1. Micah P. Hinson – Micah P. Hinson & the Pioneer Saboteurs

There’s not much which really distinguishes this records from the two preceding, but when I sat down to give it some consideration, I came up with one simple reason: emotional range.  Micah P. Hinson goes from the sentimental to the heartbreaking to the furious to the playful and back at the drop of a hat, whereas Perfume Genius and The National pretty much find their level and stay there.  Having interviewed the man, he is someone I am not at all surprised to see has the ability to sustain that burning desire to make music which deserts so many musicians as they reach a level of personal comfort after a few well-received albums.

Micah P. Hinson – The Striking Before the Storm

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2. Perfume Genius – Learning

This album is in some ways a one-trick pony, but I find it completely captivating nevertheless.  The lyrics are personal and poignant, something the drowsy, woozy production only serves to emphasise.  It’s the kind of album I tend to stick on and listen to in its entirety as well – in fact I don’t think I’ve ever done anything else.  I struggle to really articulate what it is I like about this album, for some reason, and I can easily imagine people not liking it, but it’s just one of those which grabbed me from the very start for some reason and in the six or seven months since I first heard it rarely has a week gone by when I haven’t played it at least once.

Perfume Genius – Write to Your Brother

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3. The National – High Violet

I am, as you probably know by now, something of a contrarian.  The fact that this fucking album is in every bloody end of year list imaginable means it irks the living shit out of me to put it on this one as well.  Honestly, though, there is no escaping the fact that after a very, very slow start indeed I have completely fallen for this album.  What turned the slow build of an album I was initially indifferent to into a complete about-face was probably seeing the band at Glastonbury.  They mixed the new songs in with the old, and despite a fairly low-key performance, it was still obvious that I had come to love pretty much everything on High Violet.   I now have it on two slabs of gorgeous purple vinyl (alright, alright ‘violet’ vinyl) and even my bloody mum loves it.  Alright you National bastards, you win.

The National – Anyone’s Ghost

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4. Broken Records – Let Me Come Home

I knew virtually every song on Broken Records’ first album, and that robbed me of a little bit of excitement on hearing it, but this one was (almost) all new, which was brilliant.  In terms of the music itself, this record harnesses Broken Records’ instincts to wind themselves into a frenzy and gives it a real sense of purpose. It’s also very much a whole album, with fantastic dynamics from start to finish.  In fact, there have been a lot of these this year, which somewhat contradicts the popular assertion that digital music has killed the album.  Maybe for people who were never that fussed about albums in the first place it has, but not for most of the rest of us.

Broken Records – Dia dos Namorados!

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5. Sam Amidon – I See the Sign

I still feel this album tails off a little, and I still can’t stand that bloody R Kelly cover, but neither of those gripes stop this being a fucking amazing record.  The lush orchestration is never intrusive, and complements the more traditional elements with rare beauty.  Sam’s voice is truly an amazing thing, which gives him something of a head start, but almost every element of this record is lush and captivating.  Every time I hear Sam Amidon’s music I find it baffling that I actually had to listen to his previous album for about six months before I realised that I loved it. It really, really should have been obvious.

Sam Amidon – How Come That Blood

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6. Jason Lytle – Music Meant to Accompany the Art of Ron Cameron

There are many reasons I love this album, not least of which the fact that I have been waiting for Jason Lytle to give us something weird and challenging for ages now.  In the end this isn’t an album written for purpose, more a cleaning out of the odder corners of his store cupboard, but nevertheless the result is an album bursting with ideas, be they entirely finished or not, and hence one I find more lively, engaging and enjoyable than any of the more sensible and polished work Lytle has worked on in the last six or seven years.

Jason Lytle – Liquid Hyper Tweeker Energy Drinks

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7. David Tattersall – Happy For a While

For an album released with so little fanfare (i.e. almost none at all), this is absolutely brilliant.  In my review I said that there is a part of me looking forward to the Wave Pictures dishing out a good solid beating to their guitars again, but this album, which is far more acoustic, shows that they (yes, I know, but Tattersall is the main songwriter, so it almost counts) can go the other way with perfect results as well.  It’s not just the strength of the songwriting, almost a given when Mr. Tattersall is involved, but the variety of the arrangements which make this album so briliant, in my view.  For an album with such sparse instrumentation the shifts in pace and feel across the whole record are really nicely executed.  All in all, brilliant.

