I’m trying to become just a little bit more relevant to the good people of Edinburgh this year, so I am going to have a go at making this a weekly feature where I pick up on the most appealing looking gigs looming in the capital for the forthcoming week. As it will invariably have mp3s of the bands it should hopefully be useful for the rest of you as well.

Monday 28th January: Operahouse & Endor at Cabaret Voltaire – Free Entry.
Operahouse have a new single, the hugely infectious Born a Boy, out this week so a free gig seems like an excellent chance to check out their excellent bouncy indie-pop.
Endor I don’t know all that well, but I have heard such a lot of good things about them that I am rather looking forward to this.

Operahouse – Machine Palace (Demo)
Endor – Lead Balloons

Wednesday 30th January: Laura Viers at Cabaret Voltaire
I am not a massive Laura Viers fan, but she has done some gorgeous things. I missed her last album but I’m open to persuasion if anyone reckons it’s really worth exploring. I’d be going to this if I had any money left this month. Check out the gorgeous duet on Shadow Blues though – truly exceptional.

Laura Viers – Shadow Blues

Wednesday 31st January: Broken Records & Boyfriend/Girlfriend at The Caves.
This gig is being hosted as part of a club night with DJ sets from Vic Galloway and I Fly Spitfires so it should be brilliant. Tickets aren’t available for sale, so I hope I can get in with my grey hair and qualifications, but I like the sound of Boyfriend/Girlfriend and you all already know how much I love Broken Records. Don’t you?

Broken Records – Lies
Boyfriend/Girlfriend – Fears Of

Saturday 2nd February: Morrissey at the Playhouse
Seriously, I am going to a Mozza gig. I’m not a devoted fan, but I reckon it would be daft to pass up the chance to see a legend live, so thanks to JC at The Vinyl Villain for coming up with a couple of tickets. No idea what I’m going to make of this!

Morrissey – You’re Gonna Need Someone On Your Side

Sunday 3rd February: Okkervil River at Cabaret Voltaire.
If I wasn’t busy I’d be going to this. I really liked The Stage Names, the album they released last year, although I somehow never quite got round to reviewing it. It’s lovely laid back indie Americana with a little more kick than most.

Okkervil River – Unless It’s Kicks

Back at long last, would you believe. After the abortive attempt at a Christmas podcast and then the IT disaster in Toad Hall – when my retarded computer ground to a halt and had to have its entire operating system reinstalled – I have finally managed to record the 19th Toadcast. Sorting out the IT department was not at all as easy as it should have been, so it’s taken ages to get to the point where I could record one again.

So, excuses over and done with, what am I going to inflict on you this time? The bloody Scots, that’s who. The Scottish music scene is an amazingly fertile one, so I thought I’d review 2007 and have a bit of a look forward to 2008. So I’ve pulled together some of the big guys like Malcolm Middleton, Emma Pollock and King Creosote and interspersed a few of the lesser known acts from around here to give you a nicely rounded look at what’s going on musically in the land of Buckfast and deep-fried Mars bars.

Toadcast #19 – The Scotchcast[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/songbytoad/ToadcastNo19.mp3]

01. Sons & Daughters – Gilt Complex (1.01)
02. Glasvegas – Daddy’s Gone (5.55)
03. The Low Miffs – Also Sprach Shareholder (13.58)
04. Malcolm Middleton – We’re All Going to Die (17.24)
05. Aidan John Moffat – The Boy That You Love (23.37)
06. Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta – The Empress (28.00)
07. The Pendulums – Greenhat (34.38)
08. Broken Records – Kathy (40.49)
09. Rob St. John – Wooden Rose (45.44)
10. Found – Some Fracas of a Sissy (53.28)
11. Kid Canaveral – Smash Hits (58.49)
12. Popup – Lucy, What are You Trying to Say? (61.38)
13. Emma Pollock – A Temporary Fix (68.28)
14. King Creosote – Church as Witness (76.04)
15. Mother & the Addicts – Roll Me on Over (79.37)
16. Frightened Rabbit – Be Less Rude (88.09)
17. The Twilight Sad – Walking For Two Hours (94.37)

