I find the idea of posting endless Christmas novelty tracks around this time of year to be both tedious and lazy. When I think about the best things that Christmas means to me, it is warmth and family time and the chance to just relax and spend time with the people I love the most. It is not sleigh bells and fucking mistletoe. Consequently, when I think about Christmas music it most certainly does not include some indie group either rattling off an ironic version of some shitty festive song, nor does it include some ‘twist’ on the genre either, where misery and unhappiness are overplayed to try and subvert the overweening saccharine of the genre as a whole.

What Christmas music tends to include for me is music that makes me feel warm and cosy inside. Intimate, emotional songs that are warm and sincere and have a wonderfully enveloping atmosphere, to go with the crackling fire. This pretty much excludes everything that anyone could describe as a Christmas song, but that is, in a musical sense anyway, how I see Christmas.

This song, on the other hand, is a song about Christmas that is in no way a Christmas song. There is nothing about this track that you would ever want to play as you munched on mince pies with a slosh of expensive brandy lurching dangerously about your glass as you sway precariously back and forth in mid-conversation with some elderly aunt you never speak to at all for the other three-hundred and sixty-four days of the year.

Phil Ochs is a genuine genius. He wrote some of the most directly political, the angriest and the most conscientious music in history. If you are one of those who looks at the hideous gargoyle that modern America has become, with its total disregard for its own poor, its warped, impotent rage manifesting itself as foreign policy, and the vain, selfish avarice that the charred ashes of the American dream have become, and feels nothing but disgust, it is people like Phil Ochs that should temper your views.

For the same society that produces such bloated parasites as Bush and Falwell, such vicious scorpions as Rumsfeld and Cheney, the kind of self-regarding insecurity that condones the genocide of anyone other than themselves as long as it ameliorates their own contemptuous sense of self-righteous indignation, and the sort of business practises that define what others do as immorally anti-competitive and what one does oneself as enshrined in the imaginary declaration of the rights of the greedy, the grasping and the aspirational, must also produce its antitheses. Any country that produces this kind of rottenness must, almost by definition, produce the people who fight against it the most directly and with the most courage.

In other words, if you think it takes courage to sit on this side of the Atlantic and snipe about stripping Americans of their civil liberties, destroying the rule of law in order to give the government unchecked power to do as it pleases, suppressing internal dissent and calling all who question this madness traitors, imagine what it takes to deal with it face to face. Phil Ochs was just that man. He was far from just a political singer, he was also a brave activist. He never flinched from anything, and spoke with his heart and conscience and he acted on his beliefs with the courage barely a single caustic commentator today could come within a mile of equalling.

Eventually, disillusioned by the brutal police attacks on an anti-Vietnam war protest, amongst other things, and emotionally devastated by an attack in South Africa that left his voice permanently damaged, he took his own life in April 1976. For a better history, try reading this, from which I have lifted the following quote.

His nephew David found him hanging from his own belt in his sister’s bathroom. He was thirty-five years old. I can make no case for martyrdom here. There is nothing noble about suicide, regardless of how that suicide may have been the result of social forces or diminished expectations. Had he lived, I doubt Phil would have made any new songs, and if he had, they probably would not have compared favorably with his best work. But it remains a fact that whenever I read about some ludicrous injustice or monumental hypocrisy, I wonder what Ochs would have said about it, how he would have summed up the situation with an acerbic line or two. And I wonder who the next dead hero will be.

He reminds me of Bill Hicks a little in that sense. In fact, I have Bill’s commentary on the last war in Iraq, and its just frightening how applicable it is to this one. So for those who berate America, of whom I am definitely one, think on this: those of us who so smugly criticise, where is our Bill Hicks, and where is our Phil Ochs?

Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky
Phil Ochs – The Ballad of William Worthy
Phil Ochs – Here’s to the State of Mississippi
Bill Hicks – Hello Oxford (Best bits towards the end)
Bill Hicks – Polls (Excerpt)

Buy some Phil Ochs here. You’ll be a better person for it.
Also, visit The Waiting Room and have a listen.  If it hadn’t been for DC I might never have found No Christmas in Kentucky.  Thanks mate!