David Tattersall – Between My Ear and the Cradle

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8. Male Bonding – Nothing Hurts

A large part of me is rather hoping that 2011 will be the year guitar music batters its way back into my listening habits.  I have always had a taste for aggressive, rough guitar music, even though I don’t really hear that much which really appeals to me at the moment.  This is quite poppy and polished actually, but it’s thirteen equally cracking songs, half an hour long, and a loud, boisterous joy.  Beneath the garage punk aesthetic is an unmistakable hint of that period of British guitar music where indie was in the process of turning into Britpop, but without a lot of the affectations.  It’s almost as if this rollicking reinterpretation has produced an interpretation of that kind of music the hipsters might finally find acceptable.

Male Bonding – All Things This Way

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9. Songdog – A Life Eroding

I’ve known of this band for bloody years, but only now have they released an album I have managed to properly click with, and one which has sent me digging back through their back catalogue to see why it never quite happened earlier. It tails off a little towards the end, which is the only reason it is not in the top one or two.  Generally they write pretty miserable, dysfunctional songs, but they do it with a very acid wit which they are not afraid to turn against themselves if things feel like they are getting too earnest.  A great album from a band who have been around for a very long time and never received the credit I think they are due.

Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost

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10. The Books – The Way Out

This is very much an album-lovers’ album, as I would suppose you might expect from The Books.  I recently realised I never actually reviewed this on Song, by Toad, with the only reason being this: I bought this on vinyl immediately and have never listened to it anywhere near my computer, so it just never popped into my head.  This is symptomatic of my listening habits all year, and not in a bad way I think I can confidently state.  It’s on beautiful multi-colour flecked vinyl, and I sit down, listen to the whole thing and absorb everything from the great bits to the strange bits to the bits which are suspiciously similar to early Lemonjelly.  Probably not my favourite Books album, but one I listen to all the time.

The Books – Beautiful People

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11. The Scottish Enlightenment – St. Thomas

I waited ages for this album to materialise, and then once I’d loved the preceding EPs so much I started to get paranoid about over-anticipating it and ruining it for myself.  Once the ludicrous over-thinking was over, however, it turned out to be slow-burning gem: an album that simply fixes you in its gaze and keeps on reeling you in, sometimes so slowly that you wonder how it is so impossible to escape.

The Scottish Enlightenment – Pascal

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12. Liars – Sisterworld

There are times when I really think this is the album Grinderman should have been; not entirely, but here and there.  It does embody that drooling malevolence however, grumbling intimidatingly along before exploding into fearsome, thumping noise.  And when it does go mental it inspires some of the most unhinged leaping around that our living room has seen in ages.  There is more spite and rage in the fiercest moments of this album than pretty much anything else I’ve heard for years.  Not pure noise, just oozing malice.

Liars – The Overachievers

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13. Titus Andronicus – The Monitor

I have to confess that the first few times I heard this I just thought it was a big, ridiculous mess.  Honestly, there are guitar solos in here which sound like Celtic bagpipes, and all manner of other rambling digressions, often in the form of massive, proggy wig-outs.  Slowly though, once the ‘fuck, what?‘ impulse had worn off, I found myself loving this album, to my considerable surprise.  It is still a massive, preposterous mess, but it is done with such joyful abandon that I just can’t help myself.

Titus Andronicus -Richard II

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14. Run On Sentence – You the Darkness and Me

This record flavours its dark, fairytale folk atmosphere with that touch of glamorous theatricality which has been so badly done by so many others – only Dustin Hamman absolutely nails it.  There’s rattling percussion and a touch of exaggerated dramatics, marvellous vocals and a genuine emotional grip which doesn’t let you go from the start to the finish.  It’s not emotional in that uptight, inwardly focussed indie-kid way either, instead it erupts out of the album in an unabashed, unfiltered way which, for all it can seem over the top at times, always feels so genuine that even a professional sneerer like myself can’t be cynical about it.

