade Fire play with a manic energy and I get the impression that if I’d been up front near the stage I’d have been completely blown away.  As it was, the music just got bigger and bigger – bolder and more anthemic – and by the end we were all on our feet and dancing, even in the cheap seats.

The technical production also adjusted very quickly to their sound, and by halfway through all the subtler violin flourishes were coming through perfectly, even against the clattering background of the rest of the band.  Win Butler, a little like Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, seems to be warming to the role of strutting indie frontman.  ‘Ego issues’ was Mrs. Toad’s verdict, but I thought he did superbly.  You want a bit of peacockery in your front men, especially in a venue this size.  It fits the music too, which is quite grand in both sound and scope: themes as big as theirs benefit from the rather fervent delivery if you ask me.

In the end I was so very nearly robbed of a great gig by crap seats.  If you’re going to the SECC make sure you get standing tickets and get down the front.  It took them most of the gig to draw me in entirely, but they bloody did it, bless ‘em.  By the end of the show I was ecstatically wobbling my head about in as decent an approximation of actual dancing as I can manage, and just letting the power and bombast of Rebellion, Intervention and Wake Up course through me.  Stupendous – I just wish I’d been bloody closer!

Arcade Fire – Rebellion (Lies)
Arcade Fire – Intervention
Arcade Fire – WakeUp

And yes, before you ask, they were still far, far too white.  Sheesh.

website | hype | amazon

I would describe this as something of a quasi-religious experience for me, but there’s something so relentlessly normal about The Wedding Present that it wouldn’t seem right. Twenty five [D'oh! - see comments!] years since the release of their brilliant debut album George Best the Weddoes are on tour, playing the album in its entirety. Sort of the musical equivalent of the testimonial match footballers get after ten years of service.

To large extent The Wedding Present are a teenage boy’s band. If you’ve ever been a lad at that age, Gedge has an uncanny ability to nail every alienated, rejected and bewildered emotion you ever felt with no more than a few simple lines of almost uniquely conversational poetry. He just talks and it seems to come out in perfectly metered verse almost by accident, without any noticeable artifice whatsoever. Coupled with this is some of the most archetypal indie guitar you either have or ever will hear. ‘It’s just not natural to play a guitar that fast’ he quips rather exhaustedly after Brassneck.

Archetypal indie they are indeed. Ed, who was there too, points out that they were on that genre-defining C86 compilation which is generally described as being the big bang at the origin of the indie universe. After a quick trip through Gedge’s extensive back catalogue, the group settle into the meat of the gig – every song on George Best in order. At this point the heart of this band comes sharply into focus. A deliriously happy mosh pit of men in their late thirties bounces into existence: ageing indie kids – like Gedge himself – revelling in the music that made them who they are.

I am a Wedding Present neophyte in relative terms. It took university, and the relentless persistence of the legendary Mr. James Strath to open this particular door for me. I was aware of them by the time of Watusi, but Mini was the first record of theirs that I bought for myself. So watching the joy of this heady blast from the past was always going to be a bit of a spectator sport for me, but it was still a privilege to stand there, bouncing away happily to myself whilst classics like Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft, My Favourite Dress and, later, Kennedy rattled through the venue.

They are superb live – more passionate and more reckless than on albums, but nevertheless technically right on the money, as you might expect from such stalwarts. Hearing songs this good belted out with such expertise and yet such passion really throws the enthusiasm generated by virtually any of the new groups I write about into sharp perspective. There will be few bands who ever match what the Weddoes have achieved, in my view. You could put George Best, Watusi, Seamonsters, Bizarro and Saturnalia up against pretty much any album ever recorded and they would be highly unlikely to outshine them. A shuffling, unassuming indie kid he may be – perhaps the original shuffling indie kid – but David Gedge is one of the best there has been. And this gig was a chance for us all to acknowledge the fact.

The Wedding Present – My Favourite Dress
The Wedding Present – What Did Your Last Servant Die Of?
The Wedding Present – Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft

From Bizarro:

The Wedding Present – Brassneck
The Wedding Present – Kennedy

website | hype | amazon

The cover of Lloyd Cole’s Antidepressant is one of my favourite album covers of the year. I just love that painting for some reason. Looking at the cover for The Most Serene Republic’s new record Population I see a record cover that, although there is not much more than a passing visual similarity, feels the same. It really strongly feels like the barest variation in the central idea behind the Lloyd Cole cover, don’t ask me why.

