I get in trouble, sometimes, for straying from my comfort zone on this blog.  Frankly, I find this a little bit baffling.  I know we all like to know what we are getting when we do things and so on and so forth, but I would have thought that breaking up the constant stream of similar music on a site like this would be a good thing.

Anyhow, Wolf Eyes is sufficiently different that I am not really going to be able to review it, just to say that it is there and that I actually think I rather like it.  When I played some on the Fresh Air Radio show Ruth genuinely didn’t believe that I would sit and listen to this, and in a sense she is right.

This is quite harsh noise music (by the standards of this website), so I do not, for example, pour a nice glass of wine, open a book and play this record.  In fact, I am not really entirely sure how to relate to it, because I don’t really listen to music like this very much at all, so I have next to no context for understanding it properly.  They get involved in art shows and stuff like that as well, so it seems like I am listening to one element of a broader work, in isolation, which may not be how the band would ideally like the music to be approached.

Nevertheless, there is something about this I find myself really enjoying – or at the very least, something I find myself fascinated by.  Apparently Wolf Eyes get a little criticism for not being a real noise band, and they are easy enough on the ear to have been released on Sub Pop at times in the past, and it is quite possible that they are therefore a little closer to mainstream or conventional pop than a lot of the purists of their genre, but I don’t really know enough about it to say.

All I can say is that in amongst all the weird noises on this record there is something which I seem to find really rather good, but being such a different kind of music for me, I could no more tell you what that is than I could fly to the moon.

Wolf Eyes – Track 01

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I rather unkindly dismissed this album as boring a little while back, but I have been listening to it a lot since then and I think I need to retreat from that position just a little.

Just to be straight, I am not taking it back entirely.  I think there are quite a few weak songs, and that the sound is just a little too soft and pleasant at times, but there is still some really excellent stuff on All Eternals Deck.

I should first confess that I got into The Mountain Goats, not by the early records which the purist indie-snob might require, but by their Big Pop Hit The Sunset Tree in 2005.  I have also, just to add even more caveats, subsequently discovered that I am probably not all that much of a Mountain Goats fan, all told.  I have explored their back catalogue both forwards and backwards, and rarely found more than bits and pieces which I have liked, although I’ll admit I haven’t heard their very first records, which are supposed to be fantastic.

Which brings us to All Eternals Deck, an album which initially reminded me too strongly of the distinctly soft Heretic Pride, from a year or two ago.  All Eternals Deck is, I think, a better album, and I should not have written it off so quickly.  The Age of Kings is wistful and lovely, and the somewhat bizarre High Hawk Season probably shouldn’t work, with the weird choral backing, but does.

There are other highlights too, such as the rather unpleasant The Autopsy Garland and lovely opener Damn These Vampires, but I still think that I personally would not have included a little under half these songs. Particularly towards the end of the album, for all the songs definitely sound like Mountain Goats songs, that is about all they sound like – their defining characteristic becomes their only one, in a way.

It’s difficult to meaningfully write about an album when you only have a loose relationship with the band’s music, so I don’t want to imply that even I think my opinion on this record is worth all that much.  But for all there is a fair bit which still isn’t really doing that much for me, there are some excellent songs here, and I think I have been a bit unfair in how quickly I dismissed it.

The Mountain Goats – Age of Kings

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The Mountain Goats – High Hawk Season

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What an utterly schizophrenic record; half incredible, half dull, with the dividing line almost smack in the middle of the album. For some reason, after The Night Will Always Win I seem to find Build a Rocket, Boys! really quite boring.  It is very classic Elbow: big, swoonsome, lush waves of orchestration and Guy Garvey’s gorgeous voice, which always makes you feel like everything is going to be okay.  By now, with Elbow, you know the score.

The thing is, it’s kinda dull.  It’s a bit like an excessive helping of power balladry for middle aged people who still think they’re a bit indie.  I suppose Elbow are a bit like that anyway – anthemic, uplifting, choral, emotive – so when the songs don’t click it can all be a bit schmaltzy. This doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re a bloody great band, of course.  Because I do.

