This is a little teaser for tomorrow’s podcast, because the playlist became so long that all sorts of good things ended up being cut from it, including three splendid suggestions by Dylan from Blueback Hotrod.

As most of you probably know already, for some inexplicable reason back at the height of the popularity of the original Star Trek series a couple of the main characters dipped their toes in the muddy shallows of the Celebrity Music Vanity Project.  With some bafflingly bizarre results:

Most of you probably know that video already, not that that makes it any less funny.  Less well known is that Leonard Nimoy also dabbled in the world of music, and it was no less weird:

This kind of crazy stuff just didn’t seem as incredibly fucking ludicrous back then, or at least so it seems, looking back.  Remember when the cast of Star Wars appeared on the Muppet Show?  Genius!  Can you imagine the beast from Alien doing a song and dance number with a bunch of felt puppets?  No, me neither.

Anyway, enough of  such visual nonsense.  Tomorrow’s podcast is going to be all space related and these rather splendid songs didn’t quite make the cut, so seeing as they are so odd and so brilliant at the same time I thought they had to make an appearance somewhere, and seeing as it’s Friday and the weekend is only hours away, some silliness won’t go amiss.

Leonard Nimoy – Highly Illogical

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William Shatner – Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds

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William Shatner – Real (From this – buy it, it’s actually really, honestly a good album!)

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Star Wars Theme

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Star Trek Theme

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Jetsons Theme

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Hrrgh.  I left a gig early last night because I was so tired from constant late nights this week, editing Samamidon session videos (3am every night, and one early morning meeting at Proper Job thrown in for good measure).  The plan was to head home and get some sleep, but it didn’t work.

What are your plans this weekend then, Toadlings?  Since the session our house has gone to hell, because I have been too focussed on the videos to do things like clean or tidy, and Mrs. Toad does fuck all unless I particpate.  And, frankly, who can blame her.  We need a wife.  Then on Sunday there will be football and some music plotting with a couple of friends of mine.  Not very exciting, I have to admit.  There probably won’t even be much drinking because, honestly, I’m too tired.

I am currently listening to the new albums by Antony & the Johnsons, Animal Collective and Andrew Bird, all which are no better than okay.  I’ve not listened to them all that carefully yet, nor, crucially, in the right order.  My phone is old and has a bizarre quirk of only playing songs in alphabetical order, which can be good for albums, but often just messes with the artist’s intent.  So I am not writing them off just yet, and will almost certainly review them once I’ve given them a proper chance.

So, please de-lurk and chip in with your Friday Five, and if you want to suggest next week’s five email me at the address on the contact page.

1. Best work hangover coping strategy.
2. When you give your house a ‘mother-in-law clean’, just how clean does it get?  If there’s no mother in law, who is your closest approximation?
3. Most trendy/haircutty band you actually like.
4. Most famous/stadiumy band you actually like.
5. Most annoying word people add ‘y’ to because they can’t be arsed thinking up a suitably adjective.

These all come from my time living on a fantastically cool Humber Keel Barge on the Thames, during my wild youth.  They look a bit like this, but without the mast and are deceptively large on the inside.  It was very, very cool.  This is a compilation I made of albums I wasn’t all that into, but which had some very good songs nevertheless.  I like that kind of mix – they make you remember an album quite fondly when otherwise you might never play it again.

Preston School of Industry – Straits of Magellan

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Obi – Incredible Jack

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Dan Bern & the IJBC – Crow (IJBC apparently stands for International Jewish Banking Conspiracy – the card)

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Lucinda Williams – Ventura

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Day One – Ordinary Man

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And, just to send you off into your weekend with a snigger, try this little snippet on for size. Barack Obama might be cooler than I thought – the dirty little pervert:

…and there was much rejoicing.  And by much I mean fucking loads of fucking rejoicing, with bells and whistles and beer and skittles.  And gin.  This is brilliant news.  I first got a sniff of this news when from Jonathan from A Classic Education contacted me about this episode of Maps, a daily show on a Bologna radio station.

