It’s the Gigpocalypse! Gigmageddon! A gigantic week-long party of musical funz! The final kick in the balls your exhausted, fading liver can’t quite handle before it gives up the ghost and implodes altogether.

After a pretty lacklustre musical showing thus far, the Edinburgh Festival finally earns its spurs this week with what can only be described as the inevitable descent of total and utter carnage.

Lach’s one-man show is back on (after illness) at Cabaret Voltaire, free every night this week at 8:45pm, and of course the Antihoot will be on every night this week except Tuesday from midnight to 3am in the Gilded Balloon.

Then there’s also the next two Toad at the Circus gigs, firstly an acoustic strummer affair, and then on Friday a thumping racket.  I will be DJing at these gigs, but don’t let that put you off, they might still be quite fun.

As well as conventional gigs, Avalanche Records have a full list of really rather excellent in-stores this week too, featuring the likes of Emily Scott and Edinburgh School for the Deaf – full details here. Oh, and of course the week finally stumbles to an alcoholic close with the return of the fantabulous Retreat Festival.  It will be awesome, and my liver will be begging for mercy long before the end.

Tuesday 23rd August 2011: Ulrich Schnauss & Jonnie Common at the Electric Circus.

This will be a carnival of electro loveliness.  I know less about Mr. Schnauss, but Jonnie’s album is pretty damn close to being the best Scottish album of the year, for my money.

Jonnie Common – Summer is For Going Places

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Wednesday 24th August 2011: Neil Pennycook, Benjamin Shaw & John Egdell at the Electric Circus.

It’ll be an all-acoustic affair for our third Toad at the Circus gig.  Apart from Meursault’s Neil Pennycook performing solo, we have the amazing Benjamin Shaw coming up from London and the equally excellent John Egdell from Newcastle.

Benjamin Shaw – 12,000 Sentinels

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Wednesday 24th August 2011: Sebadoh at Cabaret Voltaire.

This is a bit straightforward isn’t it.  Sebadoh are lo-fi indie rock legends (to paint with the broadest of brushes) and they are playing in Edinburgh.  I think this might be sold out though, so there might be little point listing it but umm… it’s Sebadoh, y’know.

Sebadoh – Nothing Like You

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Thursday 25th August 2011: Withered Hand, eagleowl, Woodpigeon (solo) & Meursault (solo) at the Queen’s Hall.

Something of an Edinburgh all-stars gig this one.  If you aren’t from here and want to know why those of us in Edinburgh have been so excited by our homegrown music scene recently, then this and Retreat are the ones to show you.

Withered Hand – Religious Songs

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Thursday 25th August 2011: Willy Mason at Cabaret Voltaire.

Willy Mason has sort of slipped off the critical radar since the pop smash (relatively speaking of course) of Oxygen back in about 2005 or so.  I saw him live back in London before moving up here actually, and it was absolutely brilliant.

Willy Mason – We Can Be Strong

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Friday 26th August 2011: Brown Brogues, Ghost Outfit & Rollor at the Electric Circus.

Let’s see the babbling hen sluts talk over this.  Fuck you, motherfuckers, tonight is going to be loud!  Brown Brogues are a clattering racket and according to The Pigeon Post Ghost Outfit are the best live band in Manchester at the moment.

Brown Brogues – Treet U Beta

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Friday 26th & Saturday 27th August 2011: Lach’s Antihoot Antifolk-off at the Gilded Balloon.

As the Antihoot has been taking place this year Lach and myself have been selecting, with the help of the audience, the favourite act of each night and we’re inviting them all back this weekend, where we’ll be recording the performances to release as The Best of the Antihoot on Song, by Toad Records.  It’ll also be a fantastic way to have a big fuck off party to celebrate the end of an awesome run at this year’s Festival which has, of course, seen me make my stand-up comedy debut.  But the less said about that the better.

Saturday 27th August 2011: The Machine Room, Land of Cakes & Plastic Animals at Sneaky Pete’s.

Continuing the excellence of their Festival booking, Sneaky Pete’s have three excellent new Edinburgh bands on on Saturday.   I’ll be at Retreat, but if it happens to sell out then this looks like an excellent alternative.

The Machine Room – Your Head on the Floor Next Door

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Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th August 2011: Retreat Festival at Pilrig St. Paul’s church.

There are a couple of events which define my musical calendar.  Most Fence events would pretty much be included in there, and the other would be Retreat.  The best bands in Edinburgh, fucking lovely people and the nicest atmosphere at any music even I’ve been to in the city.  Bart Owl is a hero. A sarcastic, ginger hero.

