Christ, people are getting this shit up and running early this year.

I am not much of one for festivals, frankly.  All the tents and mud and rock ‘n’ roll rather fails to float my boat most of the time, and the sheer numbers of people really do put me off.  I never did like people all that much.

But there are a couple which I quite like, and they have both made unprecedentedly well-organised announcements this afternoon, so I thought I should pass them on.

Fence Homegame. The Homegame Festival is undoubtedly my favourite festival, taking place in the comforting surroundings of Anstruther, where you can find beds, clean sheets and comfortable showers.  Anyhow, the Fencey chaps have just let us know that next year it will be taking place on the weekend of the 12th-14th March, and that tickets will go on sale at noon on Tuesday 1st December only from the Fence website.  This means an almight digital free for all, of the kind which melted their server a couple of years ago, but if you don’t manage to get your hands on one then you might be able to find a few as they become available on the Beef Board as the time draws closer.

End of the Road Festival. Mrs. Toad had the mother of all sulks with the EotR folks when they failed to add Meursault to the bill for last year’s festival.  We’ll be trying to put that one right this year, but in the meantime they have announced a handful of bands already: Wilco, The Mountain Goats, The Low Anthem, A.A. Bondy, Diane Cluck with Anders Griffen and The Wilderness of Manitoba.  All good bands, although only the last one is new to me.  5000 people is right about my tolerance limit for groups of people, so I may have to consult with my midget companion on this one.

In any case, there you go, some fucking news for ya.  While it’s still fresh enough to actually be news.  Now that doesn’t happen every day around these parts.

Having made such an almighty pig’s ear of last week’s listings, I find myself wondering if the gigmosphere really is as thin as it looks this week, or whether I’ve just managed to make another spectacular arse of spotting the good ‘uns again.

There’s something a little different happening, actually, because Joey Comeau and the Loose Teeth Press are going to be at the Bowery as part of their reading tour tonight, which sounds rather interesting.  Also, the Charity Baw at the Roxy on Saturday looks like a bit of a spectacular, so it’s not actually as quiet a week as it looks.

Tuesday 17th November 2009: King Charles play the first Fresh Air Tuesday at the GRV.

Fresh Air student radio are taking over the GRV on Tuesdays this year, putting on something a little different each week, and kicking things off this week with King Charles.  I don’t know them at all, but I have dug up a few songs and they sound really rather good.  Definitely worth checking out.

King Charles – Beating Hearts

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Friday 20th November 2009: Otters Sing Lullabies present Conquering Animal Sound, Molly Wagger and Aurora Stands in Snow at the Bowery.

This will be a quirky night of music, all quite gentle in most senses, but nevertheless a little disturbing in others.  There will be a lot of acoustic loveliness and quite a bit of slightly eccentric electronic  trickery as well.

Saturday 21st November 2009: Charity Baw at the Roxy Art House.

Pretty much every bastard is playing this one.  There are local heroes such as Withered Hand, Aberfeldy, Benni Hemm Hemm and Come On Gang but, somewhat more intriguingly from my perspective, there will also be the amazing (The Real) Tuesday Weld.  That sounds a bit hard on the local contingent, but I don’t mean it that way, simply that I have been a Tuesday Weld fan for bloody ages and never once had the chance to sample their visually sumptuous live show.  Yes, yes I did just use the word sumptuous.  Sorry. What I basically mean is that they use their rather excellent videos as a backdrop to the live performance, which sound brilliant. And at least a little sumptuous.

(The Real) Tuesday Weld – Kix

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Sunday 22nd November 2009: Debutant, Rasied by Wolves, The Last Battle at the Bowery.

This is my gig of the week, I think.  I’ve not properly seen any of these bands live and I have been twitching to see all three for a while.  Debutant’s atmospheric guitar layering will probably be quite distinct from the more traditional songwriting of the other two bands, but it looks like this should be a good ‘un.

[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met.  He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week.  Cheers C&B.]

To me modern German music has always been about the monosyllabic pioneers of Krautrock.  Can.  Faust.  Neu!   Or perhaps the ear-shattering crunch of Einsturzende Neubauten’s strategies against architecture.   Brilliant stuff, but forbidding too; and sometimes a little too Baader-Meinhof for my bourgeois ass.   But in the last year or so I’ve discovered three people who’ve made me seriously rethink my assumptions about German music, and this post is about those three.

