Song, by Toad

Just to reassure everyone that I’ve grasped the Song, By Toad ethos, and that I fully understand the website’s mission of promoting Edinburgh’s blossoming new music scene; my first proper review as understudy for His Royal Toadiness is of an unsigned band from western Canada.

A new offshoot of the acoustic revival seems to be emerging. It’s one that sees indie-folk acts starting to use electronic instruments, but assimilating them into a ’folksy’ approach to the overall sound of the band.

We’re not talking about the Hi-NRG synth-pop of the Pet Shop Boys, or banks of gleaming Roland synths pretending to be the London Symphony Orchestra; but minimalist drones, bleeps and pulses played alongside acoustic guitars, traditional fiddles and so on.

Little, if anything, seems to be pre-programmed or sequenced, and the electronic instruments are often played live in the same spontaneous manner as the acoustic ones.

And this is where we find The Rural Alberta Advantage. They use a restricted palette; mainly just rattling drums, a smattering of strings, the aforementioned electronic keyboards and a nice line in male/female vocal interplay.

Nevertheless, I think their indie-folk credentials remain intact. This isn’t city music. It’s not urban. It’s not punk. There’s a tangible warmth and an enveloping darkness to the songs that evokes the country, with all that open space and big skies where I’m told you can actually see the stars. It really is rather good, if you ask me.

The Rural Alberta Advantage – Don’t Haunt This Place
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Frank, AB
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Sleep All Day

Website | MySpace

Right then, boys. Just leave me a pint of Brain’s Dark over b’there and a Clark’s Pie and we’ll have some proper music up b’yer quicker than Shane Williams can outrun the English!

I won’t lie to you, but, it’s all Max Boyce and Dame Shirl from now on…

Of course, it won’t be anything like that; but Matthew must have been expecting some such nonsense so I thought I’d humour him!

Okay, so I’ve been given the keys to Toad Hall for a couple of weeks, which I’m most grateful to his lordship for, but I’ll admit I’m a little out of my depth here guys. I’ve got a few ideas for posts – well, three - so we’re fine until Saturday; but feel free to chip in with any suggestions for posts, new music you’ve found, favourite recipes, anything really.

So to finish off my brief introduction in predictable, but no less grand for it, style. Here’s some classic Cool Cymru that his lordship would probably approve of.

Super Furry Animals – The Man Don’t Give A Fuck

60ft Dolls – Stay

Catatonia – International Velvet

Given that, as far as I am concerned, I already live in something of a music Mecca – not Edinburgh per se, but Scotland in general – it only makes sense that when holiday time rolls around I should head for the other great global centre of sulky indie-folk: Portland, Oregon.

Home to so, so many great bands, home to the Pickathon Music Festival, home to more rain even than Scotland, this just seems like a wonderful way to spend the next couple of weeks.  I am working early on, in fact I have four or five interviews lined up over the course of the festival, and there will be videos made as well, but after that I am subscribing to the Mrs. Toad philosophy: “I do fuck all.”  She’s right, it’s a holiday, blogs and jobs can wait.

So I’ll be posting, but not that much.  After a couple of brilliant Campfires & Battlefields babysittings, I am handing the controls over to Dylan, Song, by Toad photographer and beer-guzzler extraordinaire.  So be nice and kind, make lots of comments to make him feel welcome, and I will be back and on the go on Thursday the 14th August.  Until then, erm, good luck!

Dead Kennedys – Holiday in Cambodia
Franz Ferdinand – Jacqueline

The third in this series of posts addresses hype, and the excesses thereof to which we seem to be constantly subjected at the moment. It’s certainly a common enough complaint at the moment, but I seem to remember there being plenty of hype overload well before the internet.