Stop it.  Stop it.  Just fucking stop it.  Don’t panic, this is emphatically NOT about paedophilia.  Before you get your knickers in a twist have a quick look at the tracklisting, and in particular the band names, and hopefully you will see why the podcast has the name it does.

So what am I really on about?  Well, I happened across a band recently called Young Girls, and it finally became clear that after Bear Crystal Wolf Fuck Ghost bands, the new fashion is quite clearly paedo bands.  Bands whose names, whilst not exactly dodgy in themselves, lead to a lot of very, very awkward moments on Google.

So there you go.  No awkward debates about awkward psychological or sociological issues at all, I promise.  Just lots of good tunes by bands with dubious names.  Mostly.

Direct download: Toadcast #188 – The Paedocast

01. Teens – Golden Years (00.05)
02. Girls – Broken Dreams Club (05.59)
03. Wheatus – Teenage Dirtbag (15.19)
04. XX Teens – The Way We Were (19.23)
05. Tim Minchin- Pope Song (26.17)
06. Sonny Boy Williamson – Good Morning, School Girl (33.27)
07. Young Boys – Bring ‘em Down (42.30)
08. Young Girls – We’re Not Friends (46.30)
09. Tiny Tim – Tiptoe Thru’ the Tulips With Me (51.36)
10. Sexy Kids – Sisters Are Forever (59.17)

Frankly, I’ve no fucking idea what Friday is this week.  Between our Electric Circus gigs (yes, good guess, the second of which is indeed tonight, and look, only a fiver in – what value!) keeping up with the blog and the minor matter of actually trying to run a record label I don’t know whether I’m bloody coming or going at the moment.

One of things I like about putting on gigs at the Electric Circus is that I get to DJ inbetween and after the bands.  It’s much like writing a blog, releasing records or putting on gigs – effectively you’re trying to insist to everyone how awesome all the music you like is.  I don’t know if the actual audience enjoys it as much as I do, but umm… well, they were very patient with me at the gig on Wednesday anyway.

I am also just about managing to preserve a sliver of Festival bonhomie, despite the associated bollocks, but it is hanging on by the skin of its teeth.  There is fun, to be sure, but the whole thing is such a carnival of over-priced commercialism I can’t help but wonder if it might start to suffer from the malaise afflicting many of the big music festivals this year.  The Fringe has become such a juggernaut that people felt obliged to start the Free Fringe, just so the Fringe would itself have some sort of Fringe – sort of a festival ouroboros in a sense.

Ah well, balls to that.  Get thee down to the Circus tonight and we’ll have drinks and party like it was early June.

1. If you were DJ what would you insist on playing that no-one would really get.
2. What was the last thing you slept through and shouldn’t have.
3. Name a really pointless album reissue.
4. And a really good one.
5. What’s made you laugh recently?

This week’s five songs are daft cover versions:

Richard Cheese – Rape Me

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Clem Snide – Beautiful

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The Lance Gambit Trio – Barbie Girl

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Me First & the Gimme Gimmes – Stand By Your Man

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The Flaming Lips – Can’t Get You Out of My Head

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 This is Night People Records.  They aren’t just awesome, they are so eye-wateringly awesome I am tempted to give up on the label business altogether and take up knitting.

I’m a pretty phlegmatic kind of a person most of the time, and there are very few labels who generate any kind of real envy in me, but these guys definitely manage it.

Johnny from Fence and Stuart from Chemikal Underground are such lovely guys I could never be that nice if I took classes, never mind the respect I have for the labels they run.  Empty Cellar release The Sandwitches, Pillars and Tongues and early Sonny and the Sunsets stuff, and Full Time Hobby have both Micah P. Hinson and Timber Timbre on their roster.

But for all this, nothing quite matches the levels of delight and abject jealousy I felt when I opened up my first order from Night People. Jesus Christ and the Opossums their records are lovely!

From a musical point of view I guess you’d probably have to call the label experimental.  That doesn’t really cover it though, because they run from electro-pop to indie rock to noise pop to more or less anything.  There is a lot of experimental music on the label, but seeing as how one end of their spectrum is relatively conventional I quite like the fact that the other end is far too much for me to really handle.

The label’s founder, Shawn Reed, started the label as a means to self-release his own material back in about 2003, but the project has since become rather massive, as you can see from their back-catalogue.  But as well as having the courage to invest time and money, over a long period of time, in music that really isn’t very commercial, there is more about Night People to incite my burning label envy.

