Over the top, raucous folk music may be drifting slightly out of fashion these days, but I think I’d describe this album as I described the band’s Toad Session in 2009: “a complete, and completely splendid, mess”.

Also, in the interests of full-disclosure, I should point out that they are playing an album launch at Medina in Edinburgh on Saturday the 16th October.  Myself and Dylan from Blueback Hotrod will be sorting the gig, Jesus H. Foxx will also be playing, and tickets can be bought in advance here, for a fiver.

Anyhow, cynical self-promotion aside, the band weren’t entirely happy with their debut album, Follies in Great Cities.  I got the impression talking to them that whilst they didn’t want to criticise the record itself, they would in retrospect have done things rather differently.  The process seemed to be something they were just a little at odds with, and they said that they wanted this record to be a bit more raw, to try and capture the energy of their live shows.

This, they have certainly done, as this album careers along at a cracking pace, stumbling from one violin and harmony-fuelled stomp into the next.  In the early days of Honeytrap the combination of Big Dan’s lead and Little Dan’s impassioned wail gave the band’s eccentric yomps style enough, but adding Sophie into the vocal mix gives them even more toys to play with, and they use that variety really well, to add depth and texture to the style of the album.

Funnily enough, though, I really don’t like the first song.  When I first put it on I just thought it was a like a version of Honeytrap where all the vim and energy had been removed, and I was a little worried that I might not like the album, until the introductory yelp and squawk of violin which introduces Roslin is a Cylon reassured me that all was going to be just fine after all.

In terms of what they were aiming to capture with this recording, in contrast to the first, I think it’s fair to say that they’ve nailed it.  If I wasn’t at heart a socially awkward indie kid with a well-suppressed but nevertheless significant fear of making a tit of myself in public then this is the kind of music I would get hammered to and dance about like a fool in the front of the stage.  When the band recorded their Toad Session they (and we) were already pretty fucking plastered, and although that meant the whole thing was more than a little chaotic, they still played really well, and that’s kind of the vibe this record gives off – it’s like they’re all on the same penny farthing, careening out of control down a hill and just about managing not to fall off it, despite numerous close shaves.

In amongst all this excitement there isn’t much sign of some of their earlier, more emotionally intense (as opposed to just musically intense) material.  There are times when, in the middle of all the cavorting, it might have been nice to change emotional gears here and there and hear something a bit less caricatured, but nevertheless for the most part this is a raucous joy of a record.

Honeytrap – Roslin is a Cylon

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Honeytrap – Little Johnny Winter

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Bandcamp | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

Welcome to the latest in an ongoing series where I try and review albums by my friends without either pissing them off or sounding like I’m slathering them with praise because we have on more than one or two occasions been spotted in the same pub together.

The Last Battle remind me, if not in sound, at least somewhat in politics of some other friends of mine, Broken Records. Both bands seemed to suffer something of a backlash before they’d really had much of a, er.. well, much of a frontlash.  I’ve heard a surprising number of people spit feathers about these guys, given that they’ve hardly gone stamping about the place talking themselves up as far as I have noticed.  They were greeted with rather hyperbolic levels of enthusiasm on their appearance a year or so ago, with a lot of people seemingly too hasty to find the Next Amazing Band from Edinburgh ZOMG! etc etc, and I can see how that might draw reactions, but it is hardly the fault of the band themselves.

Anyhow, in amongst all that hysteria proclaiming them to be alternately the best and worst band in the city depending on what day of the week it was, they simply got on with signing to my pal Ed’s label, 17 Seconds, and recording a debut album.  Thinking for yourself can be tricky when there’s a lot of shouting going on, so with all the shrill reactions I’ve actually found it quite hard to gauge my own relationship with this record.

Edinburgh is more than well stocked with bands who tend to draw the term folk into descriptions of their music at the moment, but when you look at the likes of Withered Hand, Broken Records, eagleowl and Meursault, the Last Battle are probably closer to traditional folk than any of them.  In fact, they remind less of their immediate peers and more of the folk-influenced stuff I was listening to when I first moved to Scotland in about 1994 or so.

