This lot’s disdain for the basic syntax of being in a band extends from not bothering to name their songs to calling their Bandcamp page bandcampsucks.bandcamp.com.

They didn’t even bother giving their EP a name, nor even breaking it up into individual songs on the aforementioned Bandcamp page, choosing instead to simply fire up a single twelve-minute song called This is the Whole EP, Fuck You.

So all I really had to go on when trying to find out who these guys were, after their songs had been kicking around my inbox for a month or two was a single word: Milkshakes.  Now, fortunately, it appears that is one of the few terms for which even a Google image search can’t find porn, but neither could a regular search find the band – there are, it seems, a few Milkshakey bands out there.  Eventually, it took a Twitter query, swiftly answered by DC from The Waiting Room, to find them, so the hive mind does appear to have some benefits.

I don’t know if the band are specifically trying to make a point with all this posturing, but it did make me laugh, and definitely put me in a good mood to actually listen to the music.  Yeah right lads, fuck off yourselves!

Except for the last song, the tunes are all short, sharp, all over the place, a mess of distorted, sloppy guitars, spanked drums and yelled vocals.  Aesthetically they take a lot from punk, a lot from the current lo-fi fad and bits and pieces from most other forms of raucous guitar pop inbetween, but the results are fucking ace.

The songs spend more time being kicked than they do stretching their legs, but that gives the pop moments a little more glimmer, as and when they manage to fight their way to the surface. A lot this is abrupt, stop-start stuff, with loose time signatures and drums played like fucking artillery, giving it a jarring, confrontational feel, none more so than on the last song, which sound like an engine that won’t quite start but nevertheless manages to be one of the best songs on the EP.

I can’t really decide how tongue in cheek this whole business is.  If this lot are taking themselves entirely seriously then they might just be a bunch of muppets, but if they are just taking the piss then it kind of ruins things a bit too, because I like my fuck offs to have some proper spite behind them.  So I am happy with the ambiguity, now that I have eventually managed to track them down, because it keeps things fun without taking the sting out of it.

Milkshakes – Track 03

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For those of you who care at all about the actual business of music, as well as the art of music, which I suppose mightn’t be that many of you, this makes for absolutely fascinating viewing/listening.

As much as anything the candid nature of the chat, as well as the fact that it comes from an insider make this compelling.  Interesting, too, to hear that the music business was struggling massively up until the advent of the CD.  Just as it has been since.

It’s also interesting that he pinpoints mass exposure on commercial radio as the one thing which keeps the balance of power tilting towards the old entertainment behemoths.

More here.

You know, the only things in my Facebook events thingy for this week are my own gig, a friend’s birthday piss-up and some club night or other.  Three items.  In the days before Facebook events became an invite to bury our inboxes in spam it used to be fucking useful, but now… sheesh!

Still, even having investigated a little further, this really does seem to be it.  Am I right?  Is this it?  Are we going to have to do something intellectually valid with our week instead, like read a book or go to the Cameo and see some Romanian film with Cantonese subtitles or something like that?  I’m not sure I can handle that type of highbrow shit anymore.

Friday 16th September 2011: Indie Funday at Henry’s Cellar Bar with Night Noise Team, The Spook School, Thank You So Nice, Little Love, Alex Foottit and Coral Brierley.

Indie Funday looks to be extremely aptly named.  I assume with so many bands on the bill that this will be going on late, and from the looks of the bill the term ‘indie’ applies as much to the aesthetic usage – as in a blanket term for guitar pop – as it does to the ethos of the bands. Should be a highly enjoyable night.

Spook School – Hallam

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Saturday 17th September 2011: The Japanese War Effort, Animal Magic Tricks & Yusuf Azak at the Wee Red Bar.

This will be our first post-Festival Ides of Toad night.  Most of the rest of them are booked up already, so we’ll have a full schedule between now and Christmas.  All three of these artists have the ability to be as obscure as they do melodic, and I think that ambiguity is a large part of what attracts me to them.

