Robin Grey has been featured a couple of times before on Song, by Toad, largely because there’s just something I like about his voice, both in the sense of his singing voice and also in terms of the way he expresses himself as a writer.

There’s something of the pub open mic night act about him in a sense, and I can easily picture him fetching up at a nice boozer London, with his guitar case and a scarf and that wee hat of his, to play a few songs and have a pint or two.  I may be pulling this image out of thin air of course, but you never know.

I think it comes from the fact that his songs have that same kind of mild personal observational tinge which doesn’t seem to come from a painful place, but simply tells of the pedestrian pleasures and disappointments of an ordinary life.  And maybe that’s the key to it – it’s just an honest, normal, friendly record by a bloke who somehow just manages to seem like a really decent guy, such that you end up sympathising that bit more with his failures and being that bit more happy about his triumphs.

This is all delivered acoustically, with a bit of guitar, some banjo and the odd bit of violin here and there.  There are other instruments, but these are the ones which dominate.  Robin’s voice is easy on the ear to begin with, but is complemented on this record by female backing vocals*, something for which I have always had an tremendous weakness.

There are a couple of songs on this about which I am a little ambivalent.  Montreal and Ninety Days don’t quite do it for me, but tracks like Shakes and Shudders are absolutely gorgeous.  The female vocal isn’t used much on that song, but bloody hell it’s lovely.  I Love Leonard Cohen is also brilliant and is one of the songs on this record most characteristic of the description I gave above.  This is gentle, everyday stuff, and is the kind of album which you end up developing a real affection for, as I have.

Robin Grey – Younger Looking Skin

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Robin Grey – Shakes & Shudders

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*Looking at his MySpace page it could be any one of three, so I’m not sure who to credit.

Those who have any interest in such things will have noticed that a band from Utah called Navigator released one of my favourite albums of 2009, called Bad Children.  Navigator is largely the work of a fellow called Braden McKenna, whose work sprawls far beyond the stuff he releases under the umbrella of Navigator and into all sorts of other mental stuff.

If you go to his homepage you’ll see all kinds of stuff available for free download, including both Bad Children and this fantastic record: Old Mountain Radio by Grizzly Prospector.  It’s hard to tell who is responsible for what work exactly because an awful lot of it sounds, in production style and vocal characteristics, an awful lot like Mr. McKenna himself, although he seems to collaborate with a handful of other people so it’s feasible that some of the bands featured on the page may not be his at all.

On the mp3 tags for this album the composer is credited as being Parker Reese Yates.  That could be one person’s full name or three people’s surnames, you never know with Americans and their enthusiasm for using last names as people first names.  Either way, the short version is that I have no real idea who wrote and recorded this album, although I suspect strongly that Braden J. McKenna was fairly heavily involved.

This is something of a concept album, and I would tentatively suggest that it is something of a tongue-in-cheek one; not a piss-take, just written with a slightly raised eyebrow.  Also, it happens to be completely gorgeous.  The familiar low-fi recording style is strongly in evidence, but with much gentler instrumentation you don’t get anything like the aural battering which a Navigator recording tends to dish out.

In fact, there’s barely anything on this record at all, bar a fragile vocal and gently plucked acoustic guitar.  It’s like some strange cross between Woody Guthrie and Will Oldham, although neither as raucous as the former nor as honeyed as the latter.  The songs are almost impossibly short as well.  Basically, there is no point listening to most of these tracks individually, because the whole record is a start-to-finish meander where there is no real demarcation between songs, more an unhurried train of thought in musical form, which is sometimes beautiful – such as the gorgeous harmonies on Old Mountain Hum – and often so slow that it’s almost stationary.

It’s a bloody brilliant album though.  One which may have been very carefully constructed, but which still gives the impression of having casually drifted off the tip of someone’s tongue one evening and dripped slowly into recorded form in no other order than the one in which it happened to coalesce, like smoke rings drifting in an out of shape against a twilight sky.

