Yusuf Azak‘s debut album Turn on the Long Wire is out on Song, by Toad Records on the 15th November.  I suppose I’d have to say that I’ve pretty much been stalking Yusuf since I first heard his free EPs a couple of years ago.  Now, having done battle with far heavier hitters for his signature (*cough cough* – maybe slightly exaggerated) he asked us earlier this year if we’d like to release his album.

Well you can pre-order a copy now from Song, by Toad Records.  I am working on a design which will come in something like thirty different variants, and will hopefully have them ready by the end of the month.  Seeing as how we are nice people we’re releasing a free download single, Eastern Sun, which you are free to pass around, download, embed, whatever else it is you do with free singles, all you like.

Yusuf Azak – Eastern Sun by Song, by Toad

Direct Download: Yusuf Azak – Eastern Sun

To support the release, Yusuf will be embarking on a nationwide joint tour with Ethan Ash, and we’ve booked three Scottish launch dates as part of that tour.  I owe a big thank you to Lauren and Kevin who have done most of the hard work as regards booking, and I really hope to see you guys at the launch nights up here.  Not sure how many of the Southern dates I’ll get to – it rather depends on money and practicality.

Meursault‘s national tour also kicks off tomorrow too, starting at the Caves in Edinburgh.  The Caves are probably the most atmospheric places you could play in Edinburgh, so I strongly encourage you to get along to that one.  Full details of the rest of their tour are down at the bottom of the page, below Yusuf’s, and on their MySpace page.

Yusuf Azak & Ethan Ash,  joint UK tour :
11th Nov: LP Bar, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.
12th Nov: The Grain Barge , Bristol.
14th Nov: Imploding Acoustic Inevitable, The Tudor House Hotel, Wigan
15th Nov: Fuel Cafe, Manchester
16th Nov: Hamptons Bar, Southampton
18th Nov: The Astor Theatre, Deal, Kent,
19th Nov: CB2 Basement, Cambridge
21st Nov: New Cross Inn, London
25th Nov: Cellar 35 (with Amber Wilson), Aberdeen
26th Nov: Gambetta (with Jonnie Common), Glasgow
27th Nov: The Roxy Art House Theatre (with The Japanese War Effort – acoustic), Edinburgh

Meursault’s UK Tour:
25th Oct: The Caves, Edinburgh
26th Oct: Head of Steam, Newcastle
27th Oct: The Harley, Sheffield
28th Oct: Royal Park Cellars, Leeds
30th Oct: The Luminaire, London
31st Oct: The Playhouse Bar (free entry show), Norwich
2nd Nov: Saki Bar, Manchester
3rd Nov: Stereo, York
4th Nov: Dexters, Dundee
5th Nov: Beach Ballroom, Aberdeen
6th Nov: Stereo, Glasgow

I seemed to forget why this was called the Fallcast until the very end, so it clearly isn’t a very central concept to the podcast itself.  Basically, I just rattle on about some new music for a bit, which means there’s hardly an excuse to call this bloody podcast anything, really.

Still, next week we have the Inspector Tapehead Toad Session, which is nearly finished, and then after that I was thinking about doing podcasts from vinyl.  I reckon I can probably just run a lead into to the microphone jack of the computer, straight from the Tape Out RCA connection on the back of the amp, although that may well not work I guess.  I could just get myself an mp3 turntable, but that’s expensive.  Still, doing the podcasts straight from vinyl seems like a good idea to me for the future.

For now, though, it’s just me sitting and talking shit to my computer, sorry.

Direct download: Toadcast #145 – The Fallcast

01. Broken Records – Modern Worksong (00.17)
02. Kurt Vile – In My Time (09.09)
03. Twin Shadow – When We’re Dancing (12.28)
04. Husband – Feelings (20.39)
05. Houses – Endless Spring (27.00)
06. Laku Noc – Sleep (29.53)
07. Brown Brogues – Treet U Beta (37.22)
08. Shapers – Virginia Reel (41.29)
09. FOUND – String Theory (44.33)
10. Ravens & Chimes – Division Street (54.31)

Excuse me for foisting a split infinitive on you this early in the morning, but that particular thought popped into my head last night, and it’s a curious one.  I was walking home from Black Bo’s in the centre of town and it was pissing down with rain (I assume 2am, half cut, walking in the rain is usually when this sort of cod-profundity pops into people’s heads) and I walked past two or three flats Mrs. Toad and I nearly moved into, before buying the place we’re in now.

I think I’ve mentioned before that this house is the longest I have ever lived anywhere in my whole life.  My previous record was three years when we lived in Singapore as kids, and three years in the same place in Glasgow, albeit split over two spells, but Mrs. Toad and I have been in the place we’re in now for as long as we’ve been married which is a little over four years now.  This, in itself, is a slightly strange thought.

