I am learning to despise hotel internet.  Whether I book myself and end up staying in a fucking Travelodge or Mrs. Toad books and we end up staying on one of the larger guest suites at Buckingham fucking Palace, absolutely all of them have such risibly bad internet connections that recording a podcast leaves me tearing my fucking hair out.

I couldn’t even get the online image editor to load properly, so the image is that rather pathetic, borderline clipart stinker you see in the top right hand corner.  Dreadful.  My art teachers would be justifiably disappointed.

Anyhow, this is called the Plancast for one simple and far from compelling reason: the fact that Mrs. Toad and I are down in London and have had to be clinically heartless in who we do and don’t see.  We don’t exactly have lots of friends down South, but still far too many to see in one weekend and at times in the past we have tried to do too much and ended up being inadvertently rude to everyone.

Direct download: Toadcast #174 – The Plancast

01. Love Inks – Blackeye (00.06)
02. Dubstar – The Day I See You Again (04.57)
03. Rev I.B. Ware with Wife and Son – I Wouldn’t Mind Dying (But I Gotta Go By Myself (12.01)
04. Billy Bragg & Wilco – Airline to Heaven (18.30)
05. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Hard Time in a Terrible Land (23.12)
06. I Break Horses – Hearts (29.39)
07. Tusk Tusk – Out of Tune and Out of Time (37.22)
08. Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark (41.01)
09. Girls Names – Nothing More to Say (46.02)
10. Thomas Tantrum – Hot Hot Summer (51.33)
11. Jarad Miles – Darjeeling (56.04)

And what, you might ask, is a Stinky Liberace?  Well I will tell you.  It comes from a strange and strangely detailed dream I had last night, which I will try and explain in the sanest way possible.

Myself and a random other person were monitoring someone’s internet usage for some unspecified reason or other.  We noted that the pages were flicking by so fast that it was probable that they were just scrolling through but not actually reading anything.

Then, for the briefest second, another page popped up and then vanished again.  ‘Oh,’ I thought to myself, ‘so they are reading something.’ I went to have a look at what it was, and as I did I was vaguely aware, out of the corner of my eye, of someone running out of the front of the building to the public toilets across the road.  At this point I became aware, in that vague way you do in dreams, that we were in South America.

Anyway, I went to investigate the page which had snagged the attention of the person we were (for no reason that remember being aware of) spying on.  It was just a plain text ad a bit like the ones on Google, and not very interesting, and beside it was a link which said something like those captions you see on Page 3 of the Sun: ‘Michelle, 23, from Taunton’ or something like that.

‘You dirty bastard’, I thought to myself. ‘You don’t pay attention to anything, but you’re aware enough to find the link to the titillating picture of the pretty girl.’  And then I thought, ‘ah fuck it, I might as well’ and clicked on the link myself.

There was nothing there, though, just a small, vague jpeg of what looked a bit like one of those 3D barcodes.  ‘Ach, just bait for spyware’, I thought and peered at it to see what the fuzzy little thumbnail might actually be.  At that point someone jumped up and pointed and screeched with laughter “He got a Stinky Liberace, he got a Stinky Liberace!”

Everyone around me was cackling with glee and pointing, but I had no idea what they were on about, but I happened to put my hand up to my head, and found I had this nasty glue-like substance in my hair.  It suddenly dawned on me why that guy earlier had dashed across the road to the public toilet – he had to wash it out fast.

So I charged off myself and frantically barged someone out of the way, to plug up the sink and run the hot water.  Because the toilet was a bit of a shack in South America there wasn’t much handsoap, so I scrabbled around trying to cobble together whatever I could to wash whatever it was out of my hair.

Around now it dawned on me that a Stinky Liberace was one of those nasty internet pranks to dupe people into clicking on links and then shaming them by getting them to lean into the monitor to peer at the vague thumbnail before shooting some sort of nasty gluey stuff at them as the punchline. There was even a song everyone was singing at me, with a sort of circus-like tune: “He got a Stinky Liberaaaa-chee! He got a Stinky Liberaaaaa-chee!”

And all the time I was wrestling people out of the way in that public toilet in South America to get at the sink and all the handsoap I could get my hands on was ‘How is that fucking possible, it shouldn’t be possible to make something like that squirt out of a computer’ while that fucking annoying song rang around the bloody place.

So now you know what a Stinky Liberace is.  Be careful what you click on on the internet people, or you could end up trying to wash your hair in the sink of a public toilet in South America.  And then what a tool you’d feel.

And you thought you were strange.

I even, as soon as I woke up, looked up the term ‘Stinky Liberace’ to see how the fuck it ended up popping into my head, but it seems not to exist.  Entirely a product of my sleeping brain, apparently.  Which is reassuring in some ways, and kind of terrifying in others.

