Cotes du Rhone is our default red wine of choice in this house, and after yesterday’s birthday celebrations being cut rather short due to my feeling shitty, we are having a quiet evening in with a couple of bottles of red wine, a bacony, beany stew and we are going to light the fire for the first time this Winter as well.

There is nothing remotely related to that on this podcast of course, but then these titles have become increasingly unrelated to the actual podcasts themselves recently so I doubt that’ll surprise anyone.

In fact, given I’ve been talking about how when the weather gets cold I tend to listen to less new music and less raucous music, the lo-fi, rackety nature of this playlist is probably a total self-contradiction, but then, this is the fucking internet, what do you really expect?

Direct download: Toadcast #149 – The Rhonecast

01. Cerebral Ballzy – Insufficient Fare (00.12)
02. Male Bonding – Crooked Scene (05.53)
03. White Wishes – Hold Your Hand (13.36)
04. Johnny Reb – Nine on the Line (21.11)
05. The Dead Kennedys – Kill the Poor (25.03)
06. The Louche FC – Back Bedroom Casualty (32.14)
07. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Destroy the Evidence (38.49)
08. Carnivores – Dressed for the Rain (42.26)
09. Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands – Sixteen Dreams (48.17)
10. Heavy Hawaii – Teen Angel (56.36)

Hooray, it’s my fucking birthday.  Whoop-de-fucking-doo.  The thing is, I genuinely don’t care about birthdays, either in a positive or a negative sense, but Facebook and birthdays are an ungodly fucking combination, really they are.

“Yo, happy birthday dude.”  “Hey man, have a good one.”  Fuck off!  If you really, truly care then at least buy me something expensive, and if you don’t care enough to do that, which you shouldn’t, then let’s just drop all the shallow platitudes shall we. I don’t care about my birthday, so there’s no need for you to pretend to.

Can you tell I’m tired?

Last night was brilliant.  The Scottish Enlightenment were fucking awesome and the New Music Innovation thingy in Glasgow was surprisingly interesting.  The thing is, it was the third night out on the lash in a row for me, so by the time I stumbled back from Haymarket to our house I was pretty clapped out.  My legs ache this morning.  How does a hangover and a lack of sleep make your legs ache?

So, I am considering a late afternoon nap before I go and play fives and then head out to the Wark to kick my liver while it’s well and truly down.  Bit of a run around, nice tea, lots of beer.  Consider the weekend launched!

1. Most obscure member of your family who consistently remembers your birthday.
2. Coolest childhood birthday party moment you can remember.
3. Biggest birthday trouble you’ve been in.
4. At which gig have you felt either much, much too young or much, much too old?
5. Do you prefer birthdays or Christmas (or Thanksgiving, Easter or Whitsun if you want).

The five songs are from Uncut’s Best of 2003 covermount compilation.

Hamell on Trial – Oughta Go Round

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Paul Westerberg – Crackle & Drag

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Soft Hand

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The Handsome Family – Far From any Road

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The Fiery Furnaces – Two Fat Feet

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Lo-fi garage rock with a bit of surf and a bit of rockabilly, this really is good stuff.  It’s sloppy, rough, loud and cocky and I am really fucking enjoying it.

Mrs. Toad always knows when I am going to get into something.  She walked into the room when this was first playing and asked what it was.  I said it had just arrived in my inbox, and she told me that I was going to like it.  Eh?  I said.  ‘Well, it’s rough and a bit atonal and the singer sounds like he’s not really arsed – basically it’s right up your street’.  And she’s right, it really is.

They’ve buried the vocals deep as hell on this, and they are barely enunciated to begin with, giving the impression of someone singing through a drunken stupour, carried along by the constantly crashing drums, which get a fucking good beating on this record, and the guitar which, while it sounds as off-balance as the singer, still fair snarls its way through the songs with some vigour.

They use some sort of keyboard thing (my knowledge of keyboards, as you can probably tell, is next to nil) to provide a constant wail through most of the songs and, a little like early Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, it seems to hold it all together quite well.  It’s almost like a crying child they give a good kick at the start of a song, and who doesn’t stop bawling until the end of it.

I am perhaps a little less convinced by Devil You Know, the last song on this EP, but the rest are bloody great.  It’s four songs on a 7″ which is short, sharp and punchy as fuck.  Money very, very well spent if you ask me.

