Song, by Toad

Nearly Home

How, in all my complaining about being away from the house and about living in a crappy little short let basement flat, did I omit this song? What a buffoon. If ever a song title encapsulated our current situation perfectly, it’s this. This is an excellent version too, an acoustic one from the soundtrack to No Direction Home, that superb documentary from a year or so ago.

Bob Dylan – Subterranean Homesick Blues (Alt Version)

Well this weekend we move back in, thousands of pounds poorer and weary of the suitcase lifestyle, but ready to set about the house with some gusto. We had to omit the decorating from the overall project, as it was the one thing we knew we could do ourselves and we were very tight on budget. So we both have the next week off to blitz the place and try and get it ready for a housewarming party on the 8th. We won’t finish, but we should break the back of most of it, and it will be nice to have a week together to bed back into the place after being out for nearly eight months. We have new windows, a patched roof, repaired beams, two new bathrooms, a new kitchen and fully replaced plumbing and electrics. We won’t recognise the place, but we’ll be home. At fucking last.

Here’s a new song from Toad favourites Broken Records that seems to fit the bill. I was at work so late last night (2am, since you ask) that I had to skip their gig with the Twilight Sad at Cabaret Voltaire, and I am not at all impressed. Still, they’re playing here twice before Christmas, so I’ll have to make one of those. What do you think the chances are of them agreeing to be the first release on Song, by Toad Records then? They may be a bit big for me these days, but it would ace if they were up for it.

Broken Records – Nearly Home

4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge

This is so late a post on these lads as to be almost entirely pointless.  But this blog isn’t just about news or being at the most cutting of edges, it’s just me rambling about stuff when it occurs to me, so apologies to the news chas… actually, there’s no news chasers reading this in a million years are there?  What was I thinking?

Anyhow, I’m at work at half midnight, and I’ve been listening to The Waiting Room’s Tom Waits fest so it seemed as good a time as any to post about this excellent little single.  I mean little quite literally too, as my copy is on one of those tiny little mini CD thingies.  Nicely done, I thought.

The reason for the Waits business is that, although I obviously can’t post Forever on the Edge itself (preview on MySpace), the song the label have made available as a promo track is a Waitsified interpretation of that song – the last song on this four track single.  It’s ingenious really, and actually a thoroughly good impression.  And really, if you cover a Waits song you always end up doing a lesser job than the great man himself, so I think this is a splendid way to express your allegiance.

The rest of the CD contains the excellent single itself – a pretty standard but nevertheless highly satisfying bit of scratchy indie, with bounce and charisma.  The second track Conversational Karate is not so splendid, although the lyrics are as clever here as they are on the other songs.  But then Orderly Queue is a really good track as well, so all in all I’d say this is a pretty sound investment.

Honestly, I don’t know what to tell you about this that can explain it any more than that.  This is absolutely off-the-peg indie-pop with a bit of growl and crackle, a nice central conceit, spoken verse and a spiky, catchy chorus.  It may be standard but it’s bloody well done, and I really like this track.  If they can keep this sort of thing up, they should be well worth keeping an eye on.

4 or 5 Magicians – Tom Waits Blues

myspace | hype | buy the single

Toadcast #17 – The Cellarcast

The wench is away and I am here by myself, managing the last few days of our house project. You can imagine what fun that must be, I’m sure.  Still, we move back in this weekend, so it may be a crap couple of days but it’ll all be over soon and then you’ll be relieved of me constantly whinging about it, which will be nice for you.

Given we’re living in a basement flat on a short term let for a month I got quite into the basementy idea with this playlist. I digressed into The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, but mostly it’s music from ‘95/6 when I was living in a damp, grotty basement flat in Glasgow with a mate and the girl I was seeing at the time.

I bought stacks of CD singles back then and lost them all when someone broke into the flat.  Thanks to the joys of the internet I’ve been able to track most of them down recently, so you get a few of those, as well as some of the stuff I was listening to at the time.

It’s interesting as a historical document, to me anyway, but I am not sure how well the playlist itself works.  There’s something about this podcast that I’m not sure I like as much as the others, even though I like all the songs on it.  I don’t know, let me know what you think.  Perhaps Tears of Rage, Oasis and the Cranberries aren’t good enough songs to have all on the same podcast.

