Sping.  SPRING.  Hurry the FUCK UP for Christ’s sake before we all go fucking mental.  Good grief what a long drawn out wait it has been.  Some sunshine would be nice.  A cup of tea in the garden would be nice.  Actually, even the chance to go outside of a weekend and rescue the garden from the tangle of weeds and fallen leaves it has become over the winter would be nice.  Obviously there’d have to be coke and whores afterwards, just to keep up the rock ‘n’ roll pretensions, but for now a nice cuppa and a Rich Tea biscuit in the back garden, with dirty hands and earth under our fingernails, would be very welcome indeed.

For those of you craving a spot of news, apparently Bob Dylan’s new studio album is being released in mid-April, which is rather jolly, I have to say.  I have no great expectations for it to be a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, but so what.  It might be a bloody good listen anyway.

Secondly, here’s a wee video of Broken Records (who?) recording their debut album, which will be released, erm, quite soon.  June 1st, it seems.

Monday 16th March 2009: Finley Quaye at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

You know, I never knew that Finley Quaye was an Edinburgh artist.  I actually rather liked Maverick A Strike, although I must confess to having largely neglected his stuff since.  I am busy tonight but just out of curiosity this looks like a rather interesting gig, if just to find out what he’s been up to all this time.
Finley Quaye – Even After All

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Thursday 19th March 2009: Limbo & Canongate Books present Irregular, at the Voodoo Rooms.

To say that this is an ambitious project sounds a little condescending, but in a sense I suppose it is.  This is going to be a combination of music and spoken word, with readings from recent Canongate publications mixed with live music from the likes of Black Diamond Express.  I have no idea how they intend to put it together or whether or not they can pull it off, but it sounds fucking fascination, frankly, and I shall be there for sure.

Friday 20th March 2009: Sleepingdog, Esperi & The Kays Lavelle at the Wee Red Bar.

There will be no mosh pit at the Wee Red on Friday, but Sleepingdog generate a kind of hypnotic loveliness which should bring a fascination of its own.  Essentially, it seems, a vehicle for Belgian lassie Chantal Acda, they’ve just released an album called Polar Life, a rather appropriate name, given the music, which I assume will be available at the show and from the sounds of the MySpace page should be rather good.
Sleepingdog – The Prophets

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Saturday 21st March 2009: Ballboy at the Wee Red Bar.

Ballboy are the Edinburgh indie-pop stars who never quite hit the escape velocity needed to break out of the city into the wider music-listening consciousness.  This is a bit of a shame because they’ve got some really brilliant songs.  Now there’s a new album as well, called I Worked on the Ships, which I have yet to hear but if their previous stuff is anything to go by should be a really enjoyable listen.
Ballboy – I’ve Got Pictures of You in Your Underwear

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Saturday 21st March 2009: Tunng at the Picturehouse.

Me?  Publicising a gig at the Picturehouse?  I thought I was trying to be alternative.  Ah well, people have been trying to get me to properly listen to Tunng for ages, most notably Ruth from the Bowery, so I thought that a live performance would be a bloody good way to start.  I’m rather looking forward to this actually – a bit of bleepery, a bit of slightly arcane folk music – splendid!
Tunng – Tale From Black

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Well, not me obviously, because the answer to that is no-one.  But Mrs. Toad and I were purchasing a little wine on our way home from the pub tonight and instead of going into some sort of warehouse off-license we ventured into the Edinburgh Wine Shop, which is small, friendly and, I suppose, slightly dorky.  It’s the sort of place where the staff know about wine, where they sell lots of real ale and no fucking Fosters whatsoever and where, generally, they play classical music.

Classical music has always kind of baffled me, not out of general dislike or anything, more out of pure ignorance.  I don’t know it, understand it, or anything.  Nor could I hope to intelligently critique it.  However, I wonder sometimes about what causes stuff to stick in the memory, or to stand the test of time.  Great classical musicians, once they achieved fame, found their music performed to royal courts; to the largest audiences available at the time.  A bit like Britney Spears.

