Even looking at gig listings makes me feel a little weak at the moment. Gigs mean bars, and bars mean booze, and even two days after our Christmas bash at Toad Hall the prospect of ever drinking again feels just a little scary. In terms of industrial levels of weapons-grade levels of drinking I don’t think I’ve ever been to or hosted such a fearsome train-wreck of a party.

The Divine Comedy – A Drinking Song

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Basically, I crashed just after 5am, rose at 9am to go and stumble blindly around a football pitch, before coming straight home and pitching into bed again until 9pm. I am reliably informed that Ally, Dylan, Mrs. Toad, Neil and Mrs. Toad’s brother carried on for a little less than another hour before collectively collapsing in random places all over the house, and my last.fm profile shows the last song being played at about ten to six. Apparently the Tannoy monitor speakers which came with the Toad Session recording setup were so abused that they shut themselves down to prevent overheating. I can only imagine what might have been audible to the general public, but fortunately the police were not called. I can only assume that the lady next door is deaf, long since dead, or just generally terrified of even speaking to her degenerate neighbours.

Shame on all of you who missed it. But then, maybe you did yourselves a favour. Oof.

So, erm gigs. Ah, whatever, you’re on your own this week people, I am not going anywhere near beveraging establishments, at least until tomorrow’s Fresh Air Awards. Oh shit, is it that soon?

Saturday 20th December 2008: Broken Records at the Picture House.
It’s to be proud of that Edinburgh finally has a band considered big enough to be invited to headline a venue this size.  I suppose Idlewild count as an Edinburgh band, and they’re pretty big, but basically the last time things were doing this well in this particular city was when Josef K, the Shop Assistants and the like were making waves in the early 80s, as far as I’m aware.  Broken Records have spent this year as the flagship band from these parts – the only consistently touring message to the rest of the country that things in this part of the world are very , very healthy indeed.
Broken Records – Wolves (Toad Session)

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Saturday 20th December 2008: Cherry Poppin’ Daddies at the Voodoo Rooms.
I have no idea what they’re like these days, but I remember them emerging at the heart of the late-90s swing revival. I have one of their albums, it’s great fun, and I assume this gig will be just the same.
Cherry Poppin’ Daddies – When I Change Your Mind

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Saturday 20th December: Henry’s Cellar Bar Christmas Party, with eagleowl, Gasgiant, Rodent Emporium, Bukkake Birthday Party, Norman Silver & the Gold & The Incendiary Bats.
I don’t know half these bands, but erm, eagleowl are good and it looks like it should be a jolly splendid old bash. No criticism of any of the individual bands involved, but it makes absolutely zero sense as a lineup, just superficially listening to the MySpace pages. Mind you, it’s a party I suppose, not an episode of Jools Holland. Just stay off the booze – I promise you you’ll regret it.
eagleowl – Blanket

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Is that everything? Probably not, but fuck you, I don’t care. I am going to continue staring vacantly at my monitor for the next four hours and then scurry off home as soon as humanly possible to hit the sheets once more. Fucking gin.

Ah, mates.  Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em.  Mrs. Toad’s best friend from her reckless yoof is visiting us here in Edinburgh with her gentleman friend, and consequently I got to thinking about my own old friends, and all the people who, over the years, have introduced me to so much brilliant music.  So I started to patch together a playlist of all the important friends who have added a lot of music to my life.  The problem is that it became way too long for my one hour restriction, so for this week I cast that aside, and allowed myself an extra ten minutes.

Honestly though, old friends are so important, this could have gone on for two hours, easily.  Every one of the people I mention here has a whole story of their own, and it was quite difficult to resist telling all of them in proper detail.  It seems such a shame, actually, to reduce all of these people to a two-minute link.  I could almost do a whole podcast for any one of these scenarios really, and maybe I’ll do that in future.  For now, though, you’ll have to make do with this.  It may be shabby, but it really could have been so much worse.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Toad is fucking plastered.  Oh good.  Enjoy!

Toadcast #50 – The Friendcast

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01. Pink Floyd – On the Turning Away (02.27)
02. Pearl Jam – Black (11.23)
03. The Tragically Hip – Wheat Kings (18.30)
04. Gene – Her Fifteen Years (25.23)
05. Radiohead – Black Star (28.04)
06. Verve – Lucky Man (34.41)
07. Weeping Willows – Eternal Flames (39.19)
08. Billy Bragg – Days Like These (DC Remix) (45.41)
09. Bob Dylan – Po’ Boy (49.42)
10. Elbow – Newborn (55.46)
11. Blanche – Do You Trust Me? (63.19)
12. Maximo Park – Apply Some Pressure (69.07)

Alexei Sayle – ‘Ullo John, Gotta New Motor

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Apparently you can still read a sentence quite easily if the letters in the words are completely jumbled up, as long as the first and last letters in each word remain where they belong. Isn’t that nice.