Toadcast #17 – The Cellarcast

01. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End (03.33)
02. Oasis – Rocking Chair (10.54)
03. Bob Dylan & the Band – Tears of Rage (17.59)
04. Bob Dylan – Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Live) (25.54)
05. The Band – Rockin’ Chair (29.17)
06. Lloyd Cole – Unhappy Song (37.59)
07. Hootie & the Blowfish – Sad Caper (48.40)
08. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Shallow Grave (54.03)
09. Tom Waits – November (55.55)
10. Barenaked Ladies – The Old Apartment (63.26)
11. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (68.33)
12. The Bluetones – Colorado Beetle (71.08)
13. The Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There (79.35)
14. The Cranberries – Joe (87.07)
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Ballad of Robert Moore & Betty Coltrane (96.13)

Timothy Dick – On a Grassblade

Some quiet music needs to be played really, really loud. Nick Cave’s masterpiece The Boatman’s Call springs most obviously to mind, and I might include Leonard Cohen in that, as well as some Lamchop and Bonnie Prince Billy (fuck off with your quotation marks). You could have the stereo at full volume when listening to this, and still strain to hear some of the more hushed moments.

Timothy Dick almost brings time to a halt, pauses the breath in your lungs and silences all around you with nothing but the sheer careful quietness of his music. It’s the sort of stuff you could silence traffic with at Piccadilly Circus. When Howe Gelb drops his tin can blues approach, he slows down to this kind of careful, dusty storytelling, rich with character and emotionally laden with great droplets of imagery. You watch them grow and form until they are impossibly full and it seems like you hold your breath forever as they finally break away and drip downwards.

See, even I’m at it now. I’ll be kidding myself I’m a proper writer if I keep this up, but you know what I mean, hopefully. This kind of timeless songwriting and delivery seems to have lived in America since before time began, and simply seeped into the hearts of some of the settlers the second they set foot on the soil. You know the kind of music with so little ornamentation that you listen for every last flick of finger on guitar string, or strained syllable of verse?

Timothy Dick is not rock ‘n’ roll, and he is unlikely to become famous. I can’t even see you getting into this unless you really, really take your time and genuinely do nothing else while you listen to it apart from gaze wistfully out the window and absorb the music. But this man could make boiling eggs seem like an epic tale of heartbreak in the tragic story of some doomed life we’ll never know.

Timothy Dick – Lost Star

Big thanks to Shane from The Torture Garden for alerting me to this.

myspace | hype | buy from cdbaby

Gossamer Albatross – EP

Yes, they are indeed called Gossamer Albatross. It’s a bloody silly name, but for some reason I rather like it. For an obscure bunch from Hereford, where not much has happened since they dumped Newcastle out of the FA Cup with that goal all those years ago as far as I can tell, they really are surprisingly good. There’s a touch of baroque folk pop about them, but the necessary limit on the number of musicians for a group at this sort of embryonic stage of their career keeps the sound nice and spare.

Lewis Gordon is only 18, and according to the press snippets on their MySpace page is ‘a self-proclaimed musical genius and snob’ prone to ‘giving damning criticisms of other local bands on the Hereford Music forum’. I have no idea if this is true, and although it does make the fellow seem a bit of a prat, I can’t imagine there being much to prove him wrong on the Hereford indie circuit, although I really would have no idea.

His email to me was pleasant and to the point, describing the music thus: “Our influences include Final Fantasy, Neutral Milk Hotel, Islands and lots of other ace american indie stuff.” I don’t know any of these groups particularly well, so I thought it best to just throw the names up and let you draw your own conclusions.  Myself, I am reminded of the Ralfe Band, who released a similar album of floating folk pop a couple of years ago.

Gordon’s voice flirts with melodrama, lending a faintly preposterous air to the music when I first heard it.  I was grabbed though, and the more I hear it the more I am enjoying it.  Plucked guitar and airy strings give a similarly unreal accompaniment, which means this has quite a dreamy air about it half the time.  On Held Hands the piano provides a welcome grounding, keeping the rise and fall of the rest of the music from floating off into the air.  It also adds some deeper notes, which make it somehow more mysterious and gripping than some of its lighter brethren.

All in all, this would be five pounds very well spent indeed.