Grizzly Prospector – Oh! Grizzly Me! (Slow) (Live)

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Grizzly Prospector – True Love Will Find You in the End

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Download for free from Magic Goat Music.

As any maker of year end lists will tell you, you should only really allow yourself to make your best of the year list several months into the following year, not in November of the one you’re trying to describe. I’ve been trying to properly digest this album for months, and only now am I getting to some sort of understanding of how I feel about it, and that after an extended break over Christmas not listening to it at all.

Whereas the last record was a sort of enigmatic sweep across the Americana sub-genres, this is perhaps a little more straighforwardly rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s still difficult to pin down beyond the vague description of ‘Americana’. There are tints of country, rock ‘n’ roll, a little folk, a faint hint of pop… but it’s just it’s own beast, really. I don’t mean this in a challenging, genre-bending sort of a way, because it all sounds very familiar, it just has a distinct, comfortable character of its own.

That kind of approachable, unpretentious nature is all over this record, actually. The songs are all short and entirely devoid of noodling or showing off, the lyrics are personal, emotional and thoughtful without being tense or confrontational.

That welcoming nature perhaps put me off a little at the beginning though, I have to confess. Sean Scolnick sings about personal pain and his voice has a kind of sadness to it, whilst still giving off the conviction that everything really is going to be fine. I am perhaps becoming a little unused to such unworried music, so it came across as a little light on first listen, and it’s taken me a good few months to really make friends with Be Set Free, which is odd for such an inherently friendly record.

The piano escalates from a twinkle to a chime* as the mood swings upwards from wistful to joyful, giving the album a healthy emotional variation, with the call and response of Cinderella perhaps as jaunty as it gets, although Say Yes isn’t far behind. I Love You, But Goodbye, on the other hand, as well as being one of the best songs I’ve heard in ages, has an incredibly affectionate sadness to it. It’s exactly the emotion you might expect from the title, but there are few who can master that kind of mixture of warmth and melancholy with quite the deftness of Mr. Scolnick.

Langhorne Slim – I Love You, But Goodbye

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Langhorne Slim – For a Little While

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*Fuck off – sometimes cliches are just the most appropriate words to use. At least I didn’t call anything soaring or swirling.

This is just a brief list of some stuff I’m looking forward to in the Edinburgh music scene over the coming year.  I don’t intend to be parochial about this, or too narrow, but I am not as close to the precise ins and outs of what’s happening in the rest of the country so there’s a limit to what I can meaningfully say about what’s going on there.  It’s not meant to be exhaustive either, just some thoughts pottering about at the front of my mind.

New Labels

Last year saw the first steps made by a couple of new labels in Edinburgh, Kilter and Mini50.  With Song, by Toad Records virtually at capacity in terms of labour and money, and 17 Seconds and SL Records also really busy, these two new labels should have a pretty free hand in terms of first dibs on emerging bands this year.

Kilter have already showed the quality of their work with the beatiful eagleowl single in December, so in that sense they’re a slight step ahead.  Mini50 have been negotiating with some of the newer bands to emerge in the last year or so though, and album releases by the likes of Mammoeth should give a really solid foundation to their launch.  Basically, this is great news for the city’s young bands.

Jeffrey Lewis – Don’t Let the Record Label Take you out to Lunch

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The New Generation of Bands

Whilst I’m talking about the newer bands to emerge last year, there is a definite gap forming in the local musical ecosystem.  The fact that Broken Records and now Meursault and Withered Hand have graduated to an audience both nationwide and beyond leaves an opportunity for one of the new generation to make a mark locally.

With a single and an EP already to their name, Jesus H. Foxx are slightly further ahead in their development, but with the very promising emergence of bands like the Pineapple Chunks, Conquering Animal Sound and the Last Battle there is the opportunity for a band from the new generation to progress to the stage where they will obviously and easily be able to fill small venues like Sneaky Pete’s and whatever the Roxy management turn the old Bowery space into.

