Videos: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr
Audio: download for free below…

Every time a drum kit comes into our house I am kinda worried that the cafe downstairs is going to have a tantrum about the noise, but we’ve been lucky so far, and long may it continue.  More worrisome in this instance was probably Jonnie Common’s incredible box of tricks.

In a slight change to the usual lineup, my wee brother happened to be over from the States visiting when we recorded this, so he did the sound for us.  He has his own company over there, called Red Cottage Audio, and spends most of his time as the sound designer/recording engineer for the Boston Ballet, so I am not sure quite how he took the change from that to trying make a bunch of pop songs sound good in our living room. Still, it’s all about the results, and the results are fantastic.

The pictures are also especially good this time around.  Fee has contributed photos before – most notably to, I think, the Shenandoah Davis and Pictish Trail sessions – but this time she really has excelled herself.  I generally cut the photo sets down to about twenty pics, but in this case I really couldn’t manage any fewer than thirty, I liked them that much.  Head over to Flickr to see the set.

As per usual, all the Toad Session recordings are made available for free sharing/downloading/whatever, just after the full interview podcast, which is below, and as well as the main video at the top of the page, we have individual videos of every song as well (see a bit further down) as well, finally, as the full tracklisting for the podcast itself at the bottom of the page.

Oh, and this wouldn’t be a proper plug if I didn’t point out that Inspector Tapehead’s debut album, Duress Code, can now be purchased from Song, by Toad Records.

Toadcast #146 – Inspector Tapehead Toad Session

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Inspector Tapehead – Yarvil (Toad Session)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Inspector Tapehead – WCMJ (Toad Session)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Inspector Tapehead – A Fillet of Bozo (Toad Session)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Inspector Tapehead – Pherenzil Tear (Toad Session)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

01. Inspector Tapehead – Yarvil (Toad Session) (05.37)
02. Adam Beattie & the Consultants – We’ll Wave From the Shore (15.23)
03. Jonnie Common – Photosynth (19.24)
04. Inspector Tapehead – WCMJ (Toad Session) (28.27)
05. Charlot Webster – Stay What You Are (40.40)
06. dBASS – Garden (44.35)
07. Inspector Tapehead – A Fillet of Bozo (Toad Session) (56.59)
08. Django Django – WOR (63.51)
09. Inspector Tapehead – Pherenzik Tear (Toad Session) (80.24)

I love videos like these.  Some Australian chappie made loads, and I stumbled across them a few months ago and just couldn’t stop watching them.

You know, the funny thing about quitting my job is how incredibly easy I have found it to be disciplined about my new job.  I don’t sleep in, I still work late, although not as crazily late as I used to have to, and I don’t even skive and piss about on the internet during the day.

This morning, however, I slept in.  Shit.  Until eleven, which is quite bad, and even then I had to drag myself out of bed like a member of the living dead.  I’ve always been a sleeper, however.  I can miss out on all the sleep in the world by staying up late, but for some reason getting up early is absolutely beyond me.  To tackle this, Mrs. Toad makes me get up and drive her to work in the morning these days, which ensure I am out and about by nine every morning.

This makes plenty of sense, because once you’re up, you’re up, really, aren’t you, and it seems to work… until a band buggers off in the van meaning that whatever my good intentions, I can’t drive her to work, which is what happened this morning.  And there’s something deeply unsatisfying about sleeping in when you are your own boss and the only person getting cheated is YOU!  Dammit, world, what have you done to one of my great pleasures in life?

So yes, wake up, rub your eyes and de-lurk, for ’tis Friday, the day for drinking, fornicating and snoozing at your desk in the mid-afternoon!

1. Do you have a really bad sleeping in story?
2. Would you rather work late or get up early if you have a lot of shit to do.
3. Favourite sleeping place.
4. Which dead music publication do you miss the most?
5. If you were starting a music magazine, name one thing you definitely would or would not do.

This Friday’s five tunes are all from the covermount CD of an old Comes With a Smile issue.  The late, very much lamented Comes With a Smile.

