This is fucking great. To say that I am chuffed to be working with Animal Magic Tricks is an understatement. ‘Nuff said. New album coming in Spring, and the one that this might be on… well, hopefully soon after, I reckon.
 If there is one cast-iron rule about appearing on Song, by Toad it is that bands who use a ‘z’ where they should use an ‘s’ simply get their emails deleted and will never appear on the site, ever. Mostly this rule came into place to avoid rappers who think that ‘z’ makes them look hard, but in general it pertains to my reflexive and violent dislike of stupid fucking typography in band names.
But, the chinks formed by FOUND, eagleowl and more recently PAWS have turned into full-blown cracks these days, and what was once a rule has now been downgraded to more of a guideline. Which is good, because if those blinkers were still on I might have missed out on Dolfinz.
I am going to repeat the disclaimer from Basement Fever’s post about this band, which is where I found them in the first place: don’t read too much into the Slipknot t-shirt or acoustic guitar, because neither will give you any kind of impression of what this band are like.
The music they make is the kind of music in which I have to confess I think Scotland has been woefully slow at catching up with the rest of the world. With an extremely small number of exceptions, I haven’t heard much of this grungey, lo-fi guitar music executed with anything like the quality of our neighbours either South of Hadrian’s Wall or across the Atlantic.
This is of course early days for the band – from Stonehaven apparently – but despite all the noise, and despite playing their guitars like they’re watching TV and trying to send a text message at the same time, they keep their hooks relatively prominent and ensure that under it all this is still functional pop music.
And with that I suppose I must mention that the usual caveats remain, of course, about ensuring that all the lo-fi aspects of this music don’t overwhelm the pop aspects, and also blah blah they seem to be pretty new on the scene and therefore you can’t read tooooo much into the handful of songs they’ve put up for free download on their Soundcloud page. and so on and so forth.
Nevertheless, these guys sound really promising, and I am looking forward to hearing more. So much so, in fact, that I have booked them to play the Electric Circus on Wednesday 17th August. But no, this isn’t just me writing posts to shill for my gigs, stop being so fucking cynical.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And, what might be their first ever demo, if you guess based on when they actually uploaded it to Soundcloud in the first place:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Well, I suppose this answers the question of what people mean by ‘buzz’, albeit at a very low level for the time being.
It seems that all at once Ghost Outfit have popped up on a few radars, and given a couple of those radars have only had a few dicey recordings and someone else’s word to go on, I think we can see how (nebulous excitement + lack of much real information) = BZZZZZZZZZZZ! Sometimes it’s the clamouring to know enough to have a real opinion which generates more fuss that simply thinking something is good in the first place.
Anyhow, I am booking four shows at the Electric Circus this August, and one of the bands playing is Ghost Outfit. They are from Manchester, and Dave from Manchester night Underachievers Please Try Harder contacted me about possibly booking them in Edinburgh. Dave books as The Loomer Agency (I think it’s his company, although I’m not certain), he helped me sort out the recent Milk Maid gig, and books for plenty of other excellent bands like The Louche FC and the brilliant Weird Era.
Anyhow, he sent me a link, I liked what I heard and asked if they wanted to play in August, and we sorted out a slot on Friday 26th, at which point Dave added the somewhat unnecessary aside (I’d already booked them after all) that if I like their recordings, I should wait to see them live, because they are unbelievable.
Anyhow, the only reason I mention this is because yesterday, this band I know nothing about appeared in two other highly, highly credible places: Basement Fever, and The Pigeon Post. And, coincidentally, the former was pointing out that the latter had described them as the “the best live band in Manchester (by my approximation) for the past 6 months or so”. And lo and behold, they’ve been featured on Cloud Sounds as well. So I was intrigued enough about booking them to begin with, but when these three muppets (whose opinions, just to be clear, I hold in very high regard indeed) are also showing excitement, then I reckon we might be in for a treat on the 26th.
Anyhow, the band are currently engaged in a project whereby they are making videos for each song on their new EP, and as they post the video on their Tumblr site, the are also making the song available via Bandcamp. At least I think that’s what’s happening.
I Was Good When I Was Young (above) is a pretty obviously excellent pop song, but if you look at some of the other songs on the aforementioned Bandcamp page then you’ll see that it really ain’t all quite so easy. There are songs of clanking, barely listenable noise, lo-fi snarling to the point that you wonder if they’re deliberately trying to hurt your ears, and then on Side Two, some surprisingly mellow stuff – well, fairly mellow anyway.