So was Mozart really the best available to his time, or was he just Madonna – some pushy, stringy old lady whose thirst for celebrity and knack for manipulating the press far outweighs any measurement of talent.  I don’t, as I’ve said, have the knowledge to really answer that question, but the people who read this blog are all fans of alternative music.  Not alternative in the sense of being NME readers rather than MTV fans, but in the sense of genuinely loving really alternative music.

Even fucking Celine Dion has performed to royal audiences.  Britney Spears, Take That, Madge, all these people have achieved something akin to the twenty-first century equivalents of patronage – the barometer for the best and best-remembered classical composers.  So, without wishing to enter into an argument about which classical composers truly deserve to be remembered at the expense of which others, what have we actually lost?

Where are the Nick Caves of that era, compared to the Coldplays?  Do we really need to remember Eric Clapton?  I mean, his politics are fucking detestable, but was he good enough to deserve immortalisation?  And even if you take the attitude that might means right – that being that popular is justification enough in itself – then what of the bands who would be the equivalent of Jeffrey Lewis.  Or the Wave Pictures.  Or even Wilco.  How long will these guys live in human memory without that massive groundswell of popular approval which ends up sanctifying an artist for all time.  And what of the likes of Daniel Johnston, for example, who is barely known in his own era and might so easily disappear within a couple of decades, once he passes on, because apparently All fucking Saints were invited to perform at the fucking Royal fucking Variety Show and he was not.

Pearl Jam – Jeremy (Yeah yeah, Nirvana, yadda yadda…)

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Giant Sand – Flying Around the Sun at Remarkable Speed

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Eef Barzelay – Ballad of Bitter Honey

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This week I welcome you to the absolutely 100% guaranteed non-controversial podcast.  Nothing to see here. Move along.  Although, it might be slightly controversial, just possibly, around two thirds of the way through if you are excessively religious or perhaps if you have some objection to pointing and laughing as Jade Goody dies of cancer or Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse slowly expire in the full and relentless gaze of the public eye.

Has anyone seen the film Deathwatch?  It’s set in Glasgow in the 1980s and almost entirely obscure, despite an amazing cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow.  What it amounts to is that a woman discovers that she is going to die, and then a TV company ask to buy the rights to film her last weeks.  It’s a bit over the top at times, but a pretty visionary movie nevertheless.  It’s always disconcerting where something like that makes a prediction which proves to be so uncannily true.  I think the scariest thing about 1984 is how utterly determined the species seems to be to make sure that it comes true.

If you can find a copy, I’d recommend that you watch it.  It’s pretty hard to track down though – we had to get ours from Amazon France for some bizarre reason, so good luck to you.

Toadcast #60 – The Blandcast

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1. Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm (04.41)
2. Clem Snide – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience (09.00)
3. Pree – Light Falls (17.05)
4. Frivolous Laura – A Lullaby (20.22)
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Statues (27.27)
6. The Low Anthem – Oh My God Charlie Darwin (37.18)
7. Kill It Kid – Burst its Banks (41.31)
8. Pete Doherty – The Last of the English Roses (49.03)
9. R.E.M. – Perfect Circle (59.41)

No, we’re not doing that this week actually, although Five Ways to Leave Your Lover would be a fine Friday Five at some point in the future.  Nothing too insulting, nothing too pedestrian, and points given for believability combined with strangeness.  Nice idea actually but, well, maybe later.

This week’s five were suggested by the excellent Mr. Team Turnip on the Pains of Being Pure at Heart review, I think.  It was all about bands who develop their songwriting and those who simply consolidate once they have found a style with which they and their fans are comfortable.

