No, I am not, but Avalanche Records is. I pinched this video from the Guardian’s Edinburgh blogger, a position I applied for but was rather hilariously deemed to have insufficient blogging experience. Â Still, I’ve had a ton of link love from them since they kicked off with someone more respectable, and I don’t have to cover local council meetings, so it all worked out for the best I’d say.
Anyhow, in the most 21st Century way possible, I am writing this from my iPhone on the train from York to Edinburgh on my way back from In The City in Manchester. This is because, in the most 20th Century way possible, this train doesn’t have fucking WiFi for some unfathomable reason, so I can’t write nice and comfortably on my fucking laptop. Come on, people, get your shit together, if the fucking bus has WiFi now, surely a £70 train journey should have equivalent facilities.
Anyway, an iPhone is far from the easiest device to type out a whole post upon, so I had better cut this short and get straight to my ritual invitation to take this opportunity to de-lurk and leave your first comment because, well, no-one else will be talking any sense anyway, so the pressure’s off really, isn’t it.
1. What was the first poster you ever put on your wall?
2. Describe a print or poster or something like that which reminds you strongly of your folks’ house.
3. What did your Grandma always cook when you were home to visit?
4. Are you the Good Son (or daughter of course), the Bad one or an only one?
5. Odd nostalgic bit about going back to visit your family.
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Almost everything is somehow subtly wrong with this album, and I cannot stop playing it.
And by wrong, of course, I most certainly do not mean bad, I just mean eerily, creepily, uncomfortably wrong.
It is, in theory, one of the prettier records I have heard in a long time, with acoustic strumming and slow, gentle vocal delivery, violins in the background and gentle harmonies. Â It is, however, absolutely never pretty.
The violins are eerie, the vocals ghostly (not in that distant, lo-fi, reverby way fashionable production would have them be ghostly either, but genuinely ghostly in their very nature, not merely in their treatment) and the songs seem to convey the feeling of broken families, of revenge yet to be exacted, of the iron fist of fate hanging ominously over you, certain both of its murderous intent and its unavoidability.
There is just a hint of ominous organ shimmering away underneath some of this, a slow mocking banjo refrain, and drums which skitter like rattlesnakes. Â The violin always seems to be playing a murder ballad from the American Civil War, and the solace of something truly warm and beautiful is never quite afforded you, despite promising to break through here and there.
So I wouldn’t say that I love this record exactly. Â I find it disturbing, and it fascinates me, and I can’t stop playing it, but it is not nearly ‘nice’ enough to say that I love it, although in many I ways I think I do. And especially for someone working in such a well-established musical style, I really think Delhart has done an impressive job of creating music I find so elusive and fascinating. Â Top stuff.
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There’s nothing like starting a review with a bunch of tedious and slightly tenuous comparisons so, erm, why the fuck not, eh. This sounds to me like a funny old mix between Natalie Merchant, Michelle Shocked and Jolie Holland.
And with that out of the way, I’ll do the negatives first: sometimes the songwriting has too much gingham-clad, oven-baked, log cabin goodness for me. This is folky music, with gorgeous vocals, banjo, violin and a skitter of percussion, and it can be just a little too nice for me at times, particularly when the bass guitar kicks in and it starts to sound like a nice sensible rhythm and a nice sensible song.
Whilst this does happen from time to time, it is generally not that much of a concern. Tracks such as Slow Walk and Lately in DM are fantastic and, whilst not exactly groundbreaking in style or structure, have the strain of emotions personally felt about them, and this gives them real impact. At times though, despite there being nothing I could really criticise about the songs, this album just fails to grab me.  There are some brilliant songs on here, and some which are all in the right place, but nevertheless have failed to take real hold on me for some reason, and I couldn’t tell you why.
I really like the minimalism of the instrumentation on this record as well. This may have been due to restrictions of facilities or budget (and often is when I admire the lo-fi or bare-bones nature of under the radar bands), but they did have access to drums and bass guitar, so it is good to see songs like Young Blood Blues embellished with no more than a constant, gentle strum of banjo, and a little slide on the acoustic guitar.
So it’s a pretty album – at times too pretty for me, as I said – but there’s a lot of really good stuff here. Â And it’s being released on vinyl too, as is a lot these days it seems. Â Where the fuck are the record labels getting all this bloody money – it’s not cheap you know!