Despite the mess, the overall results are fucking ace. Even the most abrasive song – probably this one – doesn’t sound like they’re deliberately just trying to be dicks, because the general variation around it gives even that rattle of awesome noise somewhere solid to settle. I am really looking forward to this gig!
 Those of you who listen to the Toadcasts on a regular basis will have heard some of this already, as I played the amazing Mirrors of America on Toadcast #182 the other week.
That’s probably the most aggressive of the songs on here, which should tell you something about the general tempo. Those of you who remember my reviews of Powerdove and Lady Lazarus will not be surprised that I like this. It’s mysterious and odd, and perhaps what might have happened to those two bands if they had constructed their songs electronically instead of with instruments and other toys.
Music this slow runs the risk of lapsing into easy listening, even when drenched in lo-fi production values and peppered by some very unusual noises. If you aren’t careful the songs can become buried underneath the atmosphere of the scene that is set, preventing the individual characters from making an impact. Lady Lazarus in particular struggled with that, with so many songs on her album, but in the case of a four-song EP it is a lot less of a danger.
Here, the breathy, mumbled vocals dodge their way through minimal landscapes, knowing full well they are hidden by the general mist and needn’t fear having to meet your gaze. The rest of the music is like that – it seems to obfuscate without directly hiding. Tiny Feathers might not quite grab me as much of the rest, but everything else here seems to have mastered that trick of getting you to stare into a jar of smoke for hours, convinced you can see shapes in there somewhere.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
 Yeah, you know what, me neither. I don’t know why I even bothered checking. PJ Harvey, something urban, something ethnic, something epic, and snoozzzzzzzze…
Although, if you thought I was writing this post with the express purpose of mocking, or even particularly criticising the Mercury Prize then you’d be wrong. Actually, I am just amazed by how out of touch with mainstream music I am becoming.
Before I even started writing about music I remember seeing the Mercury nominees compilation CDs in shops, thinking I was going to like them and then not really managing to. The Mercurys suffer from that eternal problem of trying to be underground yet accessible, and of trying to be cross-genre enough to represent all of British music, and yet also in-depth enough to make interesting picks.
In other words I am not going to slag the nominations off, because they are spread too thin, and it is therefore an impossible job to pick them. But here they are, if you are interested.
Adele – 21
Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi
Elbow – Build a Rocket Boys!
Everything Everything – Man Alive
Ghostpoet – Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam
Gwilym Simcock - Good Days at Schloss Elmau
James Blake – James Blake
Katy B – On a Mission
King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – Diamond Mine
Metronomy – The English Riviera
PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
Tinie Tempah – Disc-Overy
When I started writing this blog I reviewed albums I found out about in Uncut, Word and Mojo and bought in HMV or on Amazon. I have drifted from that to the extent that I have only actually heard two of the albums on that list. And only think one of them is much cop.
Let’s be absolutely honest, it costs £500 to even take part. That was basically equal to the entirety of what we spent on PR on the last Meursault album, and when our distributor suggested entering it, I didn’t really think it was a worthwhile use of our money – never mind the whole pile of free albums you have to donate to the committee for them to actually listen to.
They don’t allow albums without a UPC (barcode) to enter either, which rules out a large number of my favourite albums of the last year. I can see why they do it, because otherwise they’d be even more inundated than they presumably already are (although the £500 pay-to-play sticks in my craw just a little).
They might, although I hope not, make the entirely specious claim that these costs guarantee a certain minimal level of quality, but the more involved I get with the world of music the more obvious it becomes that that is a completely ridiculous claim. Most of the shit in my inbox comes from people with budgets and barcodes, not those without. I’ve had promo emails from a few of those bands – James Blake, Everything Everything, Metronomy, P.J. Harvey – and they just aren’t very good, so the quality argument is balls.
When you also factor in my indifference to the albums by Twitter heroes Wild Beasts and The Horrors I just think that, basically, writing this blog has made my music taste so obscure I barely have any relationship with the world of the Mercury Prize anymore. This isn’t an ‘oh, you wouldn’t get it’ kind of hipster boast, either. In actual fact it’s harmful to what I do.