Li’l Daggers – King Corpse

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MySpace | Buy from Livid Records

BBC Introducing in Scotland is going to be undergoing changes in the new year. It was announced a while ago that Ally McCrae from Detour will be taking over from Vic Galloway, who had been doing the job for something like ten years.

BBC Radio 1 is aimed at a yoof market, and I suppose this kind of transition was inevitable at some point, even though it seemed a little abrupt when it finally happened. I’ve only really met Ally once or twice, and I hardly know the guy, but he’s always seemed like a really sincere, decent bloke so I am sure he’ll do a cracking job, and this post is in no way supposed to be a slight on the new regime, just a quick salute to the old one.

The first time I ever really came across Vic was when he was in a band called the Khartoum Heroes with Kenny Anderson, who I loved when I was at university, although I only found this out much, much later.  The first time I knowingly encountered him was at Homegame quite a few years ago when his band, Deaf Mutes, played a set.  I cynically expected it to be shit, ended up really enjoying it, and I remember thinking ‘Oh right, so he can actually walk the walk, unlike most of the rest of us doing media-based stuff, who generally just talk a good game’.

Anyhow, since then I have bumped into Vic and his producer, Muslim Alim on a number of occasions (Scotland is just not that big a country) and honestly, they are two of the loveliest guys you could hope to meet.  They’ve also given our label and the bands we work with an absolute ton of support, not least in the absolutely crucial role they played in getting Meursault their BBC Introducing set at Glastonbury, which resulted in a playlist slot on Radio 1 and all sorts of other stuff.  They haven’t always played everything we’ve sent them, but they’ve been generous with advice, honest about what they haven’t played and why, and just massively encouraging in a way that means an awful lot to a startup record label with no idea whatsoever what the fuck it is doing.

More to the point, though, they are not dicks.  That may sound like a stupid statement, but it actually isn’t; the music industry is full of total pricks.  Whiney pricks, slippery pricks, backstabbing pricks, fairweather pricks, snotty pricks, status whores, fashion whores and attention whores.  The number of times I have been dismissively ignored by people who think what we’re doing might not be fashionable enough for them to be associated with, or by people who have themselves been treated like shit and realise that, given our respective positions on the status ladder, now it’s their turn, is just plain depressing.  In fact it is one of the most wearing parts of being involved in music.

So when you meet people like Vic and Muslim who are just absolutely straight down the line, genuine guys it is a complete breath of fresh air, believe me.  With those two I have never once felt like they expected me to try and impress them, like they were evaluating us, or like they were anything other than just plain good lads who enjoyed what they did and wanted us all to do as well as possible.

So no slight on the new team intended at all, but I did think it worth saying this: cheers fellas, you’ll be missed.

Generally speaking when I see videos like this my reaction will be ‘oh, cool’ and I will share it on Facebook or something like that.  Danny MacAskill is an amazing cyclist, and his previous video was shot all around Edinburgh, soundtracked by Funeral by Band of Horses.

Hearing how central the song was to the video Mrs. Toad told me I should get in touch with him and ‘suggest’ to him that he use music from our label in future videos.  Now, I have no idea how to do that kind of thing without coming across as a complete twat (*smoothes eyebrows* Hi, you don’t know me pal, but it’s your lucky day… *cough cough cough*) so I never bothered.

So imagine my surprise when I pressed play on his latest video, only to hear something awfully familiar playing through the speakers: Wax & Wire by Loch Lomond. So of course, it pretty much had to go up here as well, didn’t it!  I have no idea if it’s in the film because Danny is an Edinburgh lad and he knows about what we’re up to here, or if he’s just really into American music (as his earlier use of Band of Horses might suggest) and thus happened across the band independently, but either way, it’s pretty cool.

The song is downloadable below, and can be found, if you’ll forgive the blatant plug, on their Night Bats EP which is available on Song, by Toad Records here.

Loch Lomond – Wax & Wire

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Before seeing the band perform for the last time ever at Sneaky Pete’s last week, I had the chance to sit down for a chat with Owen Ashworth from Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.  This is his last tour as Casiotone, but this is not for the purposes of retiring from music, more so that he can put to bed a project which has dominated the last thirteen years of his life and start work on new projects with relative freedom.

