This podcast was recorded – not a word of a lie – on a deserted mountaintop in Corsica in the shadow of a ruined castle.  Not an especially enormous ruined castle, I’ll grant you, but the shadow of a ruined castle nevertheless.

I will try and show you this as clearly as possible when I choose the picture for the mp3 tag and all that stuff, but I honestly doubt it will be all that easy.  Vast panoramas of rocky mountains don’t really come across all that well in photos, particularly when the only device you have with you with which to take them is an iPhone.

Anyhow, having recorded this, the challenge is going to be to find somewhere to upload the fucker.  Bank machines and shops which let you pay by card are pretty scarce commodities in the interior of the island, never mind a decent internet connection.

Direct download: Toadcast #180 – The Corsicast

01. Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Come a Long Way (00.09)
02. Yusuf Azak – Lay Me Down (05.36)
03. The Black Tambourines – Better Off Dead (09.54)
04. Fog – 10th Avenue Freakout (18.42)
05. Six Organs of Admittance – Saint Cloud (23.19)
06. Adam Stafford – Fire & Theft (33.20)
07. Neil Young – Old Man (Live at Massey Hall 1971) (38.45)
08. Girls Names – I Lose (46.53)
09. Mavis the Dog – End of Our Day (50.55)
10. Jenny Reeve & Jill O’Sullivan – Tooth & Claw (56.59)

I can think of a couple of things going on this week based on my Facebook events calendar, but feel free to fill in the gaps in the comments section to promote anything happening you’d like to give a big “up” to. Particularly if you think Matthew wouldn’t like it.

Monday 27th June – Pilrig St. Paul’s Church Hall – Woodpigeon, Eagleowl and Rob St. John

I’ll refrain from promoting this as watching the same band play three times with different lead singers, because it will be bloody brilliant. And as Mark Woodpigeon pointed out last night, they will all have completely different sounds

Thursday 30th June – The Wee Red Bar – The Last Battle & Friends

This should be a hell of a night, being as the Last Battle have an EP to launch and can count the likes of King Creosote and Loch Awe amongst their supporting friends. There may even be a surprise guest or four on the bill too, I can’t mention who, but this show will certainly be more than an excuse to only go out and get drunk that night.

Right! Over to you, fill the comments with your suggestions on where Edinburgh’s gig-going public can spend their cash this week!

I’m in the process of moving home again. I’ve moved six times since I’ve been in Edinburgh and I have to admit I’m getting thoroughly fed up with it. At the moment I’m just looking for a room so I’ll probably be on the move again before long. Yaaawwnn….

We had to move out of our last flat rather quickly as a water leak behind the walls we reported in January was neglected by the letting agency until, well now really, and in the meantime the walls have rotted and the floors have buckled. So they now have to rip the whole lot out and start again. Idiots.

Anyway. It’s been on my mind unsurprisingly so I thought it would do as a Friday Five theme. Everybody lives somewhere so we must have some experiences we can share or advice to offer each other. Hopefully anyway. Remember to come out of the woodwork if you’ve been lurking!

1. Have you got any disaster stories about your homes to tell?
2. What is the most important quality I should look for in a new housemate?
3. Have you ever lived with any complete weirdos?
4. What’s the most unusual place you’ve stayed – even if only for a night?
5. Describe your dream home.
 

This week began with the terribly sad news of the death of Clarence Clemons of the E-Street Band. Clemons had been a member of Bruce Springsteen’s legendary backing band since 1969, and his exuberant saxophone was a key component in creating the distinctive sound of Springsteen’s early records.

You’ll have read reams about Clemons’ vast contribution to Springsteen’s career in obituaries and articles written since last weekend, so I won’t bore you with a copy-and-paste job here; but I had an interesting conversation with Martin Savings & Loan the other day about where the loss of Clemons leaves the E-Street Band as a viable outfit moving forward.

When original E-Street Band organist Danny Federici died a few years ago; Charles Giordano, Federici’s opposite number from the band Springsteen had been working with on the Seeger Sessions project, shifted sideways and filled Federici’s E-Street position.

With no disrespect to Danny Federici or his legacy, it won’t be so straightforward for Springsteen to bring a sub off the bench to fill Clemons’ sizable shoes.