That image is a closeup of the Peaking Lights EP Space Primitive. It’s a vinyl pressing of an EP originally released on cassette, and there are only three songs on the record, so Reed took the opportunity to press a one-sided 12″ record and screen print a design on the other side.  It then comes in a plastic sleeve with a single sheet of card bearing a screen print which complements the design above.  See what I mean when I said ‘eye-wateringly beautiful’?

Peaking Lights – Lifed

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When I received it, Space Primitive was in a package of three records, all of which are equally gorgeous.  Below is the artwork for Blunt Instrumental by Tyvek (another design with a beautiful screen print on the actual record) and then a split 12″ by Wet Hair, Shawn Reed’s new band, and Naked on the Vague.  These too, as you can see, are works of art in themselves, even if the music was shit, which it most emphatically isn’t.

It’s all a hugely DIY operation.  Most of the bands in question have no more than a MySpace page, which these days betrays not just a slight lack of commercial ambition, but an utter lack of interest in the internet as a whole. Also, Reed does all the screen printing himself, and in an interview with Altered Zones described the operation thus: “dude, I’m not like, Insound. I am one dude in a house in Iowa”.

Tyvek – Robots, Dogs

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For ‘one dude in a house in Iowa’, though, his output is just plain fucking incredible, frankly.  Apart from the record above you can buy all sorts of screen prints from Night People, as well as a somewhat bewildering quantity of cassettes.  American boutique labels seem to have gravitated towards a tape and vinyl only model some time ago actually, a trend the persistence of the CD market in the UK seems to have rather retarded.  You can see it happening here, but it’s still a pretty slow process.  And if you thought the artwork on the tapes was any less special than the vinyl, just have a look at the array of examples on this post on The Cat’s Pyjamas – fucking incredible!

So, I think you all understand the label envy now.  One dude in a fucking house in Iowa.  Christ he makes me feel like I am woefully underachieving!

Wet Hair – In the Garden of the Pharoahs

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Naked on the Vague – Cryptic Tonsil

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 This, unlike my usual tedious pontificating, is actually a straightforward question to the Toad readership: in the days of Soundcloud and Bandcamp embeds, YouTube videos and free promo mp3s being issued by labels with almost every release, is it still necessary for me to post two mp3s with a review, generally of whatever songs I feel best represent either the album or my opinion of it?

I ask, because things have changed a lot since I started doing this.

Back at the beginning there was no such thing as a free mp3, and those of us who wrote blogs like this were all engaged in borderline illegal activity.  Technically speaking, mp3 blogs should probably have been covered by the Fair Use Exemption, allowing us to give away part of copyrighted works when part of a critique of the work in question, provided that did not in itself negatively affect sales of the overall work – so we gave away a couple of individual songs in order to make sense of our review of an album.  Although once those parts of copyrighted works were also being sold as individual copyrighted works in their own right, things became a little muddier.

Nevertheless, it was generally accepted that as long as we stuck to an unwritten code – no more than two songs per album, no leaking pre-release, always take things down when asked – it was pretty well established that most of the music world saw what we were doing as beneficial.  Radio play is a free listen, and can be taped too, and for all there were some tantrums at the time, it is pretty clear in hindsight that this all helped stimulate demand for music, just as we mp3 bloggers feel we are doing now.

It’s not quite so simple anymore, however.  As the music industry has seen how much of a benefit can be achieved by freely passing their material around, they have sought to control it a little more, whilst not destroying any of the benefits, and I can’t say I blame them for it either.  Given the power of anything you can embed in a Facebook stream, and the rise of things like Twitter and Tumblr, a simple mp3 is actually quite outdated these days, with embeds from Soundcloud, Youtube and Bandcamp being passed around social media sites at a furious pace.

So embedding mp3s, for one thing, might just not be necessary anymore, what with all the other approved alternatives out there.  And for another thing, it is still illegal and done without explicit permission.  Anthony from God Don’t Like It came to the world of blogging a little later than me, I think, and I was talking about this with him on the weekend, when Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s management (very graciously I might add) asked me to remove some of the stuff I made available with my recent review of their Tell My Sister release.

Basically, he was horrified that I would ever use anything not supplied by the artist with specific permission to share it.  When I started it was all illegal, so I never worried about that really, because we knew that most of the time we had the label’s tacit approval to do what we were doing. Nowadays, that is less the case, and I began to wonder a bit.