It was interesting listening to him talk about it, because for all he repeated the reasons he’s given about not being the same person anymore, and it feeling a little false to sing songs in his thirties which were written when he was in his twenties and in a completely different place emotionally, it seemed that the actual constrictions and demands generated by the success of the band played an equally important role in his deciding it was time to move on to new projects.

Have a watch of the video above for edited highlights from the interview, and below we have a couple of live videos from the performance.  I’d forgotten, I have to confess, just how much I love the Casiotone material, until I heard about this tour and went back to listen to it all over again.  It really is incredibly intimate and organic for music made entirely on machines, and I ended up buying three of his records on 12″ before end of the show.  When the live element is being retired, all we’ll be left with will be the artifacts.

Hmm, given I seem to be spending today talking about other people’s podcasts, it’s probably the right time to mention a fine find by Ted over at Cloud Sounds.  I first got into Cloud Sounds when he played a Meursault song a while back and it showed up in my Google Alerts.  I’ve not missed an episode of his joyless whinging since, but I can promise that the music more than makes up for all the chat about toasties and the latest excuses about why the sound is shit this particular week.

Anyhow, I’d not heard The Louche FC until the other week, when Ted was pimping the Christmas bash he’s putting on a Fuel along with Dunc from Red Deer Club on the 10th December.

I’m getting right back into my guitar music at the moment, and this stuff touches on the shoegazey side of things, for which I have always had a soft spot, whilst also dabbling in the various forms of ‘old fashioned pop with added scuzz’ which are so popular at the moment, with songs like Motorcycle Au Pair Boy.

The Louche FC – Back Bedroom Casualty

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The Louche FC – Motorcycle Au Pair Boy

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It’s not often I write a post purely because of being excited about just one song, but I used to do it quite a lot, back when this blog was in its youth.  I can’t figure out if it’s in its difficult adolescence at the moment, or the steady decline into tedious middle age, but youth is definitely in the rearview mirror.

Anyhow, I’m getting quite into my podcasts at the moment, and that is where I found this little gem.  I subscribe to a couple on iTunes – Cloud Sounds and Edinburgh Man – and then on Mixcloud I follow Adge, Folk Radio UK, IMP and Jon Hillcock’s New Noise.  If you have an RSS reader, or Flipbook on your tablet, or iTunes or any of these things, I am not sure if radio isn’t becoming as obsolete as fixed schedule TV, for a vast majority of applications.  Not that I don’t really enjoy some radio shows, but in general I don’t listen to them live most of the time.

Anyhow, I was listening to New Noise this weekend, and Jon finished with this absolute gem from a German band called White Wishes.  I know nothing about them, but this has a touch of shoegaze, a touch of dream pop and for all it didn’t grab me immediately, the band match The Scottish Enlightenment’s knack of letting a song have time to sink in, rather than rushing to splash the Big Main Riff all over the place as soon as possible.  Hold Your Hand in particular starts okay, by the middle I think it’s really good and by the end I think it’s excellent.

Hold Your Hand and b-side Bicycle can both be download for free from the band’s Bandcamp page, and they don’t even go in for that massively, massively annoying email harvesting bollocks which everyone seems to be obsessed with at the moment. It’s hard to tell much from two songs, but this is promising indeed I think.

White Wishes – Hold Your Hand

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The above video is something I found whilst browsing Folk Radio UK this morning.  The animation was done by a guy called Yannick Puig, and the music is by a band called Kwoon.  It’s difficult to think of this as a music video when the visual element is so beautiful – it seems a little insulting to the film-makers, honestly.  Folk Radio descibe it as a short film, and I think that’s the best way to put it – completely spellbinding – but then I have always been a total sucker for beautiful animation.

So, now that I’ve managed to get my concentration back and focussed on the matters in hand, what the fucking hairy old arse is happening in Edinburgh this week then?  Well, for starters I am turning 35 on Friday.

I would say that there is nothing sadder than an ageing hipster, but I was never actually a hipster, so I think I’m clear of that one. I remember the hipsters at school, and although I got on well with them and traded mixtapes, I wasn’t exactly what you’d call one of them – too sporty I suppose.  NHS prescription glasses and flying elbows on the basketball court do not go very well together. And basketball takes place indoors – as for football, well, just forget it.  Musicians play football occasionally, but hipsters most certainly do not!

Any old how, what’s happening this week in chilly Edinburgh then?  Well, nothing at all as far as I can tell.  I’ve checked the venues, checked my calendar, checked my Facebook events, checked everything I can think of and… nothing. So what the fuck am I going to do with myself then?