Run On Sentence – Lost in Winter

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15. Glaciers – Here Come the Glaciers

In many ways I thought this was going to be a slow album of carefully constructed noises, drifting between the experimental and the odd, but it is far from that.  There are certainly those aspects to it, but there is a fullness and a pop sensibility to much of this which belies the introverted DIY aesthetic of the label and the album artwork (in other words, I made groundless assumptions and was wrong).  Nevertheless, this is a bold alternative to the acoustic sessions I had already heard, and an album I have come back to many a time since first hearing it.

Glaciers – Brooklyn

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Once again this New Year’s Eve Mrs. Toad and I shall be forgoing the dubious pleasure of stumbling about in the freezing cold city centre surrounded by other people’s sick, and will instead be having a glass or two of wine in the house, like we did last year.

Like last year there will be live music, and like last year you are all invited.  Jonnie Common (Inspector Tapehead), Neil Pennycook (Meursault) and Jamie Scott (Japanese War Effort) will be playing, and the set may well include some collaborative stuff, or just three solo sets, depending how effectively they get their shit together in between now and then.

We’ll get another keg, I think, because that was a great success at the Christmas Party.  Kegs tend to cost us around £1.80 per pint (70 pints, £130) so please come prepared to chip in if you fancy guzzling posh beer all night instead of cans of Tennent’s.  Also, we’d really appreciate if you could buy your tickets in advance, just so we have an idea of numbers.  All the money goes directly to the bands, so it is for a good cause.

Sold out now, sorry.

Many thanks – hope to see you there!

16. Cotton Jones – Tall Hours in the Glowstream

This album may peter out slightly, but there is something I find utterly compelling about the first two thirds of it.  The sound has a wonderfully naive and pretty core, with a shimmering, enigmatic veneer and for some reason this has consistently fascinated me since I first heard it.  In many ways it’s just a lovely, dreamy pop album, but the way it’s been put together is bloody ace.

Cotton Jones – Sail of the Silver Morning

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17. Sparrow & the Workshop – Crystals Fall

This is a little over-long perhaps, but a fierce, ballsy album which sometimes channels the bone and guts of malevolent folk tales, whilst at others the emotional heart of it comes from somewhere altogether more personal.  Excuse the term, but Jill O’Sullivan and her gentleman friends (now there’s a band name!) write music with more balls than most bands I’ve heard in ages.  Figurative balls, Jill, sorry, you know what I mean.

Sparrow & the Workshop – A Horse’s Grin

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18. Sweet Baboo – I’m a Dancer/Songs About Sleeping

There is an unsettling combination of wonderfully comforting, lovely music and rather darker lyrics at work here.  The songs seem to portray the manic microscope of a paranoid, slightly twisted over-thinker, but it’s all delivered in such gorgeous acoustic pop that it takes a moment or two for it to sink in.  This is the sort of album which tends to generate an awful lot of ‘hang on, what did he say?’ moments, particularly if you are (foolishly) only half paying attention.

Sweet Baboo – Y’r Lungs

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19. 30 Pounds of Bone – Method

It’s a very rough album this, and yet a very warm one at the same time.  The actual recorded sound is extremely immediate and very raw, and the lyrics could be pretty well described that way as well.  It all gives the impression of an album so close to the bone that you may at times find yourself looking away, but there is such an unvarnished quality to the whole presentation that listening to it ends up feeling like something of a privilege.

30 Pounds of Bone – Ghosts in the Grass

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20. Erland & the Carnival – Erland & the Carnival

This is a bit of an ex-Britpop supergroup (well, not really, but justaboutkindasorta) who seemingly tired of fey, sensitive ukuleles in alt-folk music and set about making an album which, whilst it does fit in that genre, sets about its business with a good deal more pace and purpose than many others it might share a display with in your local Fopp.  It may not be breaking any new ground at all, but there isn’t a weak moment on this album.

