The title pretty much warns you that you’re in for something a bit, erm… well not quite Radio2 anyway. And you’d be right, because this is a great big fucking bizarre mess of a record and, well, totally brilliant if you ask me.

This EP is a compilation of old material, described by the band as “b-sides and re-released a-sides”.  It’s full of meandering thoughts which get lost from time to time, lots of odd noises, a bit of growly shouting where you might expect some singing and all sorts of other antisocial behaviour.

A lot of experimental stuff I listen to is quieter in its noodling, but this is a screechy, aggressive, in your face record which frankly makes my ears hurt, as much as I do like it.  Self Assembled Martyr might be the most palatable song, because there’s a fairly constant thrum of ukulele throughout most of the track, giving a rather welcome crumb of solace.

Everything else sounds like the bad dreams of a puppet from a Punch & Judy show which has finally had enough of all the darkness and lies gibbering in a corner of its darkened bedroom, clutching a bottle of gin from which the last drops have long since been licked.

Oreaganomics – Pockets Full

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I’ve been a fan of the Sequins since, rather annoyingly, about a week after their last Edinburgh gig three years ago.  Since then I’ve bought a couple of excellent singles and their frantic, fantastic debut album The Death of Style, released on Tough Love Records a couple of years ago.

A couple of lineup changes have ensued, and the band are no longer working with Tough Love, and almost inevitably the sound has changed a little as well.  This EP is more harmony and guitar-based than The Death of Style, which was something of an explosion of frenetic machine gun rhythms, whereas The Risky Woods is probably closer to their earlier material.

Perhaps because of that less demanding approach, this took me a little longer to get into than I maybe expected, but having done so I find I am really enjoying this.  It’s got a lot of the same theatrically preposterous characteristics which so endeared the Sequins to me in the first place, from the occasionally slightly Queen-esque guitars of All That We Know, to the downright surreal Offside & Beautiful, which is presumably the world’s first gay football anthem.

I suppose I’d say that under all the really nice, slightly rock ‘n’ rolly indie guitar riffs, The Sequins are basically just a little bit over the top, and that’s one of the things I like best about them.  They’re exaggerated, and a little bit larger than life, but they never ever let it get to the stage where you might think of them as a novelty band.

Another interesting aspect to this is that this record is out on Indie mp3 Records, another example of a label being a blogger, a promoter… pretty much everything music-related actually, rather than just a single entity like a traditional label.  I like this model, because hearing someone talk about music is a pretty consistent way to sniff out who is a sincere music fan and who is just chancing it because they heard such and such a band might be cool at the moment.

The Sequins – Space Travel in Your Blood

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Part of this album I really, really like, and part of it I find downright irritating – it’s a strange dichotomy, and makes listening to it an odd experience.

It’s very folksy, and that’s nice, but there are definitely times when it is way too overdone for my personal taste.  There is a tweeness about the lyrics in particular which at times really does put me off, but at times old-fashioned styles are blended with modern scenarios in a way which gives this album a really strong and appealing character of its own.

The first track embodies my uncertainty about this album.  It’s a lovely little ode to the allotment – a lovely, pretty song on one hand, and yet somehow gratingly soft-focus sentimentalism on the other.  This theme continues through the album and I honestly can’t tell you where I stand on it.

If forced to nail my colours to the mast, I think I would say that the Laura Ashley-flavoured soft focus nature of the album ultimately gets to me too much to enjoy much of this.  There are some really strong tunes at the beginning in particular, and I really do like the first third of this album, but after the half-way mark I find myself really drifting, and it is a bit of a struggle to listen to all the way through.

I like what these guys are doing, but they are seeking a balance which is tricky to find, and whilst at times they seem to absolutely nail it, which is why I wanted to write about this album in the first place, I think that a little too often they err on the site of flared corduroys and a paisley shirt for me to fully embrace this particular record.  It’s definitely doing something which I really like though, so I will be keeping an eye on them in future for sure.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – One Wednesday in June

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Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – England

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I am going to feel like one of those parents trying to turn a two-year-old into a champion as I write this review, because this album is really good, but I fear I might spend most of the time nit-picking.  Straight A’s?  No A-stars?  You have FAILED ME!

Okay, it’s not going to be like that, but I personally feel that Jamie from the Japanese War Effort has a work of absolute fucking genius in him, but I am not absolutely certain that this is it.

