I’ve been talking to Anthony from God Don’t Like It recently, and I think we both agree that longevity is the key to achieving anything in the music industry, particularly if you are a publication or a label or a promoter or a venue or anything like that – just make sure you stick at it for as long as possible.  For bands, maybe the flash in the pan model is a bit more feasible, but even then only if you play a particular kind of music.

Applied to mp3 blogs the same is true, particularly when you take their popularity boom into consideration.  Most music blogs started up about the time I moved to a Blogger account, in around 2006.  Around that time there was something of an explosion, with new ones popping into existence every few weeks, and consequently the older ones, dating back to 2003/4 and so on ended up with a kind of mythical status in the eyes of many writers (and readers) of these sites, because they blazed the trail that we all follow.

Muruch is a music blog written by a friend of mine, and it trumps all of these whippersnappers: it recently celebrated its tenth birthday!  There are a few reasons why this is an incredible achievement.  Firstly, the sheer slog of writing even a handful of posts a week for no tangible reward is a lot harder than most people think.  I pretty much go from internal monologue to blog post with barely a filter inbetween, which is why I get myself in hot water from time to time, but it is still the only way I can generate this amount of writing this regularly.  For Muruch to have managed ten years of consistent posting is a feat of endurance which I doubt many will be fully able to appreciate.

There is a little more to it than that, however.  Most mp3 blogs, this one included, play pretty fast and loose with the law.  Almost everything I post is sent to me by bands and PR people and therefore cleared for posting, but there are definitely times when I think ‘aw, fuck it’ and just fire something up on the assumption that a/ the band probably don’t mind and b/ if they do mind then they probably don’t care all that much and are unlikely to ever find out anyway.  This applies to a lot of music blogs, but not to Muruch.

Muruch, is entirely, 100% legal, which is one of the reasons they don’t feature all that many mp3s, a fact which hurts their audience somewhat when you consider the importance to blogs of things like the Hype Machine blog aggregator.  As well as this, when the music industry started wielding the ludicrous DMCA and making invalid, nuisance complaints against anyone and everyone, resulting in blogs being vandalised by their hosts or just shut down altogether, Muruch was one of the only ones to stand up and fight back.

Because everything they post is legal they were able to pursue a counter-claim all the way back to the source of the complaint, and by doing so highlighting just how little control bands actually have over their own music.  It was a brave and rather thankless task, but something which I think deserves an awful lot of respect.  So well done Vic, thanks for all the support for the record label, thanks for the last ten years, and good luck for the next ten!

George Davis – Sixteen Tons

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Eels – Sixteen Tons

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This self-titled, self-released debut album has made such an immediate positive impact on everyone I’ve played it to that I’ve deliberately held back on writing this review for a bit, just to be sure I didn’t get too swayed by other people’s enthusiasm and could actually react for myself.

Anyhow, Bottle of Evil is a contraction of Evil Hand and Bottle of Steven, the solo projects of the two gentlemen involved, the former of whom used to be in a band called Genaro.

I don’t want to get too side-tracked here, but it is worth mentioning that I really thought Genaro had promise.  Their debut album came out on the now-resting Benbecula Records a couple of years ago, and although I never really clicked with it myself, I thought the band had some cracking songs and loads of potential.  Apparently there was a second album written, but they never recorded it before they split.  As Kurt Vonnegut might say: ah well, so it goes.

I am going to get the term shoegaze out there and out of the way immediately, because there is a lot of shoegaze in this stuff, but that seems to be increasingly popular these days.  I like this kind of music, more based on texture than hook, because even if the song itself is a wall of guitar noise, which it can be here, there is still something dreamy and blissful about it.  This makes me feel like a disturbed child, slowly and relentlessly knocking its head against the wall until it’s brain has been mashed into a bloody pulp, and it may be responsible more than any other kind of music for my preference for the hands-jammed-in-pockets indie head-nod, which is as close as I ever get to dancing.

There’s definitely a touch of the early nineties in Manchester to Bottle of Evil, even a touch of Laid by James about it at times, which is one of my all-time favourite album.  A couple of tunes, such as Holding Up the Bar are less successful, from my perspective, but their acoustic strum serves to break up the album really nicely, meaning the thrum of guitar never gets overbearing.