The Japanese War Effort – Surrender to Summer

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On 10th October Song, by Toad Records will be releasing a split 7″ by Rob St. John and Ian Humberstone (who formerly recorded under the name of Tissø Lake).

House on the Hill is Ian’s side of the record, which he recorded to half inch tape on a whirring old Tascam reel-to-reel recorder over the course of a handful of fog-strewn days in a frozen Cambridge kitchen in winter 2010.

The video below was assembled from archive footage of the Telstar satellite, which receives signal from Andover Maine, and retransmits to Cornwall in England.  It was launched on a Delta rocket for ATT at a cost of $50 million in 1962, footage used under a Creative Commons license from Archive.org.

Ian Humberstone – House On The Hill by Song, by Toad

This is called the Fullcast for no better reason than that I tried to fit far too many songs onto the playlist.  I’d have used half the Palmist Records stable if possible, but eventually decided to settle for one single track.  There’s always next week.

I didn’t even make room for a song from the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record, although to be fair I haven’t really listened to that enough to actually know what I think about it, so maybe that would have been hasty.

If anything this reminded me of the really early podcasts, when I tried to squish two hours of music into a single recording, and the things were just sprawling behemoths of wittering and tuneage.  I can’t say I regret the decision to trim it down to either ten songs or an hour.

Direct download: Toadcast #191 – The Fullcast

01. Beaters – Dark Haunter (00.22)
02. Body Wash – Cool Bike (06.34)
03. High Pop – For Jord (08.23)
04. Django Django – Waveforms (11.35)
05. Steven Malkmus & the Jicks – No One Is (As I Are Be) (17.31)
06. Milkshakes – Track 1 (24.57)
07. Kurt Vile – The Creature (27.37)
08. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Don’t Turn Your Back on Love (34.41)
09. Steel Phantoms – Bedouin (41.50)
10. Eagulls – Possessed (47.24)
11. Sands – Fares & Tolls (53.15)
12. U2 – Lemon (60.17)

I still can’t get over just how good that version of Flittin’ is.  Bloody hell. More here.

One of the bonuses about having a Proper Job is that you get to skive.  We self-employed people never really get to skive, because the work doesn’t magically vanish at the hands of an over-eager intern or a grumbling old pro, it just sits there until the weekend or some evening or something and then stares at you accusingly until you inevitably have to do it anyway, and generally at a far less convenient time than if you’d just got the fuck on with it in the first place.

The last time anyone actually paid me to do anything we used to go to the King’s Wark for absolutely awesome Friday lunches – fine scran, a couple of pints and back to waste the afternoon.  You can see how the Friday Fives came about – after that lunch I was never capable of actually doing much else!

Anyhow, today I am awarding myself a skive.  Mrs. Toad has been away this week, and whenever she goes away I work really late, so I’ve got a lot more done this week than I was expecting to, and so you know what?  Fuck it, I am going to the pub for a lazy, boozy lunch.  Balls to you, I think I’ve earned it.

And now, of course, we get to the Friday Fives.  This is the delurking amnesty, where all you folks who sit silent get to come out of the woodwork and say hello.  Do have a go at it, it’s not like the fives require intelligent answers.

1. Best ritual at your day job.
2. Favourite pub.
3. Best breakfast cereal.
4. How long have you known your oldest friend?
5. What’s the first thing you look to do with a lazy Sunday afternoon?

Andrew Bird & Nora O’Connor – Oh Sister

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The Band – The Weight

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Big Joe Williams – Baby Please Don’t Go

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Kelly Joe Phelps – Not So Far to Go

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Pavement – Spit on a Stranger

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 I don’t normally do pre-release announcements, but this one has tickled my fancy.  Palmist Records are run by the intern at Fatcat Records, the last time I heard, but the work they’re doing is excellent.  I wish I had an intern like that – I’d be down the fucking pub by noon every day!

Anyhow, so far Palmist have released nothing but a (splendid) series of split 12″s, and their latest is with two Portland bands – it’s like Song, by Toad circa 2009!

