Toadcast #131 – The Brocast
My brother heads off today, so I figured we’d take one last chance to do a podcast while we can. This is mostly new stuff and inbox though, so I am not sure how he’ll react.
Actually, he was in the room last week while I went through my inbox, played stuff, replied to emails, deleted things, and so on and so forth. I think his response was that he simply wouldn’t be able to handle the avalanche of shit I have to get through, and that it would simply turn him off music completely.
I don’t mind that, I have to confess, because although some people do send me wildly inappropriate things, after two hours of listening to one ‘psychedelic rock band who are blazing a trail across the LA scene right now’ after another I then open an email from Allister Izenberg, which was possibly the most terse, abrupt and non-sugar-coated promo email I have ever read, even including Trips and Falls. It was such a bad email actually that even before listening I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to really like the music, and boy oh boy was I right. It makes all the ‘rock, hip-hop, funk fusion’s next big thing’ emails easily worthwhile.
Toadcast #131 – The Brocast
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01. Hot Lava – Pink Lemonade (02.52)
02. Burnt Island – Hiding Out (07.42)
03. King Post Kitsch – Monomaniac (11.26)
04. Glass Animals – Leaflings (19.17)
05. Allister Izenberg – Little Swan (24.24)
06. Television Keeps us Apart – Voices (33.22)
07. Ola Belle Reed – High on a Mountain (41.01)
08. Clarence Ashley – Cuckoo Bird (51.54)
09. Willard Grant Conspiracy & Telefunk – The Cuckoo (54.23)
10. Soft Cat – Blackbird (62.41)
I disagree with you on your stance about the whole album dying out thing. As a whole and on a wider scale, it is, and it’s naive to deny that. Especially bigger releases and more mainstream acts. I know what you are saying about true music fans and almost everyone who comes to this site will be in the same camp. It is just a lot of music >i>i becoming disposable. You prove my point by saying you are not sure you will like any more Glass Animals stuff but you like that song. The disposable nature of indie music (mainstream is now a lost cause) is being increased more than ever by new sites such as Altered Zones which are giving increasing attention to flash in the pan bands. Now, I know you don’t really pay attention to shit like this ,and you are probably right in not doing so, but I am worried that it seems to be the bigger sites who can really make or break bands that are adopting this throwaway stance. I donno, you will know more than me about the market and the likes (as it is your job after all) but it just makes me super sad and I felt I had to vent about it. Read this nice wee article along the same lines.
I am not denying that the market for albums is shrinking, I think it was artificially inflated in the first place. Who, seriously, ever bought an album by a Radio1 pop act thinking that they’d love the whole thing, rather than because it was the only way to get hold of the two or three songs they liked?
Those people aren’t buying albums anymore, because they don’t have to, but I don’t think that means that the album as a format is dying because that was an artificial high in the first place.
“You prove my point by saying you are not sure you will like any more Glass Animals stuff but you like that song.”
That doesn’t make any sense at all. I’ve only heard two of their songs in the first place, and even during the heyday of the album people occasionally wrote ones with very few good songs on them. And sometimes there are acts whose style of music you aren’t that into, but a couple of songs cross the genre gap and you can enjoy them.
Besides, I might love the album – I genuinely have no idea just yet.
Oh dear, I was rather high while I wrote that last comment.
I think what I was trying to say is that because music is becoming increasingly disposable that this doesn’t bode well for the ‘art of the album’. I actually don’t really know what I was trying to say….SORRY MATTHEW!
That Television Keeps us Apart track is amazing. As is the first Cuckoo Bird, the second is well pretty much bollocks of course!
Ola Belle R e e d is fantastic indeed
Be sure to check out the Ola Belle Reed & Family compilation on Rounder Records.
–Ollie
Reed, is it? Ha, well Smithsonian Folkways must have had their tags wrong because I took it straight from the mp3 – whoops!
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