Well the Funkcast was probably about as gentle a ‘tell me about this genre’ podcast as you’re likely to get.  This, on the other hand, is not gentle.  I suppose it was never likely to be – there’s only so gentle an introduction you can give to this kind of music.

Basically, I was becoming increasingly curious about the number of alt-folkies I know who come from heavy metal backgrounds.  Loads of my friends here who I know because we all listen to indie rock or alternative folk or all sorts of things inbetween seem to have been really into metal when they were young.  This doesn’t entirely make sense to me because I see very little connection between the two kinds of music, and for so many people to have made that transition it must be a strong connection.

Then, of course, it turns out that loads of people whose music I listen to – alt-folk, once again – also grew up listening to metal.  The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and, more locally, Dan from Withered Hand and Neil from Meursault.  So, having been round at the house doing artwork for their single releases I asked the Neil and Chris from Meursault and Matthew who helps out with the label to put together a metal podcast.  It might not be quite as pleasant to cook your bacon sandwiches to on Sunday afternoon, but erm, well I never made any promises with these bloody podcasts anyway – just deal with it, we’ll probably be back to the alt-folk next week.

Toadcast #91 – The Metalcast

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

01. Half Man Half Biscuit – Vatican Broadside (0.00)
02. Withered Hand – Takeaway Food (05.03)
03. AC/DC – Whole Lotta Rosie (13.17)
04. Slayer – Jesus Saves (17.25)
05. Mount Eerie – Wind’s Dark Poem (24.21)
06. Nirvana – School (35.13)
07. Dinosaur Jr. – On the Way (37.50)
08. Lightning Bolt – Ride the Sky (42.59)
09. Richard Cheese – Rape Me (47.47)
10. Children of Bodom – The Trooper (53.50)
11. Meshuggah – Autonomy Lost (57.05)
12. The Mountain Goats – No Children (62.01)
13. Anal Cunt – You’re Old (Fuck You) (73.27)

Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years.  That’s weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident.  Certainly I didn’t have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that’s a different story).

At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious ex-girlfriend and was working at a pretty shite company in London and really had no ties at all.  Basically, if I hadn’t accidentally got hammered and ended up in bed pawing enthusiastically at a tolerantly indifferent yet-to-become-Mrs. Toad, the chances are very good that I would have ended up somewhere foreign, quite probably in East Asia somewhere.

I am an industrial designer by trade, and judging by some of the unutterable guff coming out of China I could actually have had an extremely healthy and well-paid career out there by this point.  Actually, fuck it, my career over here is actually pretty respectable anyway, it’s only because I am so focussed on music at the moment and because Mrs. Toad makes so much more than I do that I sometimes forget that fact.

I went to gigs down South, and I’d started writing about music online, but not to anything like this extent.  I was a designer who fannied about with web stuff occasionally, not a musical muppet whose day job required monumental amounts of patience to tolerate his extra-curricular distractions.

So yes, it turns out that never mind her tolerance for all the work I put into this nonsense and her funding for my errant ideas, just meeting Mrs. Toad had a massive influence on the very existence of this website.  Primarily I suppose because the dull, domesticated, middle class existence into which I was lured required me to find something to go a bit mental about because the other option was a mortal dose of cabin fever.  Pick your madness.

1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*.  Where would you choose to interfere?
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Trials of Harrison Hayes

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Flatlanders – Going Away

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Supergrass – Moving

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

*

Time for some roundtable chat internet-style hot air.  A couple of days ago The Pop Cop had a bit of a dig at The Scotsman’s Under the Radar blog, and today UtR responded.  The accusation was of a lack of quality control, and how the volume of writing which their six writers produces has led to some very mediocre bands being covered.  UtR responded by saying that they aren’t necessarily setting all of these bands up as the Next Great Big Thing, and that they’re under no pressure to fill column inches, so bands really only do get covered if one of their writers likes them enough to devote the necessary time.

Everyone involved agrees that the primary issue is one of taste.  Of course, I personally think both blogs praise some bloody awful music.  They in turn must look at some of the stuff I like and wonder what the fuck I am thinking.  Then again, there are plenty of times where all three of us (and everyone else) are in total accord, which is when bands tend to get famous.  That’s fine – that’s just how taste works, we’re supposed to disagree.  So far, so obvious.