When the band sent me this through they didn’t tag the mp3 files properly, so I actually listened to the songs in alphabetical order until quite recently, when I went on eMusic and got the proper tracklisting.  It’s an odd experience, but I like the album in the correct order a lot better, and it shows that they’ve put a lot of thought into the sequencing, which always makes me feel good about a band.

Good stuff – I recommend this.  Turns out my friends were right from the start!

Bottle of Evil – Same Old Story

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Bottle of Evil – Conversation

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And just in case you’ve forgotten Genaro, I love this song:

Genaro – Suspicions

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MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from eMusic

I am not sure I need to say much about this.  If you want to know what I think about Mammoeth, you can go to the recent interview Ruth and I did with Russell on Fresh Air Radio recently.

This video is the first from his forthcoming debut album (26th July), and I know I am a bit of an animation fetishist, but I think it looks gorgeous.  In fact, if you go to the Mammoeth site you’ll see that the whole graphical style of everything is really, really good. I am envious.

Well this week I shall mostly be entertaining my parents, who are taking the opportunity to inspect Toad Hall as a suitable place for the raising of yet-to-be-considered grandchildren.

There may yet be some opportunity for a spot of truancy however, as I am DJing at the Charity Baw on Saturday.  I wish I actually had the right accent to say that properly, but with my accent saying things like “baws”, or the far better “yer maw’s got baws and yer da’ likes it” just sounds stupid unfortunately.  It’s the biggest chore of living in a foreign country: you pick up the slang, but not the accent, and end up making a tit of yourself all the bloody time.

The only consolation is that it has happened to my brother as well, and he now uses American slang whilst sounding like he works for the BBC, which is hilarious!

Saturday 17th July 2010: Charity Baw at the Roxy, with King Creosote, Ballboy, FOUND, Three Blind Wolves and more…

The lineup’s great, but I know for a fact that at least one of the people DJing at this event is an idiot, but Kenny from King Creosote and Gav from OnTheFly will probably play some good tunes at least.  I haven’t actually seen King Creosote for ages now, and the upstairs room at the Roxy is about as atmospheric a place as I can imagine to break that duck.

King Creosote – Twin Tub Twin

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Sunday 18th July 2010: Endor, Gdansk & Lady North at Sneaky Pete’s.

Endor have a new album in the works, and Gdansk have always been good, so I recommend this.  This should be a night of good, old-fashioned guitary indie music

Gdansk – Kicking a Television

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Arran Arctic got in touch with me a while back about his previous album, and I felt in a slightly difficult position because, whilst I liked many elements of what I heard, I still felt that for me personally the album didn’t quite have that essential something required to really draw me in.  I try not to be mean about unsigned bands, and it felt kind of patronising to write a post which was sort of positive but mostly ‘constructive criticism’ if you know what I mean.  Who the fuck, after all, do I think I am?

Now, it is my understanding, although finding any concrete information about the guy on his various sites is a little challenging, that Arran Southall used to live up in the Isles but has since moved down to Edinburgh.  It may seem, then, that I am only showing him any attention now he’s on my doorstep, but that isn’t true.

I didn’t actually know he’d moved, but when he sent me through the new video for The Door, I perked up.  The whole new album is available to preview on his website, and the single can be downloaded for free for the next couple of months, until the next one becomes available.  I hate to say things like ‘made progress’ because again, who am I to say, but I will say this: I am enjoying this album a lot more than the previous one.  I find it a lot more engaging for some reason, and it seems to mark real progress, at least in terms of what I myself like listening to.

[Edit: Apparently that's not actually his album up for streaming on his site, just a collection of songs.  Sorry!]

Arran Arctic – The Door

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My little brother is in town visiting, and he is the sound designer for the Boston Ballet, and on Wednesday night (I think) we got obliterated on gin and had something of a musical duel; each taking turns on the stereo, me playing some of the weirder stuff I listen to and him playing bits of classical music.  Honestly, it was fucking ace.  As a DJ set it would have absolutely delighted me anyway, even if everyone else ended up fucking off, but nevertheless, that evening was what music fandom is really about for me.

So this podcast isn’t really a recreation by any means (we are far, far too sober and nothing like argumentative enough for starters) but I thought it would be nice to do a podcast along those lines.  Personally, it’s maybe not even as classical as I might personally have liked it to be, but never mind, I really like it.