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I’ve been fairly eagerly awaiting this album ever since reviewing Cedermark’s contribution to a split cassette released earlier this year. I was charmed by the fierce chaos he seemed to court with his recording, with the whole structure of the songs seemingly forever on the verge of stumbling and falling to pieces.
This, to its slight detriment I suppose, isn’t quite as rickety a contraption. The previous recordings felt like an old horse buggy driving far too fast, where the slightest wonky cobblestone might sense the whole thing cartwheeling. This, on the other hand, feels far more like a conventional guitar album. That guitar is buried under effects and squealing like a little piggy for the majority of the album, but still lacks the wildness I felt on the previous stuff.
That sounds like, and I suppose is, a moan, but it doesn’t mean I am not really enjoying the album. There’s a rattling percussion on Moon Deluxe which reminds me of the Dodos a little, as does the deep strum on the acoustic guitar, on the songs where it is prominent.
The pace of the album is generally more slow and foreboding than frantic and aggressive, and this works really well, as if it’s waiting to explode. That atmosphere is great, but there are certainly times I wish it would deliver what it threatens; that it would burst free of its restraints and deliver a truly fearsome, face-melting punch to the eardrums.
At times it can sound like Interpol meet Lift to Experience, but that is a pretty lofty comparison and I am not sure I would really want to go quite that far. And as a comparison where it fails to hit the mark is that Lift to Experience bring a kind of Biblical exuberance to their music that this lacks a little.
The drums get a healthy workout here and there and the guitar really does growl from time to time, but in general I wish the songs on Moon Deluxe had a little of the feral menace of their predecessors. It’s a good album, and the ever-present swirl of feedback, like mist twisting round your ankles, gives it a cracking sense of perpetual, low-level menace, but while I am always nervous I am never terrified.
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“Joanna Newsom backed by Black Sabbath.” Apparently Sparrow & the Workshop have some rather smart-arsed friends, because that’s how one of them described some of their recent material, according to the press release I received yesterday.
I must confess I am not surprised really, because the last couple of times I’ve seen them (not nearly often enough for my liking I must confess) they have been absolutely fearsome.  Jill and Gregor always had a touch of attitude about them (Gregor is a ginger Glaswegian for fuck’s sake, they’re always angry), but I must confess Nick always seemed like a nice chap.  Not anymore it seems, unless that’s his evil twin playing guitar these days.
In the aftermath of a lot of folky stuff in the ‘charts’ (cough cough) a lot of my favourite bands seem to be getting loud these days. Â The new Broken Records is far from being a folk record, Rob St. John is weilding an electric guitar these days, the new Withered Hand material sounds like an early eighties punk rock band and Meursault are going to be using a bass guitar and a drum kit on their new stuff. Â Good. Â I like music with balls.
Sparrow & the Workshop have plenty of balls, and always have (sorry Jill), and if they are going to rock the fuck out on their new album then I am really, really looking forward to it.
This is a strange, strange album, although not obviously so. It’s like a slightly croonsome, quite country album was being listened to through a pair of earphones which might have been built by someone in the Flaming Lips. It’s not that there’s anything Flaming Lipsy about the album at all, it’s just there’s clearly something funny about it, in a manner in which I sort of think they might approve. Maybe it’s because this feels a bit like a pleasant alt-country album being delivered by someone in one of their giant stage bunny costumes.
I guess if you wanted to be brutal about it and just slap down a label you’d have to call it an album generally consisting of lovely alt-country laments, where the session musicians all turned out to be from a lost Chillwave band somewhere. Â The vocals are ghostly and distant, and there is enough production fudgery to justify this rather shonky description, but it’s still vague.
The Cotton Jones Basket Ride started as a side project of Page France, based generally around a sort of gospelly Americana which, although lovely, didn’t have the extra nuance and intrigue of this album. Â The hazy, lo-fi production, instead of making the album more distant, gives it a layer of warmth, which judging from this band’s earlier work was there in abundance already.
Rather interestingly, they bookend two of the dreamiest songs, Place at the End of the Street and More Songs for Margaret, with a couple of jaunty little instrumental numbers, almost as if they know that these two songs threaten to turn the album from dreamy to downright soporiphic, and although I am not hugely keen on either of the two aforementioned dreamy songs in their own right, as the album is sequenced they work really well.