The big difference between the two is that The Pop Cop is written by one person and UtR by six, and once that many people are involved you are increasingly likely to find someone who likes pretty much anything.  As Ally from The Skinny and Clash Magazine responded when I said that he should have declined to write the review of the Broken Records album: ‘what do you expect The Skinny to do – pass it round the office until they find someone who likes it?’  Well with a group blog where people only write about bands they like that is inevitably what is going to happen.

So what’s the consequence?  A lot of content and a muddying of any consistent editorial voice, I suppose, although I do find that UtR is nicely unified by the interspersed editorial articles, almost always written by the two main editors.  The stuff inbetween can be a bit difficult to hold together, though.  I may write a lot of content as well, and all of you will think at least some of it is total and utter shite, but it is distinctly and obviously my voice.  This is something which you will either come to like or you will presumably cease to read after a while, but it certainly gives the site itself a very distinctive personal identity.

This all comes down to the success of blogs and their intersection with proper journalism again, I think. Basically, to get big you need to involve more people, because one person can’t do the requisite amount of work themselves.  But do that and you risk diluting the personal voice which makes blogs so special, and it’s rare that people really get around that problem successfully.  Glasgow PodcART is also produced by a team of people and can suffer from the same scattershot effect, but their constant bickering amongst themselves dilutes it rather effectively.  That interaction itself becomes the disctinctive voice – the defining character of the publication – and crucially it also mitigates against the danger of liking everything by virtue of asking enough people.

In the case of UtR it’s the editorials which punctuate the flow of posts about specific bands and hold the whole thing together, but to really address the specific accusation of the publication itself professing to like too many mediocre bands I think you’d have to treat it more like a blog-magazine.  Basically, I think you’d have to separate out the writers and give them their own columns within the larger UtR banner, with perhaps an aggregated feed as the main column of the page, so people could actually get to know an individual writer’s style and taste, rather than thinking that UtR itself liked pretty much everything, which might seem to be the case sometimes.  It would mean an extensive redesign of the site itself, and it would suddenly turn into a far bigger beast than it is at the moment, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be the best way for blogging techniques to be integrated into wider online magazines.  It’s not a new idea, of course, because basically you’d be treating everyone like a columnist.

So there you go, maybe an idea for Under the Radar, and perhaps one for the future of blogzines or whatever you want to call them.  I’d have been tempted to start something like this myself ages ago, but the idea of getting bloggers together is about as ambitious as trying to herd cats, and I’ve got far too much on my plate as it is.  For an example of it being done well, albeit at a far greater scale than necessary, try ScienceBlogs, which is one of my favourite sites on the whole of the internets.

Our Portland pals Loch Lomond have a couple of new releases coming up, so I thought it was time we featured them again on Song, by Toad because it’s been a while.

The first is the split 12″ which is out on Song, by Toad Records this coming Monday, and the second is their brand new EP – their first new material for a couple of years.

The split 12″ was recorded in conjunction with the Builders & the Butchers – another considerable Toad favourite – and is being given a UK release by us in partnership with Bladen County Records in Portland.  The artwork is from a hand-drawn biro sketch by my good self, and printed onto nice tactile paper so it should be nice and touchy-feely to handle, which is how all physical releases should be.

The new EP is out in early November, and will be properly reviewed at the time, but they are clearly going for a more swoonsome, poppier sound after the slight undercurrent of unease which brought an intangible darkness to their earlier recordings.  The EP has four new songs, and a re-recording of Spine, from their gorgeous Lament For Children EP, which is a good few years old now.  Their PR chappies have sent out Wax & Wire as a taster for now, and I’ve included the old version of Spine, just for fun.  The sound is definitely moving on, but I really like the sound of the new stuff, so that can only be a good thing.

Loch Lomond – Wax & Wire

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Loch Lomond – Spine (The old version)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Loch Lomond MySpace

This record has sort of dropped into my lap out of nowhere, and I’ve spent a long time listening to it before writing this review.  It has a somewhat sprawling feel, despite being only three-quarters of an hour long, but that’s because it’s composed of twenty-one snippets of ideas, sprinkled through with digressions and interludes, and barely alights on any one thing long enough to pause for breath before veering off to sniff around something new.

It’s an album straight out of Fife, I have to confess.  I get annoyed with these generalisations myself, but when you think of the confessional, rough and slightly oblique take on low-fi music which has clustered around Fence Records in recent years, this record sounds very much at home in these surroundings.

