You may point and laugh, people, but I am currently lying in my bed, a mere sneeze, twitch or yawn away from unspeakable agony. I fucked my back playing football on Monday and at the moment any kind of movement is like a wild gamble. Do it wrong, and my lower back spasms to extent that it can take me ten minutes to focus on the individual muscles one by one and try and relax them. It’s bloody crap.

On the plus side, my doctor has prescribed me Diazepam which, according to the Daily Mail, will turn me into a jobless, benefit-scrounging, teenage single mother by the evening.  I was offered opiates as well, but turned them down on the basis that I would snigger about it too much.  Also, I am not fond of painkillers to begin with: I prefer to actually know what’s going on if I can.  I want to be able to know how much it hurts and consequently have a reasonable idea when it’s all getting better.

The other annoying thing is that I literally cannot do anything.  When you’ve got other illnesses you can at least potter in the garden for an hour here or make some phonecalls there or do some video editing or whatever the hell else, but I can’t even sit at a desk for more than twenty minutes before everything starts clenching up, so I am quite literally confined to lying either on the bed or the living room floor, or hobbling about the house to try and loosen up.  I have watched every shitty movie known to man in the last three days.

You know what was a real disappointment though?  Neighbours.  And Home and Away to an extent, but mostly Neighbours.  Even seven or eight years after leaving uni I could still comfortably slip back into Neighbours – face it, the plot moves at an absolutely glacial pace – but this week I haven’t had the patience.  It’s a bit gutting – like I’ve finally lost touch with an old childhood friend.  Maybe the pain in my back has eroded my patience for this kind of thing.

Anyway, while you’re off gallivanting, spare a thought for me, watching American Pie: the Wedding or some other such total horse manure, and unable to even drag myself out for a bloody pint – anaesthetic beer, mmmmm!  And what better way to kick off your Friday fun than by mocking the cripple.  You heartless bastards.

1. Most pain you’ve ever experienced.
2. Coolest sounding drug you’ve been prescribed.
3. Worst thing you’ve ever watched whilst off work sick.
4. Most innocuous injury you’ve ever had a ton of sympathy for.
5. Most painful affliction you’ve ever had which seems too lame for sympathy.

This Friday I have some mid-90s acoustic versions of stuff to share with you.

Evan Dando & Juliana Hatfield – My Drug Buddy (Acoustic)

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Pulp – Joyriders (Acoustic)

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Supergrass – Caught by the Fuzz (Acoustic)

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Fun Lovin’ Criminals – Scooby Snacks (Acoustic)

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Pearl Jam – Black (Live Acoustic)

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A huge number of people I know in Edinburgh engaged in making what I guess you’d loosely call alt-folk seem to be refugees from a metal past.  I don’t get it.  How in the hell do you go from listening to death metal to wanting to make music that sounds like this?

I remember Religious Songs being one of the first songs I ever played on Fresh Air Radio.  It was early enough that my Mum was still listening to the shows (that lasted about two weeks) and she specifically emailed in to say how much she loved the song and all I can remember thinking is ‘you weren’t really listening to the words, were you Mum.’

Oddly enough, that minute little exchange seems to encapsulate Withered Hand, for me, and I’m not sure why.  I think it’s just because Dan Willson, despite being one of the most straightforward people you could ever meet, might just be incredibly enigmatic.

Musically, this record is utterly simple.  There’s nothing ground-breaking being done with songwriting, arrangement or structure here, is just eleven songs of plain vanilla songwriting.  But then, the band is a stable four-piece of acoustic (mostly) guitar, banjo, cello and drums which is not as straightforward as all that.

Lyrically, it’s hard to say why Good News is not a depressing album.  The lyrics encompass existentialist bleakness, troubled relationships with religion and what can at the very kindest be described as self-esteem issues.  But it never comes across as pompous, self-indulgent or miserable and I haven’t really been able to figure out why.  Sure, there is also a lot of warmth and wit to be found, and these act as a brilliant antidote, but that doesn’t seem to answer the whole question, I don’t think.

Dan can’t really sing, either.  His voice quavers and breaks… and is somehow gorgeous to listen to.  He has none of the attributes you would think of in a front-man, but that just doesn’t matter.  This band is his band in every sense, and there is something about it which therefore makes him the perfect front man.

The group themselves look like someone plucked them from the rejects bin in a toy shop: drummer Alan with his skinny waistcoat, wobbling quiff and languid manner; Hannah on cello with her bizarre and yet strangely perfect sartorial choices, and her wee coloured stickers up the neck of her instrument which I think she put there to help her learn the notes to the songs; baldy banjo muppet Neil in his pointy indie-slippers; and then Willson himself: straggly hair, surprised smile and a guitar decorated like Jennifer Aniston’s waistcoat in Office Space. They’re weird.  And it works.