Once again, here are the various articles that prompted this little festival of self-indulgence, so you have some idea what to expect:
A Penny For Your Thoughts by The Vinyl Villain (read the comments as well, because some of them are very thought-provoking.
Does the World Need Another Indie Band? by Tim Walker, writing in The Independent.
Why Has Modern Music Lost So Much Impact? by the Kings of A&R.
This comment, from a reader called Alex in the comment thread of my recent podcast – The Tribecast.

And here are the other posts in the series:
1. Fragmentation
2. Over Saturation
3. Hype Overload
4. Decreasing Quality

#3 Hype Overload

Hype overload is something I’m a little divided on. In one sense, an excess of shrill hysterics about how wonderful the brand new somethingorother is had become annoyingly prevalent in modern society. You can see it in just about every form of advertising known to man, and advertising itself has pretty much infested every foetid little nook and cranny of our worthless souls, so maybe it is arguable that excessive hype really is everywhere.

In all honestly though, I just don’t think that’s really the case. Yes, media-wise whatever there is, there’s more of it, but that’s a factor of there being more media in general rather than anything that I would say is particular to the world of music. Is the hype shriller, more bombastic, more needlessly over-stated than before? Well, I don’t actually know, but I genuinely have my doubts. The only real touchstones I have with which to compare this would be the pre-Napster, largely analogue world. I am only 32 and during this period. the early to mid-90s, I was only just evolving into the sort of unbalanced music obsessive I am now.

The first really hysterically anticipated stuff I remember was probably the when The Bluetones and Gene were releasing their first albums. Leaking was far less prevalent back then – or at least it penetrated less far into the popular consciousness – and after the release of two or three blinding singles all we could do was sit and wait. Stoked by the anticipation of the press, the NME in particular, I remember charging off to the record shop at lunch time on the day of both of these releases in order to get my hands on a copy. I also remember the claustrophobic disappointment as it slowly dawned on me that the genius I was anticipating just hadn’t materialised.

Basically, it’s pretty easy to write a couple of great songs, or so it appears judging by the number of groups who seem to be able to do it. Often, inevitably, these are amongst the first couple of songs a group writes, so it can be very difficult to judge whether or not they have any more in them. B-sides help, as do live shows, but basically when you hear a new group you are making wild extrapolations based on very little information. If this couple of songs happens to be brilliant, there is no way you aren’t going to be excited and, nowadays, talk about it.

Maybe the jump from bedroom recording to chart assault is being made a lot faster these days, and this may not give groups enough time to develop, settle and figure out who they are as a band, so perhaps the hype can seem out of proportion with the professionalism or presence of the groups itself. Groups like this can seem like they appear from nowhere, with the weight of expectation around them that you would expect from a band with a couple of records behind them, but then people used to overreact to a promising 7″ single as well. Maybe because music criticism and music dialogue is much more participative now, people feel more caught up in the hype.

Maybe we feel more pressure to conform to media expectations because, with music in particular, often our friends are the media, instead of just friends who make you a few too many mixtapes. I know I find it harder to turn around to a blogger I’ve exchanged emails and comments with and say ‘No, I think your new favourite band are shite, actually’ because it just feels mean, but we’d never have hesitated to sneer at the NME’s latest favourites, even ten years ago when they had a shred of credibility still intact.

In the grand scheme of things though, I remember people getting just as over-excited about new releases in the days of vinyl and fanzines, so I just don’t buy this ‘too much hype’ stuff. Yes people are prone to over-reaction, and yes the big labels are a bit desperate for love at the moment and prone to a bit of leg-humping, but really, I just think humans have always been excitable, particularly where music is concerned.

Gene – Be My Light, Be My Guide
Gene – Sleep Well Tonight
The Bluetones – Bluetonic
The Bluetones – Cut Some Rug

What a rubbish gig this wa… ah-haha! No it wasn’t, it was fucking brilliant, of course it was. I’ve seen Tom Waits once before, almost by accident, in about 1999 in the Orpheum Theatre in Boston and he was inspired. Songs like The Earth Died Screaming lurched and howled around you as if they’d been summoned from the very depths of hell, and when he then sat down to play a little more whimsically and romantically on the piano by himself the contrast was unnerving. Genius, it was. Consequently when he played London about five years ago, having missed out on a ticket by legitimate means, I stared at a £450 Buy It Now button on eBay for nearly an hour a day for the whole week preceding the gig, knowing I couldn’t afford it and nevertheless thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might somehow get away with it.