And the weird thing in this situation is just how good I think the first half of the album is.  Almost song for song I find myself wondering if they’ve written better music at any time in their careers.  Lippy Kids is utterly beautiful, With Love, Neat Little Rows… it’s absolutely brilliant stuff.

Mind you, Elbow have almost always had songs on their albums which I don’t like.  Leaders of the Free World and Asleep in the Back are probably their most consistent records, but often I find myself spellbound by their peaks and indifferent to their troughs.  Their Mercury Prize wasn’t even awarded for their best album by any means, and actually felt more like a lifetime achievement award than a prize for The Seldom Seen Kid, in particular.

So I suppose I am saying that their music needs to rouse, and in this case I am only roused fifty percent of the time.  And there is little more disappointing than rousing music which fails to take you with it on its journey.

Elbow – Lippy Kids

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Elbow – Jesus is a Rochdale Girl

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Reviewing this album is going to be a little tricky (yes, I know, I always say that).  Because Matt from Stay Loose, who are doing the UK PR for the album, knew I would like this he got a copy to me really quickly, so I first heard it before any of the swathes upon swathes of messianically-toned reviews were published.  This is a bloody good thing, because after all the fawning press, I think I might have found it hard not to be deliberately contrarian, had I not already known it was a stunning album.

It is not by any means, in my opinion at least, for everyone.  The critical world may be awash with love for Last of the Country Gentlemen, but I can imagine it turning a lot of people off.  I have a couple of reasons for that, and they are as follows:

Firstly, the album is intimidatingly intense from an emotional perspective.  It is so naked, so confessional, so tortured, that just being able to absorb the force of it takes some doing.  If you are not able or inclined to do so, then I can easily imagine it becoming a bit wearing, and you might just glaze over entirely.

Secondly, the actual arrangements are pretty minimal, and in songs which depend heavily on repeated, rolling refrains, and quarter of a hour’s worth of intense, confessional narrative, I can easily see people who are not captivated by this record finding it to be over-wrought and, ultimately, boring.  When you write an album this personal, though, I think this is the kind of risk you must know you are taking, as an artist.

For the rest of us, well I have to agree with what seems like ninety-nine percent of the British music press: this is fucking stunning.  Essentially it is a document of a particularly rough period of Pearson’s life – as he says, “I write what’s in front of me” – and is unflinchingly* uncensored to the point where you almost have to engage with it, or else you simply can’t share the same space.  The quietness of the music has a similar effect: you either hush up and listen intently to every vanishing syllable and every finger barely brushing a guitar string, or there is simply no point bothering.

Live, this effect is particularly noticeable.  I have never in my life heard such blanket silence at gigs as when I have seen Pearson play, first at the Muzzle of Bees Backyard Barbecue in Austin and then last week at Stereo in Glasgow.  It’s simply impossible to give this album anything other than your full attention.  The sparse beauty of the music demands it to begin with, but to treat such unguarded confessions with anything less would seem like the height of crassness.

There are few vestiges of Pearson’s previous band, the ten-years-dead Lift to Experience, here.  Surprisingly short opener, the three-and-a-bit minute I am Loosed, is possibly the closest you’ll get.  There is also a certain grandiosity in the idea of a fifteen minute acoustic lament, and these make up the bulk of this record, and in doing so perhaps hint at a similar underlying aesthetic to The Texas-Jersusalem Crossroads.  “Commerce versus art, commerce versus art”, as he might put it.

There is little else to say here, really.  This record is utterly brutal, and yet utterly beautiful.  The music itself is no more than quiet acoustic guitar, building from the barest touch to a brief swells of strumming as the song rises an falls.  Warren Ellis’s fiddle makes an appearance here and there, but it too is beautifully understated.  It is what it is, and a lot of people will simply find the barriers too great to really enjoy a record this burning with unhappiness, self-recrimination and heartbreak.

