Those total fucking bastards and their fucking album fucking launch. I didn’t even have my first pint until about ten o’clock at night, but I still feel pretty fucked this morning.
Still, one of the benefits was a trip to Storries Home Bakery in Leith on the way home, somewhere which isn’t really on my way home at all actually, now I come to think of it, but a very welcome detour nevertheless. Mmmm… steak pie!
I have meetings to come this afternoon, one in person and one on Skype, so even though I am self-employed it still feels like one of those days when you’re at work, hungover as fuck, and have nowhere to hide.
And tonight, of course, we have The Leg, Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six and Zed Penguin down at Henry’s Cellar Bar, so we get to do it all again. Agh! Thank goodness Mrs. Toad is away and doesn’t have to witness the wreck!
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And the questions will be shit, because my head hurts, but please de-lurk and say hello anyway, even if it’s just out of pity.
1. What are you inexplicably compelled to eat when pished?
2. Favourite soap opera.
3. Stupidest band name.
4. Favourite sea bird.
5. What TV series should I waste my Sunday watching?
Ruth and I are back on Fresh Air Radio once more this evening, live from 8pm for an hour and a half.
Ruth now has her own blog as well, so for those of you who tire of my wittering and crave a little bit more eclecticism in your world, then go and have a gander at Find Me in the Archives.
This week I have some songs from my Manchester post this week, and will be scarpering immediately afterwards to try and catch what I can of the FOUND album launch at the Voodoo Rooms. Factorycraft is out on Chemikal Underground right about now.
As per usual, the playlist will be updated live below as we go along, and the comments will be open for your heckling and chattering and general talking of pish. So feel free to chip in.
1. Devotchka – All the Sand in All the Sea
2. Golden Ghost – Plain Sight
3. Emit Bloch – Dorothy (a bit of the old version)
4. Emit Bloch – Dorothy (and the whole new versions)
5. Thao & Mirah – Eleven (feat. Tuneyards)
6. Powerdove – Sickly City
7. Moldy Peaches – Anyone Else But You
8. Roger Manning – Pearly Blues
9. Girls – The Oh-so-protective One
10. Brown Brogues – I Just Don’t Know
11. The Louche FC – Back Bedroom Casualty
12. Dum Dum Girls – He Gets Me High
13. Psychedelic Horseshit – Unseen Voids
14. Active Child – When Your Love is Safe
15. The Red River – Apple Valley
16. Husband – Feelings
This is the video for a new version of Dorothy by Emit Bloch, a song which first made an appearance on these pages on this podcast back in April last year.
Bloch’s album Dictaphones Vol. 1 was, if I remember, actually recorded as a series of demos. The plan, a little like with Springsteen’s Nebraska, was to re-record these songs at a later date and to release that recording as a proper album, but the demos simply ended up being so good they demanded a release of their own.
1st reaction to hearing this version: ‘dear sweet lord what the blazing fuck is going on here?’
2nd reaction to hearing this version: ‘well bugger me, that’s pretty good, isn’t it.’
It’s extremely, extremely rare that anyone can take the rough version of a song I love, re-record a comparatively lush pop version of the exact same song and still not have me absolutely hate it. But umm… well this is pretty bloody good isn’t it. Due to the One Little Indian Records site being down I don’t know if this is from that re-recorded album which Dictaphones Vol.1 was supposed to be the skeleton material for, but I hope so. And it might well make for a damn fine listen if it is.
Just for the sake of comparison though, here’s the version from Dictaphones. I assume you can understand my surprise:
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I was warned by my pal at Matador who sent this through for review that it is a bit of a grower, and so it proved.
I have to confess I thought immediately that a warning like that basically translated as ‘this album is a bit boring, please be generous’, and for a good while that is basically how it turned out to be. I struggled to adjust to the diminished variety of arrangements when compared to Childish Prodigy, which was my introduction to Vile’s music.
The songs asserted themselves though, albeit slowly. For me he seems to possess that crucial quality which distinguishes the really good singer-songwriters (for, accepting the broadness of the term, that’s kind of what he is, backing band or no): his delivery and his music just have innate charisma.
Even though all he is effectively doing is strumming his guitar or, on occasion, making it growl, there’s just something kind of magnetic about it. I am not sure I would put it on if I were doing other things though, particularly this album, as it is easily lost to a lack of attention. And for all it most certainly is a grower, there are still some bits and pieces which have not yet grown on me at all. In fact, unusually, the second half of the album is the stronger, in my opinion, with the brilliant Runner Ups, In My Time and Peeping Tomboy and the title track itself flowing beautifully into one another.
It is a dreamy, meandering record, this. And the vocals are so reverby that for all I catch snatches of lyrics here and there, and the images that they conjure are compelling, it is not really the whole narrative of the songs that I am responding to here. Like the music, I drift into inattention, only to be gently pulled back here and there by shifts and changes, adjustments in rhythm, a turn of phrase, something like that.