Fortunately, for once in my life I showed a modicum of restraint and am hence not bankrupt as I type this, but fuck me there was no way I was missing out on this chance even if I had to wrestle a kingpin from the international trade in black market internal organs to get a ticket.

There’s something surreal about sitting in a gig like this, the attendance at which is to all intents and purposes an act of pilgrimage. It means you aren’t just sitting and enjoying the music, it means you are basking in the occasion – it’s a Tom fucking Waits show. Tom Waits! We were so excited that all the other people vaguely affiliated with this website who went along – Martin from The Savings & Loan, funnyguytom, (Quiet) Jon, Scott from Uhersky Brod and his girlfriend Clare, Euan from The Kays Lavelle and Trampoline, and his wife Pamela, my friends Morgan (who took these amazing pictures, naughty boy that he is) and Alan, my Dad and myself (and this was just Sunday: half of Broken Records, Mrs. Toad and Mother Toad, a couple of guys from work and a few others are going tonight) – played the Tom Waits challenge. We all wrote down fifteen songs we thought might be on the setlist, chipped in a pound, and the winner took the pot. Given Waits’ prodigious back catalogue the winner could well have had only a handful of songs right, but as it was Quiet Jon took the honours with a very respectable seven. So it wasn’t just a gig, this was a rare moment for hushed and awestruck reverence. He could have come and played Nintendo on stage for an hour and a half and I think we’d probably still have absolutely loved it.

I’ve heard talk recently of the latest Tom Waits tour being the grown up one – the one where he finally shelved the manic spasms and simply performed his best songs with panache and verve and stopped acting the fool. This wasn’t far from the truth last night, judging by that one performance. The meandering clarinet variation on Cemetary Polka, the gorgeous restraint of Invitation to the Blues, the manageable eccentricity of songs like Jesus Gonna Be Here and I’ll Shoot the Moon – it all highlights the fact that he is no longer throwing down a direct gauntlet to his audience, and possibly to himself, by pushing the bounds of what counts as music to breaking point. He has done this in the past – just think back to the madness of the Big Time movie, or listen to a few live bootlegs.

So what kind of a set was this then? It was a brilliant one where the deft and well-practised mid-song digressions were masterfully delivered. Where the re-workings of the old classics were so well done that you caught yourself wondering whether they shouldn’t perhaps always have been that way. For the most part things were delivered straight up by an incredibly tight, pretty trimmed down band, and the musicianship on display was truly superb – two saxophones at once? What?

If I were to pick on one small point though, it would be this: I kind of missed the real peaks of madness he has treated us to in the past – the antisocially eccentric clashes, squawks, shrieks, crashes and whistles that make people listen to albums like Bone Machine and visibly recoil, asking themselves what the fuck that cacophony is supposed to be. Some of the songs on the setlist were some of his more feral, and it would have been nice to see him attack these like a man possessed, like he has in the past. But, you know, that’s a churlish complaint, really, for a man in his sixties who can deliver as amazing a night as the one we just enjoyed. It was a beautifully arranged journey through the work of the man I consider to be pretty much the all-time pinnacle of the musical profession.

Sitting there as the hall sang along to Innocent When You Dream was a magical moment. Him ending his show with All the World is Green – a song I will forever associate with those heady days at the beginning of my relationship with Mrs. Toad, when I was so giddy with excitement I could hardly see straight – was a magical experience. Listening to him digress into discussion of obscure laws that still exist in certain places (“It’s illegal to get a fish drunk. They’ve ruined everything.”) was phenomenal. Watching him stamp and lurch his way through Raindogs and Cemetary Polka was amazing. Watching him snarl his way through Falling Down, reclaiming it from that scrotum-shrivellingly dismal vanity project of Scarlett Johansson’s, was triumphant. Hang Down Your Head was just breathtakingly gorgeous.