I don’t think it will simply be a case of finding another horn player competent enough to play Clemons’ parts in the songs. Both Clemons and Springsteen are on record stating that the first time they jammed together in 1969, few words were spoken but they felt they shared a subconscious “connection”; that they were each what the other had been searching for in a muse.

Clemons delivered a dynamism and sense of motion to Springsteen’s epic ballads. Put simply, he brought the soul, providing an echo of classic rock n’ roll history. His energy and enthusiasm seemed to electrify the sound of both the records and the band’s live performances. In concert , while the rest of the band would either prowl hunched and elusive with their electric guitars, or be nailed to the spot by their drums or keyboard rigs; Clemons would stand shoulder to shoulder with Springsteen at the front of the stage, almost a co-frontman.  

He was the perfect foil for Springsteen. Physically opposites; a huge athletic black man, a mountain of rippling muscles clad in colourful, exotic fashions, stood strident alongside this scrawny, scruffy white dude in worn-out denims and ripped lumberjack shirts, they were a compelling spectacle. And musically Clemons’ style – a mixture of jazz, funk, gospel and traditional rock n’ roll – can’t have been seen as the obvious accompaniment to  Springsteen’s introspective, angry ballads composed on an acoustic guitar.

Yet despite – or probably because of - that juxtaposition, the partnership worked and created some of the most popular American music recorded in the last forty years or so. I’m aware that Bruce Springsteen is a favourite amongst many of the readers and contributors to this site, and a love of his music – perhaps reflecting Clemons’ and Springsteen’s odd-couple companionship – unites musicians and fans of disparate tastes and genres that I speak to.

So beyond the immediate devastating loss, where do Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band go from here?

As you have probably gleaned from the lack of action around here recently, Mrs. Toad and I are on holiday at the moment, hence no updates.  This is not to say that the blog is going to be abandoned for the fortnight we are away, just that the schedule of updates might be a little sluggish.

I am not intending to give you all the gory details of our holiday, not least because for those left at work that would be rather ungracious gloating, but safe to say we are having fun.  We got the ferry out to Corsica on Sunday and have been driving down the coast.  It’s all a bit resorty, so we have one last day on the beach tomorrow and then we’ll head up into the mountains, which is where the ‘real’ Corsica is to be found, apparently.

In musical terms, we ended up coming out here, knowing we were going to be renting a car, but with only one CD: the Song, by Toad Records sampler.  Then, after a day, once Mrs. Toad was getting homicidally bored of hearing the same album again and again and again, we finally realised the car we’ve rented has a USB port, and will read any music files on a pen drive.  And what do I happen to have with me?  Why every damn music file in my inbox, that’s what!  Haha!

So now we are driving through Corsica listening to immaculately cutting-edge indie tunes.  Take that, French radio!  So umm, well, here are some quick holiday snaps.  Just in case you give a flying fuck, which I accept you probably don’t.

Asterix!  Obelix!  Menhirs!  That’s a fucking menhir, that is, and there’s bloody loads of them here – awesome!

The reason this is called the Nukecast is because I am pretty irritated by the exaggeration of just how horrible it is to be alive in 2011.  2011 is a total piece of piss.  It’s easy, unthreatening and perfectly comfortable, and the idea that the modern world is in any way topsy-turvy is just plain silly.

I am not all that old, but even the eighties, when I was a kid, were far rougher than this.  There was actual genuine menace, the world might just have been about to end in a nuclear fireball, and no-one had anything you could honestly call a proper job.

So I complain about this for about an hour, while Mrs. Toad calls me an idiot.  Welcome to the drunken Toadcasts.  Again.

Direct download: Toadcast #179 – The Nukecast

01. Tom Lehrer – Who’s Next (00.08)
02. Billy Bragg – Think Again (10.34)
03. Milk Maid – Girl (21.07)
04. Odonis Odonis – Mr. Smith (24.06)
05. Sonny & the Sunsets – I Wanna Do It (31.09)
06. Phil Ochs – Talking Cuban Crisis (41.19)
07. Crystal Swells – Dead Awake (47.43)
08. Male Bonding – Bones (52.07)
09. M.J. Hibbett & the Validators – The Fight for History (63.10)
10. Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (72.33)

I happened across that fascinating little video this week sometime, and it’s a really odd mixture of hypnotic, fascinating and really quite unsettling.