The most obvious arguments in favour of persisting with the free mp3s, in the format I tend to use at the moment are as follows:

Firstly, what I write is not advertising, it is suppose to be critique, and as such the songs a label thinks represent an album won’t always agree with the ones I think do, particularly if something is bad.  In this case, when discussing an album, I think the Fair Use Exemption for the purpose of critical evaluation still stands. There are obvious differences, but you wouldn’t suggest that you reasonably critique a book without quoting it.

Secondly, a lot of people can’t listen to streams and embeds for whatever reasons, and tend to simply dump all the mp3s into a playlist, to listen later.  Prevent this, and the artist will simply lose the listen altogether, as few people are likely to remember or bother to look them up at some other time.

The arguments against include some which are the same as before: legal/illegal, potential harm to sales (before you even start, this argument is bollocks when applied to posting two songs from an album,  although singles are different of course), and respect for the wishes of the artist.

And, of course, there are now a couple of added ones: that there is more than enough material made freely available these days that the old ‘tacit approval’ excuse no longer applies.  And now people have a much more concrete idea of the benefits of freebies, and their wishes are clearly expressed, unlike before the mp3 blog became an established format, in which case all was muddy.

And of course it’s fair to ask where I stand when wearing my other hat, as a record label?  Well personally, if someone posts two different songs to the two freebies I give away with every release then I don’t mind at all.  I would far rather a review based on someone engaging with the music, than someone robotically copying and pasting the press release and slapping my two Soundcloud embeds up there.  As long as there are only two songs, I still think it’s a considerable benefit to the artist and to me. More than that, and you’re getting cheeky.

So I find myself here, writing a music blog with an mp3 posting policy which is a little outdated, and which I am not sure if I want to change.  I think I personally just want to balance what I myself am trying to do, which is to critique music and express my opinions as clearly as I can, with the benefit to the artist themselves.  Surely just saying that something is dull is more harmful to sales than an mp3 I might post in order to prove my point.  But then, maybe I could just embed streams instead rather than full downloads, but honestly, what difference?  And are we all multimedia enabled enough these days that there is no real difference in accessibility between a Bandcamp embed and an mp3 link?

So over to you.  Would anyone seriously miss the downloadable mp3s?  Do you believe that me posting the mp3s which represent my views of an album rather than the label’s represents an important part of the critique I provide?  What do you reckon, because I am kind of in two minds, to be honest.

 Having just written about Edinburgh School for the Deaf, and insisted that they are more late-eighties shoegaze than 2011 shoegaze, I am now going to introduce you to Sneakpeek, who are very much of 2011. They stir in shoegaze, a bit of nineties US indie rock and some C86 girl-fronted indie, and as such are very much up my street.

It was a bit of an odd coincidence actually, because I had just heard them on the always-excellent Cloud Sounds podcast, and was in the process of poking about their Bandcamp page, when I received a promo email from the band themselves.

Sending those emails is a tedious, generally unrewarding business so I guess it must have been nice to actually get ‘fuck yes, I was just listening to your stuff’ response, as opposed to the generally endless silence you normally face.

You can download the four demos they have posted for a dollar each on the aforementioned Bandcamp page, and it sounds really promising.  If you want to know just how the zeitgeist actually works, this band includes former members of a folky band, who decided to can it and write some reverby, shoegazey pop songs, rather neatly mirroring the abrupt turn away from folk to noisy guitars we’ve seen in the last couple of years.

They’re recording an EP at the moment, although to be honest I am not sure how far those more formal recordings really need to stray from the quality of the demos they already have, which suit the style of the music they make pretty well already.

Sneakpeek – Walk All Over Me (Live)

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 Changing their name from Deserters Deserve Death (because they ended up getting some dodgy emails from people who thought they were associating themselves with the Third Reich, if I remember correctly) seemed to work pretty well for Edinburgh School for the Deaf.  At least from my perspective it seemed to allow me to hear them with fresh ears, after their initial guise seemed to elude my attention altogether, for some reason or another*.

Anyhow, although the penny finally dropped, it might end up being a case of too little, too late, because just as I started to really get into the band, their guitarist and co-front-person (I apologise to the English language for that clumsy, clumsy word, but what else could I do?) ended up relocating to London, for personal reasons.  The band will continue, but without Kieran, and what that will change about them I suppose we will have to wait and see.

Part of Edinburgh School for the Deaf is composed from the remnants of St. Jude’s Infirmary, a local band signed to SL Records who seemed on the verge of making a bit of a breakthrough a few years ago now, but never quite managed to prod their momentum up to the point that it reached critical mass. You can hear some of that band in this one too, albeit more in Ashley’s distinctive vocal delivery than anything else.

