[Sorry, but I've had to disable the audio links in this post.]

[This is a long, long article which my brother wrote for the site. It's a fascinating and really slightly scary piece of writing and I seriously recommend you make the time to read the whole thing. He explains very neatly how the quality of recorded music is taking a massive nosedive, and how really high-definition may be lost to us forever quite soon.

This is something I am genuinely proud to have on this site. After all the fanny jokes and random bollocks, it's nice to publish something with genuine depth of knowledge and thought, despite the depressing inevitability that it took someone else to write it. Little bastard. He's handsomer than me too, the little fucker.

The other thing is that he illustrates his points with mp3s and I am not sure if the quality of the songs I provide will make his argument properly, but click on the pictures and you'll get the point. I know it doesn't fit the narrow column width format too well, but there's not a lot I can do about that, I don't think.]

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This is really odd. Below is a video of anti-gay fruit loop Ken Hutcherson threatening Microsoft for not hating gay people enough. He seems to forget that Microsoft would embrace paedophiles if they thought they might buy enough computers to justify it, so his little band of superstitious pansies has a snowflake’s chance in hell of anything more than the tolerant stonewall treatment.

But more pertinently, and just a little oddly, he comes across as being being just a little bit racist:

“I’m your worst nightmare – a black man…” – please explain how this has anything at all to do with the relevance or validity of your argument.

“…with lots of powerful white people behind him…” – which seems to me to very clearly imply that black people are basically useless and generally to be laughed off when they get uppity, but hot damn if dey haz some white folks behind them then you’d better all sit up and take notice.

The Bellrays – Changing Colours

I have no wish to confess to being a vain fellow whose good will is as cheap as a bit of throwaway ego massage and an insincere compliment, but I don’t think it would be a difficult case to make. There’s little that makes a blogger feel as warm and fuzzy on the inside as a really good freebie. And as the status of that freebie gets higher and higher, our chests puff out just that little bit more, our chins are held just that little bit higher and our step gains just that little more swagger. Getting a guest list spot for the New Pornographers is easily the highest profile freebie I’ve had yet, as I’m quite a junior blogger in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, despite the fact that it was largely due to the fact that I, erm, have a strategically placed friend than that the record company were in any way courting my good graces, it still made me feel really rather cool.

The New Pornographers are an odd band, in terms of where they reside in my affections. They write truly excellent pop songs and they write them about topics which few bands have the courage to take on, never mind the brains to take on effectively. That said, I never quite seem to fall in love with them, despite thinking they are excellent. The music, for all the infectious hooks and sunny harmonies, seems to lack a little impact at times. Having seen them live, I can perhaps venture some reasons for this.

There’s a clipped precision to their recorded music at times, which I find makes it a little harder to engage with emotionally than I would hope. Live, this is all solved, as the gloss is gone. Not to say that they put on a scruffy or amateurish performance, quite the opposite, but the perfectly clean execution of their records is replaced by a more fluid and therefore a much more engaging live show. The live arena strips them of a little of their distinctive sound and, if anything, makes them sound like a more generic indie rock band. It worries me that in saying this I am revealing some repressed MOR craving, but I fervently hope not. This way the infectious tunes have rougher edged indie sound to latch onto and I think this more emotive delivery benefits them hugely.

They may not have had Neko Case along but on a personal level they reminded me a lot of her when I saw her earlier in the year, also at Oran Mor. They were both warm and witty, without being frivolous. Light earnestness may be a contradiction in terms, but it seems to fit quite well to a particularly Canadian manner I see a lot of. This is how Carl Newman came across, chatting lightly and cracking mildly wise from time to time, but never clowning about. The absence of Neko Case was no loss to the band as Kathryn Calder proved every bit as lovely a singer. She really brought alive songs like Challengers and Adventures in Solitude, making them chokingly lovely, and bringing a depth to the interplay with Newman that is one of the best aspects of most New Pornographers stuff.