It may grow on me to the point of think it is great, but for the time being there is still something of a muddy fug over this album which is keeping some of the songs from making a proper impact, but those which manage to make themselves clear beyond it hint that there might well be an awful lot still to discover as the shapes in the mist slowly coalesce into something more defined.
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I am developing a rather annoying habit of losing almost all interest in bands before they’ve gone much further than a second or third album these days. I don’t know if that’s to do with the fact that bands frequently just don’t have enough ingenuity to remain interesting in the long run, but I am starting to worry that it is because I am simply turning into a novelty-whore.
With large elements of their kind of music drifting very much out of fashion – well, the elaborate cabaret folk and mariachi elements at the very least – I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about sitting down with the new Devotchka album, and was genuinely both pleased and surprised when I ended up really liking it.
It’s not even what I would describe as gripping or anything, just music which manages to combine enough indie*, a broad range of folk music, and cinematic drama to make for a really varied, engaging, enjoyable listen.
At the risk of gravely insulting this album, I am not entirely sure why I don’t find it kind of boring. It’s not as dark as their previous record, nor as reckless as others before that, and there is a wonderfully lush smoothness to it which, in my book, generally translates into bland dismissal. Not here though. There may not be much intensity on this record, but Urata’s voice has a tremendous yearning to it which seems to make the songs feel like they matter, even when the actual music is more lovely than anguished.
This is perhaps best embodied in the transition between the opening two tracks, where the gentle sadness of The Alley breaks into the pacey piano and drum undercurrent of All the Sand in All the Sea. The whole album is like this: the rich blanket of instrumentation seems to somewhat mask the variety of it, and it’s only when I realised this that I started to understand why, despite superficial characteristics which are not all that promising, I have ended up really enjoying 100 Lovers.
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*When I use terms like indie in reviews like this I generally mean in that vague and pretty much meaningless way it tends to be used to roughly describe guitar pop music. I know it’s not a great term, but you pretty much know what I mean, don’t you.
I may sound like I work for the BBC, but if anyone asks me, I do tend to tell them that I am not really all that English. My mum was born and raised in Moss Side though, which is one of the scummier parts of Manchester, and I lived in the city myself for a year apiece at the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, so if I am actually from anywhere in England in any meaningful sense, then it is probably Manchester.
I’ve always harboured a sort of simmering resentment for the place though, in that unfair way you do when your life is shit for all sorts of reasons and it ends up rather unreasonable reflecting on where you are living at the time. I’ve been through this all before on the Manchester Podcast, but I’ll rehash it here quickly, just to explain myself a little.
The first time around was my first year of university. Compared to everyone around me in Vienna and Singapore, where I was raised, I was really quite English. I liked English and American music, I supported Manchester United and I visited England quite regularly to see my family in Manchester. When I actually moved to England for the first time, however, I found it didn’t really work like that, that I wasn’t very English at all, and promptly endured a year of pretty severe culture shock.
The second time around I had been distracted for a year after graduation by accidentally becoming a restaurant manager, had been offered a design internship in Milan, only for that to fall through and for me to find myself stranded in Manchester again, flat broke, working in a pub and having a very hard time of getting the job for which my degree had allegedly prepared me. This led to a few too many conversation which went roughly like this:
“What do you do for a job then?” [I look around myself in a confused manner, as if the fact that I am standing behind a bar, pouring drinks and then demanding money in exchange for those drinks should make the answer to that question somewhat obvious.] “I’m a barman.” “No, I mean as a real job.” “I am a bar man.” “But surely you’re far too well-spoken and intelligent to be just a barman!” “Well, you’d think.”
It was shit, but I did listen to some fine music while I was there. Here are a couple of songs, one from the first spell and one from the second:
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Anyhow, after my shite experiences living there have tainted my memories of Manchester for the last seventeen years, things have slowly started to change. A few years ago I discovered Red Deer Club and Humble Soul, two of my favourite independent record labels in the UK. Why, I am not sure, but for the last year or two I have just been bumping into one cool Manchester music enterprise after another, and suddenly I find my negative associations with the place starting to evaporate.
Firstly, I came across Cloud Sounds, now my favourite podcast, and the blogs Folly of Youth, A New Band a Day and Pigeon Post. As well as being good in their own right, all of these lovely people have been incredibly supportive of what we’re up to here as well.
Secondly, Ruth from Fat Northerner kindly invited me to take part in two Unconvention events, one in Macclesfield, where my dear friend Tom Smith is from, and one in Salford, where United and stabbings are from. Around the same time I went to last year’s In the City as well, so I ended up spending a fair bit of time in Manchester last year and honestly, I had a blast.
So with my good relationship with the city almost entirely restored, I now also seem to be finding all sorts of interesting music stuff happening there too, and have ordered a pile of vinyl from small labels in Manchester recently.
