It’s relatively quiet in Edinburgh this week, but next week is going to be a bit mental, so perhaps taking it a bit easy for a few days is advisable, eh.  Oh well, perhaps not then.

First up is the Lets Get Lyrical Festival.  A bit more cerebral than your average stale beer-scented alternative music show, and hopefully as far as possible from the Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant carnival of horror you see illustrated on the right.

Their full lineup of events can be found here, although sadly the King Creosote/Ziggy Campbell one at the Caves to tomorrow is apparently sold out.  And then I am away down South for the rest of the week.  Arse.

On the plus side, though, I am away down South to do a wee interview with BBC Introducing on Wednesday and then hang out with some of my long-neglected London pals for the next few days, so it should be an extremely good week for me, I reckon.

Thursday 3rd February: Born to Be Wide Music Photographers Night at Electric Circus.

This is almost sold out, apparently, so if you want to go I would recommend getting your tickets in advance.  Sitting through seminars may not seem like the best way to go about doing something which most people do as a creative outlet, but I promise you that these things can be extremely useful either the more you go to, or the more specific the

Friday 4th February: Esben & the Witch, Trophy Wife & Wintergreens at Sneaky Pete’s.

Presumably because of the name I think I dismissed Esben and the Witch as just another London (slightly)alternative folk band, but actually they are a bit more of a somewhat shoegazey guitar band.  I’m not massively familiar with the album yet, but what I have heard sounds really quite promising. The Wintergreens are an Edinburgh band who are a little less loud, but who also make rather promising sounding atmospheric guitar songs – they’ve been around for a while actually, and I have still not managed to see them play live.  Shame on me, I think it’s safe to say.

Esben & the Witch – Marching Song

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Friday 4th February: The Go Team at the Liquid Room.

This should be really quite fun.  I’ve always been a passive fan of the Go Team for ages – never wildly excited, but nevertheless happy to enjoy their stuff as and when it has crossed my path.  They have a new album out shortly too – in a week, I think – which I will review as and when I have had a chance to listen to it, which isn’t quite yet.  Still, there’s a four hour train ride to London to deal with.

The Go Team – Buy Nothing Day

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After enjoying the Vinylcast I recorded a couple of weeks ago, I’m afraid I wasn’t able to resist the temptation to come bacl to my record collection for this week’s podcast as well.  In fact, I think I can safely say that this is now something which is going to become a regular feature of Song, by Toad podcasts because… er, well just because it’s fun I suppose.

This week I went to the Shelter charity shop on our street and bought about half a dozen records: some Bessie Smith, Shirley Bassey, Ella Fitzgerald, Kid Thomas and his Algiers Stompers, and a couple of old Dylan records.

If I end up ever developing a taste for jazz I am pretty sure I will be able to trace it directly to a sense of misplaced nostalgia, and the charity shops of Scotland.  I am a long way from being a jazz fan, but there’s something so fitting about the crackle of vinyl on an old jazz record.  I never used to listen to this stuff as a kid, but for some reason I get a nostalgic feeling from listening to it now.

Direct download: Toadcast #159 – The Vinylcast 2

01. The Meteors – Wrecking Crew (00.22)
02. Kurt Vile – I Wanted Everything (07.16)
03. The Ad Libs – He Ain’t No Angel (15.01)
04. Tom Waits & Crystal Gale – Little Boy Blue (17.39)
05. The Velvet Underground – Stephanie Says (24.07)
06. U2 – Twilight (29.00)
07. Girls Names – Graveyard (33.19)
08. Rene – Destination: Mars (40.00)
09. Ambitious Tugboat – Age Rings (43.07)
10. Manners – My Will (48.27)
11. Otis Redding – Pain in My Heart (56.36)

Deerhoof – Deerhoof vs Evil

I think it is now time for me to finally accept that I am just not that into Deerhoof.  When I first started to really become a part of the wider blogosphere (as opposed to just a random weirdo writing for his own satisfaction in an abandoned corner of the internet) Friend Opportunity was just being released, and there was a fair bit of buzz around this band.

I loved half of friend opportunity, but I haven’t really liked anything since, for some reason. Maybe it lacked the joyous wildness of Friend Opportunity, and maybe I just only have a limited capacity to enjoy this kind of frantic, unusual music.

Deerhoof – The Merry Barracks

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Destroyer – Kaputt

Talking of when I was just getting involved in the wider blogosphere, Destroyer, and in particular the gorgeous song European Oils, were massive around that time.

Since then Destroyer have released the awesome, quarter of an hour long Bay of Pigs, and I was really expecting something challenging and interesting when this release was announced.  What we got instead, unfortunately, is a fairly drab, soft-pop affair which has a certain louche charm, but not anything like enough bite or personality to really engage me, unfortunately.