The video is simply a plot of nuclear explosions over time, and despite being ten minutes in length, is nevertheless really difficult to turn away from.  What’s particularly disturbing is watching how a flurry of test detonations in any one country seems to trigger a retaliatory fit of posturing in another.

It’s also kind of chilling to watch the increases in activity triggered by events like the Cuban Missile Crisis.  It’s easy to think now that they’d never have really done it, but human beings are not particularly good at measuring self-interest when they decide that someone needs to be taught a lesson.  In fact being willing to inflict harm on yourself just to punish someone else with sufficient force is a notable quirk of how collective morality is maintained by social animals. So umm… yes, it was probably closer than we allow ourselves to think from the safe distance of 2011.

Human beings seem to have particularly laughable memories when it comes to this sort of thing actually.  I was spectacularly annoyed by all the financial analysts proclaiming the worst recession since the Great Depression, when the housing and credit markets collapsed a few years back.  Fuck, were none of these cunts alive during the eighties?

I know we remember the eighties as being full of comical haircuts, synth pop and twats from ‘The City’* making shitloads of money, but it was also the decade which spawned the Miners’ Strikes, the Poll Tax Riots (just) and Boys From the Black Stuff.

And even as a kid I remember the threat of nuclear annihilation feeling very, very real.  All this chat about the world not being a safe place now because of the ever-present terrorist threat is total bollocks.  The IRA were extremely active during the eighties, and they’ve killed more people than fucking Al Qaeda (thanks America, sucks when people harbour terrorists, doesn’t it), but beyond that we all lived with that constant feeling of low-level dread that at some point the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. might actual just melt humanity clean off the face of the fucking planet.

So umm, how about some fun, after that little rant then.

1. Can you think of a decent song about nuclear armageddon?
2. Name someone nowadays you would least trust with the Big Red Button.
3. Was there anything good about the Cold War?
4. Where were you when the Wall came down?
5. Who seems most likely to go fucking mental and nuke someone in the current political landscape?

M.J. Hibbett and the Validators – The Fight for History

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Phil Ochs – Talking Cuban Crisis

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Tom Lehrer – We Will All Go Together When We Go

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Billy Bragg – Think Again (Dick Gaughan Cover)

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The Piranhas – Tom Hark

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*The City?  That’s lovely, which one?

While I may use comparisons between bands a lot when writing about music, I tend to avoid the ‘if you like fish, you must like chocolate’ approach to music reviewing, but I am going to break that habit now.

I reckon that if you like eagleowl (and you’re a fool if you don’t) then you are going to love this.

In part, that’s quite a superficial, stylistic comparison based on drones and atmosphere and the deep rumble of bowed strings, harmonium and vocal harmonies to underpin the music.  Certainly eagleowl are a more playful and less grandiose band, so perhaps treat it with a pinch of salt.

One of the most striking things about this record, after I’ve just spent a whole paragraph talking about the mood and instrumentation, is actually the lead vocal.  It is direct and clear and most clearly conveys the sense of melodrama, and I reckon this is likely to be the key sticking point for people.

The vocal sits above the musical landscape, with clear distance between it and the rest of the music, and it is really quite dominant in the mix.  If you like it, which I do, then you’ll love this, but I can easily imagine some people finding it a little much.

For a band I have only just been introduced to, it seems these guys have been around for a while.  Their first release appears to have been in 2006, and they have an extensive back catalogue of CD-Rs before releasing their last couple of things on vinyl.

This vinyl can be bought at the brilliant Endless Nest website, the home to so much good music I nearly got a divorce over how much I spent there.  Endless Nest are apparently a collective, rather than a single record label, and as such the music to be found there is stylistically really quite scattered.  This is the place I found the wild, gleeful music of The Sandwitches, for example, and now this.

It may be dramatically different to The Sandwitches, but this is still exuberant in a way, though. There’s something exhilarating about the way they court the darkness in their own music, as if it is something which swims around them and envelops them, and is something they encourage and indulge.

As such, this is more an uplifting record than a morose one, despite the downbeat nature of most of the songs. The high point for me is almost exactly halfway through, on Thank You Oaky, where the female vocal adds harmonies which complement the male vocal so beautifully I find myself somewhat disappointed her voice isn’t used more often.

That is isn’t matters little though, because this is still an absolutely gorgeous album.