Dream on Columbia Street brings a touch of cinematic French pop to the album, giving it a really strong finish, but for all I’ve rattled on about what happens from about halfway onwards, it is really the first half of this record which makes it a cut above most things I’ve heard recently. The first five songs really are excellent – fascinating, welcoming, the kind of song which make you want to peer more closely at the odd little flea circus orchestra which seems to be playing them, from a shoebox in the corner of an odd little bar in a town from a book you remember your Grandma reading to you when you were small.
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I am pegging this lot as unsigned, although it seems sort of unfeasible given that they have US and UK booking agents, and their MySpace page looks as beautiful as this. Â The image at the bottom of this post was by a fellow called Valero Doval, and as you can see from his website, he is a very clever little fucker indeed – that’s his artwork in the video above, too, apparently.
Anyhow, I was introduced to the band by Loch Lomond when they cam over in May to record a Toad Session and do a mini-tour of the UK, but the fact that my friend Agnes was able to download an EP and actually find out some information about the band back then suggest that a record label is now involved and has asked them to quietly remove their back catalogue in preparation for a full release. Â That’s a complete guess of course, but it looks a little bit like it to me.
Anyhow, this lot are a multi-national bunch living in London, and they make rather gorgeous acoustic pop. Â There’s not much more that needs saying than that really – the harmonies are lush, the instrumentation very pretty indeed (and there’s an accordion, which is an instrument I absolutely love). Â Three songs are all I could find on RCRDLwhatever, and there’s no sign of the six or seven song EP Agnes describes, and no info left on their Bandcamp page. Â So it’s all a bit frustratingly elusive, but lovely tunes nevertheless.
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MySpace | RCRDLBL Downloads (That’s ‘RECORD LABEL’, except not, get it? Â See what they did there? Â Vowels are sooo last Christmas.)
Before we get onto the tedious ritual of me listing good gigs every week and you ungrateful fuckers not going to any of them, I felt the need to share something quite special with you. I spent my entire weekend going through lists of blogs who might be interested in the music we release and building mailing lists of people who have bought things from the label in the past and so on and so forth, so it’s not been the most exciting weekend of our lives, I have to confess.
Consequently, by bedtime last night, having spent most of the previous forty-eight hours staring at a computer screen all I was really intellectually capable of was a bit of empty-headed cinema and an early night. Mrs. Toad tends to specialise in intellectually dormant movies, but I think it’s fair to say that this time she has pretty much excelled herself. I really don’t know how she can ever top this one: The Saint, starring (so to speak) Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue.
Anyone who has read the Simon Templar books, or even seen Roger Moore’s series as that character back before his Bond days, will know that this is light, genuinely entertaining fluff. There’s not much to it, but it has a certain style and is eminently enjoyable. By contrast, the movie was so bad it veered from train wreck to masterpiece and back every thirty seconds or so.
Elizabeth Shue takes, rather predictably, the Christmas Jones role of Nucular Physicist who has, it seems, invented Cold Fusion. She even hosts a presentation at Oxford where an undergrad (in a white coat, so you know she’s sciencey) asks what fusion actually is, presumably not having had to complete GCSE Physics in order to gain a place at university, unless of course she was a vet student or something who happened to be in the wrong lecture. Shue then holds aloft some sort of pickle jar with a glass coil inside it and explains that she just feels Cold Fusion to be possible, and that’s all the justification for this lecture we are given.
Apparently she has ‘a formula’. Because that’s what it takes to create a stable fusion reaction, a pickle jar and a formula, not a gigantic installation of state of the art engineering, apparently. She’s just got two hours of ‘figgerin’ left to do to figure out which order to put the bits of her equations in. Now, I may not know much about Nucular Physics but…
But in all honesty Shue is the least of your worries when watching this – she’ll look back on the script and cringe, but not particularly on her own performance. I suppose that’s the benefit of these one-dimensional, utterly implausible, hot-babe twenty-something lady scientist characters – they’re such ironclad stereotypes that you can’t really do much with them good or bad (assuming, Miss Richards, that you can at least pronounce the name of your allotted discipline correctly).