Basically Grandaddy, one of my favourite bands, announced that they were packing it in in about 2006.  They released one final, slightly disappointing album called Just Like the Fambly Cat and then that was that.  Lead singer and main songwriter Jason Lytle apparently vanished to a farm in Montana just to get away from everything, although this may be a case of Chinese Whispers over-interpreting a casual remark, I don’t know.

The band were known for steering clear of major labels and eschewing major promoters in order to stay essentially a global indie band, and this inevitably caused problems.  After a handful of brilliant records it got to the stage where an inability to earn a consistent living led to internal tensions, and basically the determination required to follow this particular path simply pressurised the cohesion of the band.  Tiny differences of opinion seemed to grow into major fissures and eventually it all broke apart.  I don’t have that much information, so don’t take the above as gospel, but that’s kind of how it looked to me at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, kids, it’s been a strange old sleepless week & a bit. Of course, what with the Presidential pageant all a hoo-ing & a hah-ing at every turn, I managed to mince about pretty much unnoticed for the most part.

The weather has been atrocious to say the very least. Did I pack for ground frost? Torrential rain? Near hurricane-strength winds? Like fuck I did. Added to that, I’ve been averaging 2am to bed (a foldout in the livingroom of the rented space – sharing with 4 others) & 5.30am wake up calls.

Ed, my (un)usual USof travel companion, has insisted on cooking breakfast for us every morning at 5-cunting-am. The smell of slowly charring bacon has gagged me awake every fucking day – including my one & only day off. On Monday, at 6am, he set the smoke & fire alarms off in the whole apartment complex as he set fire to the electric oven hob with another of his dodgy homegrown concoctions.

The cooker was ruined &, as the rental is billed to my credit card, I’m expecting a sizable bill in the near distant to repair or replace. I’ll go into the finer details of our latest adventure on next week’s show.

So, then, to this week’s show, which has been done on the hoof, via laptop, as I flitted about the States like a ninny. There’s not so much chatter – I was knackered most of the time & the mic I had wasn’t up to much & I am to much of a tight arse to buy another just for one show – but the music more than makes up for it. Some of it, in my humble, is nothing short of astonishing.

Expect, then, many brand new tracks from as yet unreleased albums by the likes of: hillary & the democrats, brooke waggoner, little boots, anna kramer & the lost cause, pete & the pirates, meursault, babian, the welcome wagon, hurray for the riff raff, the cotton jones basket ride, andrew bird, plants & animals, raise high the roof beams, jolie holland, bobby bare jr., hari & aino, the kazoo funk orchestra, warpaint, climber, alela diane, anya marina, the decemberists, basket of figs, miss emily brown, ragged claws, clem snide, & samantha crain & the midnight shivers.

You know what to do.

The Waiting Room: Wednesday 21st January

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This is a Muppet News Flash.  It isn’t, but there is certainly news afoot at the moment.  The larger labels appear to have woken from their brandy-induced Christmas comas and managed to poke their spotty interns into action once more.  And the result: we have inboxes with Important News once again.  In order, not of how famous the band is and therefore how how highly the news scores on the Official Indie-Kid Excitement Scale, but in order of just how excited I personally am about the release of each track I bring you:

Elvis Perkins in Dearland:

Elvis Perkins’ last album was blindingly brilliant.  Aching, sad, uplifting, and literate enough to be beautifully crafted, but never arch.  To say that I am looking forward to this release is an understatement.  Shampoo is brilliant, with enough stomping funeral blues and ghostly choirs of the underworld to give it massive presence, and fucking hell his voice is in g0od form.  I love this, and I can’t wait.  A couple more tracks can be streamed from his shiny new website.
Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo

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Neko Case:

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was so beautiful that I hurriedly scampered through her back catalogue, only to be slightly disappointed.  It was a bit too Lady-country-lite in places, and I find myself slightly fearing that Fox Confessor was an aberration of brilliance, surrounded by a sea of above-average music.  Listening to this song doesn’t reassure me all that much, I have to confess, but I still have hope.
Neko Case – Maneater

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The Decemberists:

Their last album was hardly a classic, despite several great moments.  Something, somehow, didn’t quite click with it, and there were a couple of really duff songs; Summersong and The Perfect Crime were gratingly bad.  The Rake’s Song isn’t all that great, I have to say, and it sounds like it has been prematurely terminated to serve as a preview.  The song doesn’t feel over when it fades out.  But again, I have hope, albeit just a little less in this case.
The Decemberists – The Rake Song