Pillars and Tongues – Thank You Oaky

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Pillars and Tongues on Endless Nest | More mp3s | Buy the album

I wasn’t really paying attention when terms like ‘hypnagogic pop’ and ‘chillwave’ were coined, so I have never been entirely sure what they are supposed to mean.  Dirty Beaches make the kind of music that sounds like what you might hear if you submerged yourself entirely in the bath while your next door neighbour was playing pop music just loud enough that you could hear it.

That’s sort of what hypnagogic pop is supposed to be isn’t it?  Anyhow, I read something vaguely interesting on The Quietus recently about this kind of fuzzed-out lo-fi music with a fairly classic, vintage pop underpinning being part of some wider fascination with retroism at the moment.

Personally I find this kind of discussion to be slightly over-thinking what is little more than a stylistic fad, and I am happy enough to follow my enthusiasms as and when they arise – until they stop being fun, that is, in which case I’ll move on to something else.

Umm, anyhow, this digression may have been triggered by my not quite knowing how best to describe Dirty Beaches’ music, but it isn’t particularly relevant otherwise so I’ll cut to the chase.

A while back I was introduced to a band called U.S. Girls by Palmist Records, an offshoot of Fatcat down in Brighton.  Exploring their back catalogue a little further I found a (now sold out) 7″ they released as a split with a band called Dirty Beaches who are also, it turns out, rather excellent.

The bathtub-based description above still holds, however.  Whatever this music is buried beneath, it is buried pretty deeply.  The instrumentation is an off-kilter smudge and vocals so echoey you can’t understand a single lyric.  It’s not pretty in any sense.

There’s a sort of hypnotic tribal thrum to a lot of it, that borders on ambient.  Drug-addled is another description which makes a degree of sense – I can almost picture people dancing in slow-motion with blurry strobe lighting and the mother of all hangovers on the horizon.  It’s good though, albeit in a way I can’t really put my finger on.

Anyhow, if you can track down a copy of that split 7″ good luck to you, because it’s really good. More interestingly though, they have a new album out.  I have ordered a vinyl copy but it is still in transit, but you can preview it here if you like, and order it from Rough Trade here.  Oh, and that video at the top of the page is of a song on that very album.

Dirty Beaches – Drunk Driving

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Dirty Beaches – Coast to Coast

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Having already written the live listings for this week, I got a couple of emails about really interesting things happening as part of the Leith Festival and I think I should add a quick update here, because I reckon it’s stuff people will (or should) be interested in.

Leith is by some distance my favourite part of Edinburgh.  It has a reputation for being scummy – it is the old docks after all – but for all there are still some pretty ropey parts, that is a long, long way from being the truth these days.  Nowadays most of my favourite Edinburgh pubs and restaurants are to found either down by the Shore itself, or in the immediate vicinity of Leith Walk.

Also, for all Leith may not be all that scuzzy these days, it is still full of enough drunks, jakeys and weirdos that it feels a lot more like a proper city than the rest of Edinburgh, which can be a bit of an uptight middle class ghetto a lot of the time: very civilised, but everso slightly dull.

I also generally prefer the Leith Festival to the Edinburgh one, I must confess.  Partly because it feels a lot less deliberate, and is hence looser and more fun, and partly because I just prefer smaller, more manageable festivals in general.

Anyhow, the full music programme for the Leith Festival is here, but it can be a little overwhelming, so here are the highlights which have appeared in my inbox over the last day or so:

From Quiet Jon:

Also, The Wee Baby Jesuses (AKA Cheehi and Junior Judo from assorted Fence bands) will be playing a set of Tom Waits songs as part of The Leith Festival. Happening at The Village in Leith, Wednesday night, doors 8ish [i.e.: get moving - now!].

Should be fun.

From Liz:

On Thursday, as part of LeithLate, Elvis Shakespeare have Wounded Knee, Little Pebble, Blueflint and Withered Hand.  6pm to 8pm.

I’m not sending this email as a “plug” – I just thought you might be interested, personally, in the lineup [and you'd be right] and it has the added benefit of being free!

From Matthew from Pet:

We’re playing the Leithlate festival on thursday at the Pilrig Church supporting John Knox Sex Club, HRH and also playing are Sarah and the Snakes. Here’s the link to that bit of exciting spam…
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=202251416479280

So you see, when I do get spammed it tends to be in the politest, most apologetic manner imaginable.  And actually all three of those gigs look awesome, which is why I am passing them all on to you.