And I think I know why it works: everything about this project, this band, has perfect integrity.  This album has not one single contrived thing about it, and it shows through clear as day.  Everything here is that way because Willson and his band are just like that.  So to come back, somewhat cheesily, to the title of one of the songs on Dan’s previous EP: R U Courageous.  And I think it’s fair to say that this record shows unequivocally that he is.  It’s all just out there for us to enjoy, or not, judge or not, ignore or not, not dressed up in artifice, not smothered in oblique lyrics, and not forced on us as if the writer thought it was crucial that we hear it.

It just comes across as Willson saying ‘Hello, this is me, here I am.’ with no urgent compulsion that we pay attention, but with the unassuming courage not to hide anything to make himself look better or more interesting, and as such has made one of the most uplifting, personal, compelling records I’ve heard in years.  In a somewhat contradictory sense, Good News just makes me smile, all the way through, even the sad songs.

Withered Hand – Love in the Time of Ecstasy

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Withered Hand – I am Nothing

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Having just complained about Dent May being overly arch and insincere I am about to praise an album which is rather arch and definitely very stylised, and I can imagine people feeling that to be a slightly false distinction. There is a cool veneer of old-school indie meets sixties beat combo, but if you’ve ever seen this band live you’ll know that there’s not the slightest distance between them, their music or their audience: they are fucking amazing.

This record has been gestating for some time now, as the Low Miffs rebuilt from something of a personnel shakeup a couple of years ago, started working with Malcolm Ross, and finally pulled together an album of new material after two excellent singles on Art Goes Pop. I confess I was somewhat guilty myself of taking my eye off what they were doing – the world thunders on at pace, and a year below the radar can see people move on pretty quickly, I guess. Then suddenly, this appeared.

I am not yet completely on board with all of the songs; Scarface isn’t really a favourite, but I really like almost everything else. The Man Who Took on Love and Won and Cressida are exuberant pop gems, where Kind of Keen and The Back of Midnight are laid back dive bar lotharios and Mankind is flamboyantly over-the-top, mixing Scott Walker with Franz Ferdinand* to produce a somewhat mental piece of cabaret art rock.

I am still coming to terms with the songs themselves, so for the moment the whole album hasn’t quite crystallised for me, and I am still hearing it as a collection of songs rather than as a single piece of work. It’s a collection of songs I really like though, so I reckon the rest will come with time. And if you have any doubts come and see them live and you will lose them – their album launch is at Cabaret Voltaire on Friday the 26th September.

The Low Miffs & Malcolm Ross – Cressida

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Malcolm Ross & the Low Miffs – Kind of Keen

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*Sorry lads, I know you probably won’t like this, but it’s not far from the truth.

This is a bizarre album. It’s basically an indie record, but it has elements of the wild, desperate camp of Wild Beasts’ Limbo Panto, but with a lot less yearning and a lot more direct weirdness. There are howls of anguish which read as genuinely painful, and yet they are set within a context which is often so surreal and charicatured that it feels as peculiar as it does affecting.

It’s one of those albums where I found myself listening, thinking ‘what the fuck is he on about here?’ quite a bit, but still found myself oddly fascinated. Perhaps the strangest part is the way it shifts gear in mid song, not so much for that shift, which is fairly common, but for what it shifts from and to. Because this record can actually sound like a lovely acoustic indie album for large parts, and although there are hints of what it really is, which bubble away under the surface, they really are only hints for the most part.

So, most of the time Chelsea Silver, Please Come Home potters along at half-pace, with acoustic guitar and straightforward indie vocals – Saint Jerome, My Baby Tames Lions being in the most familiar format, with Cautious Melody similar, albeit with slightly more orchestral shades around the edges of the melody. Consequently, when the guitars get the big and vocals build from a croon to a wail it really does feel like something otherworldly has gripped the song by the neck and is tightening its grip to the point where the singer becomes wild-eyed and panicky and the emotional level of the song starts to wobble and leap skittishly, grasping for succour from pretty much anywhere it might be found.

So, unusually, it’s not the tunes per se which I like about this, as much as the emotional uncertainty. It’s hard to actually know what you’re faced with, where the song is going, and there’s always the chance it might just go mental on you, which brings a different kind of anticipation to listening to the album. It’s like being in the pub with a friend who is prone to occasional wild mood swings, getting more and more drunk and foggy, and all the while in the back of your mind you don’t know if he’s going to burst into tears and tell you his woes, or if his eyes might glaze over and he might start picking fights for no reason, and just maybe with you.

