Well apart from a truly sumptuous album cover, what have we here?  Well, it’s a solo project by Sindri Mar Sigfusso, from Icelandic band Seabear, apparently.  I have to plead ignorance on most of this unfortunately because, for all I’ve listened to the Seabear album briefly, I’ve never spent enough quality time with it to really know if I like it or not.

This was a little more immediately arresting, fortunately for me, and I liked it from the beginning.  It’s layered with a bit of everything, really.  Samples and bits of synth on one hand, drums and guitar riffs on the other, plenty of other stuff too, like pianos and assorted ‘proper instruments’.  The vocals are slightly distorted and distant, and they too are quite layered in their sound.

Funnily enough, despite all this, the album still plays like a straightforward indie record.  Perhaps it’s the drums – they’re like a less frantic version of the Dodos, still very insistent and purposeful, but not quite so clatterous.  They they serve to anchor most of the music on the album, leaving it free to wander about on its own with little danger of coming adrift and losing focus.

I wouldn’t say that I love this album, but I do like it a lot.  And I might just go back and have a proper listen to Seabear as well.

Sin Fang Bous – Catch the Light

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Sin Fang Bous – Clangour & Flutes

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Well, well, well, here’s a bit of news for you all.  My – well, really, our – good friend DC will shortly be leaving us for some very swanky new shores indeed.  The Waiting Room has been commissioned by WOXY, one of the few remaining really top quality independent* radio stations.

For those of you who don’t know the details, DC had an almighty falling out with his old host, Error FM, back towards the tail end of last year and quit the station in the mother of all snits.  He started looking around for a new station, and I told him that he was welcome to put his show out on Toad until he found something a little more suitable, which is why he has been gracing our Wednesdays (usually) with his blethering for the last couple of months.  The WOXY deal has been a long time in the pipeline, and there have been a lot of sealed lips for the last little while, but it has now been formally announced at last.

It can’t be overstated how impressive a result this is.  WOXY really is a very cool station indeed.  And it also can’t be forgotted how important people like DC have been to this site over the last couple of years.  I love having readers and so on, but the people who make such active and (largely) intelligent contributions in the comments mean that Song, by Toad is able to be way better than I alone could ever make it.  So go to that WOXY thread and leave gushing comments to make him look good.  They’ll be as sick of him as we are before too long, no doubt, so it might as well at least start out as positively as possible.

Well done, mate.  You and the Lady of the House really deserve this, and I am bloody chuffed for both of you.  Best of luck to you two and to the show itself.

Twentymen – The Waiting Room

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The Magnetic Fields – Famous

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*Although they’ve just ‘joined Future Sounds‘, about whom I know absolutely nothing.  Is this a good thing?  Enlighten me, please.

I was contacted a couple of days ago by a group called Hello, Broken Arrow.  I almost titled this post Hello, Hello, Broken Arrow, but the explanation would have stripped away whatever thin humour was there to begi… never mind.

The songs are lovely, but their MySpace page is so sparse that I could have done little more than re-post the music here and say ‘here ya go’, which somewhat defeats the purpose of mp3 blogging if you ask me.

So, a little more detail: they are a group of Seattle musicians who started getting together once a week to try writing songs with different people.  Initially, the idea was simply to generate a kind of creative freshness which would improve their own individual projects, but it turned into something with a life in and of itself.  The participants come from bands like Huma and Shenandoah Davis (who introduced herself to me only recently), and they haven’t quite got as far as finding labels to release anything yet, but they’re thinking about it.  They’re also applying to play Pickathon this year, which would be brilliant, but it’s still clearly very early days indeed.

I love the sound of this.  It’s West Coast alt-folk, in the broadest sense, and does sound to have obvious kinship with so many other bands from the Pacific Northwest: sparse, and slightly otherworldly, but with a good rhythm to keep things moving along.  You can’t be too definite about anything with only two demos around, but I’d say this sounds really promising.  More please!

Hello, Broken Arrow – Mine is a Light (Demo)

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Hello, Broken Arrow – Golden Fools (Demo)

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Well, Alela Diane is a massive favourite here at Toad Hall, partly for the sheer beauty of Pirate’s Gospel and partly for her unfailingly gracious attitude, despite enormous tour fatigue, when recording her Toad Session last May.  Having slowly clambered up the slippery pole of public recognition, she has finally arrived at a relatively major label release, with To Be Still released this week on Rough Trade.