Erland & the Carnival – You Don’t Have to be Lonely

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This week there will be fuck all happening in Edinburgh, or at least there better be, because I will be participating in none of it.  Apparently there’s some pagan bollocks going on at the end of the week related to a fat man and some reindeer, but I wouldn’t bother paying that too much attention if I were you.

Actually, there is the Christmas Songwriters’ Club down in Leith on Thursday which looks rather excellent.  I have been trying to buy tickets, but am finding WeGotTickets to be an unspeakable shitfest of password requirements and expired logins and all this other shite.  If you can manage that though, tickets are to be found here and I’d recommend it, because the lineup looks splendid.

Last week, however, was fucking spectacular.

The Song, by Toad Christmas Party was fucking excellent, if a little bit hectic (for us anyway, there was no evidence the audience really noticed).  Everyone came round straight after work, so we had no more than an hour and a half to set up two PAs and soundcheck six bands.  This, as many of you will know, is simply not possible.  Nevertheless, we seemed to get away with it entirely.

The Queen Charlotte Rooms was decked out to the nines in tinsel and fairy lights, and the whole affair was a ludicrous, brilliant shambles.  I was working a bit too much to properly let my hair down (one pint all night, one fucking pint!) but everyone seemed to have a lot of fun, and in general I can’t imagine a better way to close out what has been a rather dizzyingly dramatic year for all of us.

A massive thank you to everyone who came, and everyone who played. The Scotsman wrote us a five star review the very next day, and the Herald tried to, but apparently there was a mistake somewhere and we were robbed of two stars, dammit.  They are sorting this as we speak, I believe. Thanks to David Pollock and Nicola Meighan for the writeups.

Eagleowl’s Stars in Your Eyes was the following night at Pilrig St. Paul’s and, although I wasn’t there myself due to parental commitments, apparently I (and any of you who also rather foolishly neglected to attend) missed Neil from Meursault as Tranny Lennox, Jesus H. Foxx as Johnathan Richman, eagleowl as Talking Heads, and Broken Records as REM.  I dearly wish I had been able to go, but I am going to have to content myself with watching Milo’s video above, stolen from this post here, and sighing wistfully to myself.

By Saturday, Kid Canaveral’s Christmas Baubles was the final nail in my liver’s coffin.  I was DJing inbetween bands and, for all my combination of naff eighties hits, indie obscurata, and the odd inclusion of I Feel Pretty from West Side Story and Nothing Like a Dame from South Pacific, I have to confess I rather doubt that my contribution was at all significant.  I did, however, save everyone from a constant repeat of Now That’s What I Call Christmas 64 or whatever else they had on the stereo when I got there, so let’s not underplay it either.

In any case, it was a bloody brilliant night, and by the time I staggered home I think it is fair to say that the weekend had been officially seized.

I am not personally going to bother doing a ‘Best of 2010′ podcast based around my own choices.  Over the next couple of weeks you’re going to get more than enough of that in text form anyway, so I think we can all live without a podcast as well.

What I thought I might do, though, was just do a quick rundown of the Song, by Toad Readers’ song and album of the year voting because… well, why the fuck not, I suppose.  As much as anything I felt like doing it because there were a couple of surprises in there, a couple of omissions and a couple of disagreements, so I guess  it gives me something to whinge about when introducing the songs, eh.

Direct download: Toadcast #153 – The Mobcast

01.The Japanese War Effort – Summer Sun Skateboard (00.21)
02. The National – England (06.05)
03. Foals – Spanish Sahara (11.17)
04. Broken Records – The Motorcycle Boy (24.31)
05. Kid Canaveral – Her Hair Hangs Down (29.06)
06. Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) (33.51)
07. Micah P. Hinson – My God, My God (41.13)
08. David Tattersall – The Typewriter Ribbon (43.44)
09. Meursault – What You Don’t Have (52.46)
10. eagleowl – No Conjunction (60.54)

No, not mine, that’s a secret for a little while longer.  Well, at least until I figure out which five they are at least, which might take another week or so.  No, this is yours.  For those of us sleeping off hangovers from Thursday’s drinking, and preparing to give ourselves whole new ones tonight, I think this might be the perfect diversion: simply list, in order, your five favourite albums of the year.