Chet – An Abiding Love, Despite Adversarial Vice

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Chet – Cautious Melody

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MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from Absolutely Kosher

I really like both of these bands individually, but as all-time indie arranged marriages go, this superficially perfect match doesn’t quite dunk the biscuit, as far as I am concerned.

It’s fey and wan and awfy, awfy twee but honestly it lacks bite.  Imagine a cover of some of Belle & Sebastian’s dreamier material, but without any rhythmic zip, melodic inventiveness or vocal bite.  That comparison material is pretty close to the limit in terms of being just a little too breezy for my taste, and this album is a considerable distance the wrong side of that particular boundary.

Before her rather lovely solo debut Amorino, Isobel Campbell wrote and recorded songs under the name of The Gentle Waves, and gentle they most certainly were.  So gentle in fact that they generally made no impact whatsoever.  This is just the same – there’s just nothing to get hold of or, conversely, nothing which makes any real attempt to get hold of you.

The ambient, loungey atmosphere can also be reminiscent of a heavily diluted version of Stereolab, if you’re looking for comparisons, and the Japanese vocal reinforces this similarity.  Again, the comparison does this record no real credit, because even at their most dreamy, Stereolab were never too far away from punctuating your incipient drowsiness with a burst of crackling noise or a shriek of feedback.  They also had tunes, however sparingly they used them.

Basically, the recipe seems perfect, but the results somehow lack zest.  I can think of a dozen In the Fishtank collaborations which far exceed this in terms of both interest and enjoyment.

Pastels/Tenniscoats – Yomigaeru

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Pastels/Tenniscoats – About You

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The Pastels MySpace | Tenniscoats website | More mp3s | Buy direct from Domino

Hmm, you know, I actually quite like this.  Sometimes people tell you something is shite so often that by the time you actually listen to it you expectations are really rather low, and actually you are pleasantly surprised.

The Arctic Monkeys started a little like The Streets as the voice of everyday life in Britain and almost instantly tipped just the wrong side of whatever fine line it was that they were apparently treading.  Somehow, both bands ended up sounding just a little bit too self-conscious, pretty much the moment we became aware of them, almost as if the labels they were given upon their breakthroughs immediately throttled the relaxed spontaneity you need to pull off the particular brand of artful social realism* they employed.  Certainly they both lost their early casual looseness and their music became just a little awkward and contrived.

As such, the departure into stylised, cinematic croonery with the Last Shadow Puppets seemed to be a much needed break for Alex Turner, bringing a little more freedom and spontaneity to his music.  Stylistically this album is a pretty clear mixture of the Arctic Monkeys’ indie rock and the swooning orchestral pop of the Last Shadow Puppets and it works pretty well, generally.

I am not going to go and insist that this record recaptures all of their earlier zest, but it’s not too bad either.  Certainly I think the inflections of Shadow Puppetry improve on the music of their previous album, although that was often closer to this kind of sound than you’d think.

I look back at liking the first Streets album, and the first Arctics album as well, and they both seem kind of like guilty pleasures in retrospect.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe because they were on the edge of what I like and both so quickly tipped over the edge into territory I really don’t like that I allow that to influence my memories of the stuff I actually did enjoy. It all reminds me of liking albums so very much of their time that out of that context it can feel like you were just a little duped.  Play by Moby might be another example – music of a certain style that crosses over just enough to be embraced by people not traditonally in that particular audience, and even small changes seem to remind you of that, because the same balancing act can be next to impossible to pull off again. I like all of those albums, but I feel slightly weird about all three.

So, not really an informative album review I’m afraid, more tangential verbal diarrhoea.  It’s not a bad record, this, I’m actually kind of enjoying it.  No more than that, I’m afraid, but that’s still more than I really expected.

Arctic Monkeys – My Propeller

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Arctic Monkeys – Secret Door

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

*Yes, I know that this is pretty much a contradiction in terms.

Continuing with the trend of being unusually mean about emerging artists this week, now it’s the turn of the XX to signally fail to impress during their turn on the stereo.  These guys have been touted as next year’s Mercury Prize winners and been on the receiving end of some really quite outstanding verbal fellatio from the music press over the last month or so.  True to my generally contrarian nature, of course, I was therefore not expecting to like the album very much and I really hope that the fact that I don’t is not due to my determinedly pessimistic expectations.  I wouldn’t rule it out, though.