Publications, internet-based or otherwise, have their own audiences, but that’s only a small part of the story. A large bulk of our audience comes from the bands themselves. When I write about popular bands, their audience, not necessarily mine, turns up to read it.  When I did that session with Mumford and Sons a year or so ago, it immediately became my most viewed session, which is no surprise. What was a surprise, though, was that it didn’t seem to really increase the appetite for the rest of the sessions. Whilst their videos may have thousands and thousands of views, we still have a good few session videos with twenty or thirty views.
Similarly, declining interest in mainstream bands is making Song, by Toad increasingly niche, which means the visibility of the site and the awareness of the label and the bands we work with will probably suffer accordingly. There’s only so much music you can listen to though, and honestly I think I prefer the site this way.
There are other people who can listen to all the Mercury Prize nominees, or particularly care about the lineup at Latitude, or even bother reading Pitchfork. It’s not really for me though. I know it’s making everything I do an awful lot less ‘relevant’, but I am happy enough with that.
/needlessnavelgazing
 Well after an extremely successful Ides of Toad on Saturday (a massive thanks to the excellent bands, and to the fucking loads of people who came along) I think this week I shall be putting my feet up and letting other people do the work for a bit.
And what a fuck of a lot of work they’ve been doing, too, because this week is a bit mental in terms of excellent gigs at which to drink yourself into an early grave. So much for the pre-Festival wind-down I discussed last week.
As well as having their album launch this week, Kid Canaveral are coming round to our house to record a Toad Session and get some beers down them, so umm… well, don’t expect me to be much use to anyone on Thursday, s’all I’m saying.
And from a gig-going perspective, well, Friday looks like a bit of a challenge, eh.
Sara Lowes is a sometime member of the Earlies and has played on some of my favourite albums of all time, by the likes of King Creosote and Micah P. Hinson. In her solo guise she makes extremely pretty pop songs, and her new album is absolutely lush.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
If, on the other hand, you want to end Thursday with bleeding ears then I recommend this one. Bronto Skylift can head a bit too far in the direction of freeform noise for me, I have to confess, and I know next to nothing about the openers, but any chance to see PAWS should be taken, because they’re fucking great.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Pineapple Chunks have kindly agreed to let us host their album launch during the Festival, and this will be a wee preview for you, as well as being the first full gig outing for Lach on his return to Edinburgh in anticipation of the return of both his one-man show and the Antihoot to the Edinburgh Festival.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This event marks the launch of Fresh Air’s Inside Track 2011 charity album (last year’s can be downloaded here),
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
This is an Unpop night I believe, and they’ve assembled a bill of some of the finest indiepop around. I haven’t heard much out of the Just Joans for a while actually, but when their skewed, cobbled together guitar pop and first rate lyrics really are an excellent combination.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I need say no more about Kid Canaveral on these pages, surely? Indiepop. Awesome. Some wonderfully sad moments. Brilliant fun live.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And finally we come to Enfant Bastard’s final Edinburgh gig for the foreseeable future. Cammy is moving to Sweden, and will be supported at his farewell show by Moustache of Insanity and FOUND’s beepmaster general Kev Sim, under the name of River of Slime.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Video: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr - Blueback Hotrod
Audio: zip download (right-click, save as).
Lach is the man behind the Antihoot, the New York open stage which gave rise to the term and the movement called Antifolk. People bandy the word about so much these days it’s almost become as nebulous as the term ‘indie’, but it had a very specific origin and a very specific meaning back at the beginning.
Last year Lach brought the Antihoot to the Edinburgh Festival, and we recorded a Toad Session with him while he was here. When we figured out that we would actually be releasing his new album as well, and that he would be returning to Edinburgh this year – running both the Antihoot at the Gilded Balloon as well as a free fringe show called Lach, the Waitress, the Walls and the Weirdos in The Speakeasy at Cabaret Voltaire – I figured we might as well wait a little while to publish this session.
Well Lach is back now, his album comes out on Song, by Toad Records on Monday and we are starting to get ready for both the one-man show at Cab Vol, and also the return of the Antihoot (tickets). If you want to play at the Antihoot yourself, then just get in touch: info@antifolk.net. The rules are that you get either two songs or eight minutes, whichever is shorter, and that has to include your setup, so best keep it simple, but otherwise pretty much anything goes.
Also, this year we’ll be picking a semifinalist each night, by a combination of audience acclaim and executive decision, and inviting them back to the Anti-idol on the last three nights of the show. Those three nights will be recorded, with the best dozen or so performances being released on a Best of the Antihoot album on Song, by Toad Records.