Some of the songs from Challengers came across so well I feel I may have been a little hasty in moving on so quickly from that album. You know how you sit in a gig and think ‘Oh yay, that song.’ for almost every song, then think back a little and realise that you didn’t actually think you’d liked the album as much as all that. Well, it turns out the New Pornographers are a terrific band, and I had only ever thought of them as good before this.

New Pornographers – Sing Me Spanish Techno
New Pornographers – Challengers
New Pornographers – Adventures in Solitude

The 2008 Plug Awards have been announced, so go along and vote. They are pretty much the best awards going if you ask me, but I am not particularly excited by the nominees this year. That album list, for all it contains an awful lot of very good albums, is pretty lacking in imagination. There are no nominations there that didn’t make me think ‘ah yes, them’ when I read them. The list of best blogs is largely the same. It’s like someone Googled music blogs and wrote down the top five results. That’s not what happens, but you get my drift. Half of them are on the Wikipedia mp3 blog page, which pretty much sums it up. Not much from the old Song, by Toad blogroll, sadly.

Be careful where you say this, though. I stirred up a right old episode of handbags on the bloggers’ message board over at elbo.ws for saying that I thought it was a crap list. I must confess I didn’t express myself very well when I first said it – accusing the nominees of by and large lacking a personal voice, when what I really meant might have been better said thus: they tend not to have that personal journal aspect that I like about my favourite blogs, which makes them as much about the person doing the writing as it does about the music.

Either way, the ensuing kerfuffle would have done a bunch of twelve year old girls proud: the next time I logged in I was ‘the worst poster on these boards’ and ‘retarded’ and found myself fending off the rather pompous, and not a little bit comical, outrage of half a dozen premium bloggers. So I got stuck right back in myself, as I’m sure you can imagine, and the whole thing descended from there. In any case, if the hierarchy of bloggers counted for anything, which it fortunately doesn’t, I would be entirely finished in the blogging world as of this morning.

It was a bit silly really, as there was a perfectly useful discussion to be had in there somewhere, but the ensuing nonsense was classic internet message board: absolutely everyone over-expressing themselves and calling each other ‘tards and so on and so forth. I called someone a cock smoker at one point myself, which I think is one to be particularly proud of. The Aussies really do bring a panache to the world of the casually vulgar insult that the rest of us can only aspire to. I told another gentleman what his writing tended to substitute sincerity for writerly knob-cheese, which perhaps mightn’t have been the most diplomatically adept way to get the discussion back on course. And, almost inevitably, I think I called them all a bunch of whores at one point as well.

Either way, without going into the rights and wrongs of the actual argument, it’s amazing how easily this sort of thing seems to happen on the internet. People just don’t seem to have quite evolved the means for preventing this sort of cycle escalating far, far faster than it would in the real world. Sometimes I think people get a bit carried away coming up with a neatly phrased put-down and rather forget the discussion they’re in. I know I went a bit over the top at the time, but then again, I did do some excellent work, especially towards the end when I got a little irritated.

I suppose what it really comes down to is the fact that it is incredibly difficult to be sensitive on the internet. I knew that half those bloggers, whose work I was about to publically declare not all that interesting, use those boards. In a direct personal conversation you can convey a lack of desire to be confrontational and directly hurtful with body language, but it is pretty bloody tricky to do so when writing something down, especially when the content itself is really quite touchy.

The Wedding Present – Getting Nowhere Fast (Live)
Shout Out Louds – Ill Wills
Art Pedro – I’m the Greatest

…and don’t spare the horses.

Yes, we are back. What an enormous relief, I hear you all cry. How did you ever get by without me. Well before I get back to my usual crisp, clear and perfectly formed blog posting* I have some bits and bobs to round up, so this will be a bit of an all-over-the-place post.

Christmas lists:
Yeah, I’ll probably be making at least one. Top 20 albums perhaps, but not much more than that because I just can’t quite be arsed. A lot of people are making Festive 50 lists in honour of the great John Peel, but I am not sure I could face it. The avalanche of new songs in 2007 reduced to fifty? I doubt I could whittle them down, but I may yet have a go.