Basically, none of the songs themselves fall short – they are all excellent in fact – but assembled together into an album it’s not quite there. Put simply, this is a bit too consistent of tempo and mood over the course of its half an hour span, and could really do with a surprise or two somewhere to make sure your attention remains hooked.

The sounds Jamie makes are absolutely stunning, however.  It’s sort of like techno music being sucked into a whirlpool of low-fi, electronic experimentalism, but that gives the wrong impression in two senses.  Firstly, underneath the sounds used to compose them, the songs themselves are well-structured pop songs, and nothing to scare the neighbours in and of themselves.  Secondly, despite that rather chaotic image conjured by that description, there is an incredible precision to this music.

The clicks and pops which litter this record are clipped and sharp, and it may be a little unusual, but it’s very deliberately and carefully constructed.  I’d go so far as to suggest that Jamie might be one of the most talented producers in Scotland, to be able to produce such well-crafted music in a bedroom studio.

The otherworldliness of the music belies the rather more domesticated nature of the lyrical content.  It’s actually, an intimate, friendly, down-home kind of record, which may not be the first thing you’d expect having read thus far.  In fact I would say that the brilliance of this album lies just there: in the ability to take so much artificial noise and technological prowess and use it to create an album of such gentle warmth.

Jamie is only just the wrong side of twenty, and has already produced Boyfriend/Girlfriend, The Japanese War Effort and Conquering Animal Sound.  He seems to be one of those guys who is just bursting with ideas and I reckon that if he ever manages to get everything pulling in the same direction at the same time he really could knock our socks off. This one may not quite be there yet, but it isn’t far off – this is a very good album indeed.

The Japanese War Effort – Lanark

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The Japanese War Effort – For the Backroads

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MySpace | More mp3s | Buy the album from Scozia Records

That really, really is a rotten title for this post, I’m sorry.

Anyhow, back in February we were visited by the extremely nice people behind They Shoot Music, Don’t They, which is a Vienna-based live music video site roughly along the lines of La Blogotheque.  They visited with the plan of having something of a holiday in Scotland, whilst also taking the opportunity to film something like a dozen sessions with local bands.

They went up to Fife to visit the Fencey people, and recorded sessions with King Creosote, James Yorkston and the Pictish Trail, nabbed Sparrow & the Workshop and a couple of others in Glasgow, and Jesus H. Foxx, Meursault, Ballboy and Withered Hand while they were staying with us in Edinburgh.

Well the first of those sessions, with Dan from Withered Hand, is now up on their site, with the rest to follow in the next few weeks, presumably.

Never mind fucking jetpacks, SPRING is what I was fucking well promised.  A few weeks ago I awoke to a pleasantly mild morning and strolled into work without ducking the head or turning up the collar and genuinely believed that Spring was on its way.

It wasn’t, of course, it was just Mother Nature fucking with my head.  I remember last year the crocuses and snowdrops were out in January, it was that warm, whereas this year it is pretty much April and they are still not out in the shadier parts of the garden.

A couple of other things blooming, to stretch a metaphor slightly, are the venues of Edinburgh.  After taking a while to get their new regime into place, the newly rechristened Roxy Rooms seem to have started to get some interesting bookings again.  The Liquid Rooms, which burned to a crisp when the Indian restaurant above them caught fire something like a couple of years ago, are on the verge of being ready for reoccupation.  I don’t know how soon, but hopefully in the next few months.  And having been used quite heavily during Sunday’s Haddowfest it looks possible that Maggie’s Chambers might be considering booking a few more gigs.

Given that a music scene cannot thrive without venues to house it, and given that we’ve been really rather stretched not just for good venues but for people willing to book them in recent months, this all seems to be good news for local bands and labels.  So it might be Springlike in a sense, even if it’s still fucking miserable and cold outside.

Monday 29th March 2010: Benni Hemm Hemm, Tisso Lake & Skeleton Bob at the Roxy Room.

Benni Hemm Hemm was excellent at Homegame, with a three-piece brass section adding depth to his sound, and the last time I saw Tisso Lake I was really impressed both with Ian’s voice and his guitar-playing, which had a really nice sound to it.  Tisso Lake will be in band rather than solo format tonight, with Skeleton Bob rounding off a really good lineup.

