There are all sorts of holes I could pick in this – the Black Tambourine meets Hill Valley circa 1955 combination is a very, very long way from being original these days, for example.  But in the end, this is just really fucking brilliantly enjoyable pop music, with enough bite and grizzle to be beyond mere musical pastiche, and the kind of lyrics which swing between the affectionately saccharine and the hilariously cynical with such mischief I can’t help but love this album.

The swoonfully pretty ‘ba-ba-paaa‘s of DQYDJB are so brilliantly at odds with the cynical message of the song itself that I just can’t help but giggle when I hear it.  She Don’t Love You would be a cookie-cutter reproduction of the soundtrack to a million American high school movies were it not for (almost) modern touches about unplayed mixtapes and the ‘fuck, did he just say what I thought he said’ lines about the villainess of the title being caught “underneath the bleachers sucking off the quarterback” and somewhat cruel observations about her preferring “guys who play guitars“.

Now, to be fair, in amongst the brilliance there are a few songs I personally think don’t really click.  Bossanova sounds just a little bit like the reason we wrote off the Strokes, and Fool in Love doesn’t really do it for me either. The guitar solos are often of the rather cheesy variety, but when the whole album takes as much joy as this one does in emphasising and then subverting that kind of cheese, it’s just part of the fun.  It may not always work, exactly, but to quibble about it would be to miss the point.

There are elements of The Beatles, elements of The Clash even – the awesome Hair of the Dog – and that all-pervading air of a kind of candy cane nostalgia which has become so distorted in rose-tinted hindsight that it might no longer bear any real relation to an actual past.  The rough, garage elements of the production add to this sense of artifice, and there is something so inherently playful in their courting of this contradiction that even when it doesn’t click with me, I don’t mind, I still love it.  It’s the kind of album that would effortlessly charm your parents and deflower you sweatily on the sofa the minute they left the house.

The Honey Pies – DQYDJB

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The Honey Pies – She Don’t Love You

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Does Carl Barat at the Liquid Rooms on Thursday qualify as an interesting gig for this page?  I am not sure.  A couple of years ago it might have.  I saw Dirty Pretty Things at the Corn Exchange back in 200somethingsomething and, much like their album, found them to be highly enjoyable but always slightly short of earth-shattering.

Somehow, not all that many years later, the gig seems almost completely irrelevant, both to me and, I imagine, to almost anyone reading this. No wonder musicians often end up with a love-hate relationship with their fans – we can be a fickle bunch of bastards and no mistake.

Anyhow, it’s pretty quiet this week, so I am going to break from precedent and list a Glasgow gig for a change.  You’ll see why…

Wednesday 6th April 2011: Jonnie Common’s Deskjob launch at the Captain’s Rest (Glasgow).

See, normally I wouldn’t list a Glasgow gig, but this one is a bit special.  Jonnie is launching Deskjob this week, which is a collaborative album whereby some of his favourite bands came round to his house and recorded the bare bones of a song, and he then built up the rest of the song around this.

He’s adamant that they aren’t remixes, so I suppose you would have to call this more of an old-fashioned producer’s album.  All but one of the bands (I think) are getting together at the Captain’s Rest in Glasgow on Wednesday, and Jonnie’s being a little elusive about previews, so I am going to just embed his thirty second snippets here instead of including a downloadable song as I usually might.
Jonnie Common presents DESKJOB – album preview (paper)clips by Jonnie Common

Wednesday 6th April 2011: Broken Records (acoustic) at the Bristo Hall.

I am not sure exactly how acoustic this is going to be, but it is the latest in an ongoing series of fundraising gigs being held to help save the Forest Cafe from extinction, after the collapse of the Edinburgh University Settlement.   Broken Records can go from very loud indeed to extremely minimal with equal success, so I highly recommend this. They probably won’t be quite as pared-down as in this video, but I still like it:

Thursday 7th April 2011: Wide Days at the Teviot, with live showcases in the evening.

There’s more to explain about Wide Days than can be discussed in this brief paragraph, but here are the very brief highlights: four seminars during the day, based on providing as much practical advice to DIY musicians as possible, followed by a series of live showcases in the evening, with bands like Withered Hand, Paws, Rachael Sermanni and several others playing gigs at a variety of venues across Edinburgh.  Go to their website for a more detailed explanation – and see you there.

Sunday The Late Call, The Japanese War Effort & The Wee Rogue at the Wee Red Bar.