One of the almighty perils of mp3 blogging (it’s a perilous business I tell you – fraught with danger…. now where was I? Ah yes, forgot to even close my brackets didn’t I. What a muppet… here you go:) So erm, anyway, one of the side-effects of mp3 blogging is that you get so utterly swamped with new music, by zealous promoters, eager bands and your own enthusiasm, that it can be hard to actually remember to listen to old stuff. Not so much the old classics, just the really excellent albums from about two or three years ago which you still love, but which are neither new enough to warrant urgent attention nor legendary enough to have indelibly permeated into your consciousness.

So today I am going to have a little look at my first ever internet Best Of list. I started regularly writing about music back in 2004, long before I even knew what blogs were, and 2004 was my first ever Official List. That was the year Wilco released their masterpiece A Ghost is Born, which was narrowly pipped to the top spot by Nick Cave’s equally stupendous double album The Lyre of Orpheus and Abbatoir Blues. Even Tom Waits released one that year. Real Gone may not have captured me at the time, but it’s one that has a surprising number of excellent songs on it when I take the time to look back.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Cannibal’s Hymn
Wilco – The Late Greats
Tom Waits – Trampled Rose

Looking back at the reviews themselves from that year, I am actually surprised by how steadfast my opinions have been. I can’t say I seriously disagree with anything much I said about those 2004 releases. The Walkmen is still a storming album of fuzzy, guitar and chiming piano-driven brilliance. That Killers album is still an indie-pop classic which, despite whatever failings they might have, caught the mood of the nation perfectly that Summer. And The Dears were one of the first in a new wave of superb Canadian music who, in the track I have chosen, married indie with cabaret, somewhat oddly.

Marianne Faithfull released a record in 2004 too. It wasn’t great, largely because most of it was penned by the dismal PJ Harvey, but Nick Cave wrote a couple of decent tracks for her. The best of the lot though was Last Song, which was written by Damon Albarn who himself recorded a version for last year’s The Good, the Bad & the Queen record. I think I might prefer Marianne’s version, actually. So yes, that’s how I started. It all shifted over to Song, by Toad a year and a bit ago, then I migrated to WordPress in about May and here we are. Let no more albums get lost in the avalanche of newness! I sometimes need to remind myself that I am a fan, not a machine.

The Walkmen – Little House of Savages
The Dears – The Death of All the Romance
Marianne Faithfull – Last Song

This album almost – almost – fell foul of one of the great perils of the internet age: pre-release over-exposure. I’d already heard over half the songs on this record before the album itself ever got anywhere near me, which was close to ruining the surprise and excitement of listening to a new record for the first time. I mean, if you’ve already heard most of the songs already and the few new ones don’t quite cut the mustard then the letdown can overwhelm even the enjoyment of listening to the ones you already knew you liked. Of course, this phenomenon is not exclusive to the internet age: it used to happen with singles too. Gene and The Bluteones spring to mind, back in the mid-90s, but I think it’s a lot worse nowadays.

I mean, a lot of bands get signed now on the back, not of demos per se, but internet self-release EPs and free mp3 giveaways until enough people have heard of them that someone at a record label finally signs what is, in effect, a near-finished product. It appears to me to be much less common for some enterprising A&R man to scour the pubs for a bit of buzz, take a chance on a dozen crap gigs and then finally unearth a group he thinks will be a gem.  The label might take a chance on the back of some sweaty basement performance and *boom* a massive new band appears as if from nowhere. Nowadays the internet, and to a large extent the blogs, are pretty much free A&R for anyone who cares to read. Take the groups your label already has, find the blogs that post about them, set up your RSS feeds and wait for someone else’s work to do your job for you.