Anyway, ummm… yeah, I’ll stop now, here’s the Friday Fives.

1. In a word, how did this post make you feel?
2. Stupidest email/attachment anyone ever forwarded you.
3. Of which beast would you like stuffed and mounted head to hang above your fireplace?
4. Best prank you’ve ever played.
5. Best (ie worst) prank that has been played on you.

These five songs were foisted upon me by Neil from Meursault because (with the exception of a particular Scottish emo-folk band) he thinks my music taste is fucking shite.

Beck – Burnt Orange Peel

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The Notwist – Gloomy Planets

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Melanie – What Have They Done to My Song, Ma

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Fog – Ditherer

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Dufus – Radiation

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I love how I’m the self-appointed expert around here, but every damn fucker I know has better taste in music than me.  DAMN YOU, INTERNET!

I’ve read a lot of comparisons to describe Lady Lazarus’s music, and I think that if I were looking for one you might recognise I might plump for a slightly more sparsely-arranged Perfume Genius.  Yes, even more sparsely-arranged.

Although, unlike the rather harrowing nature of the barest grip on normality which seemed to appear all over the Perfume Genius album, this seems more of a series of sad, but manageable set of songs.  Those not about nearly being torn apart, but more about the kind of mind games you learn to keep yourself together in hard times.

On the assumption that you don’t hang on my every word and read every glib, vacuous post I spill forth on this blog I might actually prefer to give you a nudge back to recent reviews of The Honorable Worm and Powerdove. I was listening to all three of these album on pretty heavy rotation at much the same time, and for all they aren’t exactly all that similar, they feel closely related in some ways.

Mantic, for example, uses silence in a very similar way to the Powerdove album – in much the same way The Honorable Worm uses the low level white noise of harmonium drone which permeates his album – to generate an atmosphere where there is very little happening and therefore every single thing which does ends up counting a lot more.

This record isn’t long, exactly, but my initial enthusiasm doesn’t always quite seem to make it to the end, despite the fact that I really want it to.  I know this is a particularly tired old refrain in my album reviews, so I wouldn’t take it too seriously, but I’m still not sure this couldn’t have either done with being trimmed a little, or shaken up somewhere in the middle third.

Nevertheless, I’m really glad I found this.  It’s another of those records where the artist found attempts to record it more professionally weren’t sounding as good as the demos and very wisely returned to the methods which were producing the results.  It’s reverby and lo-fi, but nevertheless a really lovely album.

Lady Lazarus – Nazarite Oath

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Lady Lazarus – Fighting Words and Fists

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Bandcamp | More mp3s

David Thomas Broughton was one of the highlights of last weekend’s Homegame festival, as far as I was concerned. That won’t be a surprise to my older readers (or anyone who listened to this week’s podcast), but it’s been a while since I’ve mentioned him on the site.

He’s a tricky fellow.  His performances depend on the spontaneous and the physical to the extent that it can be quite far removed from the records.  Or at least, the core of the songs tend to still be there, but he seems to leave so much undefined, to be made up on the spot, that you could see the same song a dozen times and not even realise until halfway through on each occasion.

I know a lot of people who have seen him live and hated him, and where usually that would goad me into calling people nasty names on the internet, in terms of DTB I actually have some sympathy.  He is an idiosyncratic performer to begin with, which can always put people off, but I have also seen him be downright bloody-minded and hostile with his audience when gigs haven’t been going well, so I can see people not taking to him.  His voice is kinda funny too.

This doesn’t matter to me of course because I think the lad’s bloody brilliant, and I think I repeatedly and increasingly annoyingly insisted on telling him so at Homegame.  And he has a new album.  And after all that talk of his occasionally obtuse experimentalism, it’s a short, snappy pop album and an absolute joy.

Often his songs drift through random noises and sound collages, from the harsh to the amusing to the impenetrable, only for scraps of melody and genuine beauty to emerge on occasions rare enough to keep you perplexed yet frequent enough to keep you hooked.  This is nothing like that though, and nor is the rest of the album.

I’ll review it properly after its release date, which is in a week or two on the Brainlove Records, but for now this video is just so splendid it needed to be thrust upon the internets immediately.

Well it’s been a while since we announced an actual, real new release on Song, by Toad Records but here is one for you: the debut single from King Post Kitsch, called Don’t You Touch my Fucking Honeytone.

The song comes out on Monday on a rather special,  limited edition four-song white 7″, with a free download code, and I will be posting pre-orders tomorrow. The title actually has nothing to do with the song itself, but the guitar on his debut album The Party’s Over, which this single is from, was all recorded on a tiny wee Danelectro Honeytone, so I suppose there’s sort of a connection, tenuous as it might be.