Either way, the debts owed by this music are more to much older forms than to anything coming from the local scene or anyone’s previous bands.  This is an old-fashioned, epic, shoegazey guitar album, and could as easily have sprung into existence in 1988 as now.  Live it descends frequently into a shrieking noise of feedback and distortion, with blood spilled and musicians staggering about the stage in a delirium.

The recordings are a little more disciplined than that, to the extent that songs like Memories of Wounds don’t quite get off the ground at all, for me, but these moments are not particularly common. The album starts, somewhat oddly, with what is traditionally the band’s epic set-closer, a song which can take a quarter of an hour to stumble to a stop, and generates as blistering a wall of free-form guitar noise as I’ve heard anyone make in a long time.  It works though, as the song itself takes a long while to build up, and when you have plenty more good songs you can afford to use up an absolute belter this early.

One of the things which stands out about this album is not that it sounds like the endless shoegaze rehashes we’ve been hearing recently, but more that it actually sounds like the real, original thing.  It’s not 2011 shoegaze, it sounds much more at home amongst the older stuff, actually.  This, again, might be related to Ashley’s vocal, which has a clear, high quality to it very reminiscent of that cusp between the original eighties indie movement and the Britpop behemoth into which it eventually morphed.

All in all there might be a couple of sticky patches here, songs which perhaps don’t quite gel for me, but overall this is a really good, really promising debut album and I really hope Kieran’s departure doesn’t change the dynamic of the band for the worse.

Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Of Scottish Blood and Sympathies

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Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Love is Terminal

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Soundcloud | More mp3s | Buy from Bubblegum Records

*Yes, I know, shame on me.

 Yoo hoo internets, I’m ba-aack!  With a friend visiting, and in no mood to waste his holiday watching me fanny about on the computer, I ended up taking an unplanned day off yesterday.  We even did one of those tourist things which it is so easy to ignore when you actually live in a city: we climbed Arthur’s Seat.  And it was bloody amazing!

So what, after a weekend of endurance drinking, does this week hold in store? Well, the general idea was ‘as much sleep as I can manage’, but it looks like this might turn out to be something of a challenge, as we have a pretty busy gigging week ahead of us here in Edinburgh, from the looks of it.

Wednesday 17th August 2011: The Pineapple Chunks‘ album launch at the Electric Circus, with Dolfinz, and Mutch & Thomas.

This is the first of our four Toad at the Circus gigs, which we’re putting on in association with the Electric Circus over the next couple of weeks.  It also happens to be the launch of the Pineapple Chunks’ excellent new album A Dog Walked In (which can be previewed and purchased on their Bandcamp page).  Joining them on the bill will be lo-fi slacker indie outfit Dolfinz from Stonehaven, and a new project by Dan Mutch and Alun Thomas from The Leg.  It will be wonky and messy, this, but I think it’ll be fucking brilliant as well.

Dolfinz – Hot Pants

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Wednesday 18th August 2011: The Cave Singers at Cabaret Voltaire.

The second Cave Singers album underwhelmed me slightly, but their first was brilliant and they’re a cracking live band.  Their stomping Gothic Americana comes out really powerfully in a live setting, and I’d be intrigued to hear how well the ballads, which were the strongest songs on their second record in my opinion, come across live.

The Cave Singers – Beach House

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Thursday 18th & Friday 19th August: Kristin Hersh at Cabaret Voltaire.

Do I really need to explain much about the legendary Kristin Hersh?  If the answer is yes, then go and look up the Throwing Muses, and have a look around her own website.  As well as musically, I have a lot of respect for Kristin Hersh for other reasons as well.  When the digital panic reached its most shrill she was one of the first to start genuinely looking for new solutions, instead of simply trying to pretend that technological progress should be forbidden from happening.

Friday 19th August 2011: Randolph’s Leap, Amber Wilson, and Matthew Healy at the Electric Circus.

This is our second Toad at the Circus night, and instead of ramshackle and potentially (hopefully) rather awkward guitars, this lineup  is more of the folk-pop variety comprised of the quirky sentimentality of Randolph’s Leap, Amber Wilson’s first full band show in Edinburgh (I think) and a solo outing by Matthew Healy from Loch Awe.

Randolph’s Leap – Going Home

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Friday 19th August 2011: Chad VanGaalen, Jesus H. Foxx, and Tom Gilbert at Sneaky Pete’s.

More evidence, to follow up the point made by Bart in the comment on last week’s listings, that Sneaky Pete’s have a consistently excellent lineup throughout August.  Nice to see the Foxx back out and about as well.