I am nearly at the end of the unspeakable ordeal that is generating the Toad Records blog spam list. This entails going to the Hype Machine’s blog list, looking at what every single blog is posting and if they post stuff I like, emailing them with links to the Toad Records releases with a nice note saying something along the lines of ‘I hope you enjoy these and it would be lovely if you were interested in reviewing them’. The problem is that there are fucking thousands of blogs and going through this list is so tedious it’s untrue. Still, I’m as far as ‘t’ now, and it needs to be finished by this weekend because everything is officially released on Monday. Fuck I’m tired. I’ve been up until 3am every night this week working on this, with the exception of the Snow Patrol Frightened Rabbit gig on Tuesday (thanks Euan).

In other news, we just invested in a really, really nice vocal microphone for the Toad Sessions. When I say nice, I do mean nice as well, not just ‘slightly nice’. It’s supposed to be a bloody grand’s worth, but we got it for under half that, so roll on the next Toad Session.

If you want to suggest the next Friday Favourites, just get in touch and let me know. This week the Five Friday Favourites come from our own dearest Tart, who left the following comment: “how about a Friday Five on what actually did help you all get sex: music, dialogue, scent, substance etc?”

1. Best pulling music.
2. Worst pulling approach that actually worked.
3. Apart from rohipnol, what should you give someone (food, drink or drug) to get into their underpants?
4. Best bit of chatting up you ever managed.
5. Coolest first date successfully executed.

Willie Nelson & Family – Good Hearted Woman

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Tom Waits – Burma Shave

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The Men The Couldn’t Hang – Dacing on the Pier

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The Lemonheads – Into Your Arms[audio http://www.matthewjamesyoung.com/sbt/TheLemonheads-IntoYourArms.mp3]
Alabama 3 – Bourgeoisie Blues

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Righty-ho, readers of Toad, here’s your chance to get stuck in and tell me what a clueless phillistine I am even more vociferously than you normally do in the comments section.

For the end of the year I will be making a few lists of my own: a Top Twenty list of albums, and a Festive Fifty of individual songs. However, it would be nice to have reader lists as well, so I reckon everyone should email a list of the following:

1. Top ten albums,
2. Top ten songs,
3. Top five gigs,
4. Surprise hit of the year,
5. Biggest disappointment of the year,
6. Publication of the year (blog, magazine, whatever – just not this one),
7. Best major label release,
8. Top tip for 2009.

And the Toad ones:
1. Favourite Toad thread this year,
2. Features you’d like to see introduced,
3. Best band you wouldn’t know about if you didn’t read this.

Email me your responses (email address can be found from the ‘Contact’ link above).

Secondly, I will be writing an end of year summary post, and it would be really nice if any of you wanted to do the same. Email me a couple of mp3s that you want to represent your ‘year in music’ and write a bit about anything you want, really, just something kind of suitable for an end of year roundup. I’ll try and get a couple of musicky types to contribute as well, if I can, just to add a little bit of flavour.

For now, though, my Festive 50 list stands at about seventy songs, and my shortlist for the album of the year is this: Barton Carroll, Bombadil, Langhorne Slim, Felice Brothers, Meursault, Devotchka, Elbow, Pale Young Gentlemen, The Low Lows, Aidan John Moffat, The Cave Singers, The Pictish Trail, Dodos, Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta, Donny Hue & the Colors, Micah P. Hinson, Ghostkeeper, Honeytrap, Johnny Flynn and Shearwater.  I’ll whittle it all down over the next couple of days.

So until then, I leave you with something rather nice I happened across recently: a young lady called Hafdis Huld, from Iceland. She sounds so incredibly Waiting Room friendly that I assume DC must have played her before – not a million miles away from Soko or Hello Saferide, for example. She’s someone I intend to listen to more in the coming year, so see what you make of these two.

Hafdis Huld – Ski Jumper

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Hafdis Huld – Tomoko

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Evenin’ all.

Once again we, over at the ever-grateful TWR, are taking advantage of Toad’s generous offer to host our nonsense on the hallowed pages of  S,bT while we negotiate a permanent home for the radio show.

For those of you who give even the slightest hint of a toss, we’re currently talking to a number of very interesting (& interested) proper professional radio stations, here in the UK & the US.   We should be in a position to make an informed decision early part of January ’09.  Until then we’re taking a bit of a break from the ‘on air’ chaos &  are instead just podcasting each week’s outing.  Essentially it’s a busman’s holiday.

This week we have the pleasure of introducing to you, the Listening Few, the following sweetness: Mother Mother, The Duchess & The Duke, Arthur Adams, Blitzen Trapper, Tom Williams & The Boat, Michael Bach, Rags & Feathers, The Tallest Man on Earth, Jay Jay Pistolet, Fredrik, Eagleowl, Francis + the now expected many much so more.

The Theme Tune Competition is still running, as are competitions for the Sŵn bundle of goodies, the Ida Maria/V.V. Brown bundle, as well as the  The Kabeedies/Tim & Sam’s the Tim & Sam Band with Tim & Sam/Pelle Carlberg/Lucky Delucci bundle.  Free stuff, effectively, for the sake of an email.