Low – Walk into the Sea (Acoustic Version)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Jens Lekman – No Time for Breaking Up

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Dolorean – Holding On (Live)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Brendan Benson – Between Us (Uncensored Version)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Eighteenth Day of May – Sir Casey Jones

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In general I like to flatter myself that even my most unhinged rants contain a kernel of a relatively well-reasoned argument in there somewhere.  Whether you agree or not is something else, but they aren’t supposed to be just self-righteous wailing.

This, on the other hand, is just a big old cry-baby whinge.

As a record label I always saw it as my number one responsibility to make some money for the artists we dealt with.  We’re a tiny label, so okay, it was never going to be much money, but tales of bands coming out of record deals owing their labels money, or never having made a penny in the first place just annoyed me.  Surely if the label can’t make at least some money for the band then they are bloody doing it wrong.

So far, however, the only band we’ve managed to make a red cent for has been Meursault, and all of that has been spent on the costs of keeping the band on the road because, contrary to popular myth, live fees do not cover that until you get really quite big – not even close. No-one else is in the black yet at all.  Grade so far: C- at best.

In fact, you have to get a hell of a lot bigger than anyone we know or deal with before a band can make anything like a living out of actually being in a band.  There were bands playing prominent slots on The Other Stage at Glastonbury this year – pretty significant success by anyone’s measure – who still go on the dole when not touring and who still rely on someone else to pay their rent.

The facts are quite simple: there just isn’t much money in music, and almost no-one is making anything much at all out of it.  That’s just the uncomfortable truth of the matter.  It’s like being an actor or a footballer: the astronomical money made by the dubious few masks the countless thousands working part time in bars and christ knows what else just to make ends meet until, in a few years, they give up, pack it in and try and establish a normal life for themselves.

That sort of implies that people just don’t value music that highly, doesn’t it?  But that’s bollocks, and this is where the great big whinge comes in.  It’s not just that most people you could ask would strenuously deny that they don’t value music that highly, it’s that major companies with shitloads of money prove by their very actions that music has a pretty fucking considerable value, thank you very much.

- Dr. Martens boots celebrated their fiftieth birthday by, amongst other things, releasing a compilation of ten cover verisons by assorted bands, along with accompanying Doc Martens-friendly music videos.
- Nokia have been farting on about their Comes With Music scheme a few years back, where their phones were touted as coming with instant access to free music.
- Orange Unsigned showed how committed Orange were to unearthing some under-appreciated gem and *cough cough* supporting grassroots music culture.
- Miller are at this very moment busy fumbling their way through the DIY music scene up here, putting on gigs where you can only buy their trouser-wettingly awful beer and trying desperately to get people to compare the sincerity and idealism of fledgling music careers with their own cynical marketing rubbish.

And now, it seems, music is so valuable that Converse (ie Nike) are starting up their own record label.  Well fuck me sideways.  Now, I am not casting aspersions on the people running the thing, but the fact remains that yet another massive global brand has decided that music is so valuable and important that, even though their actual product has not the slightest tangential relationship to music or the making thereof, they still feel compelled enough to associate themselves with it that they are prepared to invest in actually starting a whole record label from scratch.  What?

Dr. Martens… Nokia… Orange… Miller… Converse… these are all huge global companies and they are pouring many thousands of pounds into these brand-building exercises.  Now, the only reason they would ever consider doing this is if they were absolutely certain that music, and new music at that, occupied a position of significant importance in the lives of their target audience – basically, if they were certain it had massive value, to match their massive investments.

Now, I’d like to remind you that I know this is just a whinge and not a reasoned argument per se, and I know there are reasons and supply and demand and so on and so forth, but every time I see something like this in the news I can’t help but grit my teeth and think “This is the value these people think music has, and musicians still can’t get fucking paid?  Well fuck you people right in the fucking ear.”

This is a rather ethereal and rather lovely little tranche of pop music, with just enough strange about it to be properly interesting as well.