Chad VanGaalen – City of Electric Light

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Saturday 20th August 2011: Conquering Animal Sound, and Hiva Oa at Sneaky Pete’s.

I’ll be honest, Hiva Oa and Conquering Animal Sound don’t sound like the most obvious combination on which to base a lineup, but CAS’s debut album is one of the most critically successful* to come out of Scotland in a good while, and if you haven’t seen their looping, emotive live set yet, then you should.

*I say ‘critically’ because I have no idea what the actual sales figures are like of course.

Godcast?  The fucking Godcast?  No, don’t worry, there are no theological debates, nor even any snide remarks about the ludicrous nature of religion (except that one).

This is called the Godcast because Anthony from God Don’t Like It (promotions, press, parties, DJing, drunken tomfoolery and almost everything else) happens to be visiting this weekend to hang out, have a few beers, go and see stuff at the Edinburgh Festival and enjoy the first week of the football season.

I am not entirely sure what regular listeners to this podcast will make of Anthony’s choices but erm… well fuck off, it can’t be all ‘moaning indie pish’* all the goddam time, can it.

*Copyright Mrs. Toad 2007

Direct download: Toadcast #187 – The Godcast

01. The Shivers – Irrational Love (00.25)
02. Dels – Capsize (06:47)
03. Sneakpeek – Walk All Over Me (15.02)
04. Baanex – Weird Dance 2 (17.54)
05. Solo Banton – No (27.01)
06. The Japanese War Effort – I Can’t Wear Jackets Inside (I’m Afraid) (36.34)
07. The Pineapple Chunks – Dog Shit (39.15)
08. A.A. Bondy – The Heart is Willing (46.57)
09. Funghi Girls – Some Easy Magic (51.03)
10. Seams – Motive Order (58.05)
11. The Offset Spectacles – Elements (67.54)

[EDIT: THIS JUST IN! This is a Muppet News Flash!

Readers of Toad have very kindly been offered 2-for1 tickets for tonight’s FOUND gig at Summerhall. So if you want to go along tonight just drop me an email with FOUND in the subject line and I’ll leave your names on the door. For those of you who missed the Independent Record Fair in Summerhall (just on the Eastern corner of The Meadows) last weekend, it is a bloody amazing place, and a fine spot for a gig.]

I love stuff like the above video.  It just seems a little more inventive than writing a verse-bridge-chorus three-minute pop song.  Although, given how much straightforward pop music (albeit smothered in reverb, compression and distortion) I’ve been listening to this year you’d never have guessed.

Anyhow, for those of you getting a bit bored of Festival stuff, remember we have our four Toad at the Circus gigs starting next week, with the first one being the Pineapple Chunks album launch, supported by Dolfinz (from Stonehaven) and Mutch & Thomas (from The Leg).  The info for all four gigs is on this page here, so please do come down, it would be splendid to see you.

I’ve left it a little bit late to put the Fives up today, but I expect those of you in offices (or just lounging about in your pants doing fuck all) won’t mind too much.  There’s always time to be killed on Friday afternoon.  I have Anthony from God Don’t Like It visiting me at the moment, and we’ll be heading out to the Forest Cafe this evening to see The Japanese War Effort and The Occasional Flickers, and then probably heading off to Lach’s Antihoot immediately afterwards to see Neil and (I think) Lorcan from Meursault playing, along with everyone else.

The Antihoot has been brilliant so far, actually.  I think a lot of that is due to the friendly atmosphere amongst the audience, and also to the length of the time slots.  Eight minutes is just long enough to really enjoy someone good, and just short enough to not worry too much if someone’s shit.  If you want to play just drop Lach a line at info@antifolk.net with a link to some music (or whatever it is you do), and he’ll sort you out.

In the meantime, here’s something to waste what little remains of the obligation to pretend to be busy for the rest of the afternoon.

1. How recently did you phone home?
2. Who is your favourite muppet?
3. Most underrated TV show.
4. Fashion item you saw becoming fashionable and decided not to touch with a bargepole.
5. A word which sounds odd to you when you say it.

This week’s five songs are froma compilation of indie music (as in actual, mid-eighties indie era music, not just generic guitar pop) which was on the cover of Mojo a year or two ago.

Felt – Penelope Tree

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Loft – Up the Hill and Down the Slope

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Orange Juice – Simply Thrilled Honey

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McCarthy – Keep an Open Mind or Else

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Wah! Heat – 7 Minutes to Midnight

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