Anyhow, the real highlight of this two hour festival of toe-curling agony, was Val fucking Kilmer. The man is a legend. His character’s superpower was having no actual identity and being good at disguises, something which was accomplished so cartoonishly badly that every new persona made us cackle with horrified glee. The character in that clip above (don’t watch it all, I really don’t think you could take it) was pretty much the piece de resistance however.
He discovered that Shue’s character loved Byron (or something like that, I can’t remember) so decided that in order to seduce her he would need a character with an artistic soul. I can only imagine the howls of woe from all the charming, well-mannered Oxford scientists who had been trying to slip her the salami for the previous few years, when it turned out that all it took was one of the worst haircuts in cinematic history, a pair of hilarious leather pantaloons and a completely baffling choice of accents to get into the old dear’s knickers.
“Er, sir, the Chateau Latour is four hundred pounds per bottle.” “Very well, we’ll take two of them.” Zing!
Anyhow, after foiling the plans of the Russian energy magnate who created an energy shortage by stashing Moscow’s entire supply of fuel oil under his fucking house and then decided that the best way to take advantage of this shortage was by providing Cold Fusion power to the people of Russia, thus presumably negating his entire basis of power in an instant, rather than, say, just jacking up the prices of fuel oil and controlling supply to make his fortune and keep a political stranglehold on the country’s government, but I digress… Yes, so after this, Shue decides to give Cold Fusion to the world so she and Val can live happily ever after – once she’s spent the two hours necessary to figure out which way round her formulae go (something presumably not covered in the preceding years of research) in a back room at the American embassy in Moscow, that is.
Anyhow, those are some of the edited highlights, but really this film has to be seen to be believed. You have to be tough though, because I really don’t think many people could take it. Particularly the bit where Val’s hiding in the river in Moscow and the baddies looking for him conveniently fuck off for ten minutes so he can stumble to the shelter of the nearest block of flats, only to return (again, for no fathomable reason beyond evil ESP) five minutes later to resume the excitement of their narrow escape.
Anyhow, I’ll stop now. Please, please watch this for yourself, it really is the worst film I think I have ever seen, and considering the woman I married that really is saying something. Absolutely all of it is bad. All of it. Every line, every plot device, every character, every single premise, absolutely everything. Cold Fusion! In a pickle jar with a glass coil! It looked more like she’d brought her cuppa soup in the fucking thing, honestly.
Oh hang on, I was supposed to be talking about something else, wasn’t I…
A couple of splendid Glasgow bands are coming through to play at the newly re-opened Liquid Rooms. The re-decorating may be complete, but the sticky floor and smell of stale beer have apparently been lovingly preserved. Still, it was always a good venue to see bands, because the stage is high enough that you can always see, and the PA is really fucking loud. Look for the Twilight Sad to give it a good workout!
This’ll be a gorgeously Americana-flecked night of acoustic pop. Dan Mangan’s new album Nice, Nice, Very Nice is really, erm, very nice indeed (sorry, had to be done).
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Honeytrap are wild fun, and this will be my first chance to see Sebastian Dangerfield, but I’ve talked enough about this gig already, so you know what to expect by now – or at least you should. Tickets here.
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This is the first glimpse of The Savings and Loan in about five years, and probably the first proper one just about ever. Their debut album is out on Song, by Toad Records in early December, and they will be supported by The Last Battle, fielding a rather minimal lineup (it is our living room after all). We’ve sold about half the tickets already, and whilst you are likely to be able to get in on the night, it might be safer to buy tickets in advance from here. It would help us out if you did, anyway.
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Ohhh what jolly fun it’s been this week. Â Now I know why bands find it so hard to find booking agents: because it’s a shit job and no-one in their right mind would want to do it.
Then, just as I was hating promoters for all I was worth, I started into the organisation for all my own gigs that I had to book and suddenly developed a new-found sympathy for them too. Â So WHO IS TO BLAME FOR MY SHIT WEEK, THEN? Â I can’t think of anyone, it’s most frustrating.
Anyhow, I think I am now just about sorted for everything, so here are some announcements for you, so you can add all sorts of Toady nonsense to your calendars. Once again, I am putting all the label announcements into a Sunday Supplement so that the blog itself isn’t totally over-run with self-pimping during the week, which I am assuming would bore the shit out of everyone, myself included.