For everyone else, though, Last of the Country Gentlemen is one of the most special, affecting, horrible, beautiful albums you will hear for fucking years.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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Josh T. Pearson – Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell

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* I wonder how often the term ‘unflinching’ has been used in reviews of this record!

This is going to be a really difficult record for me to review sensibly.  This is not for the usual reasons – that I happen to consider the band to be good friends, although I do – but for a more mundane one: I actually know this music and these songs so well that sitting down to try and actually review the album with any sense of detachment or perspective will be tricky.

Songs like Anti-climb Paint, Vincent Gallo and Johnny I Can’t Walk the Line have been staples of the FOUND live set for so long now I actually find it difficult to mentally attribute them to a new album.

Secondly, I’ve had a copy of this album on my hard drive for not much less than a year, when the band were first entering into negotiations with Chemikal, so I am almost too familiar with it to accurately describe what you might feel on first hearing it.

I do just about remember what I though when first hearing it, though, just about.  When FOUND divested themselves of their drummer and keyboard player last year I have to confess I allowed myself to unthinkingly assume that the electronic jiggery-pokery of Kev Sim and Tommy Perman would come to the fore, presumably accentuated by the gorgeous acoustic contribution Ziggy made to the band’s Toad Session two years ago. It may sound silly, but I am not sure, given the musicians left in the band, that it was an entirely stupid assumption.

It says something about FOUND, though, that I can hardly have ever been more shocked to hear a band make an album which is not, on the face of it, all that shocking.  Hardly shocking at all, in fact I would superficially call this a pretty conventional indie rock album, and that really did surprise me on the first few listens.

I will confess that there are a couple of songs I am not so keen on. Lowlandless doesn’t really do it for me, and the shouted “we’re not getting on” from Every Hour That Passes sits a bit uncomfortably as well, in my view.  And er… well, that’s about it, because I think I love everything else about this album, pretty much without reservation.

FOUND’s habitual double-take moments, where a perfectly inoffensive song is suddenly distorted with something incredibly strange and incredibly excellent, are few and far between (the wonky breakdown on Machine Age Dancing being a brilliant exception) and instead they have a hook-heavy record full of exuberant pop moments and, as their live shows for the last year have shown, many, many opportunities to wave your hands in the air and leap up and down like a fool.

It’s not, lest you get that impression, an album lacking any musical invention.  It’s more that instead of the ideas leading the songs all over the place, as they perhaps used to, now the songs are calling the tune and the stranger ideas seem to have been called into service to enhance the song, rather than being allowed to roam free and see what emerged.  The lead single Machine Age Dancing, for example, whilst indisputably one of the best songs on the album, and perhaps also one of the most characteristic, is definitely not the most hummable pop tune.  So there’s not a careless play for the mainstream being made here, by any means.

So, minor caveats aside, this is a great record, and if Anti-climb Paint and Vincent Gallo can’t break FOUND to a wider audience then it will simply be because people are fucking idiots.

FOUND – You’re No Vincent Gallo

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FOUND – Johnny I Can’t Walk the Line

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You know I can get pretty late with my reviews, but to be reviewing a Valentine’s Day EP this late in March is just plain silly.  Maybe I should have held out for the ultimate statement of cynicism and just reviewed it on April Fools’ Day.

In fact, that wouldn’t have been too far wide of the mark, actually.  This is a tongue-in-cheek, smart-arsed EP, written as a defiantly black-humoured antidote to heartbreak.  And, wouldn’t you know, it’s absolutely fucking brilliant.

Max, who pretty much is Dolfish, describes it on the Indiecater Records page (where you can buy it in digital and or tape formats) as being a little like your obnoxious friend who, for all they may be utterly insensitive, at least make you laugh when you most need to be shaken out of your misery.