The Contrast Podcast is doing one, and listeners and participants are invited to take part. It’s a great project, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about then bugger off and have a listen. Just email Tim your top five songs of the year, in order, by November 27th and you’ll be counted. The whole lot will come out as a series of podcasts over the Christmas period, which sounds rather jolly. Details on participating can be found at the bottom of this post.

Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Leftovers

The Waiting Room will also be doing a big old Christmas Special, with special listener requests. It doesn’t have to be at all related to Christmas, so if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear then leave a comment on the site or email DC direct and let him know. My vote was for No Christmas in Kentucky by Phil Ochs which, if you know it, is a relentlessly depressing song about poor people not being able to afford the sort of stuff everyone else takes for granted at Christmas time, and just how bleak Christmas must be if you are living in poverty and abandoned by your nation. I couldn’t find an mp3 though, so the festive spirit has been given a temporary reprieve.

Decoration – Only a Plague Can Stop Us Now

Other Shit:
Mike at Manic Pop Thrills reckons we should try and engineer a Christmas #1 for Malcolm Middleton in the UK charts. Given that the song in question is entitled We Are All Going to Die, I think you’ll agree that there could be no better choice. Given that the likely winner is some ratty old transvestite from The X-Factor, I think we owe it to ourselves as a community to get Malky in there if at all possible. Help save Christmas for the misanthropes! ‘We’re All Going To Die’ gets a digital only release on 17^th December and I’m not sure where to buy it just now, so I’ll try and remind you all closer to the time.

Blogfresh Radio has been scraping the bottom of the barrel once more and invited me to talk about Found, one of last week’s reviews. Click here for the appropriate episode.

The Sequins – Treehouses

The Daily Growl – or Tim, as he’s known to his mates – took me on a pilgrimage to the new Rough Trade record shop when I was down in London, where I spent almost a hundred quid on vinyl. What a moron. And before you ask, no I can’t afford it – not anything like. Still, I have accumulated enough singles recently that record companies have sent me as promos that I figured I might as well give in and buy a record player. Some fifteen years after they became obsolete. Genius.

Phil Ochs – Talking Cuban Crisis
*Anyone sniggering at this is barred.

Morning you ‘orrible lot. My wench is away being important once more. She said to me the other day when she was trying to skive off work due to a hangover: ‘I can’t go into work in a bad state, I handle money.’ Haha, what bollocks. I love it when financial people get all delusional like that, so don’t worry I set her straight. I calmly pointed out to her that if I fucked up my last job someone might have found a small metal implant buried in their spinal column. This means dead or paralysed. She stopped, fortunately.

‘I handle money though.’ Yeah well, I handle my penis and every last little sperm is a potential human life, so don’t gimme that. The frustration’s setting in again, can’t you tell? This podcast has some news and some current things, and then explores the randomiser on my music library, doffing my cap to the recent Contrast Podcast episode which I was too slow to participate in. Gah.

It is also my birthday on Monday, thirty-two since you ask, and we will be down in London to celebrate the occasion with our Southern friends, so there’s a couple of birthday thingies in there too, most screamingly obviously the first track of course. Enjoy Toadlings, enjoy.

Toadcast #16 – The Birthday Podcast

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01. Clem Snide – Happy Birthday (02.18)
02. The Courteeners – Acrylic (08.56)
03. Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong – Sleazy Hughes (12.46)
04. Cloud Atlas – Cigarettes & Apricots (15.54)
05. Arab Strap – There is No Ending (24.04)
06. Malcolm Middleton – The Devil & the Angel (29.32)
07. Down the Tiny Steps – Photosynth (37.29)
08. Eef Barzelay – Make Another Tree (42.19)
09. Loch Lomond – Northern, Knees, Trees & Lights (51.35)
10. The Pogues – Bolero Del Perro Listo (59.23)
11. Crash Test Dummies – Sonnet #3 (The Cold is Here) (66.52)
12. Ben Folds – You’ve Got to Learn to Live With What You Are (68.44)
13. Cold War Kids – Hair Down (81.39)
14. The Hold Steady – The Party Pit (90.22)
15. Tom Waits – Diamonds & Gold (94.11)
16. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Monsieur Le Charmant (100.18)