Destroyer – Blue Eyes

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Iron & Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean

From one awesome segue into another: while we’re on the subject of soft pop, what the fuck has happened to Iron & Wine?  I really don’t get it, this album is also a rather mid-paced, comfortable pop record with a touch of cod-soul about some of the backing vocals.

Progression is one thing, but if the flipside to the current fashion for lo-fi scuzzy guitar noise is the kind of slick, smarmy stuff that this and the Destroyer record are made of then please count me out.  I really thought this album might be the one where I really get into Iron & Wine, having never really sat down and given them proper time before, but this is just horrible.

Iron & Wine – Tree By the River

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Edinburgh does cold, clear, sunny days better than anywhere I remember being. It really is just a stunning day today – the kind which makes me wonder about bunking off this afternoon, getting a coffee and going for a stroll up the Water of Leith.  Anyone?

Did anyone order the Whitehaus Family Record I reviewed a while back?  I did, and it just arrrived, including a double vinyl album, a 7″, two tapes and about a dozen CD-Rs.  Bar-gain!  That’s my weekend’s aural pleasure taken care of, then.

This weekend we shall be doing… not very much actually.  If it keeps up being this sunny and nice then I reckon we might venture out into the garden and finish the rather slapdash job of cutting everything back ready for Spring, which we made a bit of a half-arsed job of in November.  I think the best part of having a garden is the really early stuff – watching the first shoots emerge after all the dark and the cold.  It’s actually, dare I say it without seeming like a right stuffy old fucker, kind of exciting.  We threw in a heap of new bulbs in the Autumn and I am really looking forward to seeing which ones come up.

Oh, and yes, I do own a pair of slippers, and you can stop making that face and fuck off.

So, here’s the usual opportunity to talk pish and waste time on the internet on a Friday afternoon.  And well done to Andy Murray, by the way.  Not that I really care about tennis, but for some reason it seems nice when he wins.  It cheers the Scots up anyway.

1. Level of interest in professional tennis, as a percentage.
2. Most old-fogey thing you really enjoy.
3. Suggestion for wasting a sunny afternoon.
4. Suggest an old record from your childhood for sunny Sunday afternoon listening.
5. What do you have with your cuppa?

These five songs are from the year I spent in a swanky flat with the Wrong Girlfriend just after I moved to London in about 2001 or so.

Interpol – PDA

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Chris Coco w. Nick Cave – Sunday Morning

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Bob Mould – Semper Fi

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Sondre Lerche – Dead Passengers

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Brendan Benson – Folk Singer

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I always get twitchy talking about kinds of music which I don’t really know well enough to say anything about with real confidence, well this is another of those occasions.

This kind of crunchy, math-y, thumping drums over harsh electronica stuff is generally just slightly out of my reach for some reason.  I tend to want to like it, and there are often large elements of it I do like, but in terms of actually enjoying whole songs and whole EPs or albums, it just never quite happens.

People who know more about this genre than I can tell you if Eels on Heels are producing a particularly mellifluous, mainstream version of this kind of music, but I really don’t think they are.  In fact a lot of this seems harsh as hell to me, but for some reason I fucking love it.

Opening track G really does fucking batter you when it really gets going, which is only sporadically, lending the furious passages all the more impact.  Following track, N, see video below, seems to concentrate on pace, rather than alternating waves of force and lull, and the final song Y (the EP is called letters – buy it from their MySpace page) trills electronics along with flattened vocals, bursting occasionally into a ferocious battering of drums and guitar.

This isn’t exactly melodic, and like much of this music, it bears no real structural resemblance to most music I am into or would understand as pop, but for some reason I find it really exciting, and love this whole EP.  People have been doing this kind of thing in my back yard for the last few years, and it’s a little ridiculous that it has taken a group from Italy for me to really get it, but there you go.  I never said this stuff makes sense.

Eels on Heels – G

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[Warning: long and not all that coherent football-related ramble ahead.  Read at your peril!]

You are probably already more than a little bit bored with all the hoo-ha there has been in the media, prompted by an increasing slew of clips of Sky Sports football presenters Andy Gray and Richard Keys making sexist remarks.

I wouldn’t normally even bother with this kind of thing, particularly on a music blog, and I don’t really have a conclusion to aim for either, so this might end up as a bit of an aimless ramble, but as a (nearly ex-)footballer this is a topic which has been in the back of my mind for years, although admittedly not from a sexist point of view.

Recently the Guardian wrote about what it describes as a ‘culture of sexism and bullying‘ within Sky broadcasting.  Isms in general, however, are absolutely and utterly endemic in football – most other sports too, I imagine, but I don’t have even the faintest shred of authority to comment on those.