This is a nice one actually, because it exposes our prejudices.  The sum total of all music criticism pretty much boils down to ‘I like this… and I don’t like that.’  It’s an instinctive decision and as much as we can try and rationalise it afterwards, no amount of good argument can make you like or dislike anything much more than you do instinctively.  I suppose being pointed out that something was ripped off from somewhere or that such and such is a dickhead or so on can make you cool on something, but basically I think we’re mostly left with just a gut reaction, as far as music is concerned.

So for all we praise bands for developing, complain that they are derivative or criticise them for standing still, there are always plenty of groups we love who make total hypocrites of us for doing so. So chip in with yours, please, and take this opportunity not to worry about the fact that 90% of the comments on this site come from the same ten or fifteen people.  Ignore them, they’re harmless, and I’d be delighted to be introduced to a new lurker, should you fancy it.  Take the plunge, the water’s lovely.

1. Band who just knock out the same old shit time after time, but you love them anyway.
2. Band who have impressed you by continuing to develop, despite having a lot to lose.
3. Band who have become better and better with time.
4. Band who are a total rip-off, but you don’t fucking care, thank you very much.
5. Band you love who make you feel like a total hypocrite.

Eels – Sweet Li’l Thing

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The Strokes – Vision of Division

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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – We Call Upon the Author

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The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle

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Babyshambles – Delivery

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Friends and family of this band are going to want to slap me for this review.  Mind you, Kill It Kid are signed to one of the best indie labels in the UK – One Little Indian – and the label got in touch asking for a review, so here goes.  They can take it!

This music is furious, revivalist, bluesy Americana.  It’s got loads of potential, so I’ll get the criticisms out of the way first because there’s no need to end this review on a bum note.  Occasionally they are too close, to my ears, to mimicking a style rather than necessarily interpreting it.  Also, I find myself loving lead singer Chris Turpin’s voice on the quieter numbers and finding it a little bit too much from time to time on the louder ones – caricatured, almost.

Every review they’ve had so far has mentioned his voice, and fair enough, because it has character and will divide opinion.  I would always prefer to listen to a voice with a life of its own, however, rather than another identikit music school warbler.  If you have a distinctive voice like this you just have to accept that some people will never like it, but that doesn’t matter, because they will never be your audience anyway.  Better to think about how much the other people are going to love it.

The music is phenomenal enough, and this is one of the most energetic studio recordings I’ve heard.  Either these guys virtually play a live gig in their recording studio, or their engineer is a very talented individual, because there’s no evident artifice to this at all.  I does actually sound like they are there in front of you playing, and I would be absolutely amazed if they don’t prove to be a complete fucking tornado of a live band.

So I may have some reservations about this, and I would like to see them develop their genre a little more, but there’s bags of potential here and I would love to see them on stage.  Basically, I am thoroughly enjoying this, bring on some more please.

Kill It Kid – Private Idaho (Had to change the song, sorry, because apparently Send Me an Angel Down is going to be a single, so it would have been a bit cheeky to leave that up here for free.)

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MySpace | Buy the EP from Norman Records

Well, I really was feeling wary about this, because the pre-release promo track People Got a Lotta Nerve really didn’t do it for me.  It was sort of stodgy, by the numbers alt-country and I ended up feeling rather apprehensive about the rest of the album.  I am a bit of a neophyte as far as Neko Case is concerned, with Fox Confessor being the first album of hers which I bought, and my knowledge of her previous releases still being more than a little sketchy.

Fox Confessor, for me, was a bit of a masterpiece and do I think this is quite as good?  Well, no, but I doubt I was ever going to.  When you first properly discover an artist by virtue of their writing one of your favourite albums in years then not much they can do is likely to live up to that.  What it does not do, however, is disappoint.

Neko Case’s music, if it has a fault, can occasionally flirt with the alt-country version of power pop.  On this album it does threaten to happen from time to time, but she always seems to shift just before things go a little too far.  The vocals have a similar sort of tendency.  She has tremendous vocal power and a voice that is clean as a whistle.  In terms of sheer vocal ability she seems to me (although I wouldn’t know) to have one of the strongest voices in indie music at the moment.