Is that copying? No, it’s the way that art works. People absorb what’s going on around them, assimilate it into their work and move it on a little. People generally don’t know it, but that is actually the definition of innovation: incremental improvements to existing things; although it is generally confused with invention: making shit up out of thin air. Only recently has innovation come to imply anything more than the mundane act of improving upon what is already there.

Often people don’t really know where they get their ideas from. We all absorb so many influences from one moment into the next, and our brains work in such flaky ways, that when inspiration hits us it is virtually impossible to know where it has really come from. At Proper Job I myself am basically paid to innovate, so I am pretty familiar with the process and the act of having new ideas – they tend to just pop in there. If you document your process, as we do with sketch work, then you can often trace the chain of thought back to some extent, but this is unusual, and doesn’t really help you identify exactly where each individual spark originates.

Another example would be these two snippets of violin, one from the start of a Broken Records song Out on the Water, and one from Nick Cave & Warren Ellis’s soundtrack to the bleak but brilliant film The Proposition. When I pointed out to Broken Records that the two refrains were all but identical they were mortified. They’d never even seen the film.

Broken Records – Out on the Water
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Proposition #1

I am certain that, similar as the two sound, this was not a case of copying. Ed over at 17 Seconds posted this recently, which sounds more clear cut. Surely Nirvana had to have pinched the riff from Come as You Are from the Killing Joke song Eighties didn’t they?

Killing Joke – Eighties
Nirvana – Come as You Are

Well honestly, I’d be surprised if they did, actually. I left a comment on Ed’s site saying that it would have been very hard for them to defend in court, as the similarities are strong and obvious. But really, this kind of thing happens all the time. Sometimes people simply do have the same idea.  Other times you hear something somewhere, or see something, and it sticks in your head somewhere in your subconscious. Quite apart from the fact that Killing Joke compassionately dropped the suit after Cobain’s suicide, how can you possibly prove something like this? It is easy for me to imagine that riff dropping out of the back of someone’s head, almost whole, without them having any idea where it came from. Honestly, in the creative process this happens all the time.

I am not saying that protecting people’s genuinely unique thoughts should cease. An artist’s ideas and creations are their lifeblood, even in my job, which is very commercial. But intellectual property law is absolutely throttling innovation. Honestly, it’s insane. People now use patents like buckshot. No matter what they ever intend to do or ever will do or how spurious or idiotic the patent, almost everything in the field of medical device design (my field) is bound and gagged by patents. So many of them are idiotic as well – patenting the idea of using a battery in a hand-held electronic device or something equally stupid. Either the muppets granting these patents don’t really pay any attention to their jobs or, probably more likely, the Western economy is now so frantic about owning thoughts and ideas that pretty much any old nonsense passes muster as patentable.  The fact that the Chinese treat it with utter contempt seems only to have intensified the scramble, oddly.

Now I repeat, I know intellectual property must be protected. It’s what I live off.  But the very concept of intellectual property is supposed to value and encourage innnovation, and in many industries it is simply strangling it.  We, simply, have to issue less patents.  And we definitely have to be far more bloody choosy about what we deem to be a patentable idea, because at the moment some of the IP I have seen is utterly spurious.

The problem is that the commercial process is all about ownership and competition, but for a huge part of its output it relies entirely on the creative process, which is the absolute opposite.  Creativity (and I include pure science in this) relies, in general, on collaboration, sharing of ideas, cooperating, and building slowly from one concept to the next.  Eureka! moments, if not entirely mythical, are marginal.  The two approaches are directly at odds, and the more commercialism encroaches on the creative process the more it kills it.

With lawsuits and all it may get messy occasionally, but in general I look at the sort of movement of ideas in the music industry and I get a little jealous.

I think this is one of few albums that turned out to be precisely what I expected it to be before I even listened to it. Shock and awe you will not get, but this is one of the most satisfying pop albums you could wish for. Happy, upbeat, infectious and hugely enjoyable – this is as pop as indie-pop gets.