Roberston’s voice is high and quaversome, and it soars and dances its way through most of this EP, managing to be both diffident and mournful at the same time, which is something of a trick.

Opener, Icing, is absolutely superb, and while The Great Exhibition flirts too casually with soft pop for my personal liking, as a whole the EP steers pretty clear of that kind of vibe.  Overall, there’s just enough undercurrent of creepiness about Wonderness to really pull me in, and I reckon it’s well worth the $3 purchase price – in fact, that’s an absolute steal, so cough up.

There are layers of vocals (which I will hazard a guess is Robertson harmonising with himself) which add to the other-worldliness of the music, but in general these songs have quite complex, layered arrangements with guitars, pianos, strings and all sorts adding up to a luxurious wash of sound.

Clangorious Recordings, which seems to be run by Robertson himself, is a label which describes its output as embracing the DIY ethic without succumbing to the classic, shitty DIY sound.  It’s kind of ironic that so many studio albums are embracing the lo-fi and no-fi aesthetic just at the time that technology becomes good enough that this roughness is now far from necessary in home-recorded music.

This EP is a classic case in point, lush and lovely, and really carefully put together.  There may be influences pulling it in ways which move it away from my taste on occasions, but particularly in Icing and One Desire a Day there is plenty here which I really love.

Roy Robertson – Icing

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

That old quote which compares writing about music to dancing about architecture always kind of got on my nerves.  I mean, I can sort of see where they’re coming from, in the sense that the value in music is very much in how it makes you feel, which is a very abstract thing and renders the written word kind of redundant.

Then again, people talk about feelings all the fucking time, and it’s an important thing to do, even for insensitive dickheads like me, so the idea that trying to express the feelings which a piece of music stirs in you is stupid is a bit like saying that all attempts to communicate or empathise with each other are also stupid.

The people at Forest Publications probably think I hate them, because I have consistently ignored the projects they tell me about.  I’ve done this for no obvious reason, and it’s hard to put my finger on why, because I actually think the stuff they do is generally excellent.  I think the reason is possibly related to the fact that I have slipped into a certain mindset when it comes to reviewing music, based rather discouragingly around keeping the inbox clear and occasionally interrupting the general flow with a bit of a rant about something which has been bugging me for a while.

It seems oddly difficult to break that, even for such a tiny sideways step as writing about people writing about music.  Anyhow, Ericka sent me an email ages ago about a project she is working on with Forest Publications and I, being a dick, have managed to let it slip my mind again and again so that you now only have a few days to make a contribution.

All the details are here, but the concept is simple, really. Think of a gig or an album or a song or pretty much anything music related which has really moved you, and react to it in whichever medium you feel most comfortable expressing yourself.  In my case that would presumably be words, but they are welcoming submissions in the form of artwork, photography, poetry, fiction and all sorts.  The deadine for submissions is the 30th October, but that is plenty of time in my book.

This reminds me, actually, of a feature which ran a couple of years ago on Sweeping the Nation, although that was executed in writing only, called Songs to Learn and Sing.  I wrote something about the following song, which is called Eggshell Miles, by a band called the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra.

Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Eggshell Miles

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And here, published on STN here, is what I had to say about it:

“Before Kenny Anderson became slightly famous as King Creosote, chief mastermind behind Fife heroes Fence Records, he was in a couple of bands I was really quite into back in my university days, including the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra.

“Between 1994 and 1997 I went out with a girl who was one of the most remarkable examples I have ever met of someone both highly fragile and extremely strong. She was a slip of a thing, pretty, sharp and highly intelligent and I developed a rather sizeable crush on her when we worked at the same hotel down in Manchester towards the end of my first year.

“I don’t really think it’s fair to go into the details of what had happened to her in the couple of years before we met, but a lot of it was horrific. Really bleak, awful, horrible things. Despite this, she was remarkably whole as a human being – her shell was thick, tough, and her soft centre buried deep down inside where it couldn’t be hurt. The beginnings of the relationship were amazingly tentative because of this. Her wit and humour were confident and merciless, but getting close to her on a more personal level was a minefield. Time and again she would startle like a rabbit in headlights and close up completely. She didn’t want to exactly, it was just a reflex, and one I had to treat with care and patience.