And, as usual, there is a correction to be made.  We describe the them tune to Star Trek Deep Space Nine as Theme for the Common Man, and apparently it isn’t that at all.  What it is is heavily, heavily borrowed from Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.  So the bit of classical music Ben describes hearing before we play that song must actually have been Fanfare for the Common Man, which only reminded him of the Deep Space Nine theme without actually being it.  Whoops.  Next time research before talking!

Toadcast #130 – The Poshcast

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01. Mozart – Requiem in D Minor (02.40)
02. Yann Tiersen – La Lettre d’Explication (16.18)
03. The Flaming Lips – Watching the Planets (23.33)
04. Theme to Star Trek – Deep Space Nine (28.47)
05. Les T̻tes Raides РManuela (38.49)
06. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Proposition #1 (49.13)
07. The Books – S is for Everysing (52.29)
08. Nico Muhly – The Only Tune (64.00)

Sometimes I really wish we had more poofs and asylum seekers and darkies and bankers and… well okay, maybe not bankers, but benefit cheats and single mums and immigrants in this country.  Because I’d rather a country filled with all those people than one filled with Daily Express readers.

In fact, I think the best way to solve the pressure on the country’s infrastructure which all these gay immigrants seem set to exert would be to organise a swap system.  For every asylum seeker we take in we should be able to ship a Daily Mail or a Daily Express reader off to somewhere like Kabul or Darfur or pretty much anywhere the fuck else but here.

Because the one thing we all know is that the primary reason for abandoning your family and the country of your birth only to wash up somewhere like this with absolutely nothing to your name but the clothes you are wearing is so that you can go to Kylie concerts and drink fucking cocktails.

In some senses you almost have to applaud the Daily Express for this headline.  You really couldn’t make this shit up.  But how the hell can you possibly satirise something so brilliantly insane?  Then again, why waste your time satirising the cunts – why not just tell them to fuck off.

The launch of this album was, entirely unsurprisingly, one of most enjoyable gigs I’ve been to in a long time.  I think Lloyd from Peenko was officially having The Most Fun He Has Ever Had, it was sweaty as fuck, and the whole experience was just fantastic.

As someone rather wedded to the morose and the uncomfortable, when it comes to music, I think the best way to explain how to take Kid Canaveral is to repeat a conversation I had with front-man Dave McGregor a couple of years ago.

We were watching a band called Popup play at The Voodoo Rooms, and for those who don’t know them, Popup were a band very much on the verge of breaking through a few years back, only for the album release to take longer than expected and their momentum to kind of fizzle out in the meantime.  They had some cracking tunes though, and Dave told me that they were the band who made him realise that, contrary to the prevailing indie orthodoxy, you didn’t actually have to be angsty all the bloody time.  As he put it, everything he wrote up to then tried to be angsty, and he just wasn’t very good at it (“…and it was fucking shite” were his exact words, if I remember).

Anyhow, after that revelation Kid Canaveral became, simply, brilliant fun.  It became about hooks and energy and bounce, and you can tell from watching them play: they look like they’re having an amazing time, and that joyfulness makes it almost impossible not to have one yourself.

Musically, this album couldn’t be as bouncy all the way through as it might have been, without risking losing the audience to the monotone of constant fun – that was something I thought the band might do, and something they have sidestepped so easily I feel a bit stupid for thinking about it.  The pace is really well varied, and they showcase a much greater range than their preceding three singles suggested.

It’s all about hooks and hummability though, and there are a few songs on here which don’t quite get going, in my opinion.  Left and Right, On Occasion, and maybe Talk and Talk don’t quite ignite for some reason, and I couldn’t really tell you what it was.  And tragically, they have left the brilliant Stretching the Line off this record – possibly my favourite song of theirs to date – but then they more than make up for that with the gorgeous Her Hair Hangs Down, and they confidently wait until right at the very end to drop that little gem into the mix.

So while I might personally have trimmed a couple of songs from the playlist, both for length and because a couple don’t quite tickle my fancy, but in general this lot might not be changing the world, but they are a very good band and a splendid antidote to the earnest folk pish which prevails around here (and which I do love very much, of course)!