As per usual with the Toad Sessions, the full interview podcast is immediately below, followed by free mp3 downloads of all the session tracks (zip file here), videos of the individual tracks themselves (all video here), and finally the tracklist for the podcast. There aren’t as many pictures as usual, but that’s because we were a little short-staffed this time, and Dylan was too busy with the video camera to produce the usual number of pretty pictures.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Lach – Ambition Burns (Toad Session)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Lach – Another Night Without You (Toad Session)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Lach – Coffee Black (Toad Session)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
01. Lach – A Quiet Distance (Toad Session) (12.40)
02. The Love Gestures – Hey Man (16.40)
03. Phil Ochs – Small Circle of Friends (20.31)
04. Lach – Ambition Burns (Toad Session) (32.41)
05. Kirk Kelly – Stephen Foster (37.42)
06. Roger Manning – Pearly Blues (41.14)
07. Lach – Another Night Without You (Toad Session) (55.31)
08. Neil Halstead – Might Engine (62.05)
09. Lach – Coffee Black (Toad Session) (75.06)
I couldn’t be arsed coming up with a traditional Friday Five this week, so I thought I would have a stab at picking out five reasons why the music industry can be so cliquey. This is a complaint I have heard on many occasions, usually from people on the outside trying to get in, but not all the time. Sometimes people on the inside complain that the cliques they find themselves in seems to be making their taste in music kinda predictable and increasingly unadventurous, as they end up going to their friends’ gigs and never having time for anything else.
So here is a list, largely off the top of my head and in no way supposed to be exhaustive or definitive, of why I think things end up seeming so cliquey.
1. Because you are being silly. I have lots of friends in the music industry. Lots of friends whose music I like, and lots whose music I don’t. Lots of people who I support I know and like, and lots I have never met. I am sure it can look like I just support me and my friends, but try telling people I get on with really well, drink in the pub with all the time, and whose music has never once featured on Song, by Toad that there is anything cliquey going on. Sometimes, just because people are friends with other people doesn’t mean they are in a clique of any sort. Sometimes people are just pals, perfectly open to meeting new people, and really all you need to do is say hello. Just introduce yourself, most people are pretty nice, actually.
2. Cliques are a part of life. People are friends with people they like. In real life no-one ever questions this, because being tight-knit friends with a particular group of people doesn’t bring any real benefit of which people have any need to be jealous. In music, being tight-knit with influential people can bring real benefits so people can get jealous of other people’s friendships – I am sure being friends with the likes of Vic Galloway does indeed bring a benefit to the label, for example, despite his and Muslim’s best efforts to remain objective – but there is nothing sinister about it. Sometimes people just get on well. I am not going to start hanging out with people I don’t like just in the interests of showing myself to be open-minded.
3. Music cliques self-select by personal taste. When people are first getting into the music business, they usually don’t know anyone and are probably much more open to new people. However, the people you are going to become friends with will probably be found among the people you see the most, and the people you see the most will be the people you go to the same gigs as. So you almost by definition will end up being friends with people you share an awful lot of music taste in common with. I don’t promote my friends’ music because they are my friends, in many cases I ended up being friends with them to a large extent because I liked their music in the first place. Don’t put the chicken before the egg. Or vice versa.
4. People only have a limited amount of energy. When I got into the music business I didn’t know anyone, so I just went along to whatever seemed interesting. I still try and do that today, but as you get more involved you get to know more people. As you get to know more people, there are more and more things you ‘have’ to go to. Honestly, how crap a friend would you be if, knowing someone was worried about getting a decent crowd, you skipped their album launch because you just felt like staying in and watching telly that evening. As you get to know more people working in music, by the time you’ve been to all your friends’ things you genuinely don’t have the energy left to just take a chance on something for the sake of it on some other night of the week. It’s annoying, but it’s true.
5. Old Comrade syndrome. Being in the music industry is an incredibly emotionally exhausting undertaking. Even just being a label, any criticism of our bands or our releases feels like a direct personal attack, and of course you have to publicise what you do, so in a way you are inviting the very attacks which drive you round the bend. Even in the relatively short amount of time I’ve been in the industry I have seen bands and labels and promoters just give up because they get worn out and lose the love of it.