The first is Haruko. Her real name is Susanne Stanglow, and while she looks from her photos to be about 14 years old, her music comes from an old soul.  She first came to my attention a month or so ago, when DC played one of her gorgeous songs on The Waiting Room.  She has a record out called Wild Geese, but she hasn’t received nearly enough blog love.  Yet.  Regular readers of Song by Toad will recognize her style, and no one will be terribly surprised to find Alela Diane and Mariee Sioux among her myspace “top friends,” although I also hear quite a bit of Porlolo in her voice.  Lovely melodies are present in abundance, and the recording has a consciously woody, crackly feel, like it was recorded on a big stone hearth in front of a warm fire.  There’s also a dreamy, child-like innocence to the lyrics and delivery that I find particularly moving, especially on the stunning The Mountain Adventure, which forms a sort of centerpiece for the record. Comparisons to Joanna Newsom will inevitably be made, and musically there may be something to that, but fortunately Haruko does not sound like a cat being strangled.  Haruko’s record is now available on vinyl, so get in line.

Haruko – Welcome To Loveland

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Haruko – The Mountain Adventure

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Next up is Andre Daners, who records as My Laundry Life.  My Laundry Life is all about late-80s and early-90s bedroom guitar pop in the fine tradition of Postcard Records and Sarah Records.  I first heard him back in late 2008, when Sons and Guns was released as a split single on the terrific Cloudberry Records.  I was completely hooked then, and I’m still hooked. Some people just seem to have an intuitive understanding of what the perfect, pure pop song should sound like. In early 2009 My Laundry Life came out with his debut full-length, called The Art of Science, on Vollwert Records in Berlin, which has recently emerged as sort of the “European Cloudberry.”  The best points of reference for My Laundry Life’s sound are probably The Go-Betweens or The Field Mice, which ain’t a bad place to start.  Apparently there’s a new My Laundry Life record in the works, entitled How To Wallow In Shame, and the preview tracks on his myspace are really promising.  I defy you to listen to these tunes without bobbing your head.

My Laundry Life – Sons and Guns

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My Laundry Life – Sunday’s Best

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Last up is Sibylle Baier, who is both old and new.  In the late 60s and early 70s Sibylle Baier was an aspiring folk singer and actress in Germany, and she evidently appeared in one of Wim Wenders’ early films.  Between 1970 and 1973 she wrote a few dozen songs at home and recorded them on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, purely for her own edification I guess.  Life then intervened, as it will, and she moved to the States with her husband, where she chose to focus on raising a family.  Fast forward 30 years, when Sibylle’s enterprising son starts handing out CD versions of his Mom’s old reel-to-reel recordings as family gifts.  Somehow one of these CDs wound up in the hands of J. Mascis, who in turn alerted the good folks at Orange Twin Records in Athens, Georgia, current home of Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power among others.  In 2006 Orange Twin released Sibylle Baier’s recordings as a full-length called Colour Green, and it’s a complete revelation.   Quiet, smoky vocals over a gently strummed guitar, as if she fears waking the children but is nonetheless compelled to get her ideas down on tape before they slip away.  It’s like Nico if she weren’t a junkie. Magnificent.

Sibylle Baier – I Lost Something In The Hills

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Sibylle Baier – Forgett

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[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met.  He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week.  Cheers C&B.]

This lot first caught my attention because they take their name from a character in the “Port William Fellowship” novels of the American novelist and poet Wendell Berry, one of my favorites.  At its best, Berry’s writing is thrifty and deeply rooted in a sense of community, like his characters.   It’s an example that Jayber Crow the band has taken to heart.