Tuesday 30th March 2010: Race Horses at Sneaky Pete’s.

I had a quick listen to these guys and ‘fucking mental indie-pop’ is probably the only expression which springs to mind.  It has a very 90s vibe to it as well, which you might either consider woefully unfashionable or on the verge of becoming the next big thing, depending how far along the invent-hate-rehash cycle you are with that particular decade’s aesthetic.

Race Horses – Cake

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Tuesday 30th March 2010: Beneath Us, the Waves, The Japanese War Effort & Euan McMeeken at the Wee Red Bar.

Something tells me that between the sounscapes, the glitchery and the balledry of these three bands there will not be a mosh pit at this gig.

The Japanese War Effort – For the Backroads

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Friday 2nd April 2010: Conquering Animal Sound & Debutant split 7″ launch at the Roxy Room.

This is not just the launch night for the CAS/Debutant split 7″, but also for the brand spanking new label which is releasing it: Gerry Loves Records, from the team which brought you OfftheBeatenTracks.tv.  They are apparently going to be focussing on releasing beautiful artefacts, which sounds like a terrible way to make money, but a splendid way to release music, as far as I am concerned.

Debutant – Definition

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Friday 2nd April 2010: My Tiny Robots, Cancel the Astronauts & Lovers Turn to Monsters play This is Music at Sneaky Pete’s.

There will be indie-pop, and afterwards there will be drinking and dancing.  Lots of it.

Sunday 4th April 2010: Admiral Fallow & Baby Bones at Sneaky Pete’s.

All I know of Admiral Fallow is that they are either the re-born, re-jigged or simply re-named Brother Louis Collective.  The stuff on their MySpace page sounds quite promising and this might well be worth a punt.

[In this week's Sunday Supplement, our favourite raconteur and bon vivant Campfires & Battlefields talks us through his experiences at this year's South By Southwest festival, which included meeting a certain infamous amphibian acquaintance of ours. Don't forget, if you'd like to contribute to the Sunday Supplements, just email your article in to sunday(at)songbytoad.com]

Well that was fun.

I flew into Austin pretty late on the Tuesday night, but my SXSW experience really began a few hours earlier, while I waited for my connecting flight out of Dallas.  Anyone who has passed through the Dallas Airport knows that it’s typically all ten-gallon hats, oversized NASCAR belt buckles, and poorly-concealed firearms.  But on this one night, in this one terminal, the place was almost entirely given over to the pallid, assless hipster set in their tight black jeans, one knot of whom particularly caught my eye.  There were five of them, and they were almost complete strangers to one another, having just met about ten minutes before, but despite all this they were busily hatching a plan to rent a car together so they could cover that last few hundred miles to Austin in case they didn’t get a standby seat on the plane.  I shuddered and thought to myself, “this is how horror movies begin,” then gratefully patted my inside pocket for the hundredth time, just to make sure my plane ticket was still there.  It was, and so I boarded, my head filled with disturbing visions of those poor suburban youths, stranded along some lonely stretch of highway in an overheated Kia, easy prey for any one of the thousands of sunken-eyed drifters who vote in Texas elections every year.  May god have mercy on their souls.

Anyhoo, what can I say?  SXSW was a complete blast.  Even better than I’d expected.  In four days I think I saw about 30 bands, including Shearwater twice, Liars (who fucked me right in the ear socket and made me their bitch), Quasi, Plants and Animals, The Rural Alberta Advantage, The Low Anthem, Fanfarlo, Timber Timbre, Basia Bulat, Midlake, Twin Atlantic, We Were Promised Jetpacks, The Black Angels, The Wave Pictures, Slow Club, Titus Andronicus, Japandroids, Morning Benders, St. Deluxe, Lou Barlow, Yellow Fever, The Lovely Eggs, yadda yadda yadda.  I saw bands in proper clubs and I saw bands in churches and hotel lobbies and clothing stores and pizza parlors and bowling alleys and vacant lots.  And all over the streets.  Highly concentrated musical awesomeness from 11:30 am to 2:30 am every day, plus vast quantities of free beer, tasty chow, and about a million people all being remarkably civil to one another.  And great weather, except for Saturday, which was freezing and raw but still a good day for boozin’ and chattin’.   What’s not to love?

