Song, by Toad

‘Perfect for doing the cooking on a sunny Sunday afternoon though.’

Does that mean only Mrs T will get to listen to it??

Just listened to these songs. It is the first time I’ve heard anything by this lot, although I’ve read a fair bit in recent weeks.

I’m assuming Jocasta is the single as it has the jaunty outof your radio on a wet summer’s day sound to it. Its passable, but barely. Now one second listen (as I type this) it is actually not as passable as I thought first time round. It’s annoying me.

The Rocks & Daggers thing is just pish. Why are this lot getting plaudits when so amny other great things you’ve featured herev this past few months just ignored?

Because they are pleasant, passive and perfectly tolerable. That’s what gets things on the radio. The fact that it annoys a small percentage of dedicated music fans is trivial compared to the enormous number of people that think it’s decent.

i don’t find this at all pleasant. saw them live last year supporting one of broken social scene. sounded like the levellers. somehow they got worser. isn’t that breaking some kind of natural law?

Well I listened to it again on the way into work this morning, and there really is nothing special to be heard. Jocasta and the single are quite hummable, but that is about it. It doesn’t offend me as much as it seems to you lot though, but I do have some sympathy with your position.

Besides, Cows, you hate this sort of stuff most of the time anyway, don’t you? Do you like any of the better purveyors of this kind of music or is it just a blanket ban on your stereo?

hmmm not sure what you mean by “this sort of stuff” other than shite.

so no sir i don’t like shite.

there’s no heart or guts or balls or vagina or brains to this, that i can hear anyway. it’s seth lakeman or alphabeat or linkin park. it sounds like it was made by a bunch of people who don’t actually like music very much. obviously i’m basing this all on one live experience (which wasn’t a very good night anyway) and what you’ve posted here. but still…

at a guess you mean indie, as it’s come to be known genre-ly rather than adjectively.

today i’ve been listening to variously: burial, sparklehorse, sonic youth, the gourds, adam balbo, neil young, portishead and zz top.

i listen to and love some of what you write about – eagleowl, walkmen, cave singers, man man, dylan, waits, willard grant conspiracy, iliketrains, nick cave (off the toppov my head and side of the page). but equally i loathe some of what you write about. but you could pretty much apply that statement to what i listen to as well.

i like pop music that doesn’t pretend otherwise. i like a tune and a danceable rhythm as much as i like a japanese man battering a seven necked guitar sculpture with a drum stick. i like a few simple chords and some lyrics as much as i like power noise. what it all comes down to are the simple abovementioned ingredients: heart, balls, guts, vagina, brains. and sweat too. i always applaud effort.

i’m sure there’s a metric tonne of common ground. and a whole load of wouldn’t touch that with a bargepole-ing. but i’d rather have conflict and angry discourse than pandering and appeasement.

i’ve typed a fuckload here. sorry.

Erm, steady on old chap, all I meant was that sort of pleasant folksiness coming out of London at the moment – Laura Marling, Johnny Flynn, Lightspeed Champion and all that lot. Personally I find some of it rotten, and some of it really rather good, but I always got the impression you tended to hate most of it, although I don’t know why.

Adam Balbo and Sparklehorse – mmmm! I’m really looking forward to Balbo’s new album. And Motherfucker by Eagleowl might just be the best thing I’ve heard in months.

I certainly agree that there appears to be little passion in this album. It’s watery, although a couple of the tunes are okay, but for the most part very limp. I wasn’t having a dig, but by all means rant away. I am always more than up for a lively slanging match or raging polemic.

heh. yeah….. bastard of a day and forgot to get tickets to jeffery lewis tonight and it’s sold out blahblahblah.

i’m autosuspicious (probably unfairly) of anything that comes out of london scenes or london scenesters. plus there’s enough people writing about it. i find myself alone in actually liking some of testicicles stuff but not being so hot on lightspeed champion. and his stupid fucking hair.

i LOVE folk – in big capital letters – going all the way back (and i’ll even include the corries occasionally in this) but a lot of this isn’t folk other than almost accidentally in appearance. no more so than seth lakeman or newton faulkner. oh i’ve got a fiddle or an accordian. i like my folk generally unpleasant and filled with death, incest, murder, death, booze and murder. or people freezing to death. that crops up a lot for some reason.

so yeah em apologies for venting apropos of nothing really. sometimes i get fed up explaining how i like merzbow. and blondie.