Having not heard the full album before their launch night a couple of weeks ago I think I cemented my relationship with it when I found myself thinking ‘ooh good, this one’ within seconds of pretty much every song they played.  Most bands can come up with a ‘sound’ if they’re pushed, but given the stuff that lands in my inbox I am constantly disappointed with how few can actually write songs which exist as good songs, independent of whatever signature sound the band may have developed.  This elusive skill it appears the Last Battle most certainly have, giving each song its own distinct character,.

Possibly my favourite Last Battle song is absent from this though – the excellent Ward 119.  That song bursts with such genuine tenderness I find myself wishing this was perhaps a more personal affair than the concept album it is, because for all even concept-based stories have to some extent be based on personal experiences somewhere I have, I think, always preferred more forcefully emotional songs like that one – they make a much stronger connection, for me.

Nevertheless, this is a really nicely uncomplicated album, and a consistent foot-tapper.  Scott has a very normal-blokey voice, and it’s complemented really well by Arwen’s rather more gorgeous tones. The songs are held together by the consistent strum of the guitar or mandolin, like the constant rhythm of the yellow lines on an overnight drive, and given real pathos by the cello.  As I said, it’s all done quite simply, but really well nevertheless.

The Last Battle – Oh Best Beloved

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The Last Battle – Cutlass

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

I just don’t understand it.  I mean, I come back from the most amazing musical weekend I think I have ever enjoyed, and instead of being interested and happy for me, when I start telling people about it they get this weird look in their eyes which looks just a little like blind homicidal rage.  Even more unusually, this look only seems to really go away when I shush and complain about the bad weather in Edinburgh this time of year.  (The weather on Eigg, by the way, was awwwwwesome!)

Anyhow, this is the epitome, in its own quiet way, of the dilemma faced by much of the music industry at the moment.  Do you make things smaller and more exclusive, and risk cutting off people who genuinely want to support you and be a part of what you are doing, or do you allow things to grow to the extent where they become unwieldy, lose their magic and you cease to actually find them rewarding yourself? Read the rest of this entry »

Fmmmghfh.. Eigg.  Drink.  Fuckers.  Still broken.

If those Fence bastards ever suggest you go to one of their festivals say NO!  You will be drowned in drink and have so much fun that there could not possibly be a more drab and disappointing place than Real Life, as and when you are forced to return to it.

I’ll be writing something about the festival itself once my brain heals, but for now here are some entertainments to keep you occupied in Edinburgh this week, the most important to me personally of course being the Inspector Tapehead album launch and pre-gig in-store performance in Avalanche Records.

Wednesday 29th September 2010: Willy Mason at the Roxy Art House.

I remember seeing Willy Mason at the Borderline in London before I moved up here, and being absolutely spellbound.  He played up here shortly afterwards with a full band, and I kind of felt that the band crowded both his voice and his guitar playing, both of which seemed to have more space to breathe at the London show. Nevertheless, there is a real warmth to the guy when he plays and if this show is anything like as good as I think it might be I am going to be a happy boy indeed.

Willy Mason – Fear No Pain

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Thursday 30th September 2010 (5pm): Inspector Tapehead in-store at Avalanche Records.

I promise to bring some beer, for those who fancy popping up for this one.

Thursday 30th September 2010: Inspector Tapehead, The Miserable Rich & The Stormy Seas at the Wee Red Bar.

Brighton’s Miserable Rich are signed to Humble Soul in Manchester, one of the country’s finest DIY labels, so I am really pleased to be able to put them on the bill for this one.  Of course, it was actually down to Tallah and Jim from This is Music, if I’m being honest, but I am still really pleased!   And given the amount of time The Stormy Seas have wasted on this blog, I think it’s about time we put them on a bill too.  And as for Inspector Taphead, well given how late the album was in appearing I suppose it’s only fair we were a bit late with the album launch show as well.