The lyrics are sarcastic and absolutely razor-sharp, as well as being genuinely* laugh out loud funny on occasion.  Between that and the extreme brevity of the songs the whole EP pretty much just slaps you around the face with a wet kipper and then fucks off cackling before you’ve even had much time to figure out what hit you.  Pretty much all of this is going on our Valentine’s podcast next year!

Dolfish – Your Love is Bummin’ Me Out

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*I rather resent having to point out that when I say laugh out loud funny, these days, I have to point out that I mean it literally, rather than in the ‘LOL’ sense.  Fucking annoying little illiterate web twats, they drive me round the fucking bend.

Right, after an unspeakable beast of a week last week, handling the diciest of dicey session, lost bands, exploding PAs and jetlag, this shall be the week of brutal efficiency.  Vorsprung Durch Technik and all that sort of thing.

It is also the week we finalise the Lach masters, the King Post Kitsch vinyl master for the Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone single (May 16th) and get the print press promotional work moving for his album, The Party’s Over.  Things, in short, are in full swing.

Lower Dens, The Scottish Enlightenment and Edinburgh School for the Deaf were all bloody excellent at Sneaky Pete’s last night, but I didn’t see all that many of you fuckers there.  Shame on you all, shame indeed!

There aren’t all that many conventional gigs knocking about Edinburgh this week, but there are certainly some interesting ones.

Friday 1st April 2011: Arrington De Dionyso & The Leg at the Bristo Hall.

This will lurch between unlistenable nonsense and mental genius, I would imagine, as the best music should.  The more recognisable elements seem to be at least somewhat related to a Beefhearty stomp, but that’s just one touchstone for what a quick listen to De Dionyso’s MySpace (for that’s all I know about him) shows to be a rather broad spectrum of styles.  Also, the Leg are fucking awesome.

Arrington De Dionysio – The Invisible New

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Saturday 2nd April 2011: Two Wings & Family Elan at Old St. Paul’s Church Hall.

Two Wings first came to my attention a few weeks ago, and I am really interested in what little of their stuff exists so far.  It’s quite melodramatic, flighty, psychedelic folk, but it has plenty of balls and force, and I will be really interested to hear where they go from here.  I don’t really know anything about Family Elan, but Powan Presents put on really good gigs, so I would say that if they are good enough for them, then they are good enough for me.

Saturday 2nd April 2011: Meursault, Conquering Animal Sound & Jonnie Common play Limbo at The Voodoo Rooms.

I haven’t actually seen Meursault play since they acquired a fiddle player, a drummer and a bass guitarist, so this will be a weird experience for me – almost as if the label has signed a new band, who sound suspiciously like an old band we used to know.  Conquering Animal Sound and Jonnie Common shouldn’t need any introduction on these pages, but if you don’t know them, take my word for it, they’re excellent.

Meursault – Flittin’ (Demo)

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[Edit: Fuck me for being an idiot, it's Haddowfest this weekend as well.  What a tool!  The lineup looks a little patchy, but there are some good bands on there, and I'm really impressed with how this festival has grown over the last couple of years.]

This podcast is all about our week’s record shopping in Austin, although I promise I am done going on about SXSW, so those of you bored to tears by the whole business are entirely safe, I promise.

We did buy a fair bit of vinyl while we were over there though, whether it be directly from the bands at their shows (usually whilst still pished and giddy from enjoying the gig) or on one of our particular excursions to either End of an Ear or Waterloo Records.

There is such pleasure to be had from poking through rack upon rack of vinyl, and whilst I have no real quibble with digital music, I think the sheer ritual and physical relationship it sacrifices can’t really be matched in the digital realm.