David Bowie – All the Young Dudes

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The New Roxy

And while we’re on the subject of the Roxy, Rupert Thomson, former Skinny editor, has been appointed to run the entire building in the new year.  I have a lot of time for Rupert, so I am really hopeful that he can carry on the development of what is pretty clearly the best gig space for small bands and promoters in the city.  In the absence of Ruth and Jane the place will inevitably have a very different atmosphere, but it is still easily the best space of its type around, so I really hope the new team can continue to foster the underground scene in the capital with the same kind of devotion and sympathy which Ruth brought to the place.  And very nice that they now have a one o’clock license, which is very fortuitous timing indeed for the new venture.

Tom Waits – New Coat of Paint (Live)

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Descent of the Digital Press Locusts

Last year saw the formation of so many new blogs in Scotland it made my head spin.  In fact it actually made me feel like an established veteran.  With respected indie publications like Bearded and Plan B swinging the axe on their print editions and also retreating to the web, we are getting closer to the American press model every day.

In the States there are basically no music magazines left, so labels and bands take blogs way, way more seriously, because we are pretty much the only people left who are addressing their audience.  In the UK there are still some excellent music magazines – Clash, Word, The Stool Pigeon and so on – but glossies like the NME, Q and Uncut are really becoming embarrassingly bad.  Personally I would be surprised if the year passed without a high profile music press casualty, which means that the playing field is unusually open for blogs and other digital publications.  And with the death of music television beyond the insultingly stupid X-Factor and its diseased ilk, pretty much the only music television which exists in the UK is now online.

This general trend could lead to a fairly considerable shift in how online publications are treated over the next year or so and, instead of being considered amateur or grassroots or DIY, we could end up being as close to mainstream as it actually gets in the indie world.

The Clash – Career Opportunities

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That Extra Step

Glasvegas were probably the last really big band to come out of Scotland, in terms of sheer audience size.  Frightened Rabbit, depending on their next album, could follow in their footsteps over the next twelve months.  Do any of the Edinburgh bands, I find myself wondering, have it in them to follow in their footsteps?  Are we likely to ever see the likes of Withered Hand, Meursault or Broken Records get anywhere near a late evening slot on the main stage at a major festival anytime soon?  It would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it.

Aileen Loy & Blue Valentines – Big in Japan

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Why does it always seem tougher to return to work after the Christmas holidays than any other holiday?  I suppose there must be something about that end of year exhalation which makes it feel like your travails are wholly and entirely finished, which makes the resumption of hostilities with normal everyday life seem like a ruder awakening than usual.  Certainly, I’ve been in stranger places for much much longer and found it less of a pain when that alarm rings on Monday morning and I’ve had to drag my bloated carcass out of bed and back to the desk once more.

Still, there’s plenty of non-worky things to do as soon as I get home – eagleowl session to edit, New Year’s house gig videos to edit, promotional material for the Trips and Falls and the Maxwell Panther releases to send out… all the usual jollity!  And fortunately, this particular week there seems to be little to get in the way of that.  I can’t really find much happening in Edinburgh this week, as everyone’s wallets and livers attempt to emerge from the blind coma they were battered into by the Christmas period.

The Mill is going on at Cabaret Voltaire on Thursday, which is free if you are happy to surrender your mobile number and can stomach Miller lager, which is all they’ll sell you.  I’ve not really heard of either band this week, so here are the MySpace pages for The Void and Penguins Kill Polar Bears (which of course they don’t because polar bears are fucking huge, and it would take a terrifyingly large swarm of penguins to bring one down – and even then it would take hours for them to peck one to death and the spectacle would be so unpleasant it doesn’t bear thinking about, frankly) so decide for yourselves.