Facebook may be where it’s at for a number of reasons, but MySpace still floats my boats simply for the music side of things.  Well, that and the lack of irritating people you weren’t really friends with at school littering your inbox with ‘amusing’ clips from YouTube of a monkey peeling a banana with its fucking arse cheeks, but that’s a rant for a whole other day.  A friend request landed in my MySpace inbox recently from a gentleman from Sunderland going my the nom de plume of Maxwell Panther.   Jesus the recordings are rough, but there is something about them that I really like.

The growly, scratchy songs are performed in a Lou Reed meets the Wave Pictures style, with a little Mark Lanegan and even Billy Bragg thrown in.  It all sounds like it was recorded on a tape recorder at the bottom of a cupboard in the next room, but its a style I find myself really warming to.  There are many down sides to the digital revolution, not least the steady decline of the economic viability of really high quality studios to make perfect recordings of music that benefits from that kind of equipment.  On the other side, it gives people like this the opportunity to record their songs easily.  He doesn’t need the posh kit, and the world is a better place for having Maxwell Panther’s songs in it.

The songs tend to be nicely turned explorations of modern life, coupled with a dash of borderline-existentialist anxiety, although it tends to manifest itself with enough anger and confrontation to never sound at all self-indulgent.  Given that the fellow lives in Sunderland with his missus and his five-year-old I can’t see him aiming for international stadium rock superstardom, although fuck it, it’d be better than fucking Razorlight wouldn’t it, but I reckon there’s more than a few people out there who’d like this stuff.  He’s a bloody good songwriter, and I love the ultra-low-fi production.  What a pleasant surprise this turned out to be!

Maxwell Panther – A Shade Away
Maxwell Panther – Rewire
Maxwell Panther – Too Many Magazines

Maxwell Panther’s MySpace page

Well you know how I said I wasn’t so convinced by Toadcast #17?  Well it proved somewhat prophetic, although that prophesy may have been somewhat self-fulfilling of course.  It’s one of my least downloaded podcasts for ages, but this one should sort that out.  There’s some genuinely excellent music on here, although most of it is pretty obscure.  There’s no Arcade Fire or anything to pull in the punters, bar a bit of The Magnetic Fields, but a really good selection of new and emerging music nevertheless.

And why the Homecast?  Well that’s obvious of course: we’re back in our house at long last and I recorded this from my massive old lab bench that doubles as a desk and music centre all at once.  It’s fucking brilliant – I really should take a picture and post it for you so you can see.  The bench is 2.75m long, so I have computer and stuff at one end, stereo equipment at the other and a couple of good sized speakers either side. A music anorak’s paradise!

Toadcast #18 – The Homecast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Eureka Springs (Edit) (00.00)
02. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (02.30)
03. Flashguns – St. George (07.53)
04. George Pringle – Carte Postale (13.52)
05. Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Own Me (16.59)
06. Destroyer – Foam Hands (21.55)
07. Howlies – Aluminum Baseball Bat (28.44)
08. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir – Aspidestra (38.36)
09. Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Leftovers (40.48)
10. Ruth Theodore – Overexpanding (49.22)
11. Akron/Family – Ed is a Portal (55.28)
12. Victor Borge – Phonetic Puncutation (63.22)
13. Josiah Wordsworth – Drive-by Media (70.23)
14. King of Prussia – Spain in the Summertime (74.44)
15. The Magnetic Fields – Threeway (83.07)
16. The Forms – Knowledge in Hand (87.44)
17. Howlies – Smoke (90.14)
18. The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom (95.38)
19. Found – When You Fall (102.09)

Well the season of lists and summaries and the relentless posting of annoying novelty Christmas songs may be upon us, and the release of new records may have slowed to the slightest of trickles to avoid being swamped by the overflow of effluvial Christmas Best Ofs*, but musicians are still plying their trade, even in December.