And erm, also… er, just buy one.  Please. You can do that here.

King Post Kitsch – Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone by Song, by Toad

This is a question no-one can answer of course, but the closer you get to bands and musicians the more relevant it becomes: how much is the actual music itself influencing how much I like music?

I never thought about it much, but I suppose it’s at its most evident when you go on holiday.  Sitting on the beach in Southeast Asia I’ve found myself humming along to David Gray, reggae, even some truly awful chillout and, at the time, actually enjoying it.

I had an amazing time at Homegame, but I remember going along for the first time.  This was something like 2006, and I didn’t really know anything about the Fence Collective nor indeed any of the bands other than James Yorkston and King Creosote.  My sales pitch to Mrs. Toad to get her along was “Well a lot of the bands aren’t that great, but some of them are amazing, and it’s in a tiny Scottish fishing village for fuck’s sake, what could go wrong?”

I was right, of course, but I find myself wondering about that statement in retrospect. I have been consistently excited about the lineups over the last few years, and I ask myself a couple of questions.  Firstly, is this just down to being more interested on DIY music these days, so I just know the bands better?  Or, possibly, are the bills much the same quality, but I now know I am going to have such a good time that I ignore the bands on the bill I don’t like, focus on the good ones, and mentally fill in the gaps with Homegamefun and assume everything’s just brilliant?

Then there’s the personal side: I know lots of these bands personally by now, which must change things, but I don’t really know to what extent.  There are loads of people who I personally like a great deal, and have shared many pints with, whose bands have never been so much as mentioned on these pages, so I clearly don’t just like stuff because I am pals with the band, but it must change something.

But when I think about dancing around like a pillock this weekend I do wonder, if I just heard the same stuff innocently on a stereo, would I enjoy it as much as I do now?  I suppose I probably wouldn’t.  My love for these bands is pretty impossible to separate from the amount of time I’ve spent leaping around like a muppet to their tunes, so surely if those things hadn’t happened it would take something away from my relationship with the music. I’m not sure what, but something.

I only bring this up because I wonder about explaining to people just how much fun Homegame actually is.  I could do the ‘here, listen to this band and that band and the other band’, which I guess I do on Song, by Toad to an extent, but I doubt I could really put it across properly. And as you get more involved in music that gulf between bands who are just bands, and bands you develop quite involved relationships with for one reason or another just widens.

Of course if I hadn’t loved King Creosote and James Yorkston I would never have been drawn to Homegame, and if I hadn’t loved what I’d heard once I got there I wouldn’t have kept on returning. But there’s so much more to it now, it seems kind of unfair on ‘other music’ to even try and make a direct comparison.  The fun of it comes from so many things – the manageable size making it so sociable, the new people you always end up meeting, the bands you’ve never seen before as much as the bands you’ve seen a dozen times, and of course the location and the whole annual ritual of it.

It’s a meaningless question of course.  Music fits in with the rest of your life and it’s an interactive relationship, so your experience of everything depends on everything else, and you can get as much or as little out of music as you personally choose.

But I sometimes wonder what random pop-punk or experimental electronic band from just outside Wycombe I could have developed an equally joyous relationship with had we both just happened to be around at the right time and the right place.

I think Tom Waits could be playing in Edinburgh this week and I would strongly consider missing it.  I have already spent a day sleeping it off, but I am still not convinced I have entirely dealt with the damage of Homegame just yet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t.

What I have done though is just about pull myself together to the point where I feel emotionally capable of dealing with our excellent lineup at the Bristo Hall tonight: Francois, This is the Kit and Babe.  With the exception of Babe I made the effort to avoid them all at Homegame, just to make tonight’s gig more special.

Then I am going to sleep again.  Lots.

Tuesday 10th May 2011: Francois & the Atlas Mountains, This is the Kit & Babe at the Bristo Hall.

This is the perfect opportunity for those who missed Homegame to figure out what we’ve all been going on about, and I can tell you that Babe (who are Gerard from Findo Gask’s new band) were absolutely storming on the weekend.  Also, Francois has just signed to Domino, so there will be excitement all round.

Tuesday 10th May 2011: Fucked Up, Black Lungs and Iceage at Cabaret Voltaire.

I actually know almost nothing about Fucked Up, but on Record Stor SHOP! Day they released the rather excellent David’s Town, which is a compilation of fictional bands from an equally fictional British seaside town.  This idea, and the execution of it, were brilliant enough in themselves that I thought this gig definitely merited mention here.  But of course you’ll all be at Francois right?  RIGHT?