Jayber Crow is two guys, Pete Nelson and Zach Hawkins.  Apparently they became friends in Tanzania during their university days but they come from Minnesota or thereabouts, and their songs evoke the prairies, rivers, and big skies of the rural American Midwest.  It’s a simple formula.  Fiercely strummed guitars, mandolin, banjo, some harmonica, stomping feet, clapping hands, a pair of good pipes, and melodies melodies melodies.  I picked up their full-length record called Two Short Stories back in the Spring (they have an EP too, called The Farmer and the Nomad), and I enjoyed it straight away, but for some reason it got a bit lost in the shuffle for a while.  I rediscovered it a few weeks back, though, and now that autumn is upon us it’s taken a firm hold.  To everything there is a season.  This is woody music, with plenty of dirt under its nails.  Anyhow, my descriptive powers fail, so I’ll just say that I really really like it and then drop the names of some groups they remind me of.  Neutral Milk Hotel.  The Rural Alberta Advantage.  The Avett Brothers.  There.

Now listen, and then go buy their CDs, which are available on their website.

Jayber Crow – St. Anthony

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Jayber Crow – The Limited Voice of the American Crow

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I think it would be only fair to describe this podcast as a little bit messy.  We recorded it immediately after first Craigcast two weeks ago, and so by the end of it we were all fucking hammered.

I promise I have tried to edit out as much of the madness as I could, but it was difficult.  The problem with incoherent drunken rambling is there don’t tend to be a lot of natural breaks, so it was devilishly hard to cut down.

Anyhow, this won’t be the first or last time you listen to a load of mental old nonsense on the Toadcasts, so I am going to just have to wish you luck and let you get on with it.

Toadcast #95 – The Craigcast Pt.2

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1. Mississippi Fred McDowell – Good Morning Little Schoolgirl (04.31)
2. RL Burnside – Fireman Ring the Bell (12.22)
3. RL Burnside – Don’t Let My Baby Ride (22.08)
4. Junior Kimbrough – Stay All Night (24.59)
5. Charles Caldwell – Old Buck (34.31)
6. Robert Lucas – Miss Being High (40.35)
7. Steve James – Grain Alcohol (45.22)
8. Kelly Joe Phelps – House Carpenter (57.06)
9. North Mississippi Allstars – Circle in the Sky (66.57)
10. Buddy Guy – Baby Please Don’t Leave (75.50)

I know I hammer on about guilty pleasure on this blog a lot mostly, I would imagine, because I am an incredible snob and so some of the things I used to listen to horrify me.  If you think I judge you by the shit you listen to, just think how twisted and confused that mockery must become when turned inward upon the giant Hydra of Hypocrisy which dwells inside me.

Fuck it though, I am not going on about that today, but that is the reason for the songs I have chosen, so before you start sniggering just think how hard this has been for me and try and show some compassion, you horrible people.

Recently I have been getting into a lot of software trouble with Final Cut Pro and various web streaming technologies, which is most, most frustrating.  I fixed everything by doing what you are supposed to do in these situations: head to the internet and read forums where someone, somewhere has almost certainly had the same problem in the past and see how they themselves fixed it.

I still find that kind of daunting though, I have to confess.  The idea of all the poking about in config files, which they tend to recommend, scares me just a little bit, as if deleting the wrong file would suddenly make the whole fucking computer go on fire or something.  It reminds me of my parents and their increasing disconnect with technology, actually. They simply do not have any of the instincts to fix simple things in ‘preferences’ or to go and find a file which their internet browser may have downloaded to a strange location or something like that.  I fear, in my wariness of getting too deep into config and system files, that I too may be just on the verge of letting technology escape me just a little.  Not that I was ever a computer whizz to begin with of course.

Anyhow, this site has a number of regular commenters, for whom I am deeply grateful because it gives the place an aura of authority which I myself would never achieve on my own.  However, for those of you thinking about making your first comment (and I know there are a lot of you) it must seem a bit cliquey, so on Friday I open my arms to the lurkers out there and suggest you take this chance to say hello for the first time.  It’s the perfect opportunity of course, because not one lick of sense will be talked on this site all day, so no matter how silly your contribution, you can guarantee it won’t be the silliest.

That will be Bart.

1. Technology which is getting away from you a bit.
2. How techie are your parents?
3. Favourite low-tech item in regular use in your house.
4. Best really fucking complicated invention.
5. Best really fucking simple and extremely bloody obvious invention.

Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time

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Alison Moyet – Steal Me Blind

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Elton John – I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues

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Meat Loaf – Dead Ringer For Love

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Huey Lewis & the News – The Power of Love It is a simple and unarguable truth that anyone worth their salt loves Back to the Future.  And anyone who loves Back to the Future must have at least a sneaking soft spot for this song.