Inspector Tapehead – Yarvil

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So, we are off to Eigg this weekend for the Fence Away Game.  Being a gallant sort I booked tickets for Mrs. Toad as well, as I thought she would enjoy such a picturesque setting, but the grumbling noises emanating from my better half over the last week or so have suggested that she is planning on weaselling out at the last minute.  Fucking typical, is all I can say.

Anyhow, this week’s podcast is the usual mixed bag of new stuff and old stuff, and also includes an expectation of the dubious concept of Mixtape Infidelity, as well as new tracks from Honeytrap, British Sea Power, Mount Erie, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Savings and Loan.

Please do not confuse this with the Eggcast, by the way.  I know the names are awfully similar, but I only have a limited imagination and couldn’t be arsed thinking of anything more original.

Direct download: Toadcast #141 – The Eiggcast

01. Honeytrap – Roslin in a Cylon (00.17)
02. Mount Erie – I Whale (06.50)
03. Timber Timbre – Lay Down in the Tall Grass (15.17)
04. Wilmer Watts & the Lonely Eagles – She’s a Hard-boiled R0se (20.12)
05. British Sea Power – Zeus (27.30)
06. The Scottish Enlightenment – Drip Feed (36.22)
07. Grant Lee Buffalo – Crashing at Corona (45.45)
08. The Raincoats – Don’t be Mean (49.47)
09. The Savings and Loan – Pale Water (58.01.)
10. Neutral Milk Hotel – Snow Song Pt.1 (63.15)

[I am off to Eigg this weekend for the Fence Away Game and, well, Egg Song... sorry.]

Do all of you buggers follow my inane rambling on Facebook as well as here?  Well if so then this little tale will probably sound a little familiar, as I couldn’t resist making snide comments about it when it happened, but I reckon I am still just a little irritated by the whole thing so, well… there’s more, you know I can’t just let things drop.

Apparently some anonymous but quite impressive sounding production company in London is making a documentary about music fans and the passion they have for music.  They phoned Kevin from Avalanche who rather kindly pointed them in my direction.

Anyhow, during a brief conversation with this lot it very quickly became clear that what they wanted was not passionate music fans, but music fans who jump around a lot.  Now, I can see their point of view, and they were very nice about it, but there is still something pretty depressing about the whole thing.  Obviously some retard flailing about at the front of the mosh pit like an electrocuted octopus is going to make for some pretty compelling viewing.  I mean, let’s face it, what could be more compelling, in film terms, than some drunken douchebag barging about like a fool during someone’s show?  I know, essential cinema, I was thinking the same thing.

Anyhow, at the time I was phlegmatic enough and pointed the nice lady in the direction of some people I thought might jump around a bit more, seeing as that was her number one and clearly most non-negotiable criterion, and thought no more of it.  But over the week it has continued to come back to fucking irritate me again and again.  I think about all the musicians I know who can’t get a proper job, because they couldn’t work as hard at their music if they did, who constantly irritate their other halves with the time they dedicate to music, or who traipse to one shitty twenty-person outhouse gig after another just in case the next one is the buzzing wee venue we all hear so much about, and a fair number of whom have seriously damaged their future prospects in any other careers because they have devoted all their energy to one of the most ungrateful ones of them all, and it all just pisses me the fuck off.

Is ‘passion for music’ really manifested in jumping about like a fuckwit on a Friday night and getting so pissed off your head that you can’t remember a single thing about the actual show the next morning?  Really?  Or is it manifested in deciding not to go to the cinema tonight and sitting in all day and all evening with a cup of tea, watching mind-numbing telly because you’ve got a gig to play in Dundee tomorrow and you need to be able to afford the price of the fucking Megabus?

Mrs. Toad lets strangers crash in our house whenever I ask her, and she lets the living room be turned into a recording studio for weeks on end, and endless drying prints for record sleeves litter the place every month or so.  That doesn’t sound like much, but every single other woman she works with and every wife of every man she works with has a nice, normal house and has dinner parties and coffee and wouldn’t for a fragment of a second entertain allowing that kind of encroachment into her personal life.