When something has such a high attrition rate and it is such a battle just to be able to handle all the financial wear and tear, the amount of respect and kinship you feel for people who have had the courage and determination to stick it out in the long run increases hugely. You end up feeling a very close bond with people who you know have stuck it out for a long time because you know how hard it is, and conversely you start to take the new people with a bit of a pinch of salt. Yes, it’s great to see new blood, new ideas, new energy, but are they really tough enough to stick it out? We’ll see. It doesn’t mean you want to be unwelcoming or discouraging when new people emerge on the scene, it just means you’ve heard that declaration of intent a hundred times before, and you end up being quite sceptical by default, until someone has shown they have the endurance to go with the ambition.
So in conclusion… umm, I’m not sure really. Yes, music can be cliquey, and a lot of the times that even annoys the people in the cliques themselves. But more often than not I really don’t think there’s anything sinister about it – partly it’s just the natural way of things, in that people do just form genuine friendships, and partly it is often not nearly as closed and insular as it seems when you’re looking in from the outside.
This review is a month or so out of date now, but umm… well the review process got kind of caught between formats, in the sense that I review from my computer upstairs, but I have this on vinyl downstairs and never got round to downloading the free mp3s which came with the record.
I actually got into Milk Maid by accident. I was buying a Brown Brogues single (highly recommended, incidentally) from Suffering Jukebox Records and seeing as I was in a vinyl-buying mood I thought I might as well give Such Fun by Milk Maid a try while I was there.
I loved it, but the album still surprised me, I have to confess. After the raucous buzz of Such Fun I think I kind of expected a lo-fi garage rock record, and I suppose half of it is kind of like that. At other times, however, it’s much more a laid back bluesy sound with really strong melodic guitar hooks, and at others it drifts into old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, while Same as What is a nicely rolling acoustic number.
Generally though, this is a consummate DIY pop record full of shit you can and will hum, suitable for turning up loud as balls and generally fucking great to listen to. Yucca was all recorded in singer and main songwriter Martin Cohen’s bedroom, but Suffering Jukebox is run by the lad from Mazes, who release with Fatcat, and he then recommended them to the label, who offered to release the record.
As an album, whilst it is occasionally as boisterous and beefy as Such Fun, generally there is a laid-back cocky feel to it, kind of like the bad boy sat at the back of the bar who watches as you chat to all the handsome city types but maintains that half-raised eyebrow that says he knows it’s him you really want to be talking to. Or, to put it another way, it has a kind of challenging ‘yes, and?’ kind of attitude.
For a record I expected to be a blitz of rough guitars this is actually a varied and interesting listen, as much as it is an immediate and catchy one. They shift the pace here and there, keeping you guessing, and in doing so show themselves to be a band with a good bit more depth and a few more tricks up their sleeve than your average ‘let’s just pile a shitload of noise on top and hope for the best’ lo-fi bandwagon jumpers.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
MySpace (no, seriously!) | More mp3s | Buy direct from Fatcat Records
 Those of you who listened to Toadcast #180 – The Corsicast (which is all of you, right? right?) will have already been introduced to the rather excellent Mavis the Dog. This is their second album and can be downloaded for free from the band’s website here.
Given what I am listening to at the moment would you be at all surprised to hear that this is really lo-fi? Grumbly, buried vocals and plenty of fuzz on the instrumentation – pretty much classic Happy Toad at the moment.
Instead of being angry garage rock, though, this is rattly, saucy barroom pop by turns dreamy and jaunty, but always bright and enjoyable.
There are times when they almost sound like The Beatles being played on a damaged cassette player in the next room. And then there are times when they sound like a perfect pop song slowly unravelling into a dissipating cloud of found sounds, accidental noises and abstraction. There’s piano pop, moments of bluesy guitar, and the odd drifting meander through mumbled monologues – it’s a varied and engaging stumble through pop’s least polished digressions.
Due to the fuzzy, distracted nature of the production there are times when songs don’t quite break through, and when the general pace of the sequencing can allow your attention to just get away a little. I am not sure what I would recommend here, perhaps just shifting the pace a little, and adding a little more urgency here and there, maybe just lift the blanket of fog on the production here and there, or something like that. I am not sure what it is, or what I reckon I personally would change, but there’s a feeling at times of an album in need of just a little lifting here and there.
That doesn’t stop me enjoying the record, though. It just has plenty of charm, and a kind of insouciance I find really compelling.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Mavis the Dog – Kelly’s Favourite
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Site design by Nonimage.
Social icons by Komodo Media.