The Complicated Honest Truth is a distinctively Scottish title, and the album itself has that archetypal tendency to turn relationship failure and everyday disappointment into something optimistic and oddly chipper.  It’s like there’s a grim enjoyment of the misery in the humour because, well, it’s dark, rainy and shit here so why not get pished and rip the shit out of our ordinariness.

For all the really good bits on this album, there are nevertheless patches where I think it loses its way a little; where the succession of thoughts lurches a little too much, and sometimes when the songs themselves perhaps don’t capture the rough sparkle of some of theirimmediate neighbours, and there is a slight tendency for the low-fi production to bog things down just a little.

This isn’t the case all that much however, and the plucking on the superb Girl Bites Boy and the bizarre but splendid piano at the beginning of You Are All, and the abrupt flatline transition between songs later on show a musician with a knack for bringing unusual sounds into a meandering ramble, and using these sonic interruptions to crack the texture of the album enough to make sure that everything is absorbed.

Scott has already received considerable plaudits for his previous album, I’m Not Angry, it’s Just You Broke My Heart, but this is the first I’d heard of him, and I’m glad I did.

The (Future) King of Scotland – You, Me: it’s Love

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The (Future) King of Scotland – You Are All

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

MySpace (The album should be available to buy here – it’s announced as released – but I can’t find the link, so good luck.)

The Smiles and Frowns got in touch a while ago and I was so impressed that I just went and bought their album and 7″, instead of bothering to ask for a promo copy of anything.  Well, sod it, I like vinyl and I have a couple of DJing assignments coming up so why the fuck not.

I don’t know what it was that attracted me to their sound so immediately.  Perhaps it was that weird sensation of hearing something so absolutely familiar which has been oddly and subtly subverted.  This sounds an awful lot like a certain era of the Beatles, but muffled and slight…  umm… weirdified. Memory Man sounds for all the world like it’s about to break into ‘The taxman’s taken all my dough” but then, the whole record is a bit like that.

This sounds like it’s taken all your Mum’s old hits and played them through the gramophone of one of those old Avengers episodes where Diana Rigg (rrrowr!) gets trapped in a bizarre psychedelic house of mirrors full of macabre clowns and rotating black and white swirly discs and so on, and the whole thing is clearly very brightly coloured despite being in black and white.  Spooky instrumental March of the Phantom Faces, right in the middle of the album, rather reinforces that impression, but the whole record has a touch of that kind of atmosphere about it.

There’s also a touch of the swoonsome French cinema-pop which inspired the likes of Cinerama and some bits of Belle & Sebastian, although I wouldn’t really compare the Smiles & Frowns to either of those bands.  The track on the vinyl release, Mechanical Songs, pretty much sums it up: slowly rolling melodic refrain, unhurried delivery, slighty spooky air.  It also points to how and when the album doesn’t work, for me, which is when this gentle rhythm breaks down.

There are a couple of songs on the record – Memory Man being the most obvious example – where the pace and the sounds made to carry the rhythm don’t quite match in my head.  When that happens, the rhythm loses that easy smoothness, and I start to feel the thumps of the drums a little jarring – they don’t quite sit right.  I don’t know if that makes sense, or if it’s just me making up nonsense to explain why I am not so keen on a couple of  of songs, without really knowing why, but that’s still how I’d describe it.

It doesn’t matter, though, because as a whole I really like this album so minor quibbles aside I would certainly still recommend it.  I’ll also be interested to see where they go from here, as I definitely feel there is some as-yet unfulfilled promise lurking in here as well.

The Smiles and Frowns – Sam

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website (buy their stuff here too) | More mp3s

More really good stuff from Virgin of the Birds, whose previous EP I reviewed only recently.  The plan is to release regular free EPs over the course of the next year or so, which is bloody good news for the likes of you and I.  Once again they flirt with pop songs early on, whilst keeping the rest of the EP fairly downbeat and bare-bones.

It’s funny to note that once again he starts with the pop stuff, before slowly easing matters back to a more measured stroll.  Spanish Accusations has a nice and simple, carefree piano rhythm running through it, giving it a bit of a gentle skip, but by the time The Serpent Plume brings things to a close everything has dissolved into the lazy haze of Summer afternoon.