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Hello again, Ruth and I are back on air tonight on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station.  As per usual we’ll be having some live session stuff, this time from The Japanese War Effort.  Jamie is a bit of a band-whore actually, and plays in the Occasional Flickers and Conquering Animal Sound as well as ploughing his own solo furrow.  It’s this stuff, however, which is my favourite.  I haven’t much idea what it will sound like, stripped back to the extent that it will need to be in order to be played in the Fresh Air studio, but I am certain that it will be good.

The tracklisting will be filled out below live as we go along, and it would be nice if you would use the comment thread to chip and have your say during the show.  Believe me, it’s a hell of a lot easier than me trying to man Facebook, Twitter and bloody emails all at the same time as working the desk in the studio and the camera to record the session.  Still, Ruth’s back this week and so I should be a little calmer this time than last!

On air 7pm-8.30pm GMT – Listen live here.

Tonight’s playlist:
1. Tom Waits – The Part You Throw Away (Live in Edinburgh, July 2008)
2. The Cave Singers – Belmar
3. The Japanese War Effort- Winning Eleven (Live in Session)
4. Dan Mangan – Robots
5. The Silver Columns – Brow Beaten
6. The Japanese War Effort – Lanark (Live in Session)
7. Yusuf Azak – The Key Underground
8. Rob St John – December & Whisky (Live at the Retreat Festival)
9. Doveman – Angel’s Share
10. Hudson Mohawke – Fuse
11.. Helen Love – Debbie Loves Joey
12. Tune Yards – Hap-B
13. The Japanese War Effort – Face Like A Lemon – Ivor Cutler Cover (Live in Session)
14. Bruce Springsteen – Born in the U.S.A (Nebraska Sessions Version)
15. Japanese War Effort – Punk’s Not Dead (Live in Session)
16. Leonard Cohen – Lover Lover Lover

Here is the podcast of last week’s session with the excellent Candythief, along with the session tracks and video of the performances, after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

I get more than a little jumpy writing things about stuff like this, because I am far from knowledgable and, as someone who is almost always against the wars that ‘we’ have fought recently, it can seem a bit rich to me, writing about the people who fought in them.

My Granddad was a marine in WWII though.  He drove a landing craft in the D-Day landings, he pitched up in Singapore and Madagascar, fought in the Pacific and, erm… I don’t know much else to be honest, because he doesn’t really talk about it.

He’ll tell us funny stories when they occur to him, and it’s not like he avoids the topic, but I’ve never heard him tell any kind of tale about the war which I would describe as all that harrowing.  It’s possible that he’d rather not bring it up because the memories are a little hard to face, but I suspect it might be because, for all we would listen attentively, we actually would not be able to truly understand what the tales he would be telling actually, deep down, mean to him.

The world moves incredibly fast.  The things my Granddad does tell us which do make an impact are the tales of living in Wales and Manchester immediately before and after the war.  He talks about trying to get fired by his foreman at the steelworks just to prove he could face the man down.  He talks about his brother fighting their father, and running off with him to fend for themselves and make a living whilst he was in his early teens.  He talks about how he and my Grandma tried to keep the house warm, and how he would steal coal from work to put on the fire in the evening.

It’s difficult enough to know what the people who fight in modern wars really experience, despite some excellent films which try and get it across, but as much as anything when I think about my Granddad and his role in the Second World War and in particular the combination of that war and the society in which he lived at the time, it really strikes me that increasingly no-one understands what these guys went through, not properly.  Apart from a desire to fight Germans, one of the reasons he was so keen to get into the forces, in whatever division, was because working in the steelworks in Manchester was so incredibly shit.

The perception of the threat of someone bent on ‘taking over the world’, which in itself seems like a quaint concept these days, the lingering strength of the concept of England or Britain as an Island Empire, the overwhelming industrialisation, family life being so massively different and social standards radically so… it’s amazing how quickly people forget what life used to be like, even in their own childhoods.

For the best part of six years my Granddad fought in the British army against someone trying to conquer the nation, and indeed the whole continent.  Six years.  I don’t think that it would be possible for me to truly grasp that and more than anything else on Remembrance Day, that’s what I find myself thinking.

