Almost a year and a half ago now my friend Craig came round to record a podcast about early blues which we, somewhat unimaginatively, called the Craigcast.
A great deal of that conversation centred around Fat Possum Records (Wikipedia), and how Matthew Johnson struggled for years to keep it trundling along, despite being near bankruptcy for most of the time. It wasn’t until soul legend Solomon Burke decided to release his comeback record with them that they finally got out of the financial woods with some finality.
Craig’s interest in the label is based around an obsession with old blues music, but from a modern indie kid’s perspective Fat Possum are still one of the best record labels in the world – The Walkmen, AA Bondy, Andrew Bird, Sonny and the Sunsets, Band of Horses, The Black Keys, Dinosaur Jr., The Felice Brothers, Wavves and Yuck all release with them. So this is absolutely all about Fat Possum and their bands. Sort of a tribute, and sort of a public demonstration of me being absolutely green with envy.
01. R.L. Burnside – Snake Drive (00.15)
02. Dinosaur Jr. – Almost Ready (14.11)
03. Junior Kimbrough – Meet Me in the City (21.34)
04. Andrew Bird – Plasticities (Live) (28.46)
05. Johnny Farmer – Ocean Blues (38.37)
06. Solomon Burke – Fast Train (46.26)
07. Sonny & the Sunsets & Death Cream (59.02)
08. The Walkmen – Donde Esta la Playa (61.45)
09. Cedell Davies – Keep on Snatchin’ it Back (68.03)
10. T-Model Ford – Take a Ride With Me (76.47)
The thing I hate the most about Satnavs is that although they do find wherever it is you’re going, but you tend to have absolutely no idea how you got there. So you are no less lost, in a sense, you just happen to be in the right place.
Well, I am getting a bit like that with my calendar. I write so much in my calendar that I tend to assume I put everything in it, which I don’t. The only problem with this is that I make no effort to memorise appointments or events anymore, assuming them to be in my calendar.
Previously, I used to just remember stuff. That wasn’t entirely failsafe, but I was generally pretty good at keeping things in my head. Now, once I write things down (or even when I don’t, but assume I have) they just vanish from my head altogether, leaving me entirely at the mercy of the computer.
And frankly, it’s unsettling. When I do forget something now I feel a bit like you do in those dreams where you’re entirely naked in a public place, or when you’re suddenly on stage, expected to give a grand performance on a musical instrument you never learned to play. Other people get those dreams, right? It’s not just me.
Umm, so it’s time for our traditional Friday de-lurking amnesty, time for you shirkers to step out of the shadows, and talk utter pish on the internet. Friday, after all, is not really for doing work, is it.
1. Are you early, late or completely punctual for appointments?
2. What is your most embarrassing memory failure?
3. What piece of technology would be like a helpless child without (‘your phone’ will be accepted, but please bear in mind it’s a pretty poor answer – not that this is supposed to be all that challenging of course, but a better answer will win you so much more respect, and let’s face it, that’s what it’s all about, eh)?
4. Which dream is the most disconcerting – the falling one, the public nudity one, the crumbling teeth one, or the on stage with no idea what to do one? Or even a different one, if you like.
5. What was the last question again?
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Ruth and I are back on Fresh Air in a couple of hours, so it is naturally time for much rejoicing on the airwaves of the interwebs. In fact, I am sure the internet could barely be more excited about the prospect than it clearly is already. Can’t you see it trembling with anticipation?
While we’re indulging in hyperbole, incidentally, last week the unbelievable happened: Ruth was genuinely impressed with one of my music choices. I think it was Do It Every Time by Ringo Deathstarr, but the shock when she raised her eyebrows and said ‘this is really good’ rather than just rolling her eyes and letting out a weary sigh almost knocked me clean out of my chair.
As per usual, if you have any trouble with the audio stuttering (a problem which seems to be solved now) just pause and un-pause the player, or find us in the ‘College Radio’ section on iTunes.
The playlist will appear below, as we play it, so feel free to stop by and heckle.
1. TuneYards – Bizness
2. Joni Mitchell – Little Green
3. The Honey Pies – Get it Right
4. Dr. Dog – Breeze
5. The Leg – Twitching Stick
6. Zed Penguin – This Town
7. Dusty Springfield – I Thing it’s Gonna Rain
8. Leonard Cohen – Hey, That’s No way to Say Goodbye
9. Seefeel – Dead Guitars
10. David Byrne & Dirty Projectors – Knotty Pine
11. Wolf Eyes – Track 1
12. Active Child – Body Heat (So Far Away)
13. Virgin of the Birds – Love Among the Cannibals
I first got to know about Ringo Deathstarr when they were releasing on the now sadly defunct Spoilt Victorian Child Records a few years ago.
They went so quiet in the interim (to me at least, although that seems to have more to do with my lack of awareness than any actual inactivity on their part) that they pretty much dropped off my radar altogether until Imagine Hearts, the lead single from this album, started bouncing around the internet a few months ago.
The shoegaze cycle seems to move much quicker than the broader, twenty year recycling of a previous era’s pop music, and I can think of a couple of times, even since I’ve been writing Song, by Toad, where there seemed to be a real burst of quality new bands heavily indebted to shoegaze. Ringo Deathstarr were releasing singles on SVC the first time, and this time around they have completed their debut album Colour Trip.
The underlying foundations on which this music is built do owe a great deal to Shoegaze, but also to dream-pop and a particular kid of melodic, late eighties female fronted indie, as embodied by The Shop Assistants and revived, in Edinburgh at least, by Kid Canaveral. Over the top of this is laid a smothering blanket of fuzz, shaken up from time to time by odd rhythm changes and bursts of guitar fury.
Live it may be pretty ferocious, but it’s a lot less of an assault on record, and for all it’s loud and fuzzy and abrasive, overall I would still say that this was a pretty melodic, accessible album. A couple more songs as euphoric as Imagine Hearts and Do It Every Time and I’d be calling it a classic, actually, but I am going to tentatively suggest that the whole album doesn’t quite sustain this level – that there’s a bit of the dreaded lull two-thirds of the way through.
I say tentatively because it feels a bit unkind to be nitpicking about an album I am really enjoying, but there you go. I wish there was some way the recording could borrow just a little bit of the fury of the live set, but that’s a pretty big ask for certain types of band, I admit. The first half is awesome, and the second merely pretty damn good.
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The internet has put a lot of pressure on news organisations in many different ways, but the most obvious one is the sudden demand that absolutely anything and everything be available for free. This undermines not only the comfortable business model of being able to swap money for content, but also the basic assumption that there is any need for a printed edition of anything in the first place.
Add to that the fact that there are now infinitely more sources of information out there, and you have another problem. Without a relative monopoly on the dissemination of authoritative information, the established news media are finding that rather than be challenged by newspapers who might well be telling them what they don’t want to hear (‘if you think Barack Obama is a Socialist, then you have absolutely no idea what Socialism is, you fucking ignoramus’, for example) they would rather just find one of the dozens of info-tainment channels out there, from Fox News to any one of a bazillion special interest pseudo-news sites and blogs. These sites mix some truth with some fiction with some dogma with a shitload of spin, but they are often there simply to reassure people that their own existing worldview is essentially correct.
So what do you have? A traditional news media which is in increasing amounts of trouble, struggling to generate income and in many cases struggling to attract an audience. Amongst a wide variety of effects this struggle has had is the squeeze on journalists themselves. As a journalist, just getting paid is becoming an increasingly distant fantasy, and those who are being paid are being asked to do increasing amounts of work in decreasing amounts of time. The result: shit news.
I find it depressing just how many times I send out a press release for Song, by Toad Records, only to find this that or the other blog or internet magazine just copy it, paste it, and slap it up on the internet with little evidence that they’ve actually listened to the music in question, never mind enjoyed it. It’s uncomfortable, because I’m grateful for any coverage we can get, but reading that kind of thing makes me feel just a little bit grubby.
Our business, of course, is just music, and rather trivial. But in medicine these stories are everywhere, from the supposed electro-smog stories planted a couple of years ago by someone essentially wanting to sell you a tinfoil hat, to more sinister attempts by large pharmaceutical companies to conjure markets out of nothing for anything, from homeopathic fairy tales to drugs for imaginary psychological conditions which may be no exceptional more than feeling a bit apprehensive about going back to work on a Monday.
There are two massive issues with this sort of stuff, as far as the mainstream established media are concerned: the audience appeal of simply trotting out this nonsense, and the fact that their journalists and fact checkers often simply do not have the time to combat the stream of bollocks from a PR army who now significantly outnumber them. Over the last few years I have read about these battles in the world of medicine on any number of sites, from the Quackometer to Bad Science to David Colquhoun’s excellent blog.
The video at the top of the page is well worth watching, and was generated by the Media Standards Trust charity to launch their new site, called Churnalism, which is intended to start tackling the problem of news being infiltrated by regurgitated press releases. There is a report in the Guardian here (and I have spent at least a little time checking that it isn’t a hoax itself, and superficially it appears legit!).
Initially, it appeared that the greatest threat the internet posed to the quality of news to which we have access was the proliferation of unaccountable amateur sites which could present more or less anything they wanted as fact. Now it appears that there is a secondary, self-reinforcing threat: the undermining of mainstream news media has put these organisations under so much pressure that they are actively sabotaging themselves by lowering their own standards.
Now, it’s possible that they have no choice, and that the pressure on their finances simply forces journalists into doing too much work in too little time, making this sort of lapse inevitable. This is the side of the argument on which I myself would err. Some journos may be a little deluded as to the honour and integrity of their profession, but I don’t particularly doubt their collective idealism.
But the general public’s nose for bullshit seems never to have been more necessary, and healthy scepticism never more important. And unless the major news organisations are prepared to rigorously maintain the standards to justify their lofty positions of both trust and self-regard, they could end up hastening their own downfall.
Wow, when this record is good it really is very good indeed. In fact, when it’s good it’s fucking awesome. It is not, however, consistently excellent all the way through, which is a shame, but doesn’t stop this being a cracking album.
When a band reforms after almost twenty years, as these guys have done, it almost always leads to really boring, middle of the road releases which sound suspiciously like they have been written and recorded by people whose middle-aged jobs have afforded them the leisure and the means to relive some pale imitation of their youth, when they used to feel much cooler.
In this case the band haven’t quite reformed as such, at least not in the sense of being a perfect replication of their former selves. Half the band – Sarah Peacock and Mark Clifford according to Wikipedia – have reassembled themselves into something new, with the aid of DJ Shigeru Ishihara and former Boredoms drummer Iida Kazuhisa.
What surprises me is how much I have taken to this album, considering how far away it is from my usual listening habits. That may of course be why it has taken me this long to review it, as the most techno-tinged bits (well the rest of the internet calls it techno anyway, but I honestly wouldn’t know, myself) are where the album starts to get away from me a little bit. It’s not generally my kind of music, so when they drift away from the ‘ambient dreampop’ (to pinch a phrase from Drowned in Sound) and into more beaty, less glitchy territory, then I start to get a little twitchy.
When the dreamier moments are overlaid with experimental electronic glitchery and crunchy, harsh noise elements then I really do get excited however. Peacock’s voice helps soften it, too. I can find purely instrumental music a little opaque at times, but in this case they use the vocals as an instrument, and although it’s impossible to discern any semblance of actual lyrics it seems nevertheless to provide that missing element which I so often find in instrumental stuff.
It may not be a soothing or an ‘easy’ release, this (and by easy I don’t mean that it is hard to get into, just that it isn’t always comfortable to listen to), and I may still be struggling with some of the more straightforward, dancey moments, but there are large parts of this album which I really love. As to whether the other parts are a bit dull, just too far off my radar to assimilate or only just on their way to being understood properly we shall see over the course of the next months.
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This is one of those reviews where I think I just have to bury my natural cynicism, smile at the hipster cliches and just enjoy the music.
For starters, yes that is a limited edition reel-to-reel single you see above. It is of Heartbreaking Woman and can be purchased… well I’m not sure really, but there is a contact link on Jmzs Smith’s website, so if you are one of the two or three people reading this who is impossibly indie enough to actually have a reel-to-reel player then knock yourself out.
Then, when you note that Jmzs is actually not a real name, and your intial Google searches find articles like this one, it’s hard not to fear that you are dealing with some sort of terrifying Godzilla of hipsters. Someone so impossibly hip that his mere glance can turn the coolest of vintage haberdashery into a drab Marks & Spencer carnival of shame in an instant.
And then, the music is so idiosyncratically engineered – in the sense that it looks like it hasn’t been engineered at all – that it too smack of someone being deliberately obtuse. The actual assembly of the songs is rather precise too, to it’s not just careless, nor does it have than sort of lo-fi buzz which so many deliberately DIY tend to embrace, making the whole project a little harder to pin down.
So yes, lots of chat, and no mention of the actual music yet. I know, I know, but it’s that kind of project: it has a slightly strange feeling to it, which is almost as prominent as the music itself. And the music sort of aids that impression, in an odd way. It is very, very minimal. The sound is so full of open space, in fact, that you notice every single noise.
It may or may not be deliberate, but the relatively un-engineered nature of the music means it’s kind of difficult to listen to as part of a larger playlist or digital music collection, because it’s just too quiet compared to the over-mastered fare which generally blares at us in this day and age, all subtlety battered out of it in the desperate clamour to be the loudest song on the radio.
This, on the other hand, is sung with such a lack of insistence and with so much silence in the arrangements that every single sound, be it the intermittent, half-hearted shivers of organ, the barely perceptible shuffle of drums, or whatever else might be being used as percussion, or even the single notes of guitar – there is just so little of it that it all seems incredibly important.
Other than that it’s kind of hard to tell what, despite its efforts to push me away with the cartoon indieness which leads someone to release reel-to-reel tape, I find so fascinating about this record. There’s definitely something though, because I am definitely enjoying it. And with the added fascination generated by the general bafflement at the entire project, I’d have to say that ‘really enjoying it’ doesn’t really come close to properly describing it.
This is a weird release, but one which I am finding both intriguing and compelling, and for all my slight sense of bewliderment with the whole business, it’s one I’d recommend you check out, albeit somewhat cautiously.
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Oh my aching face. This week there will be a total embargo on Fun of any sort, I think, to make up for the last seven days of fairly epic drinking. Fortunately, it isn’t an overwhelmingly busy week, so I think I should be able to spend most of it at home with a cup of tea, nursing my whimpering liver.
The Ides of Toad night was absolutely amazing on Saturday. Even with Loch Lomond sneakily squeezed onto the bill, we managed to get all four bands on and off the stage to play roughly half hour sets and finished with about seventy seconds to go – so I owe Alex Fenton and everyone who played a huge thank you for their excellence.
The details of Ides of Toadses still to come are above – with next Friday at Henry’s being the soonest. We have The Leg, Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six and Zed Penguin, tickets can be bought here or at Avalanche in the Grassmarket, and once again we will have to be off the stage by about half ten, so the bands will start pretty punctually and you would be advised to turn up early if you can.
So, do you feel a little bit dirty after all that self-promotion? Yes, me too, so sorry about that but these things have to be done. Anyhow, two things which might stand in the way of my anti-fun policy this week are as follows:
People are starting to roll their eyes quite considerably at the term lo-fi, which in some senses I can kind of understand, but I like my loud music to have growl and grumble, not just lots of guitar-bashing and shouting. This looks like a really good chance to get your your ears cleaned out – all three bands are capable of making a fine old racket. Rubber by Yuck
Kid Canaveral are Scotland’s premier indie-pop band, and if you fail to have fun at one of their gigs it is probably because you are clinically incapable of having fun. Getting to Austin for SXSW is an expensive business though, so please come along and support them.
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We actually recorded this Toad Session in the Queen Charlotte Rooms in Leith before the Song, by ToadChristmasParty back in December. Partly this was because it seemed like a fun thing to do, and partly because swapping our traditional and rather overpowering turquoise backdrop for their Christmas lights and tinsel.
Also, we had six different bands playing the Queen Charlotte Rooms that night, as sort of a Song, by Toad Records Christmas celebration, and as Rob had only just agreed to release his debut album on Song, by Toad Records (later this year – probably in the Autumn sometime) it seemed fitting that he headline one of the rooms on the night itself.
In terms of manpower we were woefully, woefully understaffed for this session. The only person who could help at all was Wee Matthew, and even he couldn’t make it for the start, so I pressed my parents into service. Well come on, they’ve got be more use than just glue, eh? So my mum took some pictures and did some filming, I set up the recording and the main camera, and then she passed the video camera on to Matthew when he arrived and the stills camera on to me.
And miraculously, it wasn’t a total disaster. In fact, the actual recordings, whilst more than a little noisy, in part due to the hum of the fridges behind the bar, are some of my favourite-sounding Toad Session recordings. As usual, we have all the individual song videos embedded below, or on our Vimeo or YouTube pages, and the photos can be found on Flickr. The main interview podcast can be streamed or downloaded immediately below, as can the individual session tracks, with the playlist for the podcast at the bottom of the page. As per usual feel absolutely free to share and pass around any of this stuff – that’s what it’s for.
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01. Rob St. John – Whites of Our Eyes (Toad Session) (07.33)
02. Smog & the Dirty Three – Cold Discovery (Peel Session) (15.20)
03. James Yorkston & the Athletes – Hermitage (21.33)
04. Rob St. John – Your Phantom Limb (Toad Session) (29.35)
05. Grouper – We’ve All Time to Sleep (36.07)
06. Ben Frost – Hibakusja (39.17)
07. Rob St. John – An Empty House (Toad Session) (51.19)
08. Earth – Hung From the Moon (57.29)
09. Micah P. Hinson – Patience (65.13)
10. Rob St. John – Muted Flourish (Toad Session) (72.06)
Er sorry everyone, I wrote out my post for Friday, got totally carried away with myself, and forgot to add a Friday Five, so here it is.
The post I wrote was all about Channel 4′s recent Sounds From the Cities: Edinburgh show, so I reckon the five songs should maybe be ones I would personally have chosen to illustrate the musical history of the city (and Scotland in general) had I been the one making the choices (and yes, I promise, no Song, by Toad Records bands).
In terms of the five silly questions, well have a stab at these:
1. Name your number one all time favourite Scottish band.
2. Which is the worst band people seem to strongly associate with wherever it is you come from?
3. Where will Sounds From the Cities never go, which might make for some funny viewing?
4. Which band closely associated with where you’re from do you love the most?
5. Name a massively famous, massively influential band you’ve never really sat down and listened to at all.
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Idlewild – When the Ship Comes In (alright, I shouldn’t have chosen this song, but I don’t actually know that much about Idlewild, but still think they and Roddy Woomble in particular deserved some sort of mention.)
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Almost a year and a half ago now my friend Craig came round to record a podcast about early blues which we, somewhat unimaginatively, called the Craigcast.