Kid Canaveral – Cursing Your Apples

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Kid Canaveral – Her Hair Hangs Down

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

I remember interviewing the Silver Columns up at Homegame this year and their combination of seriousness and playfulness struck me quite strongly.  Whilst they came across as enjoying themselves hugely, and their approach to the songwriting process seemed light-hearted and not in any way precious, there was a definite undercurrent of something a little more focussed there.  They are not, in other words, just arsing around.

Generally, I don’t think discussion of their previous work is really applicable or relevant, but I think that if there is one area where it is actually appropriate to discuss the folkier background of Adem and Johnny it is this one: you know that the actual underlying songwriting is going to be of a certain standard, and we already know for sure that both guys know how to put together an album.

I am not always all that keen on electro-pop, and disco-related stuff generally doesn’t tickle my fancy all that much either, so I was not certain what I was going to make of this, to be honest.  And true to form, by the time this album builds to its central climax – the brilliant Brow Beaten – I am just that: a little brow-beaten by the constant thud of the beats, despite loving songs like Cavalier.

The comedown after that track is palpable, and song like Columns and the brilliant Warm Welcome let you sink back into your seat and draw breath a little, before things kick back in with It Is Still You.  The thing is, I still think of this particular style of music (little as I admittedly know about it) as being more about singles, EPs, remixes and one-off moments than actual albums.  Even with this one, where I love a lot of the songs and I can clearly see the thought and effort that has gone into constructing a coherent record, it still feels a little bit like the right material delivered through the wrong medium.

Nevertheless, there is loads of stuff I love here, and plenty of these songs will be on compilations, playlists and in DJ sets for a very long time to come.

Silver Columns – Cavalier

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Silver Columns – A Warm Welcome

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Moshi Moshi

So it seems that 6Music has been saved for now, which is very good news.  Saved is not entirely accurate I suppose; perhaps reprieved might be more like it.  There is still every chance it could go if the BBC were to include the cut in a broader re-strategising of their digital radio offering.

The proposed cuts seemed punitive rather than strategic, a suspicion strongly reinforced by the recent utterances of Tim Montgomerie: “Disgraceful that 6Music has been saved.  When will the BBC share in the pain?” I think we can all agree that he comes across as a stupid cunt, but I am not really going to dig at that too much, as No Rock and Roll Fun has done a much better job of dismantling his nonsense here.

The thing which has been itching at me ever since this was announced was nicely summed up by the Daily Mash (a brilliant site, by the way – sort of like a British Onion) at the time the cuts were first threatened.  The first paragraph of this article sums it up quite neatly: “The closure of the BBC’s 6 Music has enraged thousands of people who insist it is the sort of thing they would probably have liked if they had ever got round to listening to it.”

I am thrilled that 6Music has been saved and it is the only radio station I would ever choose to listen to, but as many have said, what of the Asian Network?  Well it’s a slightly stupid question, and throws the point made by the Daily Mash above into sharp relief.  I like the idea of the Asian Network, in that it sounds like it is probably a good idea, it is nevertheless not aimed at me, not anything I ever listened to and therefore not something I know the slightest thing about.

So really, for me to weep and wail about the Asian Network all I would be doing would be rather hollowly defending something which sounded like the right sort of thing for the BBC to be doing. Honestly, though, it would be a shallow protest, because I have no fucking idea whether the Asian Network really does merit preservation or not.

As anyone who lamented the demise of the Bowery here in Edinburgh last year should have instinctively known when its takeover was first mooted, it is not enough to like the idea of something, we have to actually use it.  One of the reasons the Bowery ended up without a particularly strong negotiating position was that most of us who liked the idea of it didn’t actually go there often enough to keep it open.

Equally with 6Music, do those of us who hate the idea of it closing actually listen to the station all that much?  Do those of us who love independent music actually go to the gigs our favourite promoters put on, or buy the music our favourite labels and bands release?

One of the reasons the things I love are often called ‘alternative’ is simply descriptive: they are things which not all that many people really like all that much.  Things which are not popular often, for simple economic reasons, can no longer afford to exist.  All of which brings me back to the initial point, which is that it is all very well to like the idea of this sort of thing, and quite right to be thrilled that 6Music is, for now, not going to be shut down.  But really, protests and petitions are one thing, but the only real way to support this kind of stuff is to actually make a point of using it as often as possible.