The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (No Man’s Land)

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The Waterboys – Red Army Blues

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This is the second of today’s introductions to other projects by people in Song, by Toad Records bands.  Nightjar’s The Moth Trap, Toad Records’ first full release, was the work primarily of Andy McKay of the now sadly deceased Celebrity Chimp, and an Edinburgh gentleman by the name of Jack Richold.  Nightjar itself was just a one-off project, but Jack of course has continued to work on his own things since Andy moved to London.

One such project is The Sea is Salt, which is a partnership between Jack and a young lady called Faith, whose voice I found so incredibly beautiful on Jack’s own recording of Lady of the Calico, which I originally knew as a Nightjar song.  She sang backing vocals on that particular song, but with The Sea is Salt her voice is front and centre, and fucking hell she can bloody sing.

The musical backing is so spare as to be barely there half the time.  There is a little acoustic guitar, some piano, a little fiddle, but not much else really.  Jack accompanies on harmonies as well, but again, not all that much.  In general this music takes things out, rather than leaving them in there, to leave Faith’s vocal as by far the dominant feature.

For someone who is as talented a violin player as Jack there is surprisingly little violin on The Sea is Salt stuff, but I always like a band who can resist the temptation to throw the kitchen sink at recordings.  I’ve included Bears below, because it’s really rather different from the rest of the songs on their MySpace.  I’ve heard earlier recordings on there which were also quite abrupt departures from the dramatic vocals of the likes of Deloris and Kennoway and Star, so I thought I’d pop it in here to give you more of an idea of their range.

If I were to look for slight caveats to my enthusiasm, it would be that there are times when they threaten to become just a little too dramatic for my personal taste, but I don’t know enough about their wider repertoire to really say.  It’s not the most significant of quibbles though, because even at their most grandiose I still really like their songs.

Whatever way you look at it, this is a very long way from Nightjar, but it’s really good, and I am somewhat surprised not to see these guys on a few more bills around the capital.  But then, to do that bands often need to be a bit pushy and forward and I don’t know Faith all that well, but Jack is such a quiet, easy-going guy that I can’t see him exactly being a master of self-publicity.  It’s a shame though, because I think a lot of people would like this.

The Sea is Salt – Vinegar Hill

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The Sea is Salt – Bears

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And for those of you who have forgotten the version of Lady of the Calico mentioned above, it’s here.  And fucking gorgeous it is too:

Jack Richold – Lady of the Calico

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Today I’m going to introduce you to a couple of under the radar projects which are both related to Song, by Toad Records bands.  In both cases I don’t really know what the future of the respective projects might be, because I don’t know how far either is going to be pushed, but they are both very good and I thought they needed sharing.

Firstly we have The Douglas Firs.  This is a side project of Jesus H, Foxx drummer Neil Insh, and has been bubbling under for years.  He’s been working on this album for ages, but his work hasn’t really seen the light of day outside a small circle of his friends, in part because he really isn’t all that up for performing live.

It sounds, on the face of it, like quite experimental music.  You might call it math-folk if you wanted a bodged mental shortcut for getting a picture of it.  You can hear a lot of the bursting harmonies and repetitive percussion of Jesus H. Foxx’s music, but the sounds are not really all that similar.

This has more of an atmosphere of experimental, almost ambient electronica a lot of the time, but there are surprisingly traditional Scottish folk influences in the fiddle and some of the rhythms which I wouldn’t expect from a leather-jacket-sporting drummer who batters the shite out of his drums in quite the way Neil does.

The nice thing about both the use of vocal harmonies and the more traditonal folk influences is that they are really beautifully used to bring the songs into focus.  The more experimental aspects drift and rumble along, and can become quite meandering until these details emerge, sometimes quite suddenly, to bring everything into relief.

These mp3s are just rough-cut demos, so not yet the finished article, but they give you a flavour of what’s going on here.  It’s no pop album though, and but if you have patience for your music and like to sit down and absorb it then this all looks like it could be very good indeed.  If he ever finishes the bloody thing!

The Douglas Firs – The Quickening

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The Douglas Firs – Grow Old and Go Home

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Oh, and it appears that there are a couple of other Douglas Firses on MySpace, which might complicate matters, should this ever come to fruition.