The above picture is the vinyl starter pack from Sways Records, which just dropped through my letterbox this morning, and I can’t wait to get stuck into it tonight. I bought this for the debut single by The Louche FC, which can be heard below. I first heard these guys on a Cloud Sounds podcast, and am trying to get them up to Edinburgh for a live show sometime soon.
I’ve also just received Suffering Jukebox singles from Milk Maid and Manchester’s current A&R darlings Brown Brogues, and have been playing them loads recently. Brown Brogues are playing SXSW this year, and because they make a right old racket I might actually be able to persuade Mrs. Toad to go and see them.
Also, Static Caravan sent me through a whole pile of awesome 7″ aural pleasure recently as well – help yourself here. I found them by searching out the debut single by The Maladies of Bellafontaine, and ended up with a pile of other records as well.
And finally, Debt Records is the home to the likes of Red Tides (whose lead singer – I think – is absolutely lovely – I accidentally bumped into her upstairs at Fuel Cafe in Withington, while she was doing some embroidery or something, if I remember – this whole thing has been bit random) and Louis Barabbas & the Bedlam Six who are, of course, playing this week’s Ides of Toad gig at Henry’s. Debt Records’ ethos is to embrace live performance, focussing on good gigs in interesting places, as a way of reacting to an environment where in order to become popular recorded music is becoming more and more boring.
So apart from all these interesting projects which I have happened across in the last year or so, what I’ve found really interesting has been the self-image of Manchester’s music scene. A certain friend of mind has dismissed it as being ‘full of fucking sneering hipsters’, and given the city itself reminds me heavily of Glasgow, I think I always thought of Manchester as fashionable hipster haven.
But when I told one of my friends there that Edinburgh is good to work in because all the ambitious fashion whores tend to fuck off to Glasgow sharpish, which makes it hard to make progress here, but at least tends to mean that the people who remain are interesting and stubborn and not focussed on celebrity or stardom, their response was ‘Oh right, a bit like Manchester is with London then?’
And I suppose I’d never thought of it that way before. I’d always thought of Manchester as somewhere cool, somewhere to kind of envy, as a lot of other Edinburgh people think of Glasgow I suppose. I do forget that no matter how much you achieve, especially in something as status-orientated as the music industry, there is always someone more successful to cast envious glances towards. So next time we Edinburghers whinge about Glasgow, maybe we should just stop whining and be grateful we aren’t as isolated as Aberdeen.
Apologies for the late appearance of this post, but erm, gin interfered with my ability to function like a normal member of society yesterday so umm… well, you’ll just have to forgive me I suppose. Rest assured it hurt me more than it hurt you.
Anyway, it’s sort of a busy week this week, although it takes its own sweet time to get going. Mondy, blah, Tuesday, booring, Wednesday, nah nothing much, Thursday: MAYHEM! Well sort of. For me there will the the Wide Days launch at the Teviot during the day, and the Electric Circus in the evening, then my Fresh Air Radio show with Ruth, and then scampering off to the Voodoo Rooms to catch what I can of FOUND’s Factorycraft album launch.
Then we have the Ides of Toad returning on Friday, in Henry’s Cellar Bar this time, which will be a bit of a blast from the past for me. I went to tons of gigs at Henry’s when I was first getting interested in music in Edinburgh, but that just doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore so it’ll be nice, if a little strange, to be back there. Anyhow, this stuff is all in the Big Ol’ List below, so there’s no point prattling on about it here is there.
Thursday 3rd March 2011: FOUND at the Voodoo Rooms – album launch for Factorycraft, hosted by Limbo.
FOUND’s new album is out on Chemikal Underground, and for those who don’t already know how eye-caressingly lovely it looks, have a bit of a gander here. The album itself is surprisingly more indie rock than I would have ever have expected, and there are some absolute stormers on there. This album has been waiting to find a home for some time now, and many of the tracks are already firm live favourites – like You’re no Vincent Gallo, f’rinstance. I am not sure what tracks they might or might not be happy to share at this stage, so here’s a Toad Session version of that song. The one on the album, I promise you, is very different.
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This one should be a stomper: we have the excellent, raucous Leg, the extravagant, mental Bedlam Six and the brand spanking new Zed Penguin. I’ve not been down to Henry’s for ages, but this should be the perfect gig to return with: loud, dirty and a little bit mental.
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This is a joint fundraiser to send Withered Hand and Zoey Van Goey out to SXSW this year, and the latest installment in the Limbo chaps’ frantic start to the year.
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This has a touch of Cousteau, a touch of Richard Hawley and even a touch of our own Savings and Loan to it, and for those whose liver hasn’t been utterly obliterated by the preceding three days, I think this looks like a really good bet, particularly if you are looking for something non-local for a change at the end of the week.
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Those total fucking bastards and their fucking album fucking launch. I didn’t even have my first pint until about ten o’clock at night, but I still feel pretty fucked this morning.