Scottish folk full of people freezing to death? Well given the combination of the cold and the acohol I suppose that’s hardly surprising.

oh and none of those nigerian doctors or oilmen or yahoo lottery people will return my emails and pay up the $500,000 dollars i’ve inherited/won.

I kinda get where Marxsbeard is coming from – certainly about being ‘autosuspicious’ of anything that comes out of London. For me that doesn’t just apply to music!

But I think regarding this particular scene that’s flourishing down there at the moment, things are ringing a little more true than you’d normally expect for London; which is something I was hinting at in that article I wrote about Chess Club Records during my stint as caretaker-manager here a couple of weeks ago.

It’s inevitable that Noah And The Whale are the posterboys for the West London indie-folk scene – they are at once the best and the worst advertisment for it.

From the point of view of the record company or the casual music consumer, they’re absolutely ideal. They’re approachable, inoffensive and appeal to the lowest-common-denominator. They will shift units and put bums on seats. I mean – shit – they’re advertising this album on national fucking telly for fuck’s sake.

But on the other hand they’re the worst advert for this scene – and for all the same reasons.

I agree entirely, I think. But I wonder if they would get on everyone’s tits as much if they were still small. If you happened into a pub and caught them playing when they were small, would you have liked them more then? I mean, there are a lot of shite pub bands so if you were comparing them to the pub band circuit, do you think you’d have come back from that first gig all excited or not? Are they only looking so wishy-washy now because their label have upped the ante and basically asked us to compare them to much bigger bands, where they’re out of their depth?

I know Marx will just say that no, they’d still be shite, but I sometimes wonder this about all blandpop bands who are big – would we like them better if they were more of a secret?

Its basically a whole year’s worth of Orange phone adverts (i think they actually heve been used for that or do they all sound the same?)

Its Bright Eyes without the sentiment or intelligence. i think Matthew is right though – i’m subjected to Radio 1 at work all day and have been listening to fun, fun, fun, for the hundred thousandth time so maybe i’ve just had enough.

I don’t think that’s entirely fair to imagine them back in an environment they’ve left behind.

I mean – would you pay fifty quid to go and see Rod Stewart playing an enormo-rock-gig at some huge stadium somewhere? No, of course not, sounds dreadful.

But I tell what would be a great gig: down the local boozer with a few pints, Rod Stewart sat there on a bar stool up on stage with Ronnie Wood next to him on acoustic guitar belting out the old standards.

That would be a fucking excellent night out – but it’s an irrelevent argument because it’s not going to happen, and it’s not what Rod Stewart’s about anymore. So you can’t use that as an argument to suggest Rod Stewart isn’t shite.

That’s a bit of an extreme example – Noah And The Whale aren’t as shite as Rod Stewart’s MOR / AOR crap – and they haven’t yet travelled as far away from their pub gig roots. But you get the point!

Radio 1 all day?!

Izzy, I think you should refer your employer to Article Five of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, which states: ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’

I know! Its just not on! But unfortunately, the world does not, as i would like, revolve around me and the consensus in the office is that adio 1 is a ‘barry’ station! I try and listen to my own music on line, but my boss gets pissed when i don’t hear the phone ringing.

I know that i am guilty of pulling the muso’s snobbish attitude when a band attracts Radio 1’s affections, and to be fair, i did like the single when i first heard it. Nothing else on the album had the same catchiness though and boredom set in before i really managed to listen to it all. Sometimes, life’s too short for perseverance.

What does Barry mean? To me it’s a suburb of Cardiff that’s out towards the airport, and wouldn’t be a positive comparison to make about anything!

I suppose that’s the trouble with democrasy; you often have to put up with everyone else’s crap!.. As the saying goes; democrasy’s a terrible idea – until you consider the alternatives.

I suppose it would be just rubbing it in if I told you I was sat here in the office listening to Meursault through my very lovely noise-cancelling Shure earphones!

having a fiddle or accordian does not automatically make you a folk band.