Bugger me, that was close! My hard drive, on which I store every last song I own and have ever owned, simply ceased to function yesterday. No, the IT chap here at work may well be able to salvage it anyway, so all is not lost. But more importantly I had only recently backed everything up anyway. So I lost maybe the Kid Harpoon EP, which I can easily find again, and maybe a week or so of songs I downloaded from other folks’ blogs.

So, I am buying a brand new hard drive immediately and let this be a lesson to you kids out there – backing up, it’s like eating your greens: not fun, but you’ll thank us for it in the long run.

And for no particular reason other than that I found them recently and have no idea where they came from, here are a couple of acoustic versions of songs that seemed rather appropriate:

REM – End of the World as We Know It (Acoustic)
Manic Street Preachers – Everything Must Go (Acoustic)

I’ve been listening and listening to this and I still have no idea what I think about it.  One thing is for sure, I love listening to it, but for some reason I doubt whether or not I love it as an album.

The Fence Collective, for ’tis they yes indeed, describe it as Bleep Hop and I’m not entirely sure I can manage any better.  The Fence Collective are operating in another universe from the days of King Creosote handing his home made CD-Rs over the counter in his St. Andrews record shop.  Found are a proper signing for a proper label, and the whole enterprise looks pretty fucking sharp these days.

It’s lurching, spunky, sprightly indie pop that jumps about all over the place like a hyperactive teenager.  It somehow manages to combine classically Scottish lyrics – ie. deplorably miserable, but just a bit too witty to be self-indulgent – with music that spans an odd divide.  On one hand it touches King Creosote’s introspective indie folk with more than a little bit of eccentric electronic noodling.  On the other it launches into a sort of hyperactive spazz-pop that bounces all over the shop, and often in the middle of a song you thought was doing the sensitive thing.

If you can make more sense of this then good luck.  Honestly, it’s barely been off my stereo since I bought it, but not because I love it, more because I’m fascinated by it.  The love may well come later though, because every time I listen to the bloody thing I like it more and more.  Records like this are why we need independent record labels.

Found – You’re Really Quite the Catch
Found – Some Fracas of a Sissy

website | myspace | buy the album

I threatened this one a little while ago, and it is lovely indeed.  It’s dreamier and more uneasily atmospheric than their gorgeous Lament For Children and as such took me ages to get into.  Regular reader DC mentioned on his radio show The Waiting Room that he too had been initially disappointed and needed to work his way into the album.

I concur entirely, and promise that once you do this you will be properly rewarded because this is a terrific record.  I’ve mentioned their Sufjan Stevens similarities in earlier chatter and this holds even more on this release, although they have a sort of underlying tension to their sound where Stevens is more winsomely elaborate.

It slides from the lovely to the uneasy, but once you let it seep in it is truly arresting music.  Song in ¾ is superb, straddling The Decemberists and the Builders & the Butchers, with whom Loch Lomond are soon to release a split 12″ – really fucking exciting news.  All Your Friends Are Smiling has a plaintive violin that comes straight from the Scottish music I expected when I first heard the band’s name.

Other stuff, the lovely opener Carl Sagan for example, or Field Report sits in the well established North-West folk-pop area that has emerged in the last few years, and is as good an example of it as I have heard.  Mandolins, fiddles and a lovelorn folk rhythm provide the backdrop, often a melancholy one but never maudlin.  On top of this Ritchie Young’s somewhat nasal but nevertheless lovely voice potters along and, as with Lament For Children, knows just when to stretch its legs and provide something with more desperation, more pathos.  This particular talent turns a lovely album into a wonderfully engagingly and emotionally vital one which I highly recommend you get your grubby little mitts on as soon as you can.