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Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs:

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect smart lyrics in this release, although what we can expect musically might be less predictable.  After last year’s filthsterpiece he seems to have returned to a more textbook songwriting format, and the instrumentation of this seems pretty straightforward as well.  Not sure what to expect – this is a pretty good song, and I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a really good, enjoyable album with plenty of wry internal laughs to be had.
Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Big Blonde

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I’m going to get this out of the way right now: the centrepiece of this album, the title track, sounds way too much like Beirut to me (go to their MySpace to hear it).  This will no doubt piss the band off something chronic, and they’d have a point.  ‘Which fucking Beirut song, then?’ they would ask and I would have no specific answer.  But it’s true, and the resemblance is so uncanny that I find it just a little annoying every time I find myself humming along.

Why did I start with that annoying nit-picking, you ask?  Well because it is the solitary complaint I have about this whole EP which is brilliant start to finish, including the aforementioned song.  Maybe because of my own label, maybe because of seeing a handful of demos coalesce into full releases, I am starting to become very aware of sequencing these days, and here it is accomplished perfectly.  I wonder if Bart, who plays in both this band and eagleowl, had anything to do with it, as the approach feels quite similar to eagleowl’s own EP for some reason.

Whilst they may touch on Beirootyness at one extreme, there is a really wonderful diversity to this, which is especially impressive for such a short record.  Ghost folk, collective clappery, it’s all a little bit different on every song, which makes it all hard to describe and very, very rewarding to listen to.

I’ve seen these guys play before, and they are some sort of mad twenty-odd-strong assembly of stray members of all sorts of other Scottish underground bands, and it is easy to dismiss this kind of thing as some kind of a novelty act.  Why the fuck would you need twenty members, for Christ’s sake, it’s a band, not a fucking rogue religious sect?  But then you hear an EP like this and it pretty much extinguishes that kind of snarky thinking, replacing it with the simple truth that whatever they are doing and however they are doing it, it is being done very right indeed, so best just butt out and let them get on with it.

The Second Hand Marching Band – Mad Sense

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Website (Buy from here too) | MySpace | Buy from Chaffinch Records

What a quality heading for this post – absolutely splendid!  And sorry, but that’s the only Keane picture I could face posting.

So, Keane, how did they come up then?  Well last week’s Friday Fives started out as a conversation in the pub the previous night.  Can’t Stop Now by Keane came on and I remember confessing that actually, if it existed in total isolation, I wouldn’t mind that song especially.  The vocal melody around the chorusy bit it fairly unusual and all-in-all I don’t particularly mind it.

This reminded me of when Keane first made the breakthrough – something like five years ago, give or take.  A massive swell of excitement caught a lot of people.  I wasn’t all that aware of it because I didn’t really buy singles at that point, and the album was yet to emerge, so I didn’t think much about it but I do remember just how excited the NME were. Read the rest of this entry »

Avalanche Records in Edinburgh sent me an email yesterday saying that they had nearly sold of their stock of Meursault albums, which was splendid news.  Apparently it was the biggest seller in the shop, apart from Animal Collective, which is rather nice.

Well there’s really nothing going on this week at all as far as I can tell.  Cabaret Voltaire is doing its week of Duty Free gigs, with the notable participants being Y’All is Fantasy Island tomorrow (Tuesday 20th), Jesus H. Foxx on Thursday and Dead Boy Robotics playing what is I assume a late set on Thursday night.

There’s also White Heath playing Cabaret Voltaire on Wednesday 21st,

with a band called Midas Fall, about whom I know pretty much nothing.  I enjoyed White Heath’s two unplugged songs at the Song, by Toad Christmas Party, so that one should be worth investigating.
White Heath – 7.38 am

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And other than that I really can’t find anything.  Basically, the usual suspects are playing in the city, as one might expect, and very little from outside.  I assume Limbo will be on on Thursday, but neither their website nor the Voodoo Rooms have a lineup posted, or indeed any sign that the gig will be on in the first place.  Can anyone help me out here?  What the fuck’s going on this week?