The issue of shiteness is to do with the lack of passion or inventiveness not popularity or major label status. There is a ton of rubbish playing half empty toilet circuits or on independent labels. Shite is shite. The clue is in yr title matthew – blandpop.

Actually being bigger might give them a budget for a stageshow which might in turn distract me long enough from jamming knitting needles into my ears. See it’s not all bad.

Oddly, Dylan, barry is Scottish for very good, despite being rhyming slang for Barry White = shite. It’s a weird nation. Perhaps one of the natives can explain that a little better.

Cows/Marx – I am just wondering if people could easily have latched onto N&tW when they were smaller and perhaps seemed a bit more charming. Put in a less, I don’t know, insistent environment I could imagine liking them enough if I’d only heard a few songs and such like. Then they get big, don’t quite cut the mustard and have the quirky edges sanded off them by their producer and everyone starts being mean, but you’re still left with the impression of the decent, fairly enjoyable band from that night down the pub. Would the weak album detract from that impression? Probably I suppose, unless you were personal friends with them.

Basically I dislike Coldplay far more because they are Coldplay than I ever would if they were just Coldplay, if you know what I mean.

I take your point though, the key point about this is a lack of spirit, and that makes all these other questions a bit pointless. I do get the impression that there are lot of very well brought up young men with lovely manners on that folk-pop circuit who are in bands because they happen to be musicians, because Mummy and Daddy could afford the lessons, and not because they have a driving passion to communicate something to the world. That may be completely wrong, but it does indeed give off that impression a little.

An idle bunch of fairly talented musicians who are in bands because they happen to have the skills and happen not to urgently need a job and therefore ended up faffing about together and here we are. Some of the bunch are rather talented though, as I said, but quite a few are not.

How’s that for groundless speculation and being needlessly mean for you? If someone accused me of shooting my mouth off about things and people I know nothing about on this one, I’d have to agree with them.

I dislike Coldplay because their music is dull, lumpen, unimaginative, repetitve and lacking in any notion of craftmanship.

I’m no great shakes as a musician, but I’m quite confident that I could play every musical part on every Coldplay song I’ve ever heard.

And I can definitely sing better than that Martin wanker.

I don’t think that’s an argument you can level at Noah And The Whale or many of their other companions who loiter around Primrose Hill and Camden, though. I do think it’s clear that their sound has been sanitised by the record company and the rough edges have been sanded smooth. Which is a shame.

I often what would happen what would happen to a band like this if the record company weren’t to interfere with the sound, but still lend the same weight of promotion. Would it have the same appeal to the greater public?

*My earlier spelling of ‘democracy’ is taken from the original Greek. I spelled it that way twice just so you’d be sure.

why the assumption that the record company are responsible for the shiny sheen and fm friendly sound? And not the band themselves. They sure as fuck weren’t playing free jazz the time i saw them.
I get the impression this is often used as a cunning deflection.

I wondered about that too, even as I wrote it. No idea if it applies here, but a lot of bands with a little ambition want to sound smooth and polished. Maybe they associate it with professionalism, or maybe they just deep down prefer that sound. Either way, a scratchier, quirkier version of a couple of their better songs could be decent, I reckon. Hence the deal, and hence the album. I don’t know, as JC said way up-thread, I do struggle to understand why these guys have a hit single and an album that’s selling, compared to dozens more-deserving bands that I could name. I don’t find it as offensive as Marx/Cows, but it certainly isn’t exceptional.

Chris Martin’s talent, Dylan, isn’t the guitar or the voice or anything, it’s the kind of melody that is bland enough to be inoffensive, but distinctive enough to stick in people’s heads. It may make for tedious music, but there’s no denying that it’s a talent. He could probably make a fortune writing advertising jingles. Oh wait, he already does.

We need closure on this thread.

Will Izzy’s boss ever let her listen to decent music?

Will Marxsbeard ever receive the $500,000 owed to him by the Nigerian prince?

Will Matthew ever come out of the closet and admit that he fancies Chris Martin?

Tune in next time for the next thrilling installment…