Song, by Toad

The Velcro Quartet

Erm, given the splendidly Mojo-friendly, wonderfully grown up music I have been posting recently you may have been lulled into a false sense of slippers and Gardener’s World. This may (should) somewhat dispel these gathering clouds of maturity because, frankly, this lot have lost their fucking marbles.

Electro-glam? Surreal circus pop? Moody-electro? Yup, the lot, all in one splendidly confusing package. I am not sure any of the songs I have heard thus far really fit with one another at all, but they pretty much all tickle my fancy.

Actually, no, they’re better than that. It’s so bamboozlingly, bizarrely brilliant I want to jump around with a fucking great grin on my face and play it far too loud in the office just for the looks of totally confused horror on my colleagues’ faces. Songs about murdering your wife, the religious horror at the march of the scientific method, and a doomed lovesong rendered entirely in the banal everyday language of software.

It’s camp, it’s ferocious, it misses occasionally, and I have no idea if I’m just dazzled or genuinely impressed, but this really puts the fun right back into writing about music, really it does. They themselves describe it on their MySpace page as sounding like: “a velociraptor doing the Charleston” and a less informative but more appropriate description I cannot imagine. It’s fucking inspired, whatever it is.

The Velcro Quartet – Monsters Are Coming to Get Me
The Velcro Quartet – Suddenly They Realised They Were Compatible
The Velcro Quartet – The Love Song of Little Cosmo Nostradamus

Live in Edinburgh This Week – 29th July 2008

Well after last week, which was basically just a great big week of Meursault gigs, this week is a week of just one single gig.  Just one.  I know!  Needless to say the scurillous Bart has managed to weasel out a few things, but honestly, the man likes everything.  I was in the pub with him last week and I heard him utter the immortal words ‘I don’t like them.  I think they’re shit.’  I feel as if some sort of plaque should be erected to commemorate the occasion.  I’ve known the guy for a year or so and I have never heard these words, or even sentiments vaguely to that effect, ever pass his lips.

Thursday 3rd July 2008: Vandaveer, free gig at Cabaret Voltaire.
This one sounds sort of promising.  I don’t know much about Vandaveer apart from the fact that I have a couple of his songs floating about on my music drive which I rather like.  It’s folk-pop with a sort of drift from melancholy to sunny and back and should make for a fine evening.
Vandaveer – Marianne, You’ve Done it Now

In other news, I won’t be at the above gig because I will be attending Born to Be Wide at the Voodoo Rooms instead.  This month’s topic is Inside the Mind of a Music Journalist and, scandalously, I wasn’t invited to be on the panel – imagine that, and me all Web 2.0 and everything!  Anyway, I shall be going along and I think the chances of me being able to keep my mouth shut are very slim indeed, don’t you?  Then again it might be funny to let them all start talking about Teh Internetz for a bit and see where they end up, be0fore sticking my oar in at the last.  Not, of course, that I’m an expert anyway.  No-one really is, with respect to internet stuff, at the moment are they?  We’ve all got ideas and hunches and instincts, but I’d be sceptical of anyone who claimed to really know.

Anyway, yesterday I was at some sort of radio conference thing in Glasgow, which was quite fun.  The tricky bit was that I didn’t really know what I wanted out of the whole thing – I mean, do I really want a full-time job in radio? I doubt it really – but it was interesting to hear what people had to say.  They were generally quite impressed with what we’re doing here, I think, in terms of the combination of media and so on, so maybe we’re moving things in the right direction.

Anyhow, I drove home to Edinburgh at about eleven and it wasn’t really dark out, yet.  I forget, sometimes, just how far North Scotland is.  Really fucking far North actually.  I know we’re not far off the Summer Solstice, when all those mental Druid loonies descend on Stonehenge and knit homeopathic aubergines or whatever the fuck it is they do, but still: the middle of the night and nothing but an eerie twilight.  It was weird, but sort of fascinating too.  And I can’t think of a better song, or song title at least:

The Wedding Present – I’m From Further North Than You (Klee Remix)

The other song that jumped to mind was Yo La Tengo’s beautiful version of Sandy Denny’s By the Time it Gets Dark.  I love this – the normal domesticity of it; the sense of resolved conflict; the image of a day full of harrassment and annoyance that ends with you and your other half sitting down late in the evening with a cup of a tea or a glass of wine, after everything’s finally been dealt with, and before you ever start to talk about all the hassle of the day you know from the look in their eyes that everything really and truly is okay.

When I got home last night Mrs. Toad was in bed with her copy of the Economist and a cup of tea and the wee bedside light was on and things were just… nice, you know?

Yo La Tengo – By the Time it Gets Dark