Gossamer Albatross – Held Hands

myspace | buy the ep

As I’m only posting one track by Gossamer Albatross (it’s only a four song EP) I thought I might as well pop one in from the Ralfe Band, seeing as most of you have probably never heard of them either.

The Ralfe Band – Albatross Waltz

The Hoosiers – The Trick to Life

Sometimes promo people send me stuff so mismatched to my tastes I really shake my head at the waste of plastic, packaging and postage. Save yourselves the time and just sling it straight in the trash yourselves, for fuck’s sake. Sometimes, instead of just to me, this happens to the whole world at once. Meet the Hoosiers. If ever an album needed to go straight in the bin it is this garbage. It makes Athlete and Hard Fi seem like serious bands. It even suffers when compared to the scrotum-shrivellingly awful Maroon 5.

And it is Maroon 5 who perhaps are the most interesting comparison. Just look at the comments under this BBC review of the Hoosiers’ album. Poking about the internets, these lads just can’t buy a good review, and for very good reason: they’re rubbish. Limp, lifeless, criminally derivative and absolutely devoid of the barest scrapings of charm needed to moisten even Paris Hilton’s gusset. But look at those comments on the Beeb, and check out that other everyman review site, Amazon. This is a popular album. It’s even – *gulp* – in the charts.

The Guardian wrote a piece recently about Maroon 5 which opened with the following line: “They’ve sold 2m albums in the UK, 10m in the US. But they can’t get a good review.” Again, perhaps this might have something to do with the fact that they peddle a sort of spineless, neutered Argos Catalogue pop that carries all the emotional impact of a half-eaten Pot Noodle. But it is popular, and so are the Hoosiers.

It is easy in our insulated internet world of like-minded folks – who, let’s face it, we would never have found were it not for the wonders of the Information Super-cul-de-sac – to forget that things are popular because lots of people like them. Lots and lots of people. Remember how XFM used to be a really good radio station? Well since they were bought out and had the sperm drained from their testicles they have simply become more and more popular instead of, more deservingly, being dropped like a ginger step-child.

Basically, people like utter garbage and the general population’s taste is woefully bland. People are fucking shit. They shop at WalMart and Morrison’s, they buy Supermarket Pop like this dross, they watch Big Brother, and I’m a Celebrity, Tuck an Angry Hornet Under My Foreskin*. They buy a Ford Focus and drink in the Hogshead and All Bar One. They shop as a pastime, not as an obligation. Most people are fucking dismal, boring, dead, spiritless fucking ghosts.

And to communicate with them in a cool an unpretentious manner, record label marketing people write shite like this, from the Hoosiers’ RCA label page:

For those of you who have only just discovered The Hoosiers I will start at the start, for those who claim prior knowledge of The Hoosiers, I suggest you skip this bit and join us at the next paragraph. Deal?

Quickly, for I have little time as I must pop to the shop to pick up some milk: The Hoosiers (formerly The Hoosier Complex) are a triumvirate of odd-pop from Exeter, Reading and Stockholm. Before they were a three piece, they were a two piece and before that they were three one pieces. Its simple maths really, not rocket surgery – which, ironically, is where Irwin, (vocal “assaultist”) met Alfonso – formerly Alan (stick-ferret/drums) – ten years prior, in a local school band named Ronnie Rocket and the Rocket Surgeons.

No, no fucking deal. You make this deal with what remains of the empty shell of achingly meaningless tedium that you call a life if you so please, but only if you truly have not one last spark of spirit or dignity left in your dead soul.

What depresses me the most is that in most people’s view, the title of this album is entirely accurate. The Trick to Life for most people, it would appear, is to aspire to this sort of hellish existence, sound-tracked by, erm, whom, I wonder? Well at the bottom of the Hoosiers’ RCA page it recommends that, if you like the Hoosiers, try the following: Backstreet Boys, Kelly Clarkson, Natasha Bedingfield, Sandi Thom, Lil’ Chris and The Fray. These people do their research depressingly well.

The Boo Radleys – Wake Up Boo!
Johnny Boy – You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve
Radiohead – No Surprises
Dave Matthews Band – Ants Marching

*The actual program may be called something slightly different.