Fuck it, I myself just waved goodbye to a credible ten-year career as a design engineer – a career which meant that pretty much no matter what happened in the future, I would always be able to support myself – to do this nonsense full time.  And I still work into the small hours most fucking nights.

And to think that, really, to demonstrate passion for music all I really needed to do was leap around a bit more… well fuck, I would never have invested all this time and money if I’d known that’s all it took. And I know this company don’t care what’s really going on here, and that they are making a specific film with a pre-determined narrative, and they were nice about it and all…

But I still get fucking angry as fuck, I can’t help it.  Fuck all the people, including myself, who work so fucking hard at this shit but are deemed not passionate enough about music simply because we don’t act like the front three fucking rows at a Bon Jovi concert. And ironically enough, if you get pissed and hang out with even the quietest musicians around here for long you’ll find out that there actually is a fair bit of drunken jumping around, just rarely in the middle of someone’s fucking show (depending of course upon the band).

They are making the film they want of course, but any arse can tell you that you don’t start a film about passionate music fans by checking how much people flail about at gigs first.  Fuck off. Fuck you.  Your film isn’t going to tell anybody anything interesting or new about music, or about being a fan of music. Fuck off.

1. Most intense gig at which you didn’t dance at all.
2. Most fun you’ve had leaping around like an arse at a gig.
3. Longest you’ve held a grudge.
4. Where is your passion for music most evident?
5. Person whose intensity of feeling you most underestimated.

Smog – Held

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Grant Lee Buffalo – It’s the Life

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Marianne Faithfull – Crazy Love

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Jay Farrar – Feed Kill Chain

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Soundtrack of Our Lives – Borderline

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I also like coincidences.  I can’t remember where I heard about Nottingham’s Fists for the first time, but I find myself nudged into actually posting about them by the fact that it turns out they are off on tour with Sparrow and the Workshop in early October.  Frustratingly but unsurprisingly there’s no Edinburgh date in there, so if you want to catch either you’ll have to take the Train of Joy to Glasgow and back.

Fists are, to be blunt about it, just another indie band I suppose, but they’re good and I like them.  They touch on some of the cute off-kilter psycho-kindergarten pop of bands like The Lovely Eggs, but never stray too far in that direction.  There’s also a touch of the punch of early Hot Club de Paris or the Futureheads, but then the aggressive wail of the kind of stuff CBGBs famous also makes its presence felt.

They can be melodic when they choose, but these little oases of calm don’t surface all that often in their songs, leaving the listener a little like a beaten spouse who ends up accepting whatever tenderness they can manage from their spouse.

So it may be a familiar recipe in some senses, but I like the blend they’ve achieved, and it reminds me to a degree of Ace Bushy Striptease, who were absolutely ace at Truck this year.  So yes, another reason to go and see Sparrow and the Workshop this Autumn.

Fists – Ace is the Way (from the Olympic Hits EP)

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Fists – Skit (b-side to Cockatoo)

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MySpace |  Buy from Hello Thor Records

[This a very long article, and a lot of you may find it pompous and boring, so for those waiting for my next musical recommendation, maybe best hang on until the next post.]

By way of a rebuttal on Burdz Eye View I was led to this article in the Scotsman by a fellow called Gerry Hassan.

Basically he is bemoaning the state of the current music industry and the absence of a powerful counter-cultural movement to define the times much like the original indie movement did in its time and so on and so forth.  Burdz Eye View does a good job of giving him a good slap (in a nice way), but you know me, I could never resist opening my big mouth on something like this.

The main reason I want to address Hassan’s article is actually a little less confrontational than you might imagine.  Far from just being a curmudgeonly old whiner, he strikes me as someone who actually does get it, who genuinely is interested, and for whom there might still be an awful lot of cultural excitement left in the world of music if he actually knew where to look. Read the rest of this entry »

Matty from Sleepysoul has put together this showreel highlighting some of the music video work he has done. There are some rather impressively famous personages on this video actually (as well as Phil from Meursault and Debutant), and the soundtrack is provided by Song, by Toad Records wailers-in-chief Meursault.