I am not sure how to score this, frankly.  I could either award five points for a number one, four for a two and so on, or just add up each mention as a single vote like I did with the songs of the year – what do you think? Perhaps when you add your answers you could give me a steer on how to score it – one mention, one vote or sliding scale.

As this week’s five songs, I have picked one from each of last year’s top five albums, but I feel obliged to point out that Timber Timbre was actually re-released this year on a UK label (the brilliant Full Time Hobby), so is very much eligible for this year’s vote.  And if I were to nudge you in any one direction that would probably be it.  It’s a fucking incredible album, and would be very highly placed in my own list this year had I not already included it last year.

Timber Timbre – Magic Arrow (from Timber Timbre)

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Navigator – Danger Dragon (from Bad Children)

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Withered Hand – Providence (from Good News)

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Samantha Crain – Get the Fever Out (from Songs in the Night)

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Trembling Bells – When I Was Young (from Carbeth)

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In the new year Song, by Toad will be putting on more live shows.  In many ways this is in reaction to our friends Bart and Euan seeming to drop out of regular promotion, and the closure of far too many good venues in Edinburgh over the latter half of 2010.

So, after Euan spoke so consistently well of Colvin at the Wee Red Bar, I have had a word, and we have booked Saturday nights in January and February for Toad nights.  I think I am going to call them the Ides of Toad, simply because I am looking to pick a Saturday as close to the middle of the month as possible. The plan is to have a gig once a month at the Wee Red, except for June and December, when we will try and get the Caves and do something a bit shinier.

Also, we are doing a New Year’s House Gig once again this year, primarily because neither Mrs. Toad nor I can be even remotely arsed schlepping up to Princes Street in the pissing rain to watch some fucking fireworks surrounded by half of fucking Scotland.  Instead we will be in our house, and might traipse up to Inverleith Park to watch the fireworks for free, but only if the weather is good.  And there will be songs – many excellent, excellent songs.

So, by way of a preview of what we have coming up in the immediate future, here are the imminent Song, by Toad Live Stuff Listings:

Friday, 31st December 2010: Neil Pennycook, Jamie Scott & Jonnie Common at the Song, by Toad New Year’s House Gig.

Jamie, Jonnie and Neil are all working on a collaborative album at the moment, although I don’t know how much of this will be ready for a first viewing on New Year’s Eve.  In any case, these are three of the most creative musicians in Scotland, as far as I am concerned, and I am immensely looking forward to this one.  It will, as has become tradition for Toad House Gigs, be broadcast live on the web too.

Jonnie Common – Photosynth

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Saturday, 22nd January 2011: The Scottish Englightenment, Johnny Reb & Morris Major at the Wee Red Bar.

I haven’t exactly performed many scientific tests and so on, but I think The Scottish Enlightenment are probably my favourite Scottish band to emerge this year.  I know they’re a lot more than a year old, but it seems like 2010 was the year they got their shit in gear and suddenly produced a shedload of material to make everyone really sit up and take notice.  Johnny Reb have a pile of really promising songs, and will hopefully be one of the bands to really rekindle my love of basic guitar indie, and Morris Major are a new Edinburgh band who seem to have an awful lot of potential as well.  It’s a very guitary lineup, this on, but fuck it, it’s a bloody good lineup as well.

The Scottish Enlightenment – Little Sleep

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Saturday 19th February 2011: Rob St. John, Thirty Pounds of Bone +1 TBC at the Wee Red Bar.