In my inexperience I bought a SXSW wristband and stayed at a hotel out near the Austin airport, so I needed to take a shuttle back and forth every day and night.  It was fine, but in retrospect I probably should’ve passed on the wristband and shuttle and put my money to better use by getting a hotel room right in downtown Austin, within staggering distance of Sixth Street, SXSW ground zero.  The wristband doesn’t guarantee admission to shows, it just allows the wearer to enter official showcases before the proletariat and without paying a cover charge.  But seeing as the wristband cost $165 while the cover charges were only $15-$20 per showcase, I didn’t like how the math turned out at the end of the week.  The unofficial day parties, where I saw one amazing band after another, were free and wide open to the public, wristband or not, although a few (like the Paste Magazine party) required people to RSVP online beforehand, which is not particularly burdensome.  If you can drag yourself out of bed by noon, getting into these day parties is not difficult.  I highly recommend it.

As good as the music was, the fellowship was better.  I got to spend some time with Matthew, who turned out to be an excellent companion despite the odor, and I also met Peej, Esquire, and the lovely ladies in his life, the Honorable Vic Galloway who hospitably offered me a cigarette about five seconds after meeting him (a simple but endearing, open-handed gesture I thought), a very sweet kiwi songstress named Michelle, and a drunk guy on the street who used Michelle’s camera to take pictures of his own ass.  Good peoples all.  And at long last, I managed to see Broken Records perform live.  In fact, I got to see them play two absolutely scorching sets in two very different venues, and even had the good fortune to meet those enterprising Sutherland boys and nearly the whole Broken Records posse.  Pardon me for getting all fan-boy, but that felt good.  They made a gorgeous racket and did Edinburgh proud, rest assured.  Oh, and during “the pause” in Slow Parade?  Total silence.

Guy Clark – Dublin Blues

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Liars – Mr. Your on Fire Mr.

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The Black Angels – Black Grease

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The Lovely Eggs – Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion?

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Broken Records – Slow Parade

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The Toadcasts stumble from one clusterfuck to the next, each one more incoherent than the last.  This, I think it’s fair to say, makes the Homegame one look good by comparison.  Not that the songs aren’t good, just that the instances of people talking over one another and two conversations going on at once and so on and so forth are notably worse on this.

However, the music is excellent, and surprisingly up to the minute by my standards.  We even managed to sneak the new National song in there, which they only released on Thursday – how’s that for happening and newsworthy and so on and so forth.

We have some new Sam Amidon as well, a track by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti which dropped through my letterbox while I was away in Austin, and some splendid stuff by Harlem and Clogs.  If only it wasn’t for the pish chat, this would be a great podcast, actually.

Toadcast #115 – The Messcast

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1. Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – Ruth Drink My Whisky (05.12)
2. The National – Blood Buzz Ohio (13.40)
3. Loch Lomond – Spine (MMIX) (25.50)
4. Sam Amidon – Way Go Lily (29.43)
5. Harlem – Friendly Ghost (34.49)
6. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Round and Round (44.02)
7. Ghostkeeper – By Morning (49.10)
8. Love is All – Bigger Bolder (53.57)
9. Grand Champeen – Broken Records (62.16)
10. Clogs – Last Song (68.24)

There has been an unprecedented amount of disruption to this site over the last couple of weeks, caused by a hectic release schedule at Song, by Toad Records which prevented me preparing in the slightest for going away to the Fence Collective’s Homegame Festival, rattling through two sessions in the day and a half I was back in Edinburgh, and then buggering off to Austin for SXSW. I can only apologise, and thank you for your patience and Dylan for his assistance, otherwise the whole universe might well have imploded.

One of the best things about this site, in my opinion, has always been the sheer consistency.  Any arsehole can write a music blog, and frequently any arsehole does, but it takes a special kind of mental illness to keep it up this constantly for this long with so little disruption.  I haven’t actually been diagnosed with obssessive-compulsive disorder, but it can’t be far away.

Anyhow, after last week’s disgraceful levels of disorder, things will be back to being ship-shape and Bristol fashion around here in no time, starting with today’s Friday Fives.  This is, as per usual, your opportunity to de-lurk, write something trivial and silly and generally say hello to the Toad community.  A tiny proportion of the people who read this site actually comment, and although I am extremely grateful to those who do because it gives me a somewhat illusory air of authority, it would be nice to meet some of the silent majority once in a while.