Vieux Farka Toure – Live, The Arches Glasgow, Sunday 25th November 2007

World music of all sorts basically reminds me of two things.  Smooth tossers in minimalist flats with just a little bit of faux-ethnic tat who sported ponytails and appreciated poetry in the 1980s are the first.  The second is this, one of the greatest songs of all time:

The Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/DeadKennedys-HolidayinCambodia.mp3]

So, you remember I told you about my friend Morgan, who has declared a mission to take me to gigs I don’t want to go to – the man responsible for getting me to the Battles gig?  Well you can see what he was up against when he suggested we go along to see the son of Malian legend Ali Farka Touré at the weekend.  I am getting pretty fed up with just how narrow my musical taste is becoming these days though, so I thought I’d give it a go, especially after how much I loved Think Tank, Albarn’s post-Mali Blur album with such strong African influences.

Ultimately, this kind of thing is often far better live than recorded, where the energy and charisma of the performers can bring home some of the local atmosphere of music not well suited to the Glasgow drizzle.  It was a good performance, Touré’s annoyance with the sound guy notwithstanding, although as the latter improved so did the former.  Being outshone by his own guitarist was clearly not part of the plan, and Touré looked pretty bloody miffed early on.  He cheered up though as things improved, and the bonhomie extended to repeated invitations to members of Zeep, their support, to come and join in at various points.

Ultimately though, this wasn’t my bag.  Old fashioned Malian blues I may well enjoy but this stuff was a bit ho-hum.  I salute Morgs for having a go of course, but perhaps this is what you get for going to see Son Of rather than the big man himself.

Blur, on the other hand, never seem to get anything like enough credit for Think Tank.  Honestly, I think it’s one of my favourite albums of the last ten years.  I know Damon Albarn puts a lot of people off but come on, people, this is just a wonderful album.

Blur -  Good Song
Blur – Caravan

Song, by Toad: pwn3d!

(image credit)

I should, retrospectively, have known better than to even bring it up in the first place really. Remember a few weeks back we all had a good laugh at the poor publicity chap who sent the Laura Critchley album to me, of all people, to try? Well I tried to keep it anonymous because, as amusing as the mismatch was, I have a policy on Song, by Toad of not slagging off small artists.

The way I see it, and I’m open to correction on this, if you’re big enough to be in the NME then you’re fair game because honestly why would you care what one lone internet gobshite thinks once you’ve progressed to that level. It’s a different story for small artists of course – they care much more about their own publicity, because there is so much less of it, and the whole thing is altogether more personal. I know it’s a bit false to say that successful groups don’t care about being insulted either, but ultimately they are big enough and ugly enough to look after themselves.

So when I had a laugh at the expense of Laura I was a bit unsure because I didn’t want to explicitly have a dig at someone starting out, but the whole package activated so many of my instant prejudices to such an extent I thought it really was quite funny. Inevitably who I was talking about ended up coming out, unfortunately, and then the poor lass was enthusiastically ripped into by all and sundry. Anyhow, Andrew from Big Print Music found the post and left the following comment, putting me very, very much in my place:

Hey – its always interesting to see things form a different perspective – even if its not what you want to hear… being the bloke thats behind Laura… in a business way that is..!!

Anyhow – quite obviously the PR team didnt send the disc to the right person for reviewing.. so thanks for evening listening to it – I know that people cant be all things to all people…

That said – I thought you might be interested to hear that all the photos you are talking about were done off the cuff – no stylist – no makeup/hair person – photographer was a mate… total budget £0. It was just what we captured on that day – and the reaction was positive which is why we ran with it.

Ho hum… I realise the music is very MOR/Mainstream – but at least she has cowritten all the tracks – and her voice is more than passable… she has worked bloody hard, and is vocally good live as she is on the record.

Anyhow – why am I warbling when the battle here is already lost…!!

Mainly cos I just wanted to put some kind of perspective to this thread… She does deserve some kind of chance in the industry – theres ALOT of other less talented people who have had success… Shes not manufactured… she’s made alot of decisions herself.

Anyhow – time will tell…

(oh – and actually I wanted to sign at least one of her tracks, and had put things into place – before Id even met her, so – no full verticle movement on a meet and greet…!!)

Andrew

So if I didn’t feel badly enough about it before, I certainly do now. So kudos to Andrew for not just calling me a cunt, which he would have been well within his rights to do, and a sheepish apology to Laura for being such a twat. It’s not my kind of music at all, of course it isn’t, but having a dig at someone just starting out, especially coming from a man with absolutely zero musical skills himself, is a bit out of order. When you make Top of the Pops all bets are off, but for now, I am sorry.