“She was quite into music, and about a year or so into the relationship we picked up The Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra’s album of wonderful, Scottish, folky bluegrass 39 Stephs. The song Eggshell Miles – “To try and get to know this girl/is to try and walk on eggshells/treading very carefully/and breaking every one” – was so perfect a description of the careful beginnings of our relationship that I have never since been able to separate it from my memories of this particular girl and that summer in Manchester. I’ve never heard another song like it really: sensitive and thoughtful, and like all the best poetry, able to put into one line what has now taken me three paragraphs to describe.

“Anyhow, some eight or nine years passed, we had long-since split up, and I was listening to a freebie sampler which included My Favourite Girl by this guy called King Creosote. A couple of the music magazines had mentioned him, and I was quite interested to hear his stuff. I really enjoyed the song and it only slowly dawned on me that the voice sounded vaguely familiar. Eventually I twigged – that bloke from the Skuobhies! – so I went and fished out my old copy of 39 Stephs and put it on. And lo and behold it was him. And then when I got to Eggshell Miles I was utterly floored by old memories, so utterly bound up in the music that I hadn’t listened to for nearly ten years, only to be unlocked again and come flooding back because I vaguely recognised a voice on a sampler CD by a new band I knew next to nothing about.”

Mutual Benefit are a band who popped into my inbox for the first time a few weeks ago, and I have been listening to their stuff an awful lot since.  Their releases are available from their BandCamp page, and include their two latest EPs, Spider Heaven and Drifting, which come on the A- and B-sides of a tape with artwork made by the band and individual to every purchase (digital downloads available immediately upon purchase).

Musically, they seem to drift from Sufjan Stevens (alright, only barely) to the prettier experimentalism of Sin Fang Bous, and off into lovely dream pop territory, before losing focus and stumbling into a scatter of glitches and digressions again.  There are times when it is a little too soft and lovely and poppy for me, but it is never that way for long, and just as the niceness becomes a little grating you can pretty much bet that something strange is about to happen.

As these releases are coincident I find it interesting that the band have opted to define them as two EPs rather than a single album, which they do have enough material for here.  Bands tend to love albums.  As a record label I love albums, because they are infinitely easier to publicise.  But as a writer and a music fan I have a real devotion to the more concise and often more unified EP format, but here lies the problem with digital music, because whilst in tape form (which I confess I haven’t purchased) you would hear this as two very distinct entities, on a playlist they follow one after the other and lose that sense of individuality.  I have tried to keep them separate, but realistically that is quite a tricky thing to achieve.

Music this meandering can drift a little at times, and there are occasions where it feels like the band have let slip their focus just a little.  That’s a slightly questionable accusation to level at this kind of music though, because that lack of focus is so inherent in the way it is all put together that it is at the heart of both its best bits and its worst moments.  So whilst there are occasions when I am a little less than fully engaged, they are few and far between, and when Mutual Benefit nail it, they really do have some gorgeous songs – such as in the video at the bottom of the page.

It was a funny one, this.  I heard there stuff and was immediately intrigued, but I wasn’t immediately grabbed once I had the whole piece of work to listen to.  So whilst the fascination was pretty much immediate, a fuller relationship with the music took a little more time to achieve.  It’s good that way though, and now that this has been on constant rotation for the last three weeks or so I can finally say that I am really enjoying both of these excellent EPs.

Mutual Benefit – Desert Island Feeling

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Mutual Benefit – Here

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[My darling Mrs. Toad, fresh from administering the Evil Stare of Doom to miscreants at parties, has taken time out from her busy schedule of reducing the world's financial systems to dust to pen this article about Guy Hands' misadventures with EMI for our edification.]