Needless to say, as with all large label releases these days, even the indie ones it seems, her music takes an almighty kicking from clod-hopping production, but fortunately the songwriting is just as superb as ever and in the end manages to shine through.

It sounds a little more country than previous stuff, although presumably this is just down to the increased use of slide guitar, particularly early on, because the basic structure of the songs still seems similar to the folkier style of Pirate’s Gospel.  One thing the glossier production has allowed which I do like is the addition of some occasional strings.  These are used really judiciously – used to accent songs rather than dominate.   There are no Hollywood strings here.  The style of the fiddle is gorgeous as well: a perfect encapsulation of that ambiguous folk tease between the uplifting and the haunting.

Menig’s songwriting is perhaps best encapsulated in that single concept actually.  Just as it lifts and starts to hint at what is often so horribly described in female singer-songwriters as ‘soaring’ it changes tack unsettlingly and flips everything around by infusing it with a grief equally gripping.  It just keeps shifting you back and forth like this, which I think is one of the main reasons why it is so wonderful.

Ultimately, I would much have preferred this album recorded in the bedroom style.  I really think you could lose the bass and the drums and it would instantly become miles better: allowing her voice, her beautiful finger-plucking style and the gentle embellishments of the fiddle and the banjo some space to breathe.  But while a lot of the personality may have been buried in the studio, this is still a very good album indeed, there is no denying that.  Alela Diane Menig is a seriously talented woman.

Alela Diane – White as Diamonds

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Alela Diane – Age Old Blue

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Good grief this is like a gigantic great indie-kid wet dream.  The short story: this has been put together by Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National and released on 4AD to benefit the Red Hot Organisation, an AIDS/HIV project.

From a musical point of view, you really couldn’t ask for a better snapshot of this particular moment in independent music.  It’s phenomenal, from the amazing Feist and Ben Gibbard collaboration, to the gorgeous Iron & Wine, to all the other curiosities and unreleased gems they have managed to pull together.  Compilations like this are usually either done by labels, hence limiting their scope, or by marketeers, hence polluting their musical potential with populsim.

This one appears to be largely free of that – or at least, it has the confidence to target the indie audience with genuine flair. Rather than just slapping on songs by all the box-ticked big sellers on Amazon, they seem happy to assume that we either all know who Dave Sitek, Kevin Drew and Stewart Murdoch are, or at least that we are capable of finding out, and hence is able to absolutely pepper the playlist with genuine jewels of curiosity for those of us with indie inclinations.

So, really, there’s no excuse not to buy one.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t buy one then you’re a fucking idiot, because there’s just so much on here to love.  Get ten indie kids round a table, and I bet they’d all have different hits and different misses from this, and that is a very, very good thing.

Oh, and have you heard of HIV denialists?  There are people who deny that HIV causes AIDS, and insist that the whole thing is one Big Pharma conspiracy to sell more drugs.  This was even the official position of the South African government for some time, which basically led the Mbeki administration to allow the deaths of over three hundred thousand of its own citizens by refusing to participate in emergency medical relief programs.

As if African AIDS patients didn’t have enough on their plate with Western homeopaths exploiting their conditions for money.  Homeopathy is basically the administration of either water or a sugar pill, entirely devoid of active ingredients, accompanied by hilarious claims of medical efficacy.  It works, according to Jack Killen, the Acting Deputy Director of  the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine “beyond current understanding of chemistry and physics”.  This is a claim which would be ludicrous enough, were it not for the fact that actually it doesn’t work at all, never mind by what mechanism.  As the same fellow states: “There is, to my knowledge, no condition for which homeopathy has been proven to be an effective treatment”.

In the Western world homeopathy is generally just a tax on ignorance, or the self-indulgence of the worried well, and easy to ignore.  In Africa it is basically exploiting the suffering of people, who do not count in the West, in order to profit from their illness.  And then letting them die.

Just in case you didn’t think it was important to make a contribution in this particular case.