I have played football since I was nine years old, when my dad and I tossed a coin to help me decide if I wanted to try out for our school’s Under-12 team.  The coin said no, but that made me realise I wanted to go along anyway, so I did.  Since then I have played amateur league football at various levels in Austria, Holland, England and Scotland, and I have seen entrenched prejudice everywhere I have been. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the very best things about the digital revolution is that the actual format of music has been very much freed by the perfunctory termination of the dominance of the CD.

I’ve long believed that one of the biggest reasons behind the rise of vinyl has been the fact that simply accumulating music no longer requires a physical medium for it to be stored upon, so if you are going to collect physical objects you are doing so for the specific pleasure of accumulating physical objects – for the enjoyment of the object itself.

This, generally, seems to have lead people to split into two camps: the accumulators of data for whom the physical object that was no more than a hindrance, and the physical collector.  The physical collector seems to have taken a look at themselves and decided that, no thank you, if I am going to bother gathering all this tat, then a CD in a shitey jewel case just isn’t enough, thank you.

I find myself thinking along similar lines when people decry the ‘death of the album’ – that it should be seen as a liberating force in music, not one to be mourned.  Generally, I think it’s a pile of shit, frankly.  I know not one music fan who would ever say anything so ridiculous as ‘that’s the concept of the album finished then, good riddance’, and every band we work with at Song, by Toad Records wants to work towards an album almost as soon as we suggest working together, so the format is hardly being abandoned.

Quite simply, many major label albums were two or three pop hits, fluffed out with forty minutes of filler, which deserve not to be bought anymore, and a great many customers were forced into buying albums they might not otherwise have bought because they were forced to by the narrow range of available formats. So to a degree, the rise of digital music has put enormous pressure on the concept of ‘filler’, because you simply can’t force people to buy it these days.  This, I must stress, is a good thing.

Despite my indignation at talk of the album as a format being over, I have to confess I always loved mini-albums and EPs.  They tend to be more focussed and more complete than a lot of albums, and a lot less likely to suffer from attention span failure two-thirds of the way through.  With the digital revolution I think one of the great benefits is that there really is no need to stick to the old formats, you can simply release as many songs as you think are finished and which go together, and I am surprised by how few bands have effectively embraced this fact so far.

So, I finally find myself getting to the point: Thomas Truax has a new project called Twelve Months/Twelve Tracks, which I think looks really promising.  The concept is pretty self-explanatory, and there have been a few similar ones recently where people have attempted to write and record songs in the space of a day, and they haven’t tended to be all that successful, in my view.

From what I have seen of such projects, they tend to be a little bit incoherent and the songs themselves inevitably end up suffering from being a bit slapped together, and perhaps not really all that selectively pruned. I am hoping that with a full month to work on each song, the quality control on this will be far superior, hopefully at last putting one of these projects, which I like in principle, properly on the musical map.

Truax is an innovator in the first place, as a glance around his website will show you, and he is intending to work the span of time into the songwriting, allowing himself to be influenced by the many facets of the changing seasons as the project progresses.  Below is his January song, and I really like it; I hope the rest are as good.

January Egg Race Dream by Thomas Truax

Well it’s rare indeed these days that something lands in my inbox and I wet my knickers with excitement and post it pretty much immediately. But um… yes, it’s nice to feel that ‘oooh my goodness, what is this?’ feeling again.

It’s not often I copy and paste a press release – I hope you know this by now – but once you’ve read this one you’ll understand why:

“Helen Brown was born in Vancouver, Canada, but raised in an Athens, Georgia-based religious cult, and was blinded in one eye from a childhood baseball injury. As an adult, she dropped out of Evergreen and traveled the country for a while as a nomadic psychedelic folksinger, before forming her first band One Eyed Tramps.

For years, she lived alone in a mountaintop in southern Alaska, where she befriended a Cherokee Shaman (later revealed as a fake) who encouraged her to pursue a frustrating academic career. Rampant drug use, frequent fainting on stage, and occasional self-inflicted knife wounds on stage led to more interest in her stage antics than her music.

However, a few sides did emerge in the late ’90s (recording dates unknown), which feature a unique mix of country, girl group, R&B, and ghoulishness. Crude and amateurish at best, these recordings are appreciated for their sincerity and intensity of feeling.”

If you’re anything like me you’ll be trying to digest that barrage of unlikely information and figure out exactly how all that stuff (at once) can meaningfully influence your understanding of the music.  I honestly don’t think it can, really.  The story is just too odd to really parse effectively, although the lyrics to songs like Story of an Earth Girl do embrace a rather *cough* peculiar aesthetic which perhaps seems a little less odd when this background is taken into account.

Musically, what we have here is a varied, wonderfully lo-fi mish-mash of old fashioned girl-group, soul and R&B.  It’s the slightly warped edge that moves genres not normally within my (admittedly rather narrow) taste range to a position where this music clicked with me immediately.