Tune in, then, you.

The Waiting Room: 10th December 2008

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Jamie, who is the Japanese War Effort, also plays bass in the Occasional Flickers, so he’s not entirely new to the scene around these parts. He is new to me however. I only heard about him when he got in touch to ask about playing a couple of songs during the open mic part of the Toad Christmas Party last week, so I’ve been familiar with his music for about, erm, a week perhaps.

His music struck me as a little odd, first and foremost. I thought it was okay, and certainly found it interesting, so I thought fuck it, why not pop him on the bill. After that was sorted I listened a little more and began to like this stuttersome, introverted music more and more. His performance on the night itself was a rather excellent combination of shyness and conviction, and the simple, insistent guitar playing rolled away underneath his peculiar, rambling monologues in a rather beguiling way.

It’s not pop music by any means, but it is strangely addictive. The recorded versions add layers of clicks and drones from the world of experimental electronica, filling out a slightly spooky mood. There may not be loop pedals involved, but there’s something rather David Thomas Broughton about it all.

He has an album, Snowbird, available on, erm, cassette and I would definitely recommend it.  Having listened to it pretty constantly for the last week I have now decided that far from being strange, it’s really rather good.  And strange.  But good too.

The Japanese War Effort – Punk is Not Dead

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The Japanese War Effort – Kocham Cie

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Greeetings once more, folks, it’s that time of the week once more. At 7pm UK time I will be making my final appearance of the year on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station. It’s my final one because I’ve been banned for all the swearing broadcast shuts down during the holidays, presumably because students have other things to do, such as go home to their families and such like.

I’ll be back on next year I would hope, and will make more effort to have guests on and generally make some interesting shows instead of just blathering on about bollocks, as I have been doing this term.

I will not be being over Christmassy, but I might mention a couple of my favourite albums of the year, and play a couple of very vaguely Christmas-related songs (like No Christmas in Kentucky – thanks DC!) and stuff like that, but basically this will still just be a normal Toad show, except without all the swearing with which you are all so familiar.  Below, just for fun, are two songs that will not be on this evening’s broadcast, but which very nearly were, just to whet your appetites.

That image, incidentally, when I fished it from a Google image search, was titled christmasballs which, for no really sensible reason whatsoever, made me snigger like a child.  Christmasballs.  Tee hee!

The Young Republic – Oh Snow

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Christmas in Nevada

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Given my near-total ignorance of hip hop, I was never likely to get the joke without a little bit of help.  When I first listened to this EP I got myself in a right state because I really enjoyed it but the lyrics are quite amazingly offensive in so many places I was squirming.  It took Mrs. Toad’s common sense and Google-fu to point out to me that it was actually supposed to be tongue in cheek, but to a neophyte like myself it was hardly obvious.  Even the press release described it as ‘the wrongest thing you’ll ever have the pleasure of listening to’.

So I am really not quite the audience for this, and I doubt many of you are either, but I bloody love it anyway.  The work of Mofo Snot on the samplified backing tracks is outstanding, to my ears.  And between the glitch-hop musical atmosphere and Chopps’ lazy, indifferent delivery they’ve created something I find oddly brilliant.

Don’t ask me why I like this.  It’s awful, even when you know it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek, but I just can’t stop myself listening to it.  For some reason, despite being put together from almost no elements which I ever like, I love this EP.

Chopps Derby – Shite is Real

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MySpace |  Buy from Gull’s Trunk Records

Hmm, whilst researching yesterday’s mammoth ‘What’s On In Edinburgh post, which seems to have turned into a ‘What’s Wrong With Frightened Rabbit’ post, I happened across these chaps, whose name I have heard before but about whom I know basically nothing.

They are called Mitchell Museum and I am pretty sure they just changed their name from something else, although I’m not entirely sure. Whether or not the band changed at the same time I have no idea, but what they’re doing now is whetting my appetite so it seems to be working.

The first song I heard on their MySpace was Warning Bells, which is basically mid-90s Britpop – well done, but unexceptional.  Having made yet another rash snap-judgment I accidentally forgot to close the browser window as I finished my review and let the rest of the songs play out; and a bloody good thing too.  Basically, the music seemed to get weirder and weirder and more and more interesting as I progressed down the playlist.

It may still have an undercurrent of 90s indie but, as NaeBother pointed out in the comments section, there’s a lot more to it than that.  Extra Lives is just brilliant – stomping and infectious – and songs like Exciting But Drunk are less bouncy, but just as intriguing.  There are a few accordions and other ‘instruments’, but largely this is a sound dominated by oddtronica, interrupted regularly by thumping, spasmodic outbursts of  drum and guitar mentalism.

Definitely one I shall be keeping an eye on, hopefully starting this weekend.

Mitchell Museum – Exciting But Drunk

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Mitchell Museum – Extra Lives

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