Because of these factors, it is the restraint that I find remarkable in her music.  It would be so easy for her to overdo it, but she never seems to.  You get the impression of someone totally in control of her music.

The final word as far as Neko Case is concerned is, I think, warmth.  Despite combative and occasionally confrontational lyrics, she mixes in some wonderfully lovelorn ones and delivers it all with a kind of welcoming, friendly intimacy which is perhaps, in the absence of much quirkiness, where the rich charisma of her music comes from.  So I may never love this as much as Fox Confessor, but it’s a bloody lovely record.  Again.  She’s good.

Neko Case – This Tornado Loves You

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Neko Case – Don’t Forget Me

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As an aside, one thing the warmth of her voice falls slightly short in achieving is the ragged pain of this Harry Nilsson song.  The Walkmen recorded an absolutely stunning version a few years back, and the bewildered, raw hurt of Hamilton Leithauser’s voice suits this particular track much better, I think.  Or maybe I’m just saying that because theirs is the first version I heard.

The Walkmen – Don’t Forget Me

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

It’s always nice when I band who you’ve watched make their own luck actually manage to start achieving the breaks you think they deserve.

I’ve written about A Classic Education a couple of times now, and they’ve just emailed me through with a little bit of news, so I thought it would be nice to pass it on.  Firstly, they have a new single approaching on Bailiwick Recordings – the label which released the excellent Gossamer Albatross (who apparently need a drummer – any takers?) single earlier this year.  It is called Best Regards and, although there’s no set release date just yet, the song can be previewed on both the band’s and label’s MySpaces.

Funnily enough, there seems to be a lot of very good, slightly dark, slightly Smithsy indie coming out of Italy at the moment.  I haven’t featured it here as much as I would have liked to because most of the stuff I’ve been sent has been perilously close to, but just short of, having quite cracked it yet.  There’s no more than a hair’s breadth in it though, and it certainly seems like there is a really healthy scene bubbling under in Italy at the moment.  Fascinating how these things start to build and snowball, isn’t it.

Anyway, the other little bit of a treat in that email from A Classic Education was an English version of Toi, a Gilbert Bécaud song, which the band picked up on from the soundtrack to 1965 Italian movie called “Io la Conoscevo Bene” by Antonio Pietrangeli.  My ignorance of this is absolutely at one hundred percent, so I am doing little more than passing on the press release at this stage, I’m afraid, but I like this kind of little project.  It’s easy to end up with cultural tunnel vision when writing a blog like this and to forget that pop music is just a tiny part of a broader spectrum of arts (okay okay, I know, most of which I really can’t be arsed with) and it’s really nice to see people mixing the context of their music around like this.

Anyway, here’s the song:
A Classic Education РToi (Gilbert B̩caud Cover)

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The original scene with the original Italian version of the song:

And the same footage with their version:

I’ve written about Jake Flowers a couple of times, and I thought now was a good time for a bit of a reminder, given he has a single out soon and has been rather splendidly included on the bill for this year’s Fence Collective Homegame festival.

Small World is available now on iTunes and in a couple of weeks on vinyl and I’d recommend it.  I got into Jake’s stuff from a couple of dubious MySpace rips and his really nice EP with the Carol-Anne Showband and, and there’s a warmth to his pastoral English folkiness which I really like.  He accelerates up to a hillbilly stomp on occasion, but for the most part it’s pretty mellow, lovely music.

The big question with this kind of thing recently seems to have been whether or not it can retain its quirk and charm as it gets more popular.  We’ve seen the likes of Noah & the Whale and Emmy the Great really fail to translate low-fi wonky underground appeal into a mass market product of any real quality.  Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re popular, but I still honestly can’t say that I think either is any good.  So I’m really pleased that Jake has found a label to release on, because I’ve been a fan of his music for a while, and I hope he steups up to greet a larger audience as well as I think he probably can.  Anyone who can get this kind of music played on Kerrang Radio, for fuck’s sake, must have something about them.