I think I need a sit down and a long glass of water. I may not regain composure for weeks. The elated gloating may not subside for months.

Here’s the setlist, lifted from this blog, with download links to the ones I guessed right.

Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well
Rain Dogs
Falling Down
On the Other Side of the World
I’ll Shoot the Moon
Cemetery Polka
Get Behind the Mule
Cold Call Ground
Circus / Table Top Joe
Jesus Gonna be Here
Picture in a Frame
Invitation to the Blues
House Where Nobody Lives
Innocent When You Dream
Lie to Me
Hoist That Rag
Bottom of the World
Hang Down Your Head
Green Grass
Way Down in the Hole
Dirt in the Ground
Make it Rain

(I was doing miserably badly at this point, but fortunately I aced the encore, to restore just a little dignity.)
Goin’ Out West
All the World is Green

Well we are approaching the Carnival of Shit that is the Edinburgh Festival’s indie music offering.  The Edge is utterly abysmal, offering virtually no bands worth seeing and absolutely nothing to generate any sort of excitment.  Noah & the Whale, Johnny Flynn and the Shout Out Louds are the only real treats from out of town, but two of the best bands – Broken Records and Isosceles – are local so we get to see them during the rest of year anyway.  So brilliant as it is to see local lads headlining the Liquid Rooms, the lack of imagination shown in the booking of the festival as a whole is really quite dismal.  The Raconteurs have recently been added to the bill and they’re brilliant live, but their last album was pretty disappointing, so I am torn on that one.

Pretty much anything worthwhile happening in music this August, barring the notable exceptions mentioned above, is happening because Bart & Emily got off their arses and put together The Retreat, a month of gigs at the Scottish Scullery, in St. John’s Church Hall at the end of Princes Street.  They are putting on a lot of local talent, the setting is phenomenal and the lineups superb.  And, of course, I am fucking well missing most of it because I am off on holiday.  Oh well, can’t have it all.

Tuesday 29th July 2008: The Second Hand Marching Band, Les Cox (Sportifs), The Wind Whistles, Oso at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
The Second Hand Marching Band are a sort of weird amalgamation of the sounds of Beirut played by a group roughly the size of the Polyphonic Spree.  I don’t know the other bands all that well, but even a quick browse through MySpaceland indicates that this is going to be an excellent gig.  The Gentle Invasion haven’t done a shit one yet.
The Second Hand Marching Band – Transformers (Tragically, this song has nothing to do with giant robots from outer space (who are also cars) and is consequently far less awesome than it could be.)

Friday 1st August 2008: Je Suis Animal, Meursault & Come In Tokyo at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
C&B tipped me off about this bunch of Norweigan indie-popsters only a couple of weeks ago.  I’ll be away, so I won’t be able to go myself, but they sound really good and are supported by the splendid Meursault so if I were here, I’d be there, if you know what I mean.
Je Suis Animal – Sparkle Spit

Yes, woo hoo, we are all going to Tom Waits tonight.  By we, I mean Martin from The Savings & Loan, Euan from The Kays Lavelle and a healthy portion of Broken Records.  A couple of folk from work will be coming along too, as will Morgan, the Song, by Toad *ahem* cinematographer, as well as my old Dad.  It will be something of a outing.

The plan is to meet sometimes from 5pm onwards up at the back of Joseph Pearce’s and have a few pints, and to rise to the Tom Waits Challenge.  What’s that you say?  Well Euan and I decided to have a bet about who could name the most songs from his set, before the actual event. But it strikes me that we might as well make it a pound-a-go sweepstake (is that gambling – does that make this website officially illegal in the United States?) whereby everyone writes down fifteen songs they think he’ll play, and then at the end we count them up and the winner takes the pot, which should be a princely, erm, twenty quid or so.  And then spends it on a round of beers, of course.