Inspector Tapehead Hooops Session was recorded by the lovely gentlemen from OLO Worms as part of their kind hospitality to our Tapeheady friends on their recent tour – thanks lads.
Cloud Sounds Song, by Toad Records Special seems, according to Ted, to have been purchased for the price of a pint when we were down in Manchester last weekend. Â It’s one of my favourite podcasts, and if you want to be even nicer, you could buy the first and thus far only (I think) Cloud Sounds Split 7″ – the song by Onions is worth it all by itself.
Peenko’s Scottish DIY Labels series features Song, by Toad this week. Â I am always impressed with quite how good I am at making myself sound like a total dickhead in so few words when it comes to these mini interview thingies. Â Ah well, we all need a talent of some sort I suppose, I was just hoping mine might be martial arts or a snappy dress sense or something like that instead.
All those gigs in full (more or less):
Honeytrap launch their new album Petrushka (Toad review here, listen in full and buy here), this Saturday at Medina. Â Jesus H. Foxx & Sebastian Dangerfield are also on the bill, and tickets can be purchased here. I was skeptical about Medina as a venue at first, but I was at an Acoustic Edinburgh show there during the Festival and really liked it – the atmosphere was ace, and I think this is going to be an excellent night. Â Doors will be kinda early though, because there’s a club night on after us, so don’t be too late.
Savings and Loan House Gig will be pretty much everyone’s first chance to see Song, by Toad Records’ latest ‘signing’ (if you can really call it that, which you can’t, honestly) before their album Today I Need Light comes out on 6th December. As it’s at our house and tickets are going steadily I would ask you to buy one in advance just so we have a reasonable idea of numbers in advance. Â You can get tickets here, and I have just confirmed a (very) stripped down set by The Last Battle will also be on the cards for the evening.
The Yusuf Azak Album Release Tour is being booked up slowly but surely. Â Turn on the Long Wire is every bit as good as I would have expected from Yusuf, and is out on the 15th November. Â There are album launch nights booked as part of a joint tour with Ethan Ash on the following nights:
Thursday November 25th, Cellar 35 in Aberdeen. Friday November 26th, Gambetta in Glasgow, with Jonnie Common. Saturday November 27th, The Roxy in Edinburgh, awaiting confirmation.
The first single from his album, Eastern Sun, will be out as a free download in a week’s time or so.
AND FINALLY, the Song, by Toad Records Christmas Party has been confirmed for Thursday 16th December at the Queen Charlotte Rooms in Leith. Â We’re going to have an electric stage downstairs headlined by the Savings and Loan, for whom this will also be their album launch, and an acoustic stage upstairs. Â I am working on the full lineup at the moment, so there will be more announcements to come about this soon enough.
So, initially I was going to call this post the Gigcast because I have spent the last week furiously booking gigs, arranging gigs and very much hoping people will turn up to gigs.
Then, over the course of the podcast, I consistently forgot to actually talk about the Yusuf Azak tour I have been helping to book, the Honeytrap gig I have had to organise, the Savings and Loan House Gig I have been preparing and the Toad Records Christmas Party to try and find a home for.
This is all pretty much sorted by now I think – and I’ll give you full details tomorrow in the Sunday Supplement – so what ended up dominating the podcast was me saying bone-headed things like ‘the name escapes me’ every time I had to refer to an album, a label, or pretty much anything over the course of the whole hour. Â So in a last-minute change of emphasis I decided that by far the dominant feature of this podcast was not me talking about booking gigs or any of that rubbish, it was me being under-prepared and not knowing the things I was supposed to know. Â Again. Â Sorry.
01. Hot Panda – Mindlessnesslessness (00.03)
02. Cotton Jones – Somehow to Keep it Going (06.02)
03. Soft Cat – Dark When it Should be Violet Hour (15.37)
04. Jenny Lewis & the Watson Twins – The Big Guns (19.44)
05. Family Fodder – Oneliest Thing (25.04)
06. Fire Engines – Meat Whiplash (31.44)
07. The Son(s) – Radar (38.26)
08. The Phantom Band – The None of One (41.29)
09. Jenny & Johnny – Wild is the Wind (52.12 )
10. Adam Beattie & the Consultants – Bone Dry (59.53)
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