I found out about the Flashguns on that toppest of top cutting edge British indie blogs Fucking Dance. They are from Brighton and only barely out of diapers: still, in fact, at boarding school. So apart from being yet another indication that music is increasingly becoming an activity for the posh, who can afford the idle time and the kit (sometimes, just sometimes, I have some sympathy for the Gallaghers), the key question is of course: are they any good?

The short answer is an only slightly qualified yes. If you pop over to their MySpace page you can preview five songs, a couple of which I’ve cheekily ripped for you at the bottom of this post (of the others, House of Flowers is also well worth a listen). In sonic terms they flirt dangerously with Joe Lean/Johnny Foreigner/Courteeners jelly-mould NME toss-fodder. In my opinion however, their Smiths, Cure and other 80s British indie influences do more than enough to lift them well above that level of banal mediocrity. The slightly pained yelp of Sam’s vocal is a genuine pleasure and their guitar riffs have an insistence that has me irritating the shit out of my colleagues here at Proper Job with incessant two-finger table drums.

Ultimately I think you’d be forgiven for writing these lads off as just another of ‘that lot’, and they certainly won’t surprise you particularly, but I definitely think they have a little something extra that marks them out as being well worth keeping a bit more of an eye on. They’re pretty straightforward, but I rate these guys, I really do.

The Flashguns – St. George
The Flashguns – Bells at Midnight

*Best of the Libertines. The fucking Libertines. What a flagrantly whorish hawking of a once-great band that is. In fact, it may be the most offensive Christmas Best Of of the lot for me, just because of the sheer disregard for the integrity of their legacy that it represents. One can only assume the marketing exec whose idea it was was being sucked off by his own grandmother as he pitched it to his amphibious colleagues.

Right, I’ve slagged off the whole boiling lot in my previous post, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that I hate Christmas with a passion, and in many ways I do. But Christmas is, believe it or not, my favourite time of year in many ways.

Are you surprised that a bad-tempered old cynic such as myself should make such a statement? Well probably not, because there’s a pretty obvious vein of romanticism close to the surface which my regular readers will have had no trouble noticing.

When my family do Christmas we do indeed buy presents, but not particularly expensive ones. There’s usually a couple of books to be found around the tree, some music (mostly from me), some worthless but nevertheless rather lovely rubbish from a junk or antiques shop and a small handful of daft but thoughtful things that for some reason or another made us think of the person in question during the year. We don’t spend much, but we do tend to bring nice things for each other.

What really makes Christmas for me is the peace and quiet and the cosiness. We cook, a lot. The meals are long and prepared with care. Two or three people spend most of the day cooking, and then we sit down in the evening with candles and the fire lit and spend about four or five hours eating and chattering (see pic, top). During the day we shop for the next meal, and walk in the countryside (we tend to spend Christmas out in France but if we’re in Edinburgh, as we will be next year, we’ll probably go for a walk down by Cramond or in the Botanics, if they’re open).

There’s lots of music, from my Mum’s classical to my brother’s jazzier stuff, to my Dylan and Waits, but all of it is cosy , downbeat and emotionally solid, without being miserable. Mum gets quite keen on having lots of traditional, hand-crafted decorations, Mrs. Toad spends a little too extravagantly on wine, I joust with Mum for control of the stereo, Dad reads his books and my brother makes sure he re-visits all his childhood rituals with all of us – walks with Dad, long late night chats with me, flavoured with new music and gin, and cooking with Mum.

So as much as I loathe what Christmas is, I absolutely love what we do with it. We eat, we relax and we spend time together. The cold and dark and the fire make it all very slow-paced and quite magical, and generally one of my favourite times of the year. How can you build a proper family if you don’t do this – take time to be together, to talk and to do things as a group? We’re not even remotely religious, but it’s times like this we reaffirm all those ties and relationships and traditions that make our family so close, and despite the horrors of the tinsel and the shopping frenzy around us, I wouldn’t swap our family Christmases for anything.