Anyhow, we bought a couple of years before the housing bubble really burst, and at that time in Edinburgh most things sold through a blind bidding process in which a house was listed at an ‘Offers Over’ price, everyone interested made a bid, and the highest bidder got the house.  It was a massively frustrating process, not least because the actual Offers Over premium over and above the listed price seemed to be over twenty percent on everything we bid on, and we ended up making something like fifteen unsuccessful offers before we finally got the place we did – and even then we only got that because we whisked it out from under someone else’s nose.

Anyway, being in this house has allowed us to do so much that the other places would not, not least recording sessions in the living room which have, on a few occasions, included live drum kits.  Also, as much as we have shaped the house very much to suit our own personalities, there are many ways it has shaped the way we live in return.  The garden, the layout of the kitchen and dining room, the big, dark, North-facing living room… it’s always an oddly symbiotic relationship when you live somewhere, so it was strange to walk past two or three places we so easily (for want of another five or ten grand – so not that easily, but you get my point) might have lived.

It’s funny to walk past and look up and imagine that that might be your living room window, for example.  And funny to think how shit some of the places look to me now, in comparison to where we are – or indeed how some of them still look really inviting, too.  I would personally have chosen Leith, I think, if choosing an area – it’s scruffier and a bit more like what I am used to, I guess – but where we are is a lot swankier than that and I do wonder how that shapes things too.  Funny.

So yes, de-lurking amnesty day as per usual.  And I am going to play 5-a-sides this evening and then repair to the King’s Wark for scran.  Splendid.  Fuck the pissing rain, who cares!

1. What is your favourite antidote to torrential rain?
2. Name a good rain experience.
3. And a shit one.
4. Which place have you lived which least represented your personality?
5. Wettest you have ever been, not counting baths or swimming.

Fleetwood Mac – Farmer’s Daughter

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The Everley Brothers – Be Bop a-Lula

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Jens Lekman – Shy Phenomenon

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Taken By Trees – Watch the Waves

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David Bowie – Oh, You Pretty Things

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This EP reminds me a little of the new Sufjan Stevens album in a funny way.  I admire a lot of it, but I don’t especially enjoy listening to it.

There’s some great stuff here though.  Zeus is thumping, and very air-punchey.   Pardon My Friends is a spooky and directionless piano drift which has you scratching your head and wondering what the fuck they were thinking, but in a really good way.

There is more weird stuff too, with Mongk chanelling Blur in their more abrasive moments and the immediately following KW-h shot through with all sorts of fucked up vocoder fuzz.  Both these songs are songs I am excited that they wrote and recorded, but not songs I find all that welcoming to listen to – not that I am saying that this is a bad thing, just the opposite in fact.

The real problem, though, is that for me some of it really is just average.  Cleaning Out the Rooms does nothing for me at all, I have to confess – just plodding along like the empty shell of something they might have discarded years ago, and Bear doesn’t seem to move the band on that much either, until its epic, sparkly fadeout, which I do really enjoy.  Those two tracks in particular, though, seem to join with the parts of the new weirder stuff which I enjoy the least and just bog the whole thing down a bit.

So there’s lots that I love, and lots of things they have done here which I love, but in its entirety I am still not really all that moved by this release as a whole, sadly.

British Sea Power – Zeus

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British Sea Power – Pardon My Friends

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

I am almost shocked to find myself writing that I really don’t like this album very much.  It is growing on me, but only because I’ve listened to it about twenty times, assuming that it is impossible for me to be just this plain indifferent to a Grinderman album.  I fucking adored the first one, and it never occurred to me, I suppose, that it would be any different with this.

I remember describing a relatively recent Rolling Stones album as being a bit like ‘The Stones covering The Stones’, and there’s an element of that in this as well.  It’s almost as if the concept of Grinderman has been too influential in the genesis of this record, rather than just allowing the ingredients to be given a bloody good shake and accepting whatever comes out.  Put those four guys together and whatever you get should be brilliant, whether it’s ‘Grinderman’ in the strictest sense, or, well, pretty much anything. Whereas this feels like they got together specifically in order to make a Grinderman album instead.

So why doesn’t it work.  Well, this is a music blog, so the perpetual answer to this is pretty simple: I just don’t enjoy the songs, for some reason.  A lot of them, particularly the first couple, sound like little more than re-treads of songs from the first album.  As per usual, there is some great air guitar to be played and some brilliant lyrics, but little that… well, grabs me by the fucking nuts, to be honest.

That may sound facile or glib, but that was the incredible thing about the first Grinderman record: it absolutely, instantaneously, grabbed you hard by the balls and just kept on twisting for an hour or so.  It cleaned an awful lot of cobwebs out of my ears too, and was just plain thrilling to listen to.  This one isn’t bad, but that’s about as much praise as I can manage for it.  It is growing on me all the time, but generally only in bits here and there, and not at the kind of pace where I ever really anticipate much love for the whole album really blossoming.