Animal Man – Do You Feed? From Fucked Up’s Record Shop Day release David’s Town.

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Friday 13th May 2011: The Douglas Firs, Le Reno Amps, The Scottish Enlightenment & Iliop at Old St Paul’s Church (the one in town, not the one in Leith!).

Somewhat reversing my habit of releasing Glasgow bands like King Post Kitsch, Yusuf Azak and Inspector Tapehead from the other side of the M8, Al at Armellodie have done with The Douglas Firs what Chemikal did with FOUND earlier in the year, and turn the traffic in the opposite direction. This is the album release celebration for The Douglas Firs

This is the post-Homegame, ‘dear Jesus please just let me sleep for a week, good god someone please fetch me a green vegetable’ podcast.

I can just about keep my head together enough to get through this, but then I have the Monday listings to write and the bloody Francois/This is the Kit/Babe gig to organise tonight as well.  Aargh!

I also have all sorts of other things to do this week, but after the sort of mind-boggling battering your mind and your liver get at Homegame I am not sure I can face any of it.  I am going back to sleep, wake me up in June.

Direct download: Toadcast #173 – The Brokencast

01. FOUND – I’ll Wake With a Seismic Head No More (00.34)
02. Randolph’s Leap – Counting Sheep (7:57)
03. Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb (Piano Version) (13.57)
04. The Singleman Affair – If I Only Fell in Love When I Was Young (21.16)
05. eagleowl – Into the Fold (Toad Session) (29.00)
06. The Last Battle – Ruins (35.07)
07. King Creosote & the Earlies – Bats in the Attic (Live on 6Music with Mark Riley) (40.23)
08. Sweet Baboo – Girl Under a Tree (45.37)
09. David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got No Sole (54.57)

No, not really.  My standard excuse for not doing drugs, and I think it’s a good one, is that I struggle enough to contain the one in which I do partake, which is alcohol.  Adding another self-destructive pharmaceutical to the list would just be plain fucking silly. And so I have never partaken of anything more horrifying than marijuana. I think this would make me a shit parent.

“Don’t do drugs”
“Why, Dad?”
“Umm, I dunno, but mostly because they’re a pointless waste of everyone’s time.”
“Oh right, so they’re not evil or anything?”
“Well no, but they’re kind of like sugar and salt – mostly fun but best avoided in general.”

It’s not exactly a chilling message of horror, is it.  Don’t do drugs because, more than anything, if you get caught doing them bad things might happen.  Otherwise, who fucking cares? But some of them are quite ropey.  Dammit, I want to write a brochure for teh Gubmint.

Anyhow, it’s Friday, so time to snort coke off a teenage Hungarian hooker’s backside and get so drunk you fall asleep in a gutter in a town you’ve never been to before.  Like Livingstone.  And please don’t go to Livingstone, because no disrespect, but it really is fucking shit.

Umm… so yes, the Friday Fives. Sorry ’bout that!

1. If you were to buy a teenager off eBay for sexual tasks, where would you buy them from?
2. If you were to be king or queen of some kingdom or other, which would it be?
3. Christen your dragon protector.
4. If someone had to set Nick Hornby on fire for being one of the worst authors in living memory, to which part would you put the taper first?
5. If you owned a record shop, which album that no-one would ever buy would take pride of place in your window display?

This week’s five songs were taken from the High Fidelity soundtrack.

The Jam – Town Called Malice

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Smog – Cold Blooded Old Times

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The Beta Band – Dry the Rain

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Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Shipbuilding

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Bob Dylan – Most of the Time

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I haven’t been all that excited by new Scottish bands for a while, so it’s quite nice to see some more interesting ones emerging again.

Plastic Animals are Edinburgh based and have apparently been going for ages, but have only recently acquired a manager, who has basically been whipping them into shape to get their tunes out there, get releasing stuff and get bloody playing.

They have an EP launch at Sneaky Pete’s in July with the rather excellent Paws, and this is a gig I will be attending with considerable interest.  There’s not much to know about them so far, but they keep allowing interesting things to trickle out via their Tumblr site.

The latest is the really rather excellent Test, which I happened across today.  I friend of mine asked if I was listening to the new King Creosote and Jon Hopkins album, and that’s kind of what it sounds like – a really slow, dreamy atmosphere, plenty of hiss and drone, and lovely vocals.  Some of their other stuff is a bit more guitary – more in the standard pop song vein, I suppose you could say – and sometimes a pleasant afternoon daydream away from shoegaze.

I don’t really know enough about this band to get too giddy just yet, but they seem really promising, and if they can build on the excellence of Test then they could well be ones to keep an eye on.

Plastic Animals – It Fell Apart (Demo)

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