So here we go, Tom Waits tonight.  The first time I’ve seen him live since 1999 in Boston, when he played the Orpheum.

Tom Waits – Goodnight Lovin’ Trail (Live at Ebbet’s Field, 1974 – this is something of a rare recording, apparently.)
Tom Waits – Hold On (Live)
Tom Waits – New Coat of Paint (Live)
Tom Waits – That Feel (Live)

It seems I have all the qualifications required to be a professional writer: i.e. a rather inflated sense of self-importance, impossible levels of preciousness about my work and the ability to swear like a docker with a nasty dose of the clap.

As my good lady asked when she forwarded me this link, were we separated at birth?

From: Coren, Giles
Sent: 10 August 2002 16:41
To: James, Anita
Cc: Wells, Dominic
Subject:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. how fucking difficult is that? it’s the sentence that bestrides the fucking book i reviewed for you. it is the sentence i wrote first in my fucking review. it is 35 fucking letters long, which is why i wrote that it was. and so some useless cunt sub-editor decides to change it to “jumps over A lazy dog” can you fucking count? can you see that that makes it a 33 letter sentence? so it looks as if i can’t count, and the cunting author of the book, poor mr dunn, cannot count. the whole bastard book turns on the sentence being as i fucking wrote it. and that it is exactly 33 letters long. why do you meddle. what do you think you achieve with that kind of dumb-witted smart-arsery? why do you change things you do not understand without consulting. why do you believe you know best when you know fuck all. jack shit.

that is as bad as editing can be. fuck, i hope you’re proud. it will be small relief for the author that nobody reads your poxy magazine.

never ever ask me to write something for you. and don’t pay me. i’d rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore’s only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal – my integrity would be less compromised.

jesus fucking wept i don’t know what else to say.

Alexei Sayle – ‘Ullo John, Got a New Motor?

Ah the weekend finally, finally approaches. It’s been another hectic week here at Toad Hall, but I will be glad to put my feet up and have a nice big fat glass of gin tonight. And while we’re on the subject, here is a song that I discovered recently that could pretty well be the theme song to this website:

Derek Meins – The Gin Song

The folks are visiting this weekend as well, and we’re recording the next Toad Session with Meursault on Saturday, and there will be the Great Toad Tom Waits Expedition on Sunday – I’ll confer with some chaps and appoint an official pub for this gathering in the next day or so: say meet at 5pm?.

Oh the excitement, and oh the hectic schedule. Still, Mrs. Toad and I are then away on holiday for a couple of weeks in Portland, and going to the Pickathon music festival. There will be a few interviews conducted, some chatter and maybe even some videos, but basically it is a doing bugger-all sort of holiday. We’ve rented a boat for most of it and will be sitting peacefully afloat and doing pretty much sweet fuck all. I will be posting occasionally, but I haven’t made proper arrangements for C&B to do his usual and very kind job of blog-sitting in my absence, so we may all just have to muddle through as best we can. Don’t worry though, it won’t go silent.

In the meantime, it’s the weekend, and I haven’t had an antiseptically large gin and tonic for fucking ages, and it is very much time to put that right.

Willie Nelson – I Gotta Get Drunk

Oh, and one last thing. Thank you all for taking the time to make some really thoughtful comments on the site this week. Rod Stewart aside, I am a little short of quality new music at the moment, and I had some unbearably pompous verbiage broiling away inside that I kind of had to get off my chest, so thanks for chipping in and making for some really good threads. It really is appreciated when people take part, you know.

Rod Stewart – Baby Jane
Rod Stewart – You Wear it Well

[I was unfortunately too busy to attend this gig myself because I was at home compiling endless lists of bloggers to pester with promo copies of new Edinburgh releases, but Dylan was able to attend and has kindly written this review. Apart from making dubious comments about Rod Stewart's gentleman's equipment, Dylan is also the drummer in Uhersky Brod and the offical photographer of the Toad Sessions, and it's really nice of him to volunteer to write this review. Enjoy...]