Grinderman – Heathen Child

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Grinderman – Evil

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

I have absolutely never been good at ‘meeting people’.  This seems to be because generally people think I am an arrogant arse on first impressions, and then over a year or two they either decided that they had been wrong and that I was okay really, or they didn’t.  This happened throughout my childhood – it would always take a couple of years to settle in anywhere – so when I went to university I thought I would make an effort to change, and to be more open, more approachable, more friendly and to try and really enjoy the totally new social world in which I was about to be immersed.  It was a complete disaster.

From the safe distance of half a lifetime away I think trying to be open and friendly just made me come across as insincere a lot of the time, because it didn’t really come naturally to me.  It didn’t help that I was moving from an expat to a parochial British environment, so all my social etiquette and habits were different, but my accent was sufficiently English that I didn’t benefit from the same leeway other foreigners were afforded.

Anyhow, one disastrous year in Manchester and I fucked off to Glasgow and decided not to bother trying to interact with anyone, that I would just get on with my own shit as I always had done, and that if people wanted to be friends they could fucking well come to me when they were ready.  That’s always how I’ve lived my life anyway, and so that’s what I went back to, only with the shell rather thicker than it was before my Manchester misadventures.  After a couple of years (as had always been the norm in the first place) my classmates slowly started to realise that I might be alright after all, and I made some good friends.  Quite a few people never really came around, but fuck them, they were mostly cunts in the first place.  And thus my standard path to forming friendships was pretty much cast in iron forever more: don’t expect anyone to like you, don’t fucking worry about it one way or another, but be open enough to them changing their minds when they get round to it and just get on with your own shit in the meantime.

All that probably makes me sound like the worst possible person to be giving advice on the art of schmoozing at conferences, where you tend to get about a sentence and a half to make a good impression and no more.  But actually the fact that I fucking hate meeting new people, and tend to make an arse of it anyway, might possibly mean that for most real music people, who tend to be far more awkward and far less socially confident than your average punter, maybe the stuff I’ve learned might be of some use after all.

I did eventually learn to overcome my naturally antisocial instincts actually, at least in a manner of speaking.  During the last couple of years of my university career and the first couple of my professional one I moved around a hell of a lot.  From the Summer of 1997 to the Spring of 2002 I moved from Glasgow to Groningen to Cape Cod to Glasgow to Cape Cod to Montreal to Manchester to Cambridge to Wiltshire to Kingston upon Thames, where I finally stayed put for just over three years.  So that’s ten moves in the space of five years. I can promise you I was emotionally pretty worn out by the end of it, but I had at least learned to make friends a lot faster.  More importantly, I suppose, I had learned to be a lot less bristly when speaking to new people, less afraid of being isolated in a conversation with someone I knew nothing about, without ever losing the attitude that if someone didn’t like me then I just didn’t fucking care.

So I am getting better.  But I still curl up with embarrassment on the inside whenever I decide to screw up some courage and just blunder up to someone and introduce myself.  So anyway, here are the things which work for me when it comes to going to music industry events and hoping to bump into folk who might be interesting to work with in the future. Read the rest of this entry »

If there are two words crawling all over the internets which make me want to punch my fellow bloggers in the fucking face they are ‘remix’ and ‘exclusive’.  Remixes seem to be to bloggers much like candles are to moths – I just don’t understand the fascination, but they are every-fucking-where – whereas there can be nothing more guaranteed to give any member of the press, professional or amateur, a great big hubristic stiffy than the opportunity to use the word ‘exclusive’.

So, without further ado, I present a Song, by Toad exclusive: the release of Pull, by The Lightning Bug Situation complete with, yes, you guessed it, a remix of the single and an exclusive b-side.  I know.  I feel the shame – I can barely look myself in the eye any more.

But, just to be absolutely clear, all I am ripping the shit out of with that little diatribe is bloggers scrabbling for attention, but mostly myself for having to eat some of my own more colourful words… again.  Most certainly I am not taking the piss out of the band, who have actually come up with a really nice way of getting their music out to people, packaging up songs from their new album with a b-side, a remix and custom artwork, which they are inviting individual bloggers to host as a kind of online single.  It’s almost like breaking the album (buy it here) up into a three-dimensional jigsaw, with pieces which work nicely enough by themselves, but which can be put together such that a whole new picture emerges across the top surface.

The song itself is cracking too, not least because it kicks off by telling the school reunion to fuck off.  I know it hardly does this in an bold, empowered manner, but it’s still an important sentiment I never get tired of hearing.  There seems to be a sort of softer relation to the likes to the likes of Casiotone and The Mountain Goats at play here, with less of the harsh confrontational edge those bands often deal in, and the album itself is definitely worth hearing.