Consequently, if you’re a band and can record pretty decent version of your songs and release them before a record label even takes any interest then what are you going to do? You’ll assemble your four or five best tracks, burn them to CD-R and make them available from your website or your MySpace or wherever you can. If you do two of them, like Vampire Weekend did, then all your best material will be out there before anyone ever buys an album. And the label won’t pay you to write new songs will they, because they want the ones that have already been market-tested and that they know the public like.  So, as here, you end up releasing a debut album people know almost back to front before it even hits the shelves.

In this case, fortunately, the songs I don’t know aren’t the dregs of Vampire Weekend’s back catalogue. They are, like the rest of their output, bouncy and immensely enjoyable indie pop with just a touch of the fey about them. There’s obvious splashes of ska and it sounds a little like they kidnapped Paul Simon’s guitarist from the Graceland album, but it works really really well.

There has been a lot of criticism of these guys from the Fun Police about them being superficial flibbertigibbets who practise over-privileged, condescending musical colonialism and I think this is total shit. Honestly, they’ve found a sound they like, they make lightweight and extremely entertaining indie pop and this music can be enjoyed without having to analyse it like some kind of opera critic with a fucking pickle up your arse. Just relax, people, it may be fluff, it may not be remembered in a hundred years but the minute the sun starts shining and your friends come round for a couple of beers this is one of the first albums you are going to want to reach for.

Vampire Weekend – Boston
Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma

website | hype | amazon

I found this absolute gem on relatively new (and also Edinburgh-based – huzzah!) blog Spins & Needles, and I think it’s fucking brilliant. I’m not going to lie and say that this will appeal to everyone, but if any of you revel in the beauty of misery and pessimism taken to an almost amusingly unshackled pinnacle, then you will love this. To the unflinching growl of Glaswegian poet Gerry Mitchell is added macabre folk music with just a touch of the wrath of God about it, and the results are phenomenal.

It’s spoken word too, for the most part, but fear not – this is what spoken word is for. The sheer relish with which Mitchell unleashes his misery on us is completely captivating, and the rich rumble of his voice would almost be ruined by attempts to hit any kind of tune. The magic of his performance is in the way he drips his words out one at a time with a kind of love for each syllable and combination. There’s something utterly Scottish about this, but unless you’ve spent time sharing whiskey with a pickled Scots depressive in an empty pub as the rain absolutely batters down outside, then I doubt I could explain it properly.

Musically, the album is much the same. It’s all slow-moving and painfully lovely strings, played with a love-lorn scrape that I only really think I have ever heard Warren Ellis match. It’s not surprising then that I am reminded of Nick Cave’s gorgeous song Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum, done with The Dirty Three fittingly enough, which could almost be the sonic template for this entire album.

There’s a brand of Scottish miserablism that is in some ways so utterly over the top that there is an element of self-parody in it. A kind of pessimism that so relishes its own deplorable view of the world that it is actually almost a pleasure to indulge. And somehow this kind of album seems cut from just that cloth: so downbeat, so demoralised, so bleak that there is an oddly uplifting quality about it. They’re an odd bunch the Scots – there’s a kind of gloriousness to their gloominess at times.

Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta – Widow Dressing
Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta – The Ragged Garden of Your Eye
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum (with The Dirty Three)

gerry’s myspace | little sparta’s website| buy from fire records

I have tried and tried and tried again to like Cat Power and there is one inescapable conclusion I can manage: I am not just ‘not getting it’, she is just fucking unimaginative, uninspired and dull.   Lounge, souley, mellow blues MOR is all very well but even with a set of memorable tunes such as these it ends up sounding like a bloody novelty album.  What this is is no more than very posh, elaborate and well-funded karaoke.

Basically, I know it might been seen as snobbery to say so, but if these muppets on reality programs show us anything it’s that there are millions of otherwise talentless muppets out there who can really sing.  Throwing a sly cover onto an album is one thing, and playing an unexpected one at a gig is another, but releasing a whole album of them is just plain self-indulgent. I know that Ella and her lot all sang other people’s songs and that it is only since the Beatles that we have required our pop music to be penned by the band themselves.