Rob is currently working on his debut full-length, which is something I am hugely looking forward to.  30 Pounds of Bone released one of my favourite albums of 2010.  I could basically add a dancing monkey to this bill and it would still be fucking awesome. Actually…

Thirty Pounds of Bone – Crack Shandy in the Harbour

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The results of the only real award that matters this Winter season (apart from the oracular annunciations of my own opinion, of course) can now finally be announced!  AWESOME! I hear you cry in unison.  Maybe.

Last year we had these votes as well, but I rather neglectfully failed to actually add up the final scores.  In all honesty, it’s the making of the lists which is often the best bit, so picking a winner at the very end is probably not entirely necessary for fun to take place, but given you all did me the honour of voting it seems a little rude not to fulfil my side of the bargain.

So yes, my enormous and profoundly complex algorithm (also known as a tally chart) has finally processed all the entries, and we can announce the winner of the Song, by Toad Readers’ Top Five Songs of the Year.  On Friday we will vote for our top five albums, so you might want to start thinking about that one in advance.

Anyone who actually followed the votes will know two things about this particular vote: firstly, that the winner was completely obvious from the very start; and secondly, that there are dozens and dozens of songs with no more than a single vote each, which is kind of inevitable in this kind of thing, but at least suggests that for all Song, by Toad probably represents something of a musical monoculture, there is at least a fair bit of diversity within that narrow vista.  So congratulations to the likes of CTel for coming on here and posting five entirely different songs from a notably different genre to the norm around these parts, and balls to the indie kids who don’t like it!

So, in reverse order, we had many songs tied for sixth place.  They’re not really part of a top five, of course, but I thought you would be interested to see them:
Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Arcade Fire – We Used to Wait
Meursault – One Day This’ll All Be Fields
Meursault – Weather
The National – England
The Scottish Enlightenment – Little Sleep
The Walkmen – Angela Surf City

Getting into the top five, we ended up with a three-way tie for third place (in alphabetical order):

=3. Broken Records – You Know You’re Not Dead (Buy here)

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=3. Foals – Spanish Sahara (Buy here)

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=3. Meursault – What You Don’t Have (Buy here)

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There was a really close-run race for second throughout the voting, with Meursault, Foals and Broken Records all in there at various times, but in the end a little burst of enthusiasm carried the following tranche of epic gorgeousness over the line ahead of the others:

2. eagleowl – No Conjunction (Buy here)

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Which leaves the winner, obvious from the very start of the voting, and a song which, from the moment it was first released, generated so much excitement for the album from which it comes that High Violet was almost guaranteed to do well weeks before anyone heard more than a single song.  Bloodbuzz Ohio may not even be my personal favourite from that record (that would be England) but it does embody the rich, luxuriant sombreness of the album beautifully.

1. The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio (Buy here)

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And so there we go, your favourite five songs from 2010, a year which I thought was brilliant for new albums, far better than the extremely disappointing 2009.  A few things stood out to me from the voting, which are sort of worth mentioning, just by way of follow up.

1. No Sparrow & the Workshop?  Come on, people. I know the Sparrows have been quiet for a while, working on their new album, but I reckon they deserved a little more love than they ended up getting in this particular vote.

2. Ha ha ha, no Joanna fucking Newsom or Laura Marling. Well done.  They’re fucking shit.  I am proud of you.

3. Meursault and The National got a lot of votes. The National scored marginally more total votes than Meursault, but they were mostly for Bloodbuzz Ohio.  Meursault had about five or six songs, all of which could easily have been nudged into the top five by a couple of stray votes here or there.  In the end, I think it’s fair to say (with some pride) that the consistent excellence of their album, and their general schizophrenia as a band, cannibalised their own vote.  No matter though, because these two bands both scored almost double as many total votes as anyone else on the whole list, which is accolade enough in itself.

4. How do I know nothing at all about Foals? I assume that you all read this site because you more or less agree with my taste in music.  Otherwise, I can’t entirely see the point.  So how come, given we all listen to broadly the same kind of music, do you all love Foals so much while I have never once made the time to sit down and listen to their stuff.  Shame on me.  Homework for Christmas!

5. We got a lot of votes. This fact gives the results a sheen of respectability which I could never hope to generate on my own. Thank you.