Did you know that the fucking View are playing here in February and that they’ve bloody well sold out?  Fuck me, you might as well fill your ears with jam and stick your head in an anthill.

This is just an overspilling of all the shiny new things I have in my inbox this week.  It’s so fabulously up to the minute that there are songs in here which only landed in my inbox yesterday.  There’s a slightly sneaky legend making an appearance as well, in the shape of Jason Lytle.  Jason was the lead singer of Grandaddy, a legendary group who disbanded back in about, erm, 2006 or so, leading to Jason moving to a house out in Montana and apparently giving up on the idea of making a living out of music altogether.

The thing is, music is an art form, and no-one makes a fucking living out of making art.  The only exceptions are deplorable cunts like Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and fucking Bono, so please can we dispel the idea that art is a profession.  It’s not a job, nor a career, it’s a fucking calling; an obsession.  Of course, the good news for us fans is that, because it’s a calling rather than a job, Mr. Lytle was never likely to stay away forever.  If you care about something it’s almost impossible to stop yourself doing it.  Believe me, I know – I feel the same way about masturbation (sorry, not that funny, I know).

Oooh, by the way, I was very macho this evening.  I got home and I opened the gate to find some random chump sitting on our steps drinking beer.  So I bellowed with rage, grabbed him by the lapels and flung him out into the street, shouting angry man things like ‘get the fuck out of my fucking house you cunt or I’ll fucking batter you fucking senseless’ and other well known aristotelian arguments.  Unfortunately, as is often the case with fighting, one proved vastly less capable than the other, and he apologised and asked for the rest of his beer back and acknowledged that he was in the wrong.  Christ that made me feel like a prick and a bully.  So I ended up pointing out that my wife was small and that if she came home and found someone sitting on our steps drinking beer she’d have been scared, and that I was sorry for being so violent and please just bugger off etc etc.  He agreed and apologised and basically took all the fun out of being an alpha male, the bastard.  Christ, I might have to wait ten years to be that macho again, why did he have to ruin it for me?

Toadcast #53 – Shiny!

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01. Orouni – A Greased & Golden Palm (05.47)
02. The Gillyflowers – Country Boy (09.25)
03. Trips & Falls – And in Real Life He Wears Corduroy Pants (16.45)
04. Ragged Claws – On the Death of an Emperor (25.00)
05. Findo Gask – Wrapped in Plastic (Live) (32.00)
06. Enfant Bastard – Landscape Painting is Easy (36.23)
07. Scuff – Sailing Three Sheets to the Wind (40.56)
08. Jason Lytle – Birds Encouraged Him (Live at Maps) (47.34)
09. Auld Lang Syne – Where My Fortune Lies (51.01)
10. Scott Pinkmountain & the Golden Bolts of Tone – Abyssinia (58.24)

Straight from my inbox this morning to the giddy heights of the Pages of Toad this afternoon, that’s how fast you can be catapulted to global fame in the internet age.  Or alternatively, that’s how little time it takes your art to be pawed by some sweaty online pervert in the internet age, if you prefer.

What made me so excited about Trips & Falls that I felt I had to post this quickly about a group whose album I could just review in a week or so anyway?  It’s the weirdness.  They play lovely, gentle pop songs which, although they are good, are being done by plenty of people at the moment.  These are good examples – I’m not criticising them – but you know what I mean.

However, mixed in with these straight up girl/boy slices of loveliness are really quirky, bizarre little numbers twisted with arrhythmic drums, peculiar distortions and ghostly vocals.  You Should Really Get Yours is amazing – perverted and captivating.  The song which might be called In Real Life He Wears (or MySpace might have cut the title off – I’ll know when I get the album) is gorgeous and How Do You Do adds just a little bit of frantic Gameboy pop to further subvert the straightforward prettiness of songs like Prelude to a Shark Attack.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself here by over-praising a band whose album may yet disappoint, but if the five songs on their MySpace page were put together into an EP it would be a brilliant one.  I await the album with more than a little excitement.

Trips & Falls – You Should Really Get Yours

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Trips & Falls – Breaking Up With My Mormon Missionaries

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