The interplay of the organ, piano and shuffling guitar is beautifully judged on this EP.  The piano makes rare forays to the surface, becoming prominent only here or there after the first song, but the eccentric little dance it plays at the end of You Love it Loud is a delight.  I would say that it was the crucial instrument on this album, but that would be insulting to everything else.  The gentle rhythm of the shaky egg and acoustic guitar in tandem is really nicely done too, and the organ is just as carefully used, which makes for a really well-balanced recording, in my opinion.

If there’s one thing I have to say about this it’s that I’m really surprised it’s being given away for free.  Add a nice hand-printed sleeve, and this is easily worth five pounds to anyone.  It may not be insistent or aggressive, but it’s really good stuff, and manages to be a lot more effortless than a great many other bands who are a good bit more famous.  This is one of those records, much like Every Rival, which just exudes confidence and solace, the kind of comfort which waits for the hysteria to die down and then quietly steps in a sorts you out when you most need it.

Jon himself will be visiting Edinburgh around New Year, so if anyone would be able to book a live performance, I think that would be a really good idea.  I’d do it myself, but Mrs. Toad and I will be away unfortunately.

Virgin of the Birds – Baby, Let Me Trace You

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

MySpace | Website | Download free from Abandoned Love Records

Bloody hell, this is excellent.  In terms of my own perception, it’s appeared pretty much from nowhere, although Taylor Kirk is in fact three albums into his career now.  Spectral and sparse, this record pretty much achieves everything I thought Bon Iver failed to.  Not that the two sound all that similar, it’s just that listening to all the press fluff for Bon Iver what I ended up imagining was something more like this gorgeous album, rather than the dull and rather anaemic results with which we were actually presented.

Kirk uses organ and restrained vocal harmonies to create an extremely evocative sound, somewhere between grisly folk tale and macabre, magical movie soundtrack.  The guitar riffs are minimal, and the organ chiming and disconcerting.  I am not sure if this unsettling, magical quality is entirely due to the lead vocal of Kirk himself, or the accompanying organ noise, or maybe just due to the fact that the whole record is so restrained, but this does sound like the soundtrack to your descent into hell.

Usually that sort of thing is soundtracked by something a bit more fire and brimstone, and this doesn’t really have that, although there’s a definite shade of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand.  For the most part though, it’s just eerie.  Kirk himself was raised on a farm in Ontario, and I don’t know if this is one of those things the press make a huge play of because there just isn’t that much other information out there, but the sound of the music could easily evoke the simmering fear of misty farmland at dawn, just as the breaking light brings the shadows in the mist to life with menace.

The violin brings some welcome decorative flourishes to this potentially oppressive mix, with just enough of a blend between familiar folk flourishes and the tension of the rest of the instrumentation to bring a touch of reassuring warmth to the music.  I particularly like the way that the whole unsettling journey is brought to a close by the most friendly and accessible arrangement on the album, the gentle and sympathetic No Bold Villain.  The fiddle in particular is rather old-timey on this, which is a style it flirts with throughout the album, without ever quite coming good until this tune at the very end.  Which is nice, because it provides a comforting happy ending to an album which threatened for a while to be one harrowing horror story after another.

Timber Timbre – Demon Host

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Timber Timbre – Magic Arrow

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Gallery AC

It’s a rather varied week of gigging this week, with Richard Hawley at the Queen’s Hall at one end of the spectrum and the Japanese War Effort at the Traverse Bar tonight at the other.  There are a few side-notes worth mentioning as well – like the vanishing Whispertown 2000 gig at Sneaky’s on Saturday which I would have liked to go to, but which I assume was cancelled and the appearance, for free, of 4AD’s Big Pink at Sick Note, late at Cabaret Voltaire on Thursday.

I think I can manage maybe a couple of these shows, but probably no more because if I don’t start showing Mrs. Toad some proper attention pretty damn sharpish there may end up being a little jar of pickled toad testicles on a shelf somewhere in our house.

Monday 12th October 2009: Japanese War Effort at the Traverse Bar.

The Japanese War Effort are one of my favourite bands (well okay, we all know it’s just Jamie) in Edinburgh at the moment.  I personally think his recorded stuff has been a little variable, if I’m being honest, but if you’re prepared to pay attention, Jamie is an engaging live performer whose live assembly of his loops and beeps, and the occasional emergence of an actual song from in amongst them, is always worth seeing.
Jamie says it’s somewhere under the Usher Hall, and when I Googled I got this, so good luck to you.