So am I saying that Ella Fitzgerald was a lesser artist for not writing her own music?  Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.  Why do you think Kylie came storming back into fashion so notably?  A cunning stylist and, most importantly, she shelled out for some really memorable tunes – Spinning Around, Can’t Get You Out of My Head – these are excellent pop songs upon which she depends for the career she has now.  Writing songs that stick in people’s heads or impact on their emotions is the hard part.

Trotting out an album of other people’s songs and, by virtue of your own particularly bland and lifeless style of music, turning them into one indistinguishable, homogeneous mulch is just utterly pointless.  Do not buy this album, it’s shit.

Cat Power – Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again
The Pierces – Boring

As the Interveb Nazis are not allowing sharing of this music in order to keep its mediocrity a secret from potential dupes for as long as possible I can’t even play you anything off it to demonstrate my point.  So here’s one of hers off the soundtrack to the recent Dylan biopic as well as another song I thought was rather appropriately titled.

website | hype | buy the album

This album has been so enthusiastically and so publically fellated by everyone who has set their sweaty little mitts to a keyboard in the last month or so I feel slightly soiled even writing about it.  In terms of thematic content, furious live shows and anthemicism these lads probably have more in common with Toad favourites iLiKETRAiNS than anyone else I would compare them to at the moment.  The obsession with British identity and recent history is very similar, but British Sea Power are a much more melodic group, which has is probably why they have been so fawningly embraced by the mainstream.

After the genius of their gorgeous slow burner Open Season and the ungodly clatter of debut The Decline of British Sea Power I am at a little bit of a loss as to quite what is so much better about this album that seems to have everyone so excited.  I actually found it harder to get into, and I already knew half the songs from live shows.  It has the same big choruses as earlier releases and the same chiming, dare I say it stadium-friendly guitar climaxes.

Unfortunately, while most people love the middle ground this seems to have struck between their two previous albums, personally what I hear are songs just a little short on the fury of the first or the brooding menace of the second. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a terrific record, but I would be mildly surprised to find it on my end of year list for 2008.  Mind you, if you want a fucking good rock ‘n’ roll album to stick on, turn up offensively loud, and dance around to drunk as a skunk then you couldn’t do much better.

So a slightly qualified thumbs up from myself I suppose.  But I’ve been slow to ease my way into British Sea Power albums in the past, and they’ve made me eat my words, so keep an eye on those above and see if I’m not served them alongside a nice, generous slice of humble pie come the end of the year.

British Sea Power – A Trip Out
British Sea Power – Down on the Ground

website | hype | amazon

Tim at The Daily Growl tipped me off to this lovely little mini-album, a mere six songs long, but I had been well aware of Sara Lowes since her work with King Creosote and The Earlies. He has a fine ear for this sort of low-key indie pop stuff with plenty of folk in it and a laid back, evening-with-a-glass-of-wine vibe and this is another excellent discovery by the internet’s favourite ex-Weegie.

By evening music I don’t, as I often do, mean really downbeat. It’s definitely a pop record, and opener I Wish puts you in no doubt of that with a funky, old-fashioned, borderline-R’n'B rhythm. She switches pace quickly however, slipping down into a dreamy ballad that could easily have come out of one of the folkier Northern Soul records in the 70s. This broad span encapsulates the extremes of this album quite well actually. In parts Kate Bush (Down & Out), touches of old school folk, touches of the show tune and a hint of the more soft-focussed kind of jazz siren at times as well. There’s even a bloody 70s disco *pscheuw* sound in Down & Round, of all things.

Perhaps if Feist had been more obsessed with folk than pop she might have produced an album not dissimilar to this one. It’s full of flute, swoonsome harmonies and gentle rising strings. The overall mood of the thing may not be angry or miserable enough to be entirely my kind of music, but this is a really lovely little record.