The Gentle Invasion’s return to the world of promotion so pleased me that I managed to forget to include this initially, so sorry about that! The Late Call make rather lush acoustic pop, The Japanese War Effort could be playing anything from solo with guitar to solo with all sorts of loop pedals and odd boxes which make strange noises, and The Wee Rogue play gorgeously hushed folk songs. This will be a good gig, I can pretty much promise you.

The internet works in unusual ways.  I know Jon Rooney because he sent through his music (the excellent Virgin of the Birds) for review on Song, by Toad, then he happened to be in Edinburgh for New Year’s Eve a couple of years back and ended up playing a house gig at our place, and then sent us an email nudging us towards some of the best places in Austin when we were out for SXSW last month.

He also introduced me to Levi who writes Ball of Wax, and also curates the Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly, which is a compilation CD, in beautiful hand-printed packaging, of music Levi is especially enjoying at that particular moment.

He kindly invited me to submit some Song, by Toad Records music for Volume 23, and two of our bands (The Savings and Loan and Trips and Falls) ended up being selected, which is excellent news. So, please go here and purchase a copy, and many thanks to Levi for including us.

Apparently no-one visits websites anymore, because it’s all about the social media and so on and so forth, so I suppose most of you have already seen this.

In case you haven’t, however, I have uploaded a free Song, by Toad Records sampler to Bandcamp, with songs from some of our more recent releases, as well as a healthy dose of new material from the releases we have planned for the rest of the year.

Our release schedule is slowly filling up, as well.  Before a brief break for the Edinburgh Festival we have four-song 7″ releases by King Post Kitsch and Lil Daggers, we have Surrender to Summer by The Japanese War Effort on 10″ vinyl, and we have albums by Lach and King Post Kitsch.  It is going to be very fucking busy indeed.

So, before all that excitement starts I figured I might as well give away some free sweeties to get people excited.  And here it is, downloadable for free from Bandcamp.  Enjoy!

It is a very, very fine Spring day indeed, this morning in Edinburgh, and so needless to say I am going to spend it in my office talking to imaginary people on the internet.

This week we are simply going to have a bit of a trawl through my inbox.  As I mention halfway through the podcast, I now have unlistened albums totalling a mighty one day, eighteen hours and thirty-four minutes worth of music.  So if you are wondering why I haven’t reviewed this that or the other, then that probably has something to do with it.

The trickiest part, of course, is that it’s not enough to simply have listened to something. To actually have anything resembling an intelligent comment to make you need to listen to something really quite often, and know the ins and outs of an album pretty well.  This takes a lot more than just a once-over lasting for one day, eighteen hours and thirty-four minutes.

Direct download: Toadcast #168 – The Springcast

01. The Lovely Eggs – Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It) (00.40)
02. Lady Lazarus – Fighting Words & Fists (06.46)
03. Bill Callahan – Drover (12.09)
04. Evil Hand – Returned in Time (20.32)
05. Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon (24.41)
06. Teens – Golden Years (28.36)
07. The Spook School – Hallam (32.57)
08. The Sandwitches – Lightfoot (38.37)
09. Honeydrum – Human Stuff (45.09)
10. Timber Timbre – Woman (46.42)
11. Clem Snide – Pale Blue Eyes (54.29)

eBay is a dange… hang on.  How the fuck are you supposed to capitalise eBay at the start of a sentence?  I suppose it has to be EBay doesn’t it?  It just looks wrong. ITunes? Damn these people and their stupid typography.  I miss the days of Wilberforce Carmichael’s Internet Music Emporium and the like.

Anyhow, as I was saying, eBay is a fucking menace.  I am looking up old record players on there at the moment, and have been distracted by even older mics.  It’s terrifying, particularly with their seductively low bids when things are a day or two away from closing.  so tempting, so very very tempting… Which is exactly how our living room ended up covered in Russian propaganda posters.

See:

See what I mean.  Just a clicky-clicky away from disaster. Anyhow, bollocks to all of this, it’s Friday, which means talking garbage on the internet and generally wasting what little remains of the working week.  This is a good thing.

1. Shopping disaster.
2. Shopping triumph.
3. Top present you’ve ever received.
4. Top present you’ve bought for someone.
5. Top present you will be buying for yourself as soon as you can afford it.

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – Summer’s Been Good From the Start

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Shivaree – Reseda Casino

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Mark Eitzel – Move on Up

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Phantom Planet – California

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Rufus Wainright – One Man Guy

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