Japanese War Effort – Chocolat Froid

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Tuesday 13th October 2009: Richard Hawley at the Queen’s Hall.

Richard Hawley is one of the best live performers you’ll see.  Charming and witty without being in the slightest over-bearing, he brings his domestic, heartfelt crooning to life on stage to extent he doesn’t always quite manage on record.  It’s fucking expensive though – £21 quid, are they mental?

Richard Hawley – Born Under a Bad Sign

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wednesday 14th October 2009: Girls, Swanton Bombs & St. Jude’s Infirmary at Sneaky Pete’s.

The band intent on making themselves utterly un-Googlable have named their band Girls and their album Album.  Fuckwits.  It doesn’t matter though, I still really like their music, which is scratchy and rough low-fi indie – breaking back and forth to something warmer from time to time, which makes for a nice dynamic, if you ask me.  I’m still listening to their album, but there will be a review on the site fairly soon.

Girls – Headache

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Wednesday 14th October 2009: Glaciers at the Bowery.

This is rather experimental and peculiar, apparently, so I can imagine it moistening the gussets of a fair few of my readers.  Have a listen on the MySpace link, but it sounds really rather interesting to me – very mysterious and atmospheric, which rhythmic, looping vocals and wheezing backdrops.

Thursday 15th October 2009: Meursault & the Red Well at Cabaret Voltaire.

This is a Mill gig, so you may have to drink unspeakable beer all night.

Friday 16th October 2009: Stricken City, North Atlantic Oscillation and My Cousin I Bid You Farewell at Sneaky Pete’s.

I know next to nothing about these bands, but Stricken City seem to be doing a nice job of re-interpreting female fronted 90s Britpop bands.

Stricken City – Tak O Tak

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Friday 16th October 2009: Panda Su & Last Battles at the Bowery.

Last Battles are about as fresh out of the box as it gets, I think, and I have yet to see them live, but it all sounds very promising if you have a listen to the MySpace stuff.  Male/female duets do it for me every time!

Sunday 18th October 2009: The Wave Pictures, Stanley Brinks & Freschard at Cabaret Voltaire.

I fucking love the Wave Pictures, and I fucking love the Wave Pictures live as well.  The roughness of their recordings translates really well into a free and relaxed live show, and the band generally seem to be really enjoying themselves.

The Wave Pictures – Your Heart is on Your Sleeve

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[After his highly successful stint Toadsitting while we were away on holiday, Euan returns to write what is going to become a monthly column in our new Sunday Supplement section.  You can find more of his stuff on his blog, at his gigs or with his band, so please go and have a sniff.]

Sometimes you find a band that gets you really excited. You know as soon as you hear their very first tune that this is a band you’re going to fall head over heels in love with. Conquering Animal Sound are for me, one of these bands. I’d heard their stuff on myspace when I booked them for Trampoline. I knew Jamie from his time with Boyfriend/Girlfriend, his bass playing in the Occasional Flickers and his wonderful solo project The Japanese War Effort, so I was surprised to find him set up Conquering Animal Sound so quickly after setting up his solo project.

However, such is the output and creativity of the man. When I set up mini50 records and asked 20 artists to provide me with a song, he’d recorded one and sent it to me within about 3 days of asking . And it’s mint. Absolutely superb. It will be a great way to start the “Best of Trampoline” sampler when it eventually sees the light of day.

Anyways, I recently got back my Trampoline Edinburgh festival shows from Alex Fenton (Fentek Audio) and on it are 3 tracks from Conquering Animal Sound’s set. I missed this show but boy am I glad Alex recorded it and sent me these tracks. They are awesome. Really amazing. For financial reasons, I am not able to put any of them up on this site but I’m sure Matthew will add a couple of their tunes, from MySpace or elsewhere, for your pleasure. Simply put, CAS are brilliant. They are interesting and they captured my imagination from the word go. Jamie and Anneke have something special going on. In amongst the bleeps and clicks and atmosphere are the looped and beautiful vocals of Anneke. The loop is a tried and tested format. It can be tiresome. It can get a little dull. It never does with CAS. I am excited about sharing this band with you. You can find them here. Enjoy.

Conquering Animal Sound – Champion Sound

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.