Feist w. Ben Gibbard – Train Song

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The Books w. Jose Gonzalez – Cello Song

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Stuart Murdoch – Another Saturday

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Dark Was the Night | Buy from Amazon

Erm, this is fucking awful.  I loved Beirut’s first two albums, and maybe if I hadn’t heard them I might think this was okay, but this is like watching your football team struggle against a non-league side.  Partly it’s embarrassing, partly it’s frustrating as fuck, and partly you find yourself wondering what they’ll be like if they ever have to play someone decent ever again.

Had I never liked Beirut I wouldn’t care that this seems to have been phoned in from a beach resort in fucking Lanzarote, but it matters.  Reviewers use terms like ‘no passion’ all the times, and it kind of gets on my nerves to be honest.   Bad album or not, no artist doesn’t try, doesn’t care about their work , or just faxes in an album.  Not until they’re the Rolling Stones, playing at writing a seventy-fourth piss-poor shitfest, but not on your third.

That said, I have some sympathy, because that is exactly what this sounds like.  It sounds listless, lifeless, lazy, limp, tedious, tawdry, ter..  t… something that begins with t and means fucking pointless, anyway.  I assume that this is not the case, but this sounds like he is just vacantly reproducing the same sounds as he has always done, albeit with a vaguely different stylistic sheen, without having bothered to take the time to write any songs to go with the sound.  Peh.  As I said, I assume that this cannot actually be the case, but believe me it is just what it sounds like.

Erm, so… well.  I guess that Beirut have enough fans at the moment that most people will just buy this anyway, but I would recommened caution.  In fact I would simply recommend not buying this album.  It’s like pulling Brad Pitt, then unzipping his jeans to find the saddest little cocktail gherkin ever to disgrace a tawdry 80s wife-swapping cocktail party.  And the electronics are fucking shit.

Beirut – No Dice

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Beirut – Venice

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After so loving Aidan Moffat’s superlative, jarring I Can Hear Your Heart, I was looking forward to this, but with a little trepidation.  It couldn’t be as good, could it?  And no, it couldn’t, unfortunately.

The problem really is the music.  The lyrics are as sharp and impactful as ever, although not quite so manically focussed on betrayal and misery this time around.  This is something of a mercy actually, as that did become a little bleak after a while.  Here the subject matter is almost inevitably a little more diverse, which is good, with songs like The Atheist’s Lament a particularly welcome topic for an incresingly hardened non-believer such as myself.

Others broach Moffat’s own domestic situation.  Where I Can Hear Your Heart was hidden behind layers of artifice, you get the impression that this album comes a lot more unfiltered.  This comes from the presence of songs like Lullaby For an Unborn Child, and the presumably rather wry Now I Know I’m Right, both much more early Tuesday evening kitchen-sinkers than grandiloquent proclamations.

For all these charms, however, this album does not, for me, really succeed as a record and it is down to the music.  I know that sounds facile, but Moffat’s poetic talents actually rescue a couple of songs from the slide into the ordinary, and that trick can’t be repeated ad infinitum.  Basically, a lot of the melodies lack invention and the actual musical framework lacks zip.  It’s actually kind of sluggish.

It would be entirely wrong to infer from this that this that I think this is a crap album, because it isn’t: there are some great moments.  Oh Men! is an obvious one, witty and boisterous, Unsent Letter, Unborn Child, Big Blonde – there are a few.  But ultimately, for all it may contain some superb ingredients, there is enough lacking from this particular record that I can’t really recommend it as much as I hoped I would be able to.

Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Oh Men!

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Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Ballad of the Unsent Letter

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If you’re going to everything that’s on this week, you might wish to consider drinking cups of tea at gigs or you’ll have a liver like a fucking cricket ball by the end of all this.  You could literally drink your way through the week, the finest of music dancing in your ears, and a great big beer-hoover emptying your wallet.

My absolute definites are Withered Hand, Sparrow & the Workshop, Trembling Bells, Findo Gask and, erm, Jesus H. Foxx.  Christ.  I am going to have to make sure I have a couple of orange juice gigs in that lot or I’ll be hungover for a week and possibly divorced as well by the time Sunday comes around.

Bad liver, naughty liver, must be punished.

Monday 16th February 2009: Emmy the Great at Cabaret Voltaire.

I am a little conflicted on Emmy the Great.  It’s far too tempting to call her Emmy the Perfectly Reasonable, but that is about where I stand.  She has some very sharp lyrics, and has written some really good tunes, but on listening to her debut album I found myself perhaps less able to enjoy her music in large chunks than I was when I was sampling it in small slices.
Emmy the Great – Where is My Mind

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Tuesday 17th February 2009: Chris Whittle & Simon Kempston at the Bowery.