Regrettably, I missed Ross Clark. I blame Lothian Buses and an hour-and-a-half bus journey home from work. As a result, I walked into Cabaret Voltaire just as Ross thrashed his triumphant final chord and swung his acoustic guitar into the air. But – wow – what a chord that one was!

So, for me, the evening’s entertainment really began with Barn Owl. I don’t know why all the young kids since the Arctic Monkeys have started strapping their guitars right up high into their armpits; I suspect it has something to do with learning to play while sitting down, but if any of them are reading: Guys, it just doesn’t look cool!

Anyway, as Barn Owl, securely harnessed by their guitar straps, launched into their opening number, it was soon apparent that we were on familiar territory. They practice an earnest variety of late 80s style baggy that will inevitably draw comparisons with early Charlatans and the first Stone Roses album, with the standard hints of New Order and Echo and the Bunnymen thrown in.

I must admit that Barn Owl didn’t really grab me at first, but after a hesitant start, they seemed to settle into something of a groove. They have an undeniable knack for a pleasing tune, and often embarked on extended instrumental passages to give those tunes room to breathe and develop. It’s an unusually unrestrained approach for practitioners of this style of music at the moment, and I found myself re-assessing the pigeon-hole I’d put them in earlier.

Barn Owl aren’t currently about pushing boundaries, but a lot of people will be happy with their unashamedly approachable style. As they grow in confidence and develop their identity, they could make a lot of friends.

Barn Owl MySpace | Barn Owl – Chasing Little Sparks

There was a switch at the top of the bill as The Kays Lavelle took to the stage ahead of Meursault. Or at least three members of The Kays Lavelle; unexpected personnel issues forcing them to perform with a stripped-down piano-guitar-drums approach.

This was my first Kays Lavelle gig, so I don’t have much of a frame of reference, but the sparsely furnished sound suited the introspective lyrics and haunted vocals. Bart seemed to be having a high old time squeezing spooky science-fiction noises out of his Fender and adding unexpected sound effects to Euan’s vocals, while the exploratory chords and refrains of the piano dovetailed nicely with Grant’s complex percussion patterns.

I think it’s fair to say The Kays Lavelle will have better shows than this, but they can walk away from this one confident that the band’s music and personnel are adaptable, and that, even on nights when everything’s not going their way, they can still play to the crowd and put on a show. To me, that sounds like a handy skill any decent band could be proud of.

The Kays Lavelle MySpace | The Kays Lavelle – The Chemistry Between

So following that, Meursault got the headline slot by default, and certainly made the most of it. On percussion, Fraser was visibly wilting under the hot stage lights for the first track or two. Until, from the back of the room someone delivered his trademark porkpie hat to the stage and, with an instant and almost magical effect, the little hat brought him back to life. This in turn allowed him to reinvigorate Meursault’s sound with the astonishing range of noise he gets from the cajón upon which he sits and the shakers he straps to every appendage.

Neil responded to the resurrection of his drummer by ratcheting-up the intensity of his own performance, his voice ranging between a plaintive croak and a maniacal howl often within a single phrase. As a frontman, Neil Pennycook cuts an arresting and imposing figure, the performance of his passionate and emotional songs forcing him to writhe around the stage as if possessed by a particularly sadist demon. It’s a gripping and mesmerising spectacle, and completely at odds with the delightfully affable gent he is offstage.

Meursault’s sound; with the acoustic guitar often taking a background role behind a heartbeat of incessant banjo arpeggios, explosive percussion noises and startling vocals, is striking and unorthodox, but it seems to possess a primal attraction that sees them picking up more and more devotees with each performance.

Meursault MySpace | Meursault – A Few Kind Words