Loch Lomond – Northern, Knees, Trees and Lights
Loch Lomond – Song in ¾

website | hype | buy the album

I am about to fall foul of Godwin’s Law in my first sentence, but sometimes I wonder why we all demonise Hitler quite so much. Good start, eh? By this I do not mean to make excuses for anything he did or to play down his significance or the horror of the world he tried to create, I mean to talk about other people because Hitler was not as exceptional as you would think, given his status as human horror figure par excellence.

This all arose because I mentioned to a friend of mine that Mrs. Toad and I were planning on painting a massive Soviet Constructivist mural on the back wall of our living room. He said that it sounded like an incredibly cool idea, which of course it does, if a little nuts. Anyhow I said that I knew it was a little politically sensitive, but the actual graphic art from that period was just stunning, so sod it. The only other propaganda stuff I like as much is the Nazi stuff which, idelogy aside, is also amazingly gorgeous graphic art.

His response was interesting. ‘Oh, but you couldn’t ever do that, that would just be way too controversial’, and of course he’s right, it would be too controversial. Brian Ferry expressed a liking for their architecture and was absolutely slaughtered for it. There may well be much more personal context to that, but frankly that’s beside the point. A Nazi mural on the living room wall of your house would cause people to draw breath very sharply indeed.

But why would the Constructivist one not? Constructivism as an artistic movement flourished during Stalin’s reign and was directly influenced by his ideology. Stalin was actually responsible for a similar number of deaths – roughly 20 million* which compares pretty neatly with Hitler’s 20 million. These figures represent just murders, not war deaths. Hitler did pretty much single-handedly cause the Second World War of course, which counts for an awful lot. Nevertheless, even though Stalin is increasingly recognised for his excellence in the field of genocide, the fact that his rate of simple cold-blooded murder compares with that of Hitler makes it a little odd that the mention of his regime and his ideology does not elicit anything like the same horror in the West.

Now obviously Stalin didn’t really threaten direct geographical conquest of our homes, but then Hitler was never going to conquer America either, and yet this mentality still prevails there. It could be argued that Stalin predominantly killed his own people and was thus less of an threat to people outside his borders, but that is nonsense. Russia was very much an empire at the time, so try telling the Ukrainians, the Uzbeks, the Georgians, the Chechens and everyone else he slaughtered that it was only Russians who he threatened.

The other thing is that in percentage terms, apart from in Poland, Hitler wasn’t that efficient either. He killed almost 18% of the Polish population**, but elsewhere he was far less successful. Why is that worse than the likes of Pol Pot who exterminated a similarly massive proportion*** of his population, albeit lesser absolute totals? Hutus versus Tutsis anyone? And the daddy of them all, the relatively unknown Mao Zedong, who managed to eradicate, by conservative estimates, over 40 million people. Forty million. In fact estimates get as high as 43 million for the Great Leap Forward alone.

Now, as I said, I am not under any circumstances trying to downplay the horror of Hitler and the Nazi regime. What amazes me as much as anything is actually that he wasn’t as exceptional as you’d think. And it’s odd that he seems to be the poster child for deranged genocidal lunatics when there were actually worse. I suppose in that sense he has become a symbol in Western culture as much as a historical figure.

As much as anything it interested me that my friend visibly flinched at the idea of a Nazi mural, but thought a Soviet one sounded cool. Fascinating, I thought. Although now that I think about it, perhaps a Soviet mural from the Space Race era might be a less creepy thing to have on our wall. Ugh!

DeVotchKa – The Enemy Guns
Calexico – Dance of Death
Adam & the Ants – Deutscher Girls

Notes on sources:
* All sources are from this site unless otherwise stated. This gentleman is not an historian, he merely works in a library, but he provides massive numbers of direct citations so appears to me to be a reliable source. You are free to dispute this and anything he says of course, and I know the dangers of straying too far from source material, but I am not an historian either.
** From a BBC wiki-ish project, described here.
*** The New York Times.