Well on Thursday I am popping through to Glasgow to a Music Business Innovation thingy, at which I will be attempting to convey whatever wisdom I can muster about how to interact with media in the 21st Century.  The only problem I have with the whole event is that all the panels are happening at once, and there are a couple I would quite like to go to actually, but it looks like that will be impossible.

Then afterwards, it’ll probably be the 13th Note for Deathpodal, Le Reno Amps and the Scottish Enlightenment, and hopefully a pint with me old pals Colin and JC.  Oh, and I’ll be recording a podcast with Glasgow Podcart while I’m through there.

So, in the absence of gigs this week, I will be working on the Lach and Savings and Loan Toad Sessions, finalising the details for Yusuf’s criminally unlucky album launches, and spending some time in the house with Mrs. Toad.  She has the day off today so we will probably read books and lounge about on the couch.  I will almost inevitably put some vinyl on too; mostly likely The Books‘ The Way Out, and the new Mount Erie, Song Islands Vol. 2.

My music listening has become quite compartmentalised these days, which is odd.  I don’t actually have access to my digital library downstairs in the living room, although I know that would be easy enough to change.  Consequently the only music we listen to in our leisure time is now vinyl, so even my favourite albums of the year don’t get much time at the moment, unless I have them on record.

Conversely, because I have the two aforementioned albums on vinyl only, I’ve just realised I’ve never actually reviewed them on the site, which is ridiculous.  But because they don’t exist in digital form in my office where I do my writing they’ve never really been on that ‘imminent’ list, despite the Books album in particular being one of my favourites of the year.  This is not exactly a fascinating little tale, I know, just something marginally peculiar which occurred to me this weekend.

Well, it can’t all be essays and reviews and discussions and art now can it.

A little more Song, by Toad Records news for the week ahead.  We’ve two new free singles out this week, including the first from the debut album by The Savings and Loan, and the second single from Yusuf Azak’s album Turn on the Long Wire.

The Savings and Loan first sent me through a demo EP something like three years ago, and it has taken them all this time to actually turn that from an EP into a fully-fledged debut album.  I am not normally very impressed by PR emails which say ‘for fans of…’ and then make some ridiculously lofty comparisons the band can never possibly live up to, but when I hear this I honestly do find myself thinking that fans of Leonard Cohen, The National and No More Shall We Part-era Nick Cave really will like this.

The band consist of Martin Donnelly and Andrew Bush (plus pals, for the recording).  Martin is a bit of a poet on the side, and Andrew works as a full-time sound engineer, and indeed recorded this album.  I actually know Martin from 5-a-side football, which is I am sure how most proper record deals come about.  He runs marathons these days though, so I’ve kinda had to leave him to it because there’s fuck all chance of me joining in that sort of crazy escapade.

Pale Water is the first single from the album, which can be pre-ordered here.

The Savings and Loan – Pale Water by Song, by Toad

Direct download: The Savings and Loan – Pale Water

The epic fold-a-thon for Yusuf Azak’s debut album is now over, thank goodness.  I was up until the small hours more or less every day last week (except Wednesday when I went to see Casiotone and get pished), but they are now all done and happy and I have to confess I think they look amazing.  As long as people realise not to break the sticker, just to slide the pacakage out of the sleeve, and can fold it back up neatly we’ll be in good shape.

The album is out now, and to encourage those of you who have yet to decide whether or not to buy one, we are giving away a second single, called The Key Underground.  Ian from Have Fun at Dinner has already described the song as “probably the closest thing Scotland has to a chillwave anthem” (don’t worry, I’ll kick the shit out of him for that later) and Jon Hillcock who presents a podcast called New Noise, has called it a “hypnotic gem”.

Whatever everyone else says, I think this is as close to a nailed-on pop classic as we’ve ever released; it can be downloaded for free below and his album is available to purchase from Song, by Toad Records here.

Yusuf Azak – The Key Underground by Song, by Toad

Direct download: Yusuf Azak – The Key Underground

And for those who have been following me on Facebook and who know that just after booking Yusuf’s album launches, for Gambetta in Glasgow and the Roxy here in Edinburgh, both venues closed down: we are nearly sorted for places to move both gigs.  So the dates will stay the same, and I’ll make a proper announcement sometime this week once everything is finalised.