Anyhow, far from being the next anything, these guys are just a run of the mill, indie-schmindie band, as Jamie from Broken Records is fond of saying.  There are some nice, slow, chimey guitars from time to time, and they’ve lifted a couple of reasonable Echo & the Bunnymen riffs, but that’s about it.  What I really don’t understand is what there is in this stuff to feel strongly about one way or another.  They sound like a band mimicking those Scandinavian bands who have been mimicking vintage British indie for the last five years, the vocals have a slightly mid-90s surfeit of earnestness and that’s about all I can manage to say about this album one way or another.  It’s just… medium.

I can imagine the media getting excessively excited about something a little new sounding, or at least something which is a bit of a break from the norm.  Even the Klaxxons were at least a bit of change from what was going on at the time, no matter how shit they were.  This, on the other hand, is just fucking dull and somewhat dated.  It’s not even dated in a retro cool sort of way, just in the sense that it sounds like something someone’s Dad might think was cool.

If I were the predicting sort then I would be confidently stating that this album will not come within a mile of any end of year list – it will be forgotten in weeks.  I suppose the end of year list season is just close enough that I might be wrong on that one, but not by much, I’d wager.  Give it a year and no-one, absolutely no-one, will remember this album.

I just do not understand.

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The one thing I notice in this record more than anything is that it really doesn’t generate anything like the excitement in me that its predecessor achieved.  I am not sure if that is because the sheer hummability quota is slightly diminished, or just because this doesn’t really move on in any real sense from territory the band had already claimed with such aplomb.

There are certainly a few excellent air-punching, turn-it-up-really loud moments on this album, but there’s not much in terms of sheer thrill, for some reason.  Maybe that’s because a large part of that excitement tends to come from the sheer unexpectedness of a band’s emergence from pretty much nowhere, and there’s only so often you can manage that level of exuberant excitement when faced for what is basically the same thing.

And I may be wrong, but this does pretty much feel like the same thing.  There are certainly some excellent moments though: the slow, thundercloud piano of Floorboards Under the Bed is great,  and the first three songs, Reflection of the Television, single I Became a Prostitute, and Seven Years of Letters are all decent approximations of what made this band so popular.  Once that’s over, however, things seem to peter out somewhat.  Made to Disappear is sort of like before, only less so.  So is That Birthday Present and so are the last three songs, and although That Room is a little different, for some reason it sounds almost like a warm up for The Stadium Rock Album.  So I have to confess that, nah, sorry, this just isn’t doing it for me.

Oddly enough, because I’m writing a review I keep looking for reasons I don’t like large parts of this album, and there really aren’t many that I can think of.  It’s all pretty much as it should be, but the end result is not really the sum of its parts, somehow.  So despite nothing all that tangible being wrong with it, Forget the Night Ahead just ends up feeling inexplicably lacklustre.

The Twilight Sad – Reflection of the Television

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The Twilight Sad – Floorboards Under the Bed

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Fatcat

It’s not quite so mental this week on Edinburgh’s live circuit.  There are quite a few interesting gigs, but not all that many unmissable ones, so I think it might be easier to pick and choose a couple without overburdening yourself.  Last week’s strategy of driving to gigs in order to prevent excessive alcohol consumption proved extremely successful (until the weekend, but then the weekend is supposed to be for fun so bugger off, besides, it’s not every day your label has an EP launch party) so I might just continue it this week.  In any case, I have three five-a-side football games this week, so it may just be necessary anyway, whatever I personally may wish to do.

Monday 14th September 2009: Jeremy Jay, Tisso Lake & the Colourful Band at the Bowery.

Jeremy Jay is a K Records star, a label give considerable love by Ruth from the Bowery when she made an appearance on the Toadcast a couple of weeks ago.  Ian from Tisso Lake has a gorgeous voice and a lovely guitar sound and while I haven’t seen him with a full band before, he is rather Rob St. Johnish (*sniff, bye Rob) when he plays solo.  The Colourful Band are from Leith and while their recorded material can seem a little lacking in real conviction, there is definitely a lot of potential there, so I will be very interested to see them live to get a better idea of what they are really like as a band.

Jeremy Jay – Beautiful Rebel

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Tuesday 15th September 2009: Brook Pridemore at the Forest Cafe.

[This has shifted to the Forest Cafe from the Bowery] Anyone who saw Dan Costello at the Bowery last Monday will know that Brook is his drummer, and will be breathlessly waiting for him to sing Breakup Song for Brook Pridemore to Sing, written by Mr. Costello with the fairly obvious intention that it be sung by erm…  yes, Gary Barlow, that was it.  Apart from that, I have little idea what to expect, but if he plays with anything like as light a touch and generous-spirited a nature as Costello himself then this will be a really enjoyable night.