Incidentally, I did a podcast a while back (one of the least popular of all time, funnily enough) about bands with birds’ names, but you could probably do a similar one based around bands with bear names, but I don’t know what category I’d put Penguins Kill Polar Bears in.  Probably birds, seeing as the penguins seem to have the upper hand in the particular scenario their name suggests, but it’s far from clear cut.

Anyhow, my personal recommendation for the week would be to pop along to Out of the Bedroom, downstairs at the Tron on Thursday night.  Out of the Bedroom is an open mic night, and as such can inevitably be a little patchy, but it’s friendly, downstairs at the Tron is actually a pretty nice place for a pint (despite the rest of the place being an unspeakable shithole) and you’ll probably find that pretty much every musician you like in Edinburgh has played there at some point or other.  I used to go when my friend Scott ran the night, but I stopped when they moved to the rather unwelcoming basement of the Canon’s Gait, but seeing as they’re back somewhere nice again it would be a good time to start popping along.

The Counting Crows – Start Again

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Hmm, one of the key points of the blogosphere is not that any one particular blog may or may not be good, or that individually one site might wield a lot of influence, it is that collectively blogs wield a lot of influence.  This is at its most effective when bloggers cooperate and interact, and I’ve been doing a fair bit of that recently, but committing the cardinal sin of collaborative blogging: failing to cross-link.

Apart from being really rather bad manners, it renders the whole scheme a little pointless if I go to all the effort of writing these posts and stuff like that and then fail to nudge you muppets in their general direction.  So here’s a general breakdown of the bits and pieces people kindly invited me to make a contribution to at the tail end of last year.

Slowcoustic Review of 2009 – Basically this is a review of the year where I get a little bit sidetracked and end up ranting about the irrelevance of the major labels and the rise of the DIY movement.

Sweeping the Nation UK Music Bloggers Poll – Simon has been a constant support not just for this blog for for the record label as well, and compiles  an annual UK bloggers’ best of the year list, and here is this year’s.

Saam from Faded Glamour has conducted a UK blogger’s album of the decade poll, and has posted the main countdown here, and then the individual top three lists by the participating bloggers are assembled here.

Finally, the Contrast Podcast’s Festive Fifty reaches its finale here, and Neil from Meursault and myself introduce William Henry Miller Pt.1.  Sadly, two songs from that Decemberists toss-fest made it on there, as well as one from The Allen Creature, but that’s the problem with democracy: none of us is as stupid as all of us.  Still – Withered Hand in the top three means there must be something fundamentally right with the list, so it must be forgiven its aberrations.

I do try and avoid shilling for the label on this blog, because no-one wants to read a twice-daily sales pitch, but I reckon it’s okay to have a look forward at what we’ve got planned for the year.  That’s what the new year is for, really, isn’t it?

So I’ve got a nice big release schedule drawn up, just like real record labels do, and honestly it scares the shite out of me.  I can pretty much plan out my free time for the whole of the next twelve months just looking at it, but there are some great releases in there.

By the end of 2010 we are going to have a back catalogue to be bloody proud of, honestly, especially when you consider that we had only been a record label for about a month at this time last year.

That picture, incidentally, is a somewhat butchered (sorry Annie) version of one of four gorgeous photos on this blog taken of the two new Meursault 7″s.

Toadcast #102 – Song, by Toad Records

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01. Trips and Falls – We Were Like Strangers Today (05.30)
02. Maxwell Panther – My Ex-Identity (09.02)
03. Cold Seeds – Leave Me to Lie Alone in the Ground (17.19)
04. Jesus H. Foxx – This is Not a Rental Car (26.43)
05. Animal Magic Tricks – Smallish Hooves (29.35)
06. The Savings and Loan – Virgin’s Lullaby (36.36)
07. Inspector Tapehead – Sugar on Your Sheets (40.02)
08. Loch Lomond – Holiday (48.25)
09. Meursault – What You Don’t Have (Live on Fresh Air Radio) (58.34)
10. Nightjar – Sweet Annie Lee (66.56)