First some news though.  Ryan Adams and The National have new songs out and about for downloading (horrible and wonderful respectively).  I really wonder about Ryan Adams.  He has a large number of absolutely incredible albums to his name, and yet some utterly unspeakable shite as well.  Mind you, his best work seems to be done during bursts of crazy and largely unfiltered creativity so maybe, if that’s how he works, occasionally he’ll end up down the odd cul-de-sac and we should pretty much just accept it as part of the process which makes him great.

Also, WOXY has closed, giving a great big enormous lie to that BBC weasel who claimed that they were closing BBC 6Music to give the commercial sector some room to breathe.  The commercial sector cannot compete in that space and has little interest in doing so, so stop pretending we’re as stupid as you seem to think and give us our fucking station back you craven old lickspittle.  I heard rumours that WOXY was back on the block when I was out in Austin, but I didn’t quite expect it to be shut down within a week of my getting back.

Anyway, pills taken, here are your five questions for this week, answers don’t need to be inspired or brilliant, it’s just nice when you take part:

1. Favourite artist who is also really erratic (doesn’t have to be just music).
2. Favourite radio DJ or podcaster.
3. When do you listen to radio or podcasts?
4. If you had one free play on prime-time radio (say, in the middle of that fat cunt Chris Moyles’ show, for example) then what would you play?
5. Suggest some background music to the Queen’s speech.

And here are some songs I was enjoying during my first few months of moving my music writing from a static site to a proper blog page, back in 2006:

The Titans of Filth – Morbid Widow’s Portrait Gallery

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Destroyer – European Oils

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The Skygreen Leopards – Disciples

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Genaro – Garp 52

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Abernethy – Everyone Who Knows You

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As I was preparing the links for this review I found a certain Mr. Dent had written this about The Monitor on its Amazon page: “Loud, brazen, ridiculous, messy, and above all, epic.”

I looked at that brief list of adjectives and though ‘well, I can’t really do any better than that, so I might as well just pinch it and call it a day’.  Like all bad writers, however, I am never one to use five words where twenty-five will do, so I reckoned I might as well embellish rather needlessly on that neat and concise summary.

I am going to continue in the pilfering style however, because it is much easier than going to the trouble of thinking up your own opinions.  This album is loosely themed around the US Civil War, and in the press release this is what they had to say about it:  “It doesn’t take place in olden times, nor does it necessarily feature any characters that participated in that conflict. Really, it is a record about how the conflicts that led our nation into that great calamity remain unresolved, and the effect that this ongoing division has on our personal relationships and our behavior and how they’re all out to get us (or maybe not?) and yadda yadda yadda.” I particularly like the ‘yadda yadda’ part.

Musically, this is like listening to a garage-prog take on early Bright Eyes material.  Particularly in the quieter bits the vocal in particular could easily pass for Conor Oberst’s work, but when it gets going the guitar solos can verge on prog and sometimes, rather bizarrely, prog of the Celtic variety.  Celtic garage-prog, seriously?  And there’s lots of Springsteen in there too, but raspy, dysfunctional Springsteen.  See what Mr. Dent means when he uses terms like ‘ridiculous’ and ‘messy’ above?

It’s all very growly as well, with lots of distortion, crackle and hiss, just adding to the perception of mess and barely controlled chaos.  Somehow, though, it all works – just about.  It has taken me a lot of listening, and I have changed my mind a few times, but actually I think this album is really, really good.  There’s something about the brooding grumble when the album is in a less expansive mood and the clattering fury of it when it gets going which seem to ebb and flow at the right kind frequency to keep any potential fatigue at the sheer ear-bashing comfortably at bay.

It wasn’t easy though, getting into this record.  I think I had a permanent question mark in my expression the first few times I heard it, but I’ve listened to it dozens of times since then and for some reason I still can’t quite explain, I’ve really come to like it.  They do, to be fair to them, slip just enough tuneful melodies in there, giving you something to hum just as the atmospheres threaten to become too claustrophobic, and this manages to nudge you out of your rut before you threaten to become stuck in it.  Clever stuff, I think.

Titus Andronicus – A More Perfect Union

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Titus Andronicus – Richard II

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