This will be an evening of guitary singer-songwriters, so perhaps the right time to take it easy and just bask in the music, instead of getting pickled and dancing about the place.
Chris Whittle – Stay

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Wednesday 18th February 2009: Withered Hand, Sparrow & the Workshop & Jo Foster at the Bowery.

I haven’t seen Withered Hand’s twisted folk songs performed for a while now.  Nor, actually, have I seen Sparrow & the Workshop’s clattersome Americana.  There is no way on earth I’ll be missing this gig.
Withered Hand – Cornflake

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Thursday 19th February 2009: Findo Gask, Babygod & Night Noise Team play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

Findo Gask’s new single One Eight Zero is one of the best things I’ve heard in ages – part electronic pop, but far too lovelorn and plaintive for that.  I am really looking forward to seeing them play.  I know a lot less about the other two bands, but Limbo can generally be relied upon to produce the goods, so I’ll not be late!
Findo Gask – One Eight Zero

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Friday 20th February 2009: Trembling Bells at the Bowery.

I am fascinated to see how Trembling Bells’ theatrical folk music translates live.  Carbeth, their forthcoming album, is a fantastic record, albeit one with such a distinctive style I can’t imagine it will appeal to everyone.  But for myself, there’s no chance I’ll be missing this one.
Trembling Bells – I Took to You (Like Christ to Wood)

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Sunday 22nd February 2009: Crystal Stilts & Jesus H. Foxx at Sneaky Pete’s.

Any band who want to get anywhere this year have Crystal in their name.  I never realised when I reviewed their EP last September that they would go on to be quite so buzzy, especially given the low-fi sound, grumbling away with distant vocals and C86 guitars, but here they are.  And Jesus H. Foxx have been working on all sorts of new stuff as well, which I am very excited to hear.
Crystal Stilts – Crippled Croon

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Sunday 22nd February 2009: The Spinto Band at Cabaret Voltaire.

I don’t know the Spinto Band very well, although I’ve heard the name often enough.  Still, a quick listen to their MySpace page confirms that were it not for Sneaky Pete’s I would want to be at this gig as well.  Ah well.  In a week like this, something’s got to give.
The Spinto Band – Summer Grof

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You know, I really don’t like M. Ward most of the time, but I’m enjoying this.  The first album of his I ever bought was End of Amnesia, which I utterly failed to love.  I tried again with Post War, and didn’t really succeed there either.  I know that sounds silly, but it really does feel like failure because indie kids seem so into M. Ward that I always sort of feel that the fault is mine, and it’s actually something of a relief to find myself liking this.  Phew.  I can hide behind my fringe and shuffle about in bars once more.

It’s another album which is, if you ask me, just a little longer than it needs to be.  I’ll confess that I do lose concentration a little bit by the end, but I don’t really mind that.  For the first half of the album it licks along at a good pace, bouncing through a bluesy sort of landscape, wandering occasionally into more mysterious territory, and occasionally relaxing into some nice, familar balladry.

It’s about a million miles from groundbreaking, but it has charm, warmth and no little charisma.  Maybe it’s the treatment of his voice.  Maybe it’s just his actual voice.  I don’t know, but this album shimmies along with much more pep than most other M.Ward stuff I’ve heard.  I’m not falling all over myself to praise it, but until I doze off somewhat during the last handful of songs, I am finding this really quite enjoyable.

M Ward – For Beginners

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M Ward – Stars of Leo

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

Howdy folks & apologies for (a) busting in on Mr. Toad’s podcast post, & (b) being late. Again. There’s a very good reason for that, namely I’ve been busting my orbs getting stuff & nonsense sorted out ready for our new station premiere — which, frustratingly, I still can’t say anything about.  All I can say is it’s happening very soon indeed.

One of the things I’ve been doing, sleeplessly, for the past week, is giving TWRHQ a bit of a tart up creating & adding new graphics, links, & building an entirely new add on site (TWR 2.0) that hosts all our interviews & sessions.  Finally, long after a number of people asked for it, you can now listen to/download all the individual interviews, minus the rest of the shows they were originally docked within, that we have conducted on the show.

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