It’s not often I get the chance to write on a topic fitting for this blog. Given that I am a peon of the reviled financial system with nary an artistic bone in my body, my world rarely intersects with the ethereal world of Toad. After all, to most people the world of finance is about as pleasant as a piss-stained Glaswegian tramp and just as incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, as recent events have proved, it is apparently equally incomprehensible to many of those who are paid ridiculous sums to practice it.

Some financier fuck-ups, though, are more spectacular than others, not least the 2007 purchase of EMI by financier Guy Hands through his company Terra Firma for £4.2bn.

This week Hands is in the US Courts whining that he wouldn’t have paid as much for EMI if his banker, David Wormsley of Citigroup (aka “the Worm”) hadn’t told him someone else wanted to buy it for a similarly stupid amount (presumably £4.1bn). Hands has apparently decided, three years and a full credit crunch later, that he should actually have paid only £2bn to secure EMI.

Now, leaving aside what the Worm did or didn’t say, the whole point of being a financier is to buy high and sell low. Nope, I’ve got that wrong, a bit like this guy.  And indeed Guy Hands. Whoops. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a tricky thing, awaiting albums by bands who are personal friends.  I don’t know what I fret about more, whether it gets a good reception in the wider press or whether I myself can honestly look the band in the eye and say that I like it.

Their first album was on the receiving end of some of the most negative 3/5 reviews I think I have ever read.  Because of tricky record label negotiations, not helped by the credit crunch, it took them almost a year longer to get their debut album out than it perhaps should have, leaving the band to face a backlash before, to re-use a phrase from a recent review, there had ever been much of a front-lash.

Even from my own perspective, as much as I liked the album, much of the excitement in hearing a new release was dissipated by the fact that I already knew all the songs so well from their live shows that there were few actual surprises left in the record itself.

Whereas Ian Caple, who produced Until the Earth Begins to Part, gave the band pretty much free reign in terms of how the record ended up sounding, this time they have been working with Tony Doogan in Glasgow, who has by all accounts been a lot less indulgent.  This, it turns out, is a very good thing.

Between the negative reactions in some quarters to their first record, and the uncertain period the band themselves endured when two of their number decided to call it quits earlier in the year, there is a fair bit of emotional tension in the air when you listen to Let Me Come Home, and it has served the music very, very well indeed.  There is real bite to most of this, and it is darker and in some ways heavier than its predecessor, whilst at the same time being a lot cleaner.

People have looked at me askance a few times when I’ve said that.  Heavier than its predecessor?  When most people seemed to think that was the big problem with that album, that it was too heavy, too overbearing?  Well The National have a real weight to their music, without being sonically cluttered in the slightest.  A Leaving Song might sound a little like ‘Oh, Broken Records with more guitars’, but Modern Worksong builds up to one of their fraught crescendoes, and then breaks into a skittering piano and drum refrain.  To me this shows that for all they have retained their penchant for Big Sound, there is a newfound clarity of arrangement and ability to use certain tools in their armoury more sparingly, in order to give them more impact.

Dia dos Namorados, which follows, never attempts the highs for which the band frequently reach, and this restraint is something they use well on this album.  It punctuates the mood perfectly, retaining the heavy, foreboding atmosphere, but creating an important break in the prevalent aural textures.  The Motorycle Boy picks the drama back up, but keeps the tempo slow, so by the time pop gem A Darkness Rises Up hits, you are entirely ready for the release of giddy foot-tapping once more.

All in all, this is fucking great record.  It addresses a lot of the criticisms of the first one, without ever feeling like the band have allowed themselves to be deflected by other people’s opinions of what they should be doing.  It shifts from the rattling pace of Modern Worksong, to the ominous march of Dia dos Namorados, to the air-punching Springsteenisms of the Cracks in the Wall and finally to the gorgeous closer Home in under forty minutes.  Disciplined, full of ideas, and while there are a couple of mainstream radio sounds in there – most obviously for me A Motorcycle Boy I guess – you have to remember that that is what the band are actually aiming for: something which is interesting enough for snobs like me to like, which it is, and yet populist enough to cross over to mainstream interest.  If this album doesn’t achieve a fair bit of that, then it won’t be by much.