The sunny 70s harmonies and lovely, cheerful piano disguise lyrics that are occasionally peculiar and at times a little dark, which makes for an odd juxtaposition at times. Basically I would imagine that, as I did, you will be humming and bouncing along to some pure musical joy and then suddenly think that perhaps you heard something rather odd. You’ll rewind to check and find out yes, they really did just sing about taking it from behind. Or strange attractors (one of my favourite mathematical concepts – so elegant and so fascinating).

Ultimately though, with songs so built for pleasure, these detours into actually listening can seem a little like distractions. I don’t mean to disparage listening closely to lyrics, but really, this is music to experience with your insistently tapping toes and spontaneously beaming smile. Which is not to say that I think it is a work of genius. It somehow lacks the portentious gravitas that one would expect from anything like that, and one or two of the songs are a little less splendid than the rest, but by and large if you are after a joyous record of blissful old fashioned harmonies that will make December seem like the middle of Summer I really don’t think you could do much better.

The 1900s – When I Say Go
The 1900s – Two Ways

website | hype | buy the album

There I was listening to a song from Kevin Drew’s new album Spirit If… (visit Tim at The Daily Growl for a proper review, I don’t like it that much) when it slowly dawned on me that he was using naughty words.  Ooh, I thought, splendid!  If there’s one thing Mr. Toad likes it’s things that are good and sweary, so I listened a little closer and thus divined that the song’s title TBTF stood for the phrase Too Beautiful To Fuck, and a thought started to weasel its way into my head.

I don’t think beautiful is all that sexy.  Now, I don’t mean that I think beautiful people are hugely vain and that their personalities turn me off, or that I find ‘real’ people more appealing because they are more attainable or things like that.  I mean that in terms of sexual attraction, really beautiful people do not do it for me at all.  There is barely a supermodel who makes my trousers twitch in the slightest – although now that Elle McPherson and Cindy Crawford are getting older they are becoming far more attractive.  Angelina Jolie may be physically perfect, but I don’t find her sexually attractive at all.  I know you may not believe me, but this is the truth.

In all honesty, extreme beauty is pretty fucking common these days.  Magazines, billboards and television are crammed full of one-dimensional images of physical perfection.  Go to any expensive town centre bar in a busy metropolis and you’ll see gorgeous people everywhere.  They are slightly compelling, I’ll give you that – fascinating almost, a bit like an exhibit.  But I never could muster up the slightest desire to try and hump ‘em.  Being good-looking is easy, it’s cheap and it means nothing.

Being saucy, on the other hand, is something of a rare commodity.  There are very few people you look and think instantly ‘Rrrowwrr – I could strump her till I sprained my pelvis!’  That enigmatic quality called sex appeal is far, far rarer than the rather common one of physical perfection.  So panic not if you aren’t beautiful – you might still be sexy as hell.  Beauty itself is just not an especially attractive quality.

Kevin Drew – TBTF
Billy Bragg – Everybody Loves You Babe

P.S. Click that picture.  She has sex appeal.  She also happens to be beautiful, but that picture hurts my eyes, it’s so marvellous.

Never mind the fuss over the business model, this album just isn’t very good.  I have all sorts of things to say about the way they are actually selling the record to the public, but I think I may have to digest a little before they become coherent enough to write down.  I do, however, have to say that I have nothing but applause for their efforts to find Another Way.  It appears bands are going to have to go it alone in this way in order to force the recording industry to actually address the 21st Century instead of just sticking their fingers in their ears and hoping it will go away.  Radiohead are to be seriously applauded for this.

Unfortunately, the album itself represents no semblance of a return to form in the wake of horribly disappointing recent fare such as Hail to the Thief (soft) and Eraser (beige).  In fact, this album is very much what you would get if you ground those two records together, stirred them up, and sprinkled ten new tracks out of the mix.  The sound comes pretty clearly from these two records and, lamentably, so does the lack of spirit.

Radiohead used to have urgency, don’t you think?  I mean, even the more downbeat electronica of Kid A and Amnesiac still had a direction.  They were moving forward, at pace, straining slightly to go faster, twitching nervously at the reins.  The last three albums, if you include Eraser, have been so lacking in any kind of nervous tension or drive that they seem to me to be lifeless, unengaging records that bring no emotion at all to the listening.  It’s a shame really, but it seems churlish to complain about a group responsible for two or possibly three albums that I am pretty sure history will view as era-defining classics.

I paid £7.

Radiohead – Nude
Radiohead – Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

website | hype | buy it