Christ I am turning into a dickhead.  Euan and Bart, who you may all know from their frequent contributions to the comments section here at Song, by Toad, are both friends of mine and have both been treated shamefully by my good (good – ha!) self in recent weeks.  I have forgotten to mention both of their recent gigs.  First it was Bart’s Gentle Invasion show with The Second Hand Marching Band, and this week it was Euan’s turn, when I entirely neglected to mention the fact that The Kays Lavelle are playing at Henry’s tomorrow (Thursday 15th May).

Please go along and clap furiously, because I am feeling really shitty about this.  People like them, apart from being good pals, make an enormous contribution to sites like this by commenting frequently and for most part vaguely sensibly, because it makes the place look populated and enjoyable and keeps the “Yo man this rokz” or “U R teh SuXORZZ!!!1!” crowd very much at arm’s length.  So the least I can do is try and make a contribution to their stuff in return.  And recently I haven’t done this, and I do not like it.

So please go to the Kays show and, erm, help me make up for being a dick.  And buy Euan a pint while you’re at it, and you can trade the cost off against the reams and reams of brilliant music I introduce you to every single day of the fucking year. Oh, er, oops.  Contrition of course, I was meant to be showing contrition.

Sorry lads, seriously.

The Kays Lavelle – First Light
And just for fun:
iLiKETRAiNS – A Rook House For Bobby
iLiKETRAiNS – I Am Murdered

If you thought The Last Shadow Puppets were a bit swingin’ camp-O-rama for me, try this lot.  This is an album from the year I got to spend in Holland as part of my Master’s degree.  I met a couple of really good blokes while I was there, Andy from Middlesbrough and Andreas from Sweden, and I pinched loads of good music from them, but this album probably stands out from that era due to sheer silliness.

The high camp swinging drama of this stuff, apparently entirely sincere, is so utterly, guilelessly exuberant that there is just no way not to love it.  Seriously.  And apparently they’re still going too.  Given that I spent most of that year listening to Echo & the Bunnymen, Supergrass, Blur, Finley Quaye, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and The Verve I have no idea how I managed to find myself adoring this utter silliness, but I did, and because I never took a copy of it when I left this music is now irreversibly associated with that crazy year of drink and fornication in Groningen.

Ironically enough, Mrs. Toad’s best friend lived there at the time (I’m pretty sure, and heartily relieved, that I never shagged her – now that would have been uncomfortable) and apparently Mrs. Toad visited her there on a couple of occasions at the same time I was there.  That was about three years after we’d last seen each other and six before we’d fall in love at first sight, eventually, about five years ago.  So some say we might have saved ourselves six years of inadequate relationships and just got things over with then and there.  Myself, I think it might have been a disaster – as the Dutch apparently say: this marriage isn’t ready yet.

Oh yes, and, erm, Weeping Willows.  They’re still going apparently. And as for this album, well it’s completely preposterous, entirely ridiculous and utterly fucking brilliant!

Weeping Willows – Under Suspicion
Weeping Willows – I’m Failing in Love
Weeping Willows – Eternal Flames
Weeping Willows – Louisa

Despite the fact that Akismet has unilaterally decided to filter all DC’s comments to the spam dump, we are nevertheless looking forward to the next Waiting Room here at Toad Hall.

Mrs. Toad and I featured a truly hilarious Gourds cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin & Juice when we participated in the recent Drunk Covers show. It’s one of our favourites but I’ve never explored The Gourds any further, perhaps because the amusement of that cover version gave me the impression they were something of a novelty act. Well they’re not, apparently, and tonight DC is dedicating a whole show to them on Error FM because he is more than just a little bit of a fan it seems.

The Gourds – Gin & Juice

Most interestingly, The Gourds have recorded all sorts of little bits of silliness and some new ditties for the show itself, to go alongside DC’s usual over-excited rambling. If, like me, you know nothing about this band I can’t think of a better way to discover them.

Tonight, 9pm-Midnight (BST) on Error FM.

And here are a couple of Gourds tracks to get you in the mood.

The Gourds – All the Labor
The Gourds – I Come Up

What a brilliant burst of cod-spy thriller soundtrack lounge croon bombastic orchestrated melodramatic bedlam this is.  The Arctic Monkeys last album was something of a damp squib really, although it contained a little bit of quite decent material, but it seemed like a band who just made an album without really thinking about why.

Listening to that album, one track which really struck me was this one:

Arctic Monkeys – The Bakery

At the time I thought ‘bugger me, Alex must be developing a bit of a Richard Hawley fetish’.  Both being from Sheffield this didn’t seem too far-fetched, and as much as I was left underwhelmed by most of Flourescent Adolescent, it piqued my interest for their next album.  I never expected this though!

Instead of a slightly 50s-sounding Monkeys album Turner and his pal Miles Kane have gone all the way and more, producing an album a radio DJ apparently described as “more Scott Walker than Scott Walker”.  I don’t really know much Scott Walker, so I couldn’t tell you how much sense this makes.  Quite how they recorded this in a fortnight is beyond me, but hearing something like this, even a scratch and hiss fanatic like myself finds himself thinking ‘now that’s what Big Production is for’.  It could be the soundtrack to a dozen stylish sixties films, or a dozen spy movies: theatrical, grandiose and really ambitious.

It’s brilliantly successful too, a real rattling, swooning pleasure to listen to, although I have a minor, nagging caveat.  For all the music of the Artctic Monkeys sometimes left me a little cold, it was generally saved by Alex Turner’s baldly honest lyrics and incredibly deft turn of phrase.  The turn of phrase is still clearly at his command here, but the writing is much more artful, which sometimes makes this album feel like more of a stylistic exercise than a heartfelt musical one.  They are exploring, and fair play to them, few bands could manage anything half so inventive, nor so enormously excellent, but there are times when it seems slightly more like a project and less like a mission.

The Last Shadow Puppets – My Mistakes Were Made For You
The Last Shadow Puppets – I Don’t Like You Anymore

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