The Lightning Bug Situation – Pull

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The Lightning Bug Situation – Pull (Brent Murphy Conspiracy Mix)

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The Lightning Bug Situation – The Plains at Night in Winter

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This would have been a really helpful post if I had written it yesterday, when I should’ve.  In that tiny window of physical incapacitation I have managed to fail to inform you about such bands as Mount Kimbie and The Brothers Grimm, Alastair Roberts, eagleowl, The Wee Rogue and The Douglas Firs.  By such narrow margins are great blogs built and once-great blogs judged and found wanting.

There are excuses, though.  This is Song by fucking Toad of course, so there are always excuses, but an Interminable List of Feeble Excuses for Underachievement, by Toad just didn’t have the same ring to it.

Anyhow, last week saw a (thankfully brief and relatively benign) family crisis send me scurrying down to London, followed by a return trip via Manchester for two nights of bevvying at In the City, a drink-and-vinyl-fuelled reunion with Mrs. Toad on Friday night, followed by the Honeytrap gig on Saturday, after party in the wee hours of Sunday morning and then the Savings and Loan House Gig on Sunday itself.

By yesterday afternoon I was, I’ll be honest, Just Plain Fucked.  So for those of you who missed out on the dynamic fringes of the Brothers Grimm or the folkings of Alastair Roberts due to my lack of stamina I am indeed sorry… but not really all that sorry.  Fuck you, really, I was completely cabbaged and you can just deal with it this week.

So, what’s left to do this week, for those of a musical bent?  Plenty, actually, although not really until the weekend, when it really does kick off.  There’s only one gig which really stands out to me, which is this one:

Friday 22nd October 2010: The Chap, Milk & The Young Spooks play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

The Limbo laddies (they’re going to hate me for that) are back at the Voodoo Rooms again, which is good news.  I don’t know much about the bands in question, I must confess, but then Milk are sufficiently elusive that they have neither a MySpace page, nor much written about them anywhere on the internets, so I am not entirely blaming myself.  See, I told you there were always excuses.

But there are two weekend-long festivals, both of which look like very good bets indeed.

22nd-24th October 2010: The Hidden Door Festival at the Roxy Art House.

The link above takes you to the musical plans for this particular event, but the Hidden Door Festival is a lot more than just a gig.  It’s actually a multi-arts festival, aiming to encourage collaboration across disciplines and a general breaking down of the somewhat artificial walls which tend to carelessly emerge between different disciplines when left alone for too long.  They explain it better and in more depth themselves on this page of their site, but it certainly looks like a really interesting event.

22nd-24th October 2010: Edinburgh Popfest.

This one barely needs any further information than that which can be inferred from its name, with three days of live music spread across three venues, from the Wee Red Bar (Friday), to the GRV (Saturday all-dayer), to The Lot (Sunday – early though, so watch out for your timing).

The full lineup is available on their site, but local notables include eagleowl, Withered Hand, the Secondhand Marching Band and the Just Joans, with the more exotic visitors including Darren Hayman and Suburban Kids With Biblical Names.

Suburban Kids With Biblical Names – Funeral Face

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From about 9pm or so UK time we will have the live stream of the Savings and Loan house gig in the player on this post. I’ve put it below the jump because the player has a habit of slowing the whole page down, so click here to view. And if those fuckers try and advertise Maroon fucking 5 to you then I promise it is NOT my fault – it just comes with the basic UStream service and there’s fuck all I can do about it. Read the rest of this entry »

The Fishcast?  Yes, because the fishmonger opposite our house is today auctioning off for charity the largest lobster ever to be fished out of the Firth of Forth, and the fucking thing is ma-hooo-sive!  Honestly, if that little bastard ever got its claws on you I don’t think you’d stand a fucking chance.

Anyhow, yes, I do know that a lobster isn’t a fish, don’t worry, but the Fishcast just had a better ring to it than the Fuckinggreatbiglobstercast, and the word Crustacean didn’t seem to have an obvious way of crunching down into the Somethingcast.  So Fishcast it is, deal with it.

Direct download: Toadcast #144 – The Fishcast

01. The Generationals – Trust (00.17)
02. The Divine Comedy – The Seafood Song (09.51)
03. The Driftwood Singers – Coco Ellis (17.33)
04.  The Tragically Hip – Chagrin Falls (25.59)
05. Toby Richardson – King of All the Moves (30.06)
06. Utidur – Grasping for Thoughts (39.35)
07. Slow Talk – Fashion Sense (42.43)
08. King Post Kitsch – I’d Sooner Laugh (Demo) (53.34)
09. Bear Driver – Golden Touch (Demo) (55.31)
10. Saharan Gazelle Boy -Halfhair Girl (61.24)