The simple music fan in me just loves Let Me Come Home.  It tugs at all the emotions, from schmaltz to grief to joy to aggression.  And then a part of me remembers the reception their previous album ‘enjoyed’ and thinks ‘See!  See!  This is why I wouldn’t stop telling you how fucking good these guys are.’

Broken Records – Modern Worksong

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Broken Records – Home

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Rough Trade

I know I have gone on about this quite enough, but this wee movie fair brought a tear to my eye, so it did.  It may have been fairly carelessly flung together – or so its creator rather modestly insists – but there is something quite fantastic about this little gem.  It’s so brilliantly evocative: the slow motion, the lens flare on so many shots… just perfect.

And aren’t Kid Canaveral good, eh?  Eh?  Cracking tune.

[Edit: for those who have no idea what I'm talking about, my review of Away Game is here.]

I feel I could start these listings posts with ‘Christ, 25th October, already?’ pretty much every single week at the moment.  Not that the world is getting away from me exactly – in fact it all seems to be slowly locating some semblance of normality after a couple of months trying to get my head around my new full-time responsibilities – it’s just that I have been constantly busy since I left Proper Job and in those circumstances time just buzzes past at a frightening rate.

This weekend we finally got into the territory of proper cold.  Not uncomfortably cold, or really cold, or even very cold, just that the weather is now officially cold.  You need a jacket to go outside, and it’s probably time to put the heating on and stuff like that.  It’s the end of October, Winter is most definitely around the corner, and it’s dark by the time you get home from work.

I like the cold, actually.  This Winter just gone was excellent.  I was raised in Austria where, amongst other things, you most certainly have proper seasons.  The idea of these chilly, wet, rainy British Winters has always disappointed me, and finally getting a freeze and some snow (although there was admittedly very little actual snow in Edinburgh itself) felt like we’d finally had a Winter at least vaguely worthy of the name, so come on Scotland, let’s go one better this year and actually get some snow onto the streets of the city, eh?  Alright, alright, maybe not one of my more popular rallying cries.

That song at the top of the page, incidentally, is by a gentleman who records under the name of Pregnant.  More can be found here, for those wishing to investigate.  I have a new album to listen to some time soon, but it can all be previewed by following that link, so… well, you’re not going to be doing anything better on a Monday morning, are you?

Oh, almost forgot.  Some live shows.  Monday seems to be popular this week, for some inexplicable reason:

Monday 25th October 2010: Meursault, Port Royal and Enfant Bastard at the Caves.

Meursault are, as I mentioned on Sunday, kicking off a national tour with a gig at The Caves.  I love the Caves, and I just wish I had the balls to put gigs on there more often, because it is a gorgeous venue.  There are rumours of proper drum kits and early REM infatuations in Meursault’s immediate future, but I have no real idea if that’s what we’re in for tonight, or if it will be some time before this shift in direction becomes obvious.  You’d think I’d be on top of this shit really, wouldn’t you.  But no.

Meursault – Sleet

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Monday 25th October 2010: Lichens, The Douglas Firs & Iliop at Sneaky Pete’s.

Of all the unfortunate timing… I’d really like to see the Douglas Firs again, having missed their Retreat! performance due to work commitments.  This lineup is a little more experimental, perhaps, but continues the very promising work being done by Powan Presents.  There’s a pretty worrying dearth of active promoters in Edinburgh at the moment, and it’s good to see a couple of promising new enterprises starting up.

The Douglas Firs – The Quickening

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Sunday 31st October 2010: Our Ladies of Sorrow Halloween Party at Sneaky Pete’s.

Our Ladies of Sorrow’s Halloween Party is an Edinburgh institution, merging perversions of popular local bands with perversions of Halloween-inspired cinematic collages, and presumably even bigger perversions of the Department of Health’s recommended daily alcohol intake.  This will sell out, I would think, so I’d get there early if I were you, as I can’t find a ticket link anywhere.