This may, from the looks of the press release, have been recorded in the late nineties, but the lo-fi guitar in songs like Girls of My Dreams is not a million miles away from a lot of the lo-fi guitar production in an awful lot of music these days, so I guess the leap wasn’t an enormous one for me to make.  It’s not just that, though.  The indistinct vocals, vinyl crackle and uncertain, wobbly peaks in the vocal on the gorgeous Hit After Hit just grabbed me immediately.

The whole EP may not, admittedly, be quite as good as that song, but the aforementioned Girls of My Dreams, Story of an Earth Girl and I Walked All Night are just fucking great.  What a truly splendid find.

Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit

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Pre-order from Forest Family Records (Americans only – GRRR!)
Apparently this will be available on Rough Trade over here at some point.

[Update from the Toad-is-an-Arse department: Campfires and Battlefields has pointed out in a comment something I really should have found myself before posting this, but I was in a rush and, well, there you go.  Anyhow, apparently Earth Girl Helen Brown is part of a project called 100 Records, where Sonny Smith (of Sunny & the Sunsets) set himself the task of inventing a hundred new bands, complete with profile and songs, and commissioning artists to create individual cover art for each. What a ridiculous, awesome project!]

MOOOOR-ning! Having kicked off our own monthly series of gigs this weekend just, with an excellent gig at the Wee Red Bar, I feel very much ready to start properly going to gigs again, after an extremely quiet January.

It was an excellent night actually, so a massive thank you to everyone who came out, and thanks a lot to the bands as well, who all made an effort to bring their friends down, which as a new promoter is something I am extremely grateful for.

We’ve got something like five more gigs in the pipeline by now, including bands like Rob St. John, Ziggy Campbell, Thirty Pounds of Bone, Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six, Zed Penguin, Husband, Miaoux Miaoux, Jonnie Common’s Desk Job, and hopefully also The Leg, eagleowl and Orchestra Elastique, assuming we can make them offers they can’t refuse.

Friday 28th January 2011: Gummi Bako, eagleowl and The Oates Field play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms (tickets here).

If it weren’t for the fact that Homegame isn’t until May this year, I would have described this as the perfect warmup.  It’s been ages since Gummi Bako has brought his rock ‘n’ roll band (wonkytonk, in his own words, apparently) down from Fife, and for all I know a lot of people see them as an acquired taste, I can tell you they are awesome fun to watch.

eagleowl – Into the Fold (Toad Session)

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Sunday 30th January 2011: Broken Records & Freelance Whales at the Liquid Room (tickets here).

I haven’t seen Broken Records play live since the release of their phenomenal second album Let Me Come Home, so I am hugely looking forward to this.  The new material sounds a lot more like a guitar-based indie rock band than earlier stuff, but I can’t imagine their live impact has been anything other than enhanced by this change.

Freelance Whales – Generator – 2nd Floor

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Sunday 30th January 2011: Maps and Atlases, Gallops & Dupec vs Lady North at Sneaky Pete’s.

This looks like a night of hypnotic, crunchy, experimental electronica.  Not the wibbly, noodly stuff though, but proper, in your face racket.  It’s a kind of music which is doing quite well around here at the moment actually, but not one I feel I have properly given a chance and made an effort to get into yet.  Shame on me.

I think I have figured out why Fence Records hate the internet.  Or at least, I feel like I am starting to get some insight into what is an intensely troubled relationship.  The two of them just don’t get along at all, and the mutual antipathy has boiled over into outright hostility this afternoon, with the rush to buy Homegame tickets from the Fence website actually breaking the whole internet.

So while I wait for normal service to be resumed, and with it the opportunity to buy tickets for Homegame this year, I thought I might record a podcast.  Or at least, so I thought.  But it turned out the Facebook chat about the interminable (three hour) wait was too entertaining, and the paralysing fear of the site suddenly coming back online and me missing out on tickets was too much.

So I faffed about, went out and got pissed, and ended up recording this after our gig tonight, sorry.

Direct download: Toadcast #158 – The Refreshcast

01. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Love is Terminal (00.17)
02. Black Tambourine – Throw Aggi off the Bridge (07.34)
03. The Great Valley – Tall Smoke (11.53)
04. Hezekiah Jones – I Love My Family (Album Version) (20.47)
05. Lift to Experience – These are the Days (29.14)
06. Titus Andronicus – Fear & Loathing in Mahwah, NJ (33.09)
07. Byrds of Paradise – Touch Tunnel (42.54)
08. Eels on Heels – G (48.59)
09. Balkans – Edita V (52.40)
10. The Caulfield Sisters – I See Your Face (59.37)