Tuesday 15th September 2009: Theoretical Girl at Sneaky Pete’s.

[Edit: due to the cancellation of the support acts, anyone mentioning Song, by Toad at the door will be given free entry - bloody excellent!] I am not entirely sure about Theoretical Girl, but there’s definitely something interesting going on there, so if New York anti-folk isn’t quite your bag then this slightly theatrical, often piano-led, somewhat Dubstar-esque lady is well worth investigating.

Theoretical Girl – Another Fight

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Wednesday 16th September 2009: Jesus H. Foxx, Second Hand Marching Band & Wounded Knee at the Wee Red Bar.

We all know how good I think the Foxx are, but I am also bloody delighted to get the chance to catch the Second Hand Marching Band again.  They encompass a lot of styles, from carnival folk, to more mysterious, dreamy territory and I haven’t seen them for ages.

Second Hand Marching Band – Mad Sense

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Thursday 17th September 2009: Whispertown 2000, Joe McAdam (from the New York Fund) & No Pasaran at Sneaky Pete’s.

I liked the Whispertown 2000 debut album, maybe not quite enough to review it, but enough to be fascinated by their music.  They’re getting bigger, too, and I think they are about to play the End of the Road Festival, so they could be on the verge of making a bit of a breakthrough.

Whispertown 2000 – Done With Love

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Friday 19th September 2009: Beerjacket & Emily Scott play Trampoline at the Wee Red Bar.

Despite threatening suicide on a number of occasions, Trampoline soldiers on, as the one of the best and most consistently under-publicised nights in Edinburgh.  Of the bands on Song, by Toad Records I saw two for the first time at Trampoline shows, and the lineups are almost all excellent.

They have a couple more bodies on board now – Dave and Michael from The Stormy Seas/Shipping Forecast Garden Party/ex-Rubix – so I am really hoping they can push this onto a new level.  The lineups are almost always top notch, and I think as a night it should really benefit from the extra help, because it deserves to be a lot bigger than it is.  Euan wrote about Beerjacket when he was babysitting this blog in June, so I am really looking forward to seeing them for the first time.

Saturday 20th September 2009: The Declining Winter, Conquering Animal Sound & Fieldhead at the Bowery.

I might not be a massive fan of the Declining Winter myself, but I am bloody delighted to see Tracer Trails back promoting gigs again.  The current groundswell of belief in the Edinburgh musical community owes an awful lot to the work done by Tracer Trails a couple of years ago, who consistently brought left-field artists, often of some renown, to Edinburgh and hence, along with the now defunct I Fly Spitfires, did an enormous amount to actually make Edinburgh a place good bands would seriously consider putting on their tour schedule.  They also both made a huge contribution to actually building the audiences for this kind of music, giving subsequent promoters a confidence that there were people who would come, if they put on shows themselves.

Both promoters pretty much vanished, just as their labour was beginning to bear fruit for everyone else, which was a huge shame, so it’s really brilliant to see Tracer Trails back in business.  I urge you all to go along and show your support, because it would be great to see them back on the list of reliably excellent and challenging promoters we have around at the moment.

DO NOT WORRY!  This is not a podcast stuffed full of tedious moralising and empty pontificating and generally depressing garbage about a subject far too weighty and philosophical for this sort of half-arsed internet enterprise.  In fact, towards the end it really gets quite chipper.

Basically, there are so many extraordinarily good murder ballads that that particular aspect could so easily have entirely overtaken a podcast ostensibly about prison, crime and criminal justice.

This week, however, I have still managed to marginalise the role of the murder ballad, because the concept of death incorporates so many disparate emotions and aspects that simply doing a whole podcast about murderous folk tales and their musical counterparts seemed unnecessarily narrow.  So you get this.  Which starts out a little heavy but becomes positively gleeful by the end, I promise you.

Toadcast #86 – The Deathcast

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01. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Painter Blue (03.01)
02. Samamidon – O Death (12.33)
03. Eels – Going to Your Funeral (22.31)
04. Melanie Rivaud & Strange Weather – The Fall of Troy (Tom Waits Cover) (25.05)
05. Bob Frank & John Murry – Jesse Washington 1916 (31.53)
06. Bruce Springsteen – Dead Man Walking (37.02)
07. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Up Jumped the Devil (41.15)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (48.26)
09. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Tramp the Dirt Down (57.02)
10. Chumbawamba – Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1471 (66.35)