You can investigate Laura’s stuff here, if you feel so inclined, and here is a song that seems to be appropriate:

Billy Bragg – This Guitar Says Sorry
Gene – Sick, Sober and Sorry

The Wombats – A Guide to Love, Loss & Desperation

You know, it’s by no means bad, this. I say that because The Wombats’ frankly gimmicky and juvenile lyrics threaten to become irritating, and their bouncy, harmony-laden jerk*-pop is so light and fluffy, I kind of thought the lack of substance would kill my enjoyment of this album. It hasn’t though. In fact, I really quite enjoy it.

I mean, don’t get carried away. I’m not making passionate love to it down the back of the bike-sheds, but it’s enjoyable and upbeat and has far more good songs than I’d actually taken the time to realise. The Wombats have been zinging about the internets for what seems like ages so you, as I was, are probably familiar with most of the good songs on this already. Patricia the Stripper, Backfire at the Disco (well, maybe), Little Miss Pipedream, Party in a Forest, Kill the Director are all good solid pop songs with infectious hooks. Pile them all together and you don’t need much filler to make a pretty good record. I won’t ever play this whole album at once I don’t think, but most of the songs are perfect for party playlists and office listening. Depending, of course, on your office.

You get the picture though, I assume. It’s a good album of bouncy kiddie-pop that we can all enjoy humming along to and not worry ourselves over all that much. Best not look too closely though, as there’s no depth or substance to this record whatsoever.

The Wombats – Kill the Director
The Wombats – Little Miss Pipedream

website | hype | amazon

*As in the physical movement, not the insult. Apologies to Americans, but it’s our language so you can sod off. Try German if you don’t like it.

Oh How Fickle We Are

Cripes, people turn, don’t they?  And they turn fast, too.  Is all the environmental this and green that and sustainable the other getting on your tits too?  Christ it’s pissing me off.  All of it, from the preaching of the converts, to the hollow me-tooism from major multinationals trying desperately to persuade us that they care, they really do care.

It’s called Green Fatigue, apparently, and reminds me of when hotels say that they want to avoid unnecessarily washing towels because they want to pwotect the pweshus wickle enviwunment.  Utter bullshit.  If it was more expensive than just washing the lot all the time, they’d never consider it for a second.

The silly thing is that I come from dyed-in-the-wool hippy stock, and despite my shallow, materialistic veneer I would describe myself as something of a hippy manqué as well.  The friend with whom I was discussing this is also rather of the oatmeal variety himself, and he sparked the whole discussion by expressing frustration at the giddy myopia of the small army of global warming neophytes, all converted in the last six months from a state of skeptical indifference to a tedious kind of giddy sanctimony about everything and anything environmental.

The thing is, from a purely mathematical point of view, of course there’s no absolute certainty about global warming.  It’s a massive system and the interactions are too complex to be certain about any of it.  But it’s interesting how the same tiny sliver of mathematical uncertainty has gone from being a major doubt to totally insignificant in the space of a few months, simply as the tide of public opinion has gathered critical mass.

In Proper Job I design products, mostly medical ones, but products nonetheless.  Objects made of plastic, metal and often some electronics, ranging in size from about as big as a pen to the size of a large television.  As a couple of silly old hippies, my friend and I had to remind ourselves that we’ve been bashing on about the environmental impact to clients for years and invariably the result was utterly blank incomprehension, a moment or two of squirming, and then the resumption of the conversation from before the offending sentence was uttered.  Two years ago we’d have been grateful for anyone, anyone, to listen to us for more than a moment about sustainable product design, and let’s not forget that the enormous amount of plastic we use in various products these days makes up a significant part of our total dependence on oil.  Plastic is a hydrocarbon, and hydrocarbons basically come from oil so, simplifying slightly, without oil there is pretty much no plastic.

It’s amazing how quickly the sudden snowball put our backs up, especially given that we are basically on the same side.  Are we really that misanthropic that the fact that everyone else is suddenly doing it too is enough to send a couple of silly old hippy idealists out to the shops to buy a Humvee?  Well, no of course it isn’t, but it’s amazing how quickly we turn.

King of Prussia – Shades of Hippiedom
The Tragically Hip -  Save the Planet