Direct download: Toadcast #167 – The Shoppingcast

01. X-Ray Eyeballs – Crystal (00.22)
02. The Magnetic Fields – All the Umbrellas in London (08.15)
03. Sparklehorse – Homecoming Queen (11.33)
04. The Coathangers – Chicken 30 (17.35)
05. Lost in the Trees – Walk Around the Lake (24.30)
06. Kurt Vile – My Sympathy (32.44)
07. Pavement – Range Life (35.15)
08. Warm Ghost – Open the Wormhole in Your Heart (43.57)
09. The Books – The Future, Wouldn’t That be Nice (50.19)
10. Deerhunter – Earthquake (58.27)

HIYAAAAAAA!  I am a little bit wired this morning, can you tell?  After the onslaught of SXSW (which I will stop mentioning now, promise) I get back to the print press promo work for the King Post Kitsch album, a Josh T. Pearson session at Stereo in Glasgow this afternoon and the Husband, Miaoux Miaoux and Justin Grounds gig at Medina tomorrow.  You are all coming to that aren’t you?  ALL of you!

Oh, and the annual lifeboat collection day has been announced.  With a government seemingly intent on turning us into a third world nation (no social services, massive gap between rich and poor, what other conclusion can there be?) it feels more important than ever that we participate in things like this.  Voting seems to make no fucking difference whatsoever, so more day-to-day stuff looks like just about the only way you can really participate in democracy in this country at the moment.  Christ, I sound like a bitter old Socialist don’t I!

Anyway, on Saturday 30th April any and all volunteers should convene at our house in Stockbridge and we’ll send people out to shake a tin, while Mrs. Toad prepares a big old roast and then in the evening we can eat like pigs and get bladdered.  From experience, the most effective collectors have been anyone wielding a baby (Euan), pretty girls (better not name names here) and pushy bastards (thank you Mr. Sutherland), but we’ll pretty much take anyone, so please do let me know if you’d like to help.

So, as the sun shines on Edinburgh and I contemplate a cup of tea in the back garden, please remember that Friday is de-lurking day, and the perfect time to come out of the intershadows and say hello.  Fill in your five and then talk baws* with everyone else.  Productivity is most severely frowned upon around here, but most especially so on Friday.

1. Which festival are you most looking forward to this year?
2. Name a song for the first warm, sunny day of the year.
3. What do you tend to have with your cuppa?
4. How will you waste time, next time you have the opportunity?
5. How do you take your eggs?

This week’s five songs were all introduced to me by Campfires & Battlefields, with whom I ended up sharing far too few pints in Texas last week.

Bowerbirds – In Our Talons

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Musee Mechanique – Like Home

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Sam Amidon – Little Johnny Brown

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Bodies of Water – We Are Co-Existors

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Salt & Samovar – Swallowed a Pill

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*For non-Scots, baws = nuts, bollocks, rambutans, balls, testicles, etc etc etc.  As in ‘bawsack’ – excellent Scottish vulgarity!

So, I may be jetlagged to all fuck, but why not get on Fresh Air Radio and pass my incoherence onto you.  Hell, what could possibly be more entertaining than listening to me almost fall asleep whilst introducing songs?

Actually, it will probably work in everyone’s favour actually, as rather than the usual bollocks talking, I will probably end up playing more songs and chattering far less in between, which will presumably be much more entertaining for those of you actually listening.

I will also be joined by Olaf Furniss of Born to be Wide, who will be introducing us to lineup for Wide Days, which takes place on the 7th April 2011 at Teviot House.

Live from 8pm UK time: click here to listen.

As per usual, feel free to chip in in the comments below, and I will be adding the playlist as we go along.

1. Pavement – Spit on a Stranger
2. Preston School of Industry – Straits of Magellan
3. Sparkelhorse – Happy Pig (Live)
4. The National – Think You Can Wait (with Sharon Van Etten)
5. Lady Lazarus – Fighting Words and Fists
6. New Animal – All I Want is Gone
7. My Teenage Stride – The Genie of New Jersey
8. Dolfish – Digitised Love Letters
9. Dolfish – I’m Proud of You Joanna
10. The Zincs – Rich Libertines
11.