Sara Lowes – Uniform Days

hype | buy from her myspace page

I am a mere 32 years old. Some of you may be gasping at such superannuation, others chuckling indulgently at callow youth. In the world of music there seem to be a large clump of enthusiastic kids, a big chunk of people like me – getting a little too old to be indie kids but still are – and then another big clump of folk in their forties who decided a few years back that they were never going to be too old for all this and fuck anyone who suggests they are.

I seem to find myself easily identified as the middle category: not enough knowledge of Joy Division to be the latter, nor enough enthusiasm for Blood Red Shoes to be the former, and this is pretty much accurate. The problem is that almost everyone in this country of my age grew up listening to the sort of music that is being reprised right at this very moment, and I missed it. Spending your teenage years in Vienna and Singapore you just didn’t hear current music, ever. Beyond pantomime metal and shitty disco pop it just didn’t make the leap.

This means that when I hear groups like Cats on Fire, Decoration, The Siddeleys, My Teenage Stride, Shout Out Louds and countless others who are either reinterpreting – or just plain ripping off, depending on your view – this sort of sound I actually don’t hear a rip off.  I am hearing a good chunk of this music for the first time, despite it conjuring up a slightly disembodied sense of nostaligia, which is slightly odd because just about everyone my age over here is pretty familiar with this sound from the first time round.  There are patches of knowledge because we did have MTV and my cousin Steve used to send me mix tapes on my birthday, but for the most part my musical knowledge starts almost entirely from scratch in 1993, when I first moved to the UK to go to university.  I was seventeen.

Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Soupdragons, The Wonderstuff and The Levellers were just fading from public approval and Britpop was about to take off.  My first year in Manchester was the year Definitely Maybe, His ‘n’ Hers and Parklife were released.  So I missed C86, despite the fact that I should just have been starting to develop an interest in music at the time.  I was the only person I knew who had heard of The Stone Roses.

This is why you will often hear me get all excited about groups almost anyone else my age would probably dismiss as a bland knock-off of stuff they heard years ago.  For me the first time that is likely to happen is when the 90s Revival kicks in and grunge comes back.

The Cure – Killing an Arab
The Smiths -  Shakespeare’s Sister
The Siddeleys – Sunshine Thuggery
My Teenage Stride – Terror Bends
The Wonderstuff – Welcome to the Cheap Seats
Levellers – Liberty Song
Pulp – Pink Glove
Blur – Tracy Jacks

I introduced The Low Miffs to Blogfresh Radio last week, and that episode is now up on their site. There are a couple of minor factual errors – I really don’t think they come from Edinburgh, for example – but it’s a good episode all in all. It includes a contribution from one of my favourite bloggers, Rich from Cable & Tweed, so get over and have a listen. I don’t think I swear once. Or, more likely, I did, but they cut it out. Bastards.

Erm, so, the gig. I have to confess I was three sheets to the wind for this one, so perhaps apologising to everyone I inflicted my company upon on Sunday might be in order. Particularly the very patient Low Miffs! Unfortunately I’d been at the pub since early afternoon watching the football with some mates, and then arrived at the Bongo Club at normal gig time – i.e. about eight-ish – only to discover that nothing was happening until eleven. So what was there for it but to go to the pub for three more hours.

The plus side of this inebriated condition was that I was in a right good mood by the time the lads came on stage, and wasn’t in any way let down. They’ve not played for a while due to practical reasons so they were raring to go, despite being slightly apprehensive. It was bloody brilliant, too. They’re really rather theatrical on stage and Leo Condie truly goes for it in all his be-suited fervour.

Their songs suited this full-on delivery I reckon, and the saxophone showed through a lot more live than it does on record. I am waiting for their 7″ singles to arrive, but from the looks of it we should expect a lot more good things from these lads in the future.

The Low Miffs – Cressida
The Low Miffs – Where Are Your Songs Now?

website | myspace | buy earl grey & also sprach shareholder