What else is there to say, I suppose.  His new stuff is sounding good, this all strikes me as really promising stuff and I am looking forward to seeing him live and finding out more.

Jake Flowers – Anyhow

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Jake Flowers – Rosalie

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I’ve written about derivative bands before.  I mean, nothing comes out of the blue does it, not even the most revolutionary stuff we listen to, so there’s little point moaning about how this or that is ripped off from this, that or the other because everything borrows heavily from somewhere, we just don’t always know where.

I don’t know if it’s personal mood, then, or the degree to which you are familiar with the roots of the music but I can be really variable in my reaction to stuff which is obviously just a poppy and enjoyable re-hash of sounds heard a million times before.  The Shout Out Louds pretty much do the same thing as these fellows, but that I loved, whereas this causes me to feel just a little impatience.

This takes in all sorts of decent 80s indie, from Talulah Gosh to… well, Teenager in Love could almost be Simple Minds.  Basically though, for some reason it feel just a little too much like a rehash and not quite enough like a re-interpretation; or even a re-invigoration.  If someone told me this was simply a song-for-song cover of an eighties indie compilation made up of bands I didn’t happen to know, it would be believable.

So it’s fun, and they do demonstrate a good knack with a catchy pop tune on more than one occasion.  All in all, though, I’d have to say that there’s not enough to differentiate this musically from its very obvious influences for it to give me any great excitement as an album, despite what appears to be its wild popularity across the world of the internet.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Come Saturday

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The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Young Adult Friction

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

On the subject of women in indie, I remember that I never did get into much female fronted music as a kid.  It was all R.E.M., Billy Bragg, The Pogues, Bob Dylan and stuff like that.  Not much that was current and, for no obvious reason, not much stuff made by women, particularly with lead female vocals.  Maybe if I’d been more into Motown and soul that might have been different, but I never really crossed paths with Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez or Marianne Faithfull either, who were all working in the same basic territory which I was exploring at the time.  Sandy Denny was one of the most conspicuous exceptions, but I can’t think of many others off the top of my head.

This didn’t really change until I went to university.  All that was really different there was that I became considerably more aware of popular music which was popular away from the dominance of the likes of MTV and so on.  So I started getting into bands like Saint Etienne and their ilk and I was sort of interested in the Cranberries without ever really clicking with them.  The real sea change was of course the explosion of sassy, lady-led groups which came with Britpop.  It became such an obvious phenomenon that I seem to recall Louise Wener of Sleeper wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Just Another Female-Fronted Band’ at some point, although my memory is far from definite on the subject.

Anyhow, I got really into Sleeper (although perhaps only really from their second album onwards, rather than their first), I loved the first two Echobelly albums and I really liked Belly as well.  Elastica were around at the same time, but I never quite got into them, and the Cocteau Twins were really good too, but not quite Britpop I guess.  If you follow those links then you’ll be able to pick up almost any of these albums for a pittance on Amazon Marketplace, and there’s some amazing stuff there.

Maybe it’s because it was the first popular movement I engaged with at the time, but I still have a real affection for Britpop, despite its foisting the likes of Menswear on us.  It was brash and confident, and maybe that was the attitude which I responded to the most in this plethora of female-led rock bands.  I know that same attitude was largely the undoing of the movement as a whole in the end, as it got all tangled up in itself.  And with the decline of Britpop most of these groups disappeared from the scene to a large extent.

It was fun though – lots of fun.  It was the first time I’d really engaged with the thrill of anticipating new music, as opposed to exploring what was already out there.  It sounds dated as hell listening back to it now, and maybe that’s why those albums are all so cheap, but there are too many memories for that to matter much.

Sleeper – Lie Detector

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Echobelly – King of the Kerb

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Belly – Untitled and Unsung

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Cocteau Twins – Tishbite

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