I don’t acutally know The Whines or Burning Yellows, the two bands in question, but they play nice, melodic garage indie and I am really looking forward to my copy of this arriving. Like a lot of my favourite music at the moment it has a strong whiff of early-nineties US indie rock, and having largely missed out on this the first time around, I am very much enjoying its resurgence.

I am sure aficionados from the first time round will tell me off for being an ignoramus, but honestly, you trying getting into this shit when you live in Austria and all that’s going on around you is David fucking Hasselhoff, hair metal and risible euro disco.

The Whines – Electric Current by Palmist Records

Burning Yellows- False Horizons by Palmist Records

 Their previous release, which I seem to have managed to miss, is just as garagey, but perhaps edges away from American indie bands in terms of the overall sound, and this time forces early eighties indie-pop through the grinder, particularly the Prize Pets stuff.

This is a kind of music I am a little more familiar with, after all the amazing mixtapes my cousin Steve used to send me to relieve the horror of the pop music I was raised around, and generally I am really liking what’s happening to this stuff when viewed in the rear view mirror and layered in a bit more fuzz, as Beaters have done.

It’s funny actually, I love the Palmist output, but it’s absolutely amazing how beholden it is to revivalism.  In essence, most of the music is really quite backward-facing.  It’s done in a modern way, but the relationships to music styles past are very strong, and very much on the surface.  I am not treating this as a criticism – as I said, I absolutely love the stuff they are releasing – but it’s an interesting style they’ve developed.  Between the punk, and the garage and whatnot I think that retro nature is probably the strongest common thread between all the bands they’ve put out.

Beaters – Dark Haunter

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Prize Pets – It Takes Time

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 And, as one last treat, I think we have a hint of their sixth release too, if you have a look at the label’s Soundcloud page.  Graveyard’s Full by Growlers isn’t paired with any other songs, and the cover art assigned to it is there on the right, and doesn’t correspond to a current Palmist release.

So, given Palmist’s excellent track record so far, I think it would be foolish not to get a little ahead of the game at this point and find out a bit more about both Growlers and Thee Ludds.

Growlers- Graveyard’s Full by Palmist Records

Astral Plane by Thee Ludds

Anyone remember when I wrote about Dame Satan?  Well it’s a little over two years ago now, so no reason you should, but I thought they were rather good.  Well, a slight lineup reshuffle, a bit of a rethink and two years under their belts and they have now resurfaced as Sands. And they are still excellent.

It’s been a while since I wrote about this kind of music actually.  If you’re looking for a mish-mash of genre words to only half pay attention to, then I’d say it’s the kind of slow, dark, gothic stuff halfway between moody West Coast folk and slow-burning bluesy psychedelia.  Don’t let clumsily bastardised description fool you though, this genuinely is good stuff.

Their first release is an EP called Sea of Trees, which you can get from their Bandcamp page, and it’s a short, sharp, four-song EP which touches on all the aspects I mentioned above, without ever trying to cram them all into the same song, and hence making a mess.

Signs opens with a slow, no actually, a really slow building grumble which might be more familiar to Dame Satan fans, before giving way to the crisp gallop of Fingers. Fares and Tolls is a less dark, and altogether more wistful beast, brought home beautifully by a gorgeous duet. Then, by the time the woozy guitar solos of Favors arrive the smorgasbord is complete.

In their press material and the self-description on their website the band reference their home environment quite a lot, from the landscape and countryside of California to the music environment of psychedelia, old blues and soul music.  Their own songs showcase this confused jumble of influences, but in a manner which always seem economical and coherent, despite the broad array of ingredients they juggle.

In short, well worth your five dollars.

Sands – Signs

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 There have been a few baubles dished out this week, some shiny and some distinctly tatty, and I have to confess that from a barely-interested outsider’s perspective, it’s been pretty funny.

Even the Mercury Prize result, which I was kinda disappointed in because my pal didn’t win, created all sorts of comedy on Twitter and elsewhere.  The best was probably The Pop Cop’s hilarious rant about the Scottish New Music Awards.

Now, I wasn’t there, but looking at the results alone, they must have been pretty fucking hilarious.  Sandy Thom?  Record of the year something which hasn’t even been released yet? