Channel 4′s Sounds From the Cities: Edinburgh aired recently (and can be watched again here, for the next week) and it was a programme I was really in two minds about.  I hoped it would be really good, and feared it might be truly horrible.

A show about music in Edinburgh really could have been awesome, the kind of drive and energy it takes to make things happen here would have made for some very interesting stories, I think.  Then when bits of Twitter information and so on started to seep through and I heard talk about Jim Gellatly talking to KT Tunstall and Jon Fratelli at the Electric Circus my first thought was to wonder what on Earth any of that could possibly have to do with Edinburgh.

Then I saw the Cardiff episode, and it was worryingly characteristic of Channel 4 music television – all swoopy cameras and presenters asking awkward, stupid questions to show that they are not being pompous and taking it all too seriously.  This kind of style is supposed, I believe, to appeal to kids.  Stupid kids, perhaps. Who fucking cares, to pick an example, that Sean Connery happens to be from Fountainbridge.

You can see where my fears started to multiply with this, can’t you.  Swoopy cameras, yoof presentation styles, Jon fucking Fratelli (seriously?)… it all just seemed destined to be a big, flash, intellectually vacant carnival of f-list celebrity sycophancy.  But I did know deep down that that was just me being a reactionary, cynical dickhead.  And you know what, the show itself was actually pretty good.

I have quibbles of course – so many quibbles!  For starters, it really wasn’t about Edinburgh at all.  The people interviewed were the likes of Aidan Moffat, Stuart Murdoch and Edwyn Collins, while Jon Fratelli is a Glaswegian who was last relevant in 2005 and for all KT Tunstall apparently worked really hard playing small gigs here when she was starting off, she isn’t from Edinburgh either, nor to the best of my knowledge does she live here.  Even when they were discussing the Postcard Records era of indie bands they neglected to mention Fire Engines, Josef K, Scars or the Shop Assistants, although maybe they thought the fact that Orange Juice, nominally from Glasgow, had a couple of Edinburgh lads in the band had that covered.

Even with KT Tunstall on the show, Fence Records were not so much as mentioned.  So like all things about Scottish music, this was basically about Glasgow. Which is fine, there’s a sort of depressing inevitability to that and it didn’t really bother me, but I wish they had just called it Sounds From the City: Glasgow instead, because I did genuinely hope that they might have mentioned Edinburgh music at least once.

There was one Edinburgh musician on there, Kristina Cox, who was ‘democratically chosen by the citizens of cyberspace’.  Her presence is a good thing, at least she is from here, but what that rather innocent-sounding phrase actually means is ‘we exploited the desire of young musicians to make a breakthrough to humbug them into doing our advertising for us’. These internet vote talent show things are basically, as far as I am concerned, large brands conning musicians into passing their advertising message around as many of their friends as possible.  It fucking makes my skin crawl, but fair play to Kristina for entering and winning the vote.  She sent me her music a while back, and seemed really nice, so for all it wasn’t my kind of thing, you can’t say she didn’t earn her chance.

The other thing which I found rather disappointing was the way Scottish music seemed to cease to exist in 2005.  I think the most recently-emerged band to be name-checked was Franz Ferdinand, which is pretty bloody silly if they are were selling this, as I believe they were, as something current.  Not one noteworthy band out of Scotland in the last five years, guys?  Really?

So you’d think, with all the whining I’ve just done, that I hated the programme wouldn’t you?  And actually, I didn’t.

For starters, I have to remind myself who this was aimed at – something we frequently forget in the very inward-facing world of DIY music.  It’s not that the production company necessarily don’t care about The Phantom Band or Sparrow and the Workshop, for example, or FOUND, Broken Records, Withered Hand or Meursault, or even The Pictish Trail, King Creosote and James Yorkston.  These bands just don’t have the name recognition, and this show was pitched at the necessarily wide audiences with which television deals.  Almost none of the audience will care what is actually going on in Scotland right now because it’s nothing they have heard anything about, and even if the show were to cover it, it would be nothing they are likely to ever hear of again, meaning that the series would end up making very little connection with its audience.

If you want to make a show about actual emerging music in a place, and one which eschews the public humiliation of idiotic talent shows, then you are actually dealing with a much smaller niche – as I discussed a while back when talking about where music television might go from here. For an audience that small, Channel 4 simply could never have made the series. So I may quibble with a lot of the format – the comparative under-use of the considered opinions of some very interesting guests being my biggest gripe – but that is in the nature of the medium, and not something I think is fair to really moan about.

So what did they get right?  Quite a bit, in my opinion.  They may have neglected Fence, but they did identify the very strong spirit of independence running from Postcard Records to Chemikal Underground.  Fence are the next natural link in this chain, which continues to the plethora of interesting micro-labels popping up around Scotland today, and is one of the defining characteristics of Scottish music as far as I am concerned.

In fact it’s one of the reasons I find it annoying that they didn’t mention Fence.  Postcard and Chemikal basically took the fact that we are quite isolated from the heartland of UK media and culture, decided not let it get them down, and just got the fuck on with it anyway.  They turned a potentially huge negative into an equally huge positive and Fence, and in particular their idiosyncratic festivals, are a significant embodiment of that ethos.

They also identified that stubbornness of spirit of most Scottish music people – that urge to do things their way or not at all.  Maybe this is another feature of being isolated from the mainstream, such that individuality becomes more of a competitive advantage than conformity.  I may not like KT Tunstall’s music, but I thought she nailed it with her statement: “We realised things weren’t going to come to us, so we were going to have to do things for ourselves; organise our own gigs, our own music nights, and put our own music out.”

So the ‘Edinburgh’ bit in the title may have been completely misleading, they may have ignored everything since 2005 or so, the actual format of the show may have been a bit silly (and detrimental to the chances of holding anything more than the most superficial of conversations) and the two bands they chose to highlight may have been ones I think are awful, but to a large degree these things are either matters of personal taste or inherent in the medium itself and the audience it must by necessity address.

But they nailed what I consider to be the some of the defining characteristics of Scottish music, and really captured the spirit of independence and self-reliance that I tend to see up here.  They emphasised two of my favourite labels of all time and in general, for what it was, I think that Channel 4 actually did a pretty good job. Surprised?  I was; pleasantly so.

Ruth and I were back on Fresh Air Radio last night, but due to all sorts of massively annoying database problems with the site, I couldn’t put up one of those live playlist updatey things like I usually do, which was really kind of frustrating.

After spending last term more or less missing one another every single show I must confess I am looking forward to getting things right in 2011 and the chance to spend an hour and a half every week bickering with the old trout about music.

So given you had no opportunity to agree with Ruth about how fucking awful my taste in music is, I thought I would at least post the actual playlist online so you can see what we played and have a think about whether or not you can really be arsed tuning in next week, by which time my Toady IT problems should be well and truly behind me.

01. Mountain Man – How’m I Doing
02. Ringo Deathstarr – Do it Every Time
03. Rob St. John – Whites of Our Eyes (Toad Session Sneak Preview)
04. P.S. I Love You & Diamond Rings – Leftovers
05. Fleet Foxes – Hopelessness Blues
06. Active Child – I’m in Your Church at Night
07. Francoise Hardy – This Little Heart
08. Dad Rocks! – Nothing Keeps Up
09. Lach – I Won’t Miss You
10. Nana Grizel – Blackbox
11. The Good Ones – Sara
12. The Honorable Worm – Wouldn’t Mind Dying
13. Owen Pallett – Lewis Takes off his Shirt
14. Black Tambourine – Throw Aggi off a Bridge

Band names can be a little misleading.  I am not sure what the name ‘Dad Rocks!’ particularly led me to expect, but I don’t think it was this.  Mind you, Snævar Njáll Albertsson is not English, and it’s easy to forget that words create subtly difference impressions to different people, no matter how flawless their grasp of the language.

Coincidentally, the rolling, lovely Language actually touches on this, about two thirds of the way through the EP.  It, like the rest of the lyrics on this, has the character of a tangential train of thought, remarkably matter of fact and just slightly off-topic for some reason.

If the lyrics feel a little like a digression that just keeps on moseying onwards, then the music feels much the same.  It just rolls along at an unhurried pace, a beautifully picked acoustic guitar holding everything in place, and swells of strings, horns or harmonies weaving in and out as and when called upon.  As such, the whole EP does indeed have a very Scandinavian dreamy folk-pop feel to it, but despite the crescendos of instrumentation which appear here and there, it nevertheless has a very gentle, unassuming character.

Every time I try and pick out a highlight I get to the next song and end up changing my mind.  The piano in the opener is beautiful, the guitar in Kids is beautiful, the choral harmonies in Nothing Keeps Up are really lovely… this EP is just a gorgeous piece of work.  It is also quite an old record – mid-2010 I think – and there’s a full-length being worked on at the moment apparently, which is good news.

Dad Rocks! – Aroused By Hair

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Website |More mp3s | Buy from Bandcamp

I have been reading a fair bit recently about how Apple are using their app store to fleece content suppliers, as well as cutting off their relationships with their users, and it is starting to really get me down.

Briefly, as far as I understand it, Apple are intending to force publishers of apps to fork over 30% of any and all revenue generated through that app, as well as hoarding the all-important information about the people who made the actual purchase.  Given that in many cases an app is no more than a customised window to the internet, and that people have to pay for their app to be hosted in the first place, this strikes me as a little extreme, for two main reasons.

Firstly, the beauty of the internet is its freedom.  As film studios, anti-terrorist agencies and embarrassed US diplomats will tell you, it may include the freedom to do some distinctly dubious things at times, but the freedom of expression, revolution in communications and boon to creative collaboration which the internet has brought have been incredible.  The eradication of barriers to entry in so many industries is also a great thing, and this stimulates competition enormously, which is one of the key requirements for a healthy capitalist system.  High barriers to entry mean less competition, means prices tend to go up and quality down, and the consumer gets fucked in the meantime.  Low barriers to entry are also, it must be said, just plain fucking exciting.

What Apple have managed to do with their app-based operating system is effectively fence off the internet.  When Murdoch stuck the Times behind a paywall I think he was being an idiot, not least because of the destruction of his readership and awful publicity were needless, when the concept of the app was about to enable him to do the exact same thing in a year or so, but to little or no public outcry.

Now, with apps, the internet is behind walls again with Apple telling you what is and isn’t acceptable content, and with them charging you for what used to be free.  Barriers to entry in almost everything are creeping back up again, and I see this as a very bad thing.

The other aspect of this which is worrying is that the inner machinations regarding what is and isn’t Apple-approved content and therefore what makes it to your screens are almost entirely opaque.  They can basically do what they want, and their motives are far from reassuring.  As they have just entered into partnership with News International – yes, seriously, fucking Murdoch! – to provide a news service which will be delivered on the same platform they are forcing everyone else onto, they are now in a situation where they are directly incentivised to hobble competing news services like the Beeb or the Guardian, because they now have their very own horse in this race – a race which takes place on a track they themselves own.

This state of affairs is, to my eyes anyway, fucking incredible. The internet is not only slowly being closed, but the playing field itself is now very much not level either.

The second highly worrying aspect of this is that Apple are effectively manoeuvering themselves into a position where they will completely control your contact with the outside world.  If you use a Mac in the house as well as in your pocket, then one account controls all points of access to the digital world.

Forcing everything through the App Store and iTunes gives Apple a big weapon in the battle against Paypal to control online financial traffic, and soon they will own your transactions with the news and information you choose to consume as well.

The power this gives them to pervert, censor, exploit and control almost everything we do, see, hear or buy is quite frightening, not least because they are a private company and are hence not even slightly answerable for how they abuse that power. Does anyone ever actually read the terms and conditions they sign up for in the App store?  Well we’d better start, because before too long those arcane, utterly impenetrable paragraphs could become more important to us than the bloody law itself.

As it turns out, really well designed mobile versions of websites can in many cases obviate the need for customised apps, and I very much hope this is something people continue to focus on strongly, because I find the concept of handing so much power over to Apple, or Google if you are an Android user, to be really quite frightening.

I have an unusually healthy supply of good videos at the moment, so I thought I might pass on three of my favourites, none of which bear much relation to one another, but all of which are cool in different ways.

Above is Kid Canaveral’s brilliant new animated video for You Only Went Out to Get Drunk Last Night, a song from their cracking album Shouting at Wildlife.  Apart from the fact that it’s just plain good to watch, it reminds me of one of the best things about being involved in music these days: you can just have a bloody go.  Time and effort and a really good idea went into that video, but from what I can tell it can’t have cost any money at all.

People do seem to confuse ‘possible’ with ‘easy’ though.  Just because costs and technology are no longer prohibitive, there is still no substitute for actually having a good idea and working really hard.  Stop-motion animation like that – especially the frankly incredible dancing kitchen – is incredibly time-consuming and there are visual ideas flowing thick and fast in this video, even though it starts a little slowly.  So you can do without money, but not without genuine creativity – kudos to David Galletly who made it.

Below is a video by Powerdove.  It sets archive footage of the demolition of the Star Theatre in New York against Annie Lewandowski’s gorgeous, minimal song called Lost City.  In general I would suggest that this kind of bare minimalism has to be a little careful not to drift into dullness, but when I listen to Lewandowski’s stuff the strange noises going on in the background really do lift it well above most things which might superficially be regarded as similar.

And finally, this is just silly, but fun, even though the middle class dilettante hipster is the easiest of easy targets for this kind of lampooning, and it’s unlikely to ever be done as well as Nathan Barley.  Nevertheless, I found this extremely funny.

Have you noticed that recently YouTube comments aren’t as awful as they used to be.  Ever since they implemented the ability to vote things up or down you tend to get some excellent comments at the top of the page.  The winner on this one, as far as I am concerned?

“Vinyl’s too mainstream. Can I get this on wandering minstrel?”

With the next Ides of Toad coming up on Saturday (Rob St. John, Ziggy Campbell, Thirty Pounds of Bone Loch Lomond NOT Loch Lomond under any circumstances (*cough cough*, except perhaps maybe), tickets here, flog flog flog etc etc…) I thought now might be a good time to put up some videos from the last one, where we kicked things off in style with Morris Major, Johnny Reb and the awesome Scottish Enlightenment.

Ben Clarke and Alan McLoughlin, a couple of gents from the Edinburgh School of Art, very kindly offered to film some of the show so we could put some live videos up, and here they are.  We have a couple by The Scottish Enlightenment – Drip Feed and All Homemade things, from the brilliant pair of EPs which preceded their debut album last year – and one by Morris Major called Youth in My Heart. Unfortunately, Johnny Reb weren’t all that happy with their actual performance in the one we made for them and would rather it didn’t see the light of day, which is entirely fair enough.

These three have worked out really nicely though, so once again, thanks to the bands and the punters, and particularly to Ben and Alan for the work they put into these videos.

People are going to start laughing at me soon, if I post any more of this kind of stuff.  Guess what kind of sound Taxrat are?  That’s right, ultra-scummy lo-fi guitar pop.  I am pretty sure I would positively review a Keane record at this point, if they slapped all sorts of distortion on their instruments and muffled the fuck out of the vocals.

Anyhow, Taxrat have three songs and absolutely no information on their MySpace page, and their email to me was equally informative:

hey,
here’s a couple recordings we made a few months ago. we’re called Taxrat from southern california.
myspace.com/taxrat
thanks,
jesse

And umm… here they are.  And they’re fucking good.  I do keep telling you this, but it seems like the worse the PR email the better the band – Li’l Daggers, Allister Izenberg, Trips and Falls and now these guys.  All wrote me the most ill-advisedly impenetrable emails when they first got in touch – Allister’s was even in all-caps – and yet every single band turned out to be excellent.

Every single time I hear BBC or glossy magazine gatekeepers say things like: ‘your promo CD needs to have a certain standard of professionalism or we know from experience it is very unlikely to be worth listening to, out of all the submissions we receive’.  They use phrases like ‘of a certain quality’ to describe the more professional submissions, and every single time I hear this I really do feel like they are missing a trick.

For myself, the more professional the email submission, the more nicely formatted and extensive the press materials supplied, the more likely it seems to be that the band will be extremely boring.  It’s not a hard and fast rule, by any means, but I have seen absolutely no sign that shitty, badly written music submissions correlate with bad music; in fact if anything I would tend towards suggesting the opposite is more often the case.

In any case, yes the production values of this stuff might be either completely terrible or irritatingly fashionable, depending on your stance on this kind of aesthetic, but as far as I am concerned they are good pop songs and that’s the end of it.  I like the guitar riffs and I like the bluesy rhythm of it, and I actually like the vocal melodies too, or what little of them you can discern.

Taxrat – Brick Wall

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Taxrat – Burn Down Slow

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P.S. Also, that was one of only two pictures ‘of’ them that I could find, but it was a pretty cool one, so I thought it deserved banner status.

Man oh man I enjoyed this!

It used to be quite a regular occurrence that I would find myself standing alone at a relatively under-attended Cabaret Voltaire gig of a weekend.  They don’t seem to have been doing much gig booking of late so I haven’t actually been there that often in the last couple of years, so it was kind of nostaligic to be standing directly in the middle of the sound system’s sweet spot, just a little bit tipsy and nodding my head in that ‘I refuse to dance because I fucking can’t, alright?’ way that I share with many an indie kid around the world.

The first support, Pilotcan, were decent but Skibunny, who followed them, used a backing track, which is something which really puts me off.  Apart from the fact that it risks turning your band into some sort of self-covering karaoke performance, in this case I honestly didn’t think it was necessary.  They had guitar, bass and drums and I am sure they could have put their songs across perfectly well without the backing track.  Although let’s be honest, I listen to a lot of bands who use pre-programmed beats and samples, so it is a bit hypocritical to criticise these guys for doing what is extremely close to being the same thing. I wasn’t, however, that keen on the set anyway.

Anyhow, Ringo Deathstarr.  Well, they opened pretty much as they intended to go on: with a squall of guitars so loud you could barely even hear the vocals through the racket, never mind actually make them out at all.  This gradually changed, but one thing did not: the sound of heavily distorted, highly fuzzy guitar noise constantly battering surprisingly sprightly pop tunes to a broken and bloody demise.

It’s not an all-out noise assault by any means, at least not in terms of volume; it’s more the thick layer of fuzz which disguises the melody quite significantly.  They do it a different way, but it does remind me of the way their recent tour-mates The Wedding Present actually sound surprisingly melodic in retrospect, when all I heard was a wall of indistinct guitar noise the first time around.

Live, though, it’s just fucking loud and fucking great.  Even the more overtly indie-pop songs, which I am personally less keen on on record, come across brilliantly in a live setting, with that little bit more recklessness and aggression to their delivery.  That loose, ramshackle, pacy delivery is what the show was all about, actually.  The songs come and go thick and fast, and by the end I was just standing there still nodding my head blissfully, not wanting it to stop and wondering when the ringing in my ears would subside.  Brilliant!

Ringo Deathstarr – Imagine Hearts

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Ringo Deathstarr – Starrsha

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Buy from Club AC30 Records.

I had an awesome week of live music last week, from the Dylan Uncovered on Thursday (from which there is some recorded audio of Esperi and Yusuf Azak’s sets here), to Ringo Deathstarr on Friday and finally Conquering Animal Sound on Saturday.

This week promises to be a little more spread out, but nevertheless just as good.  As well as the return of the Ides of Toad gigs on Saturday (with an ear-carressingly excellent lineup, I might add) we will be recording a Toad Session with Armellodie Records‘ Thirty Pounds of Bone.  The Rob St. John one will be published this Saturday as well, and Rob himself will be here all week recording his debut album, so I am going to be like a giddy little puppy until the inevitable crash on Sunday, I would imagine.

In other news, I assume you’ve heard about Radiohead’s new album?  Presumably inspired by Edinburgh’s Gerry Loves Records, they are releasing the world’s second ever record packaged in newsprint.  Ah well, we all need to draw inspiration from somewhere, and apparently the Hollies don’t have any more good songs to rip off*.

I have to confess that I don’t think Radiohead have released anything which has been much cop since Amnesiac, but I really do salute their excellent adjustment to selling music in the Twenty-First Century.  I know this is all much easier when you are already as famous as they are, but absolutely no-one has adjusted as well, as quickly or as consistently innovatively as they have.  The special edition isn’t even all that pricey – just thirty quid – and I bet it’s fucking gorgeous.

Anyhow, where were we?  Oh yes, gigs:

Tuesday 15th February 2011: Ryan Francesconi, Rob St.John & The Wee Rogue at Old St. Paul’s Church on Jeffrey Street.

Ryan Francesconi is a composer who does a lot of arranging for Joanna Newsom (who has described him as a genius on more than one occasion).  He has recorded several albums of his own, including some amazing solo guitar stuff, which he will be performing on Tuesday, along with some of his Balkan stuff.  Support will come from the excellent Wee Rogue and from Rob St. John – and for those who worry about duplicating their entertainment, Rob will be playing a totally different set to Saturday’s Ides of Toad gig, so I strongly recommend going to both.

Wednesday 16th February 2011: The Last Battle, Letters & Oso Street Outreach at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

This is an interesting one.  I was contacted by Letters’ US PR guys before the band had ever played in Edinburgh, which is actually their hometown.  They were described recently by The Pop Cop as ‘Scotland’s hottest new band’, which seems a little odd for a band who has never played a gig yet, and you can preview a couple of their songs here if you like, and read their interview with Kowalskiy here.

Thursday 17th February 2011: Kill it Kid & Scoundrels at the Electric Circus.

I wasn’t as smitten with the Kill it Kid album as I had expected to be, but by all accounts they are a irresistible force live, and I reckon this could well be worth a punt.  The vocals alone are powerful as hell, and when their bluesy rock ‘n’ roll really gets going I reckon it could be pretty bloody impressive.

Kill it Kid – Send Me and Angel Down

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Saturday 19th February 2011: Rob St.John, Ziggy Campbell & Thirty Pounds of Bone at the Wee Red Bar.

This is going to be a bonanza of goodness.  As well as the awesomeness promised in the official lineup, we also have a special guest added to the bill who we are, for carbonated beverage-related reasons, having to pretend is a secret (the only American band on the label, named after a certain Scottish lake, you get the picture).  Also, Thirty Pounds of Bone will be travelling up from the very bottom left hand corner of the island to play a rare gig up here, and people have told me that the last time they saw him, he was so good that they travelled halfway across Scotland to seem him play the next day again.  Oh, and Rob has promised to play Fucking Loud, by all accounts, so I am expecting heckles of ‘Judas!’ from you.  And if your musical knickers weren’t damp enough already, we also have that Ziggy fella from FOUND, whose own album is released in a few weeks too.  100% pure unadulterated lineup gold!

Loch Lomond – Elephants & Little Girls (Toad Session)

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Saturday 19th February 2011: French Wives EP Launch at Sneaky Pete’s.

Sneaky’s have some really good stuff programmed in for the next month or two, so it’s worth just generally checking out their listings, but this is the one which stood out for me this week.

French Wives – Me vs. Me

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*Dear Radiohead fanatics, that was a joke.  Please do not form an angry mob and try and burn the house down because you hate me for poking gentle fun at your favourite band.

Mrs. Toad and I do NOT approve of Valentine’s Day, and I have to say the fact that she genuinely seems to hate it (rather than just saying so, but secretly still expecting flowers) is a very liberating thing.  It means I can now finally forget about the whole bloody nonsense once and for all, and never ever have to figure out exactly how much I am expected to spend in order to demonstrate my affection for someone.

There is, after all, very little that can be less romantic than obediently making protestations of love for no other reason than that everyone else is doing so and you are expected to conform.  I actually think it’s just plain fucking insulting, frankly.

‘Hello darling, I thought we might go out for a meal tonight.’
‘Yes dear, what a lovely idea, what made you think of that?’

In what possible world can ‘because the shops told me to, everyone else is doing it, and I feel kind of obliged’ be considered a better answer than, say, ‘because we’ve both been really busy recently and I miss spending time with you’.  And assuming that the latter is obviously the more romantic answer, what the fuck does that have to do with the fourteenth of February?

Direct download: Toadcast #161 – The Slappercast

01. Cracker – Mr. Wrong (00.18)
02. The Dead Kennedys – Your Emotions (08.39)
03. Fear of Pop – In Love (13.25)
04. The Veils – Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice (22.02)
05. Bill Callahan – Our Anniversary (24.33)
06. The Wedding Present – Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm (36.00)
07. Tom Waits – Frank’s Wild Years (39.40)
08. The Clash – White Riot (46.15)
09. Taxrat – Burn Down Slow (48.32)
10. Josh T. Pearson – Honeymoon is Great, I Wish You Were Her (55.25)