This is a massively obvious thing to say, and I am sure we all instinctively know this to be true, but big record labels do not give a fuck about artists – they will in fact exploit them longer and more mercilessly than any illegal downloader of music could even dream of managing.  Not that this means illegal downloading is good of course, just sayin’.

Anyhow, intellectual property in all its forms continues to become the major gold rush/land grab/intellectually colonialist rape and pillage/whatever else you want to call it of the Twenty First Century.  In my old job I worked with all sorts of companies who measured success not in the design and launch of successful products but in the number of patents – spurious or otherwise, they didn’t care – that they managed to generate.

Companies in the US find it almost impossible to attract venture capital, or indeed any kind of funding, without the token demonstration of some form of intellectual property.  Again, the value or otherwise of the product they wish to develop is neither here nor there, nor even the actual nature or merit of the patents, it just matters that they are there.

As we have also been seeing recently, the two companies most desperate to own us body, soul and address book, Apple and Google, have recently been wielding patents as a weapon, essentially using vague and meaningless patents which should never have been granted (they must be novel and non-obvious, rendering most of the vague, all-encompassing nonsense these fuckers patent invalid, or at least you’d have bloody well thought it should) as a means to retard their competitors’ business development.  This is not about creativity and not about protecting innovation, this is anti-innovation.

Companies can even use IP as leverage to gain credit from banks and other lenders, on the assumption that their IP portfolios can always be used to generate cash.  Sometimes this is just cynical, but I do still get the impression that some of it is plain stupid.  I have worked with enough people who genuinely believe that patents are the same as ideas, and that accumulating all this IP is the same as actually accomplishing something in the real world. Having spent years working as a design consultant actually paid to generate ideas, products and business for companies I can guarantee you that this is not the case.

Anyhow, now that I’ve ranted my little rant by way of background, I am sure you can imagine the snort of contempt which escapes me every time I read about major labels mewling at the government to extend the copyright on recorded music from fifty to ninety years.  “We’re trying to provide a pension for poor struggling artists” they bleat, offering the proverbial adorable wickle baby as proof that they are on the side of all that is cute and fluffy.

Anyhow, this is bollocks.  Copyright on recorded material is worth almost nothing to a record label pretty much the second an artist ceases to be active.  If bands play, their music sells, if they don’t, it doesn’t, it’s as simple as that for 99% of artists.  Most bands would be far better off with their old albums in their own hands, as the economics of pushing their old records themselves makes far more sense than it does for EMI to shuffle around the sync buyers of this world with the back catalogue of some defunct 80s indie band, shaking the tin for a sheckle.

Now, instinctively this is all pretty obvious to me, and I suppose to you as well.  If you think about it, selling records exacts a fixed sum, of which the label has to pay the artist a percentage (assuming that they had digital sales and Spotify streams written into their old contracts, which is unlikely), so the more an artist gets the less the label gets, so it is in their interest to screw artists as vigorously as they possibly can.  So when they go crying the poor mouth and lying about supporting ageing musicians in their dotage as the reason to extend copyright to the ludicrous ninety years, they are pulling the wool over your eyes.  They are simply looking to increase the capital represented by their portfolio of IP, as that is the currency of choice for most Western companies these days.

As I said, we probably all feel all this stuff instinctively when these vipers get on telly and complain about how poor they are, but it is nice to see an economist – like, a proper economist, rather than a burbling internet hippy like myself – basically confirm all this shit.  I know the article is a little old, as is the issue itself, but having spent so long in an industry where the massive overreach of intellectual property is constantly hindering innovation, and having jumped ship to another industry where people use intellectual property to prevent artistic interaction and development, and to ring-fence more or less any cultural artefact the fuckers can get their hands on, it is still something I care about a great deal.

The proper protection of intellectual property is crucial, I am not disputing that, but the way it is currently being abused is a serious threat to culture and to innovation.