If this doesn’t bring a tear to your eye then you have no soul worth saving:  Tom Waits – Take it With Me
Sheryl Crow – Home (Yes, Sheryl Crow)
Evan Dando – All My Life
The greatest and truest christmas song of all time, and yes I did post it last year, deal with it: Tom Lehrer – A Christmas Carol

Ah, the embarrassment. What a fool I was, but such was the inevitability I can’t really feel all that ashamed. Basically, I bought my first record player since I was 17 about four hours before our housewarming party on Saturday, and you can imagine the rest. I’ve been so excited about this ever since I made the decision a couple of months ago, that I have accumulated a pretty decent stack of vinyl in the meantime, giving Scotland’s second hand shops a pretty good scouring, with plenty more to come.

So, having left my whole music collection on random through most of the party, due to not having enough time to throw together even the most rudimentary of playlists, I inevitably failed to resist the urge of old Stones singles, some Jam, some old Motown, something by The Beat, Elvis Costello and so on and so on. Of course, being a music nazi to begin with, and being all the more excited to play with my new toy, I was in no mood whatsoever to let anyone else play at all.

Unfortunately, most of my music is not party music, especially not my vinyl purchases, so inevitably as I got drunker and less concerned with everyone else, the music got more and more maudlin. Billy Bragg, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, James Yorkston, even Leonard Cohen may have made an appearance. It got to the point where I insisted on trying again and again to play a Bruce Springsteen record that clearly had something wrong with it.

The only saving grace was that I was so exhausted after working from 8am to 1am virtually all week to get the house ready and so drunk from quaffing at the sort of reckless pace that giddy relief brings that I passed out some time at, apparently, three or four in the morning (it may have been earlier – I was pretty wasted). This left the remaining heroes of booze a good two or three hours of uninterrupted access to my month and a half’s worth of music, and freedom was theirs at last!

What a fool. But I slept the sleep of the contented that night, I tell you!

Something I played really early on: Edith Piaf РMon L̩gionnaire
Something I was asked to play but I think I forgot. Band of Horses – Is There a Ghost
Something I probably played far too often: The Beat – Tears of a Clown

In my previous post I mentioned hating Christmas, and my loathing was seconded by a reader who writes this rather interesting and very personal blog.

As November is over and the worst of the house trauma appears to be behind us, at least for now, I suddenly find myself spat out into the world of Christmas. Honestly, I think Christmas has improved this year, in the British Isles at least. The single most offensive thing about Christmas is, of course, the greed, and that seems a little more under control than usual.

I’ve read a lot about crazy Christians in America getting all over-excited about ‘The War on Christmas’. To my non-American readers, and I must confess to myself as well, both sides of this argument strike me as being completely insane. Removing the term ‘Christmas’ from Winter celebration stuff seems completely fucking pointless to me.

If a Muslim wishes you ‘Happy Ramadan’, a Chinese ‘Happy New Year’ in February or a Jew ‘Happy Hannukah’ and it in any way hurts your feelings, you are… sheesh, just so pointlessly, tediously pusillanimous that I can’t even be bothered thinking up a pithy put-down. Just fucking well gird your loins, clench your teeth and get over it. It might be worse. You might have colon cancer. In fact, you probably deserve colon cancer.

That said, these things are sensitive in the States at the moment and, pointless as it is, in the current environment the government probably can’t talk Christmas without having to include every last stupid religious festival in their considerations including, presumably, some potentially rather cool ones for the Scientologists, hopefully involving volcanoes and spaceships and nymphomaniac space babes. Predictably, the Conservative Christian Right are painting this as some sort of Darwinist, Librul, baby-raping War on Christmas. How depressingly inevitable.

All in all it is a trivial, childish argument, and both sides should be fucking ashamed of themselves that this puerile discussion is even taking place. Christmas is not a Christian ceremony and never has been. It is a pagan rite that was co-opted because the early church realised that they could never force people to give it up, and a softer line would stand a far better chance of keeping things under control. This in turn would allow people to adopt Christianity without having to reject the entire basis of their spiritual lives up to that point. Tactically sound thinking, I’m sure you’d agree. Read the Bible. There is no mention of Santa Claus, reindeer or mince pies anywhere.

The real war on Christmas, and the one the dismally narrow-sighted religious right utterly fail to grasp, is the fact that it is becoming so ubiquitous it is now an entirely secular festival based upon the worship of that oh so twenty-first century god: greed.

If you want to find the War on Christmas look in your shops and at your advertising. A potentially brilliant celebration of family and friendship and generosity and warmth and winter has been distorted into a grotesque carnival of avarice and envy and pornographic acquisitiveness. So fuck Christmas and fuck the retail sector. Don’t waste your money on tat, spend it going to see your mates and spending time with your kids and appreciating being indoors in the warmth on a freezing cold night, with nothing more than a glass of wine, a bit of Tom Waits and a warm cuddle for company.

Tom Waits – Silent Night

Sorry about the deafening silence here recently, but there’s not a lot I can do about it.  We are taking the week off to try and get the house up to scratch before our housewarming party on Saturday, and the internet connection is yet to be restored.  Hopefully I’ll be able to post again before the end of the week, but that’s about it.

Since you asked, I am knackered, covered in paint and sick to death of fucking plumbers.  The place is starting to look snappy though.  Why is my bathroom paint like a Madonna song?  Because it’s too fucking blue, that’s why.  Yes, Toadlings, it has come to this.

Incidentally, anyone know why anyone would find their way to this blog using the search terms ‘song by toad christmas’? Have I ever mentioned Christmas here, or promised anything festive?  Apart from decrying it as a frenzied orgy of pointless greed and rapacious avarice, I can’t think of anything I might have to say on the subject.  But more on this later, when I am back in business properly.  It’s not all bad, but most of it is pretty unedifying.

Speak to you all in a bit, then.

Cheers,
Matthew

It’s free, but honestly, it would be worth paying for.  Howlies have made their EP Trippin’ With Howlies available for free download from their website, here.  I’d highly recommend it, as it’s a superb wee record.  Part surf-pop, part old time rock ‘n’ roll and part scratchy, gravelly indie-pop, quite how we’ve ended up in a world where this sort of thing is being handed out for nothing is beyond me.  If I were in a position to pay to see these lads live, then I’d feel less guilty, but enjoying something and not being able to acknowledge the work that went into it with a fiver still seems wrong to me.  I know the world is changing and there are a million reasons it makes sense to do this, but I still feel wrong just helping myself.

It has cracking pace, and snarls with plenty of indie guitar balls, but underpinning all this is a melodic structure from old fashioned times which reminds me slightly of the Raveonettes’ approach.  The approach may be similar, but the two groups don’t sound much like each other.  Their list of influences might well point you to what to expect.  In terms of how they build their songs, Bo Diddley, James Brown, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry are all evident, but in terms of how they play them you see names like the Ramones and the Velvet Underground in there.

It sounds like a bit of amish-mash, but the fact that the writing comes from one side and the playing from the other means you have an easily graspable sound right from the off, and with songs of this quality you’re always going to be onto a winner.

Howlies – Angeline

website | myspace | band blog

This music drifts from the distorted acoustic songwriting of Lou Barlow on one side and a slightly fuzzy take on West Coast pop on the other. At one minute you hear the Beatles and the other Pavement.

It’s one of those albums I suppose I’ll never be falling all over myself to push on people, but it’s solid and it all works really well. There’s nothing ostentatious going on, just good solid songwriting about the sort of topics that lift a record above the average ‘baby I luv u’ nonsense you hear all day on the radio. It’s a grower too, for sure, but not in a difficult way. More in the manner that it goes quite quickly from ‘oh that’s decent’ to ‘oh that’s really very good indeed’ over the course of a good handful of listens.

The wistful pianos of Physics Never Stood a Chance beautifully compliments the toe-tappingly insistent rhythm and slightly mucky guitar riffs of Beatlesy opener Spain in the Summertime. It’s small, this, but perfectly formed. Not a rush out to the shops right away job, but truly worth investing in should you have a spare eight dollars. It may sound straightforward enough, but there’s enough pain in the voice, enough fuzz in the guitars and enough motion in the rhythm to make this a really good record.

King of Prussia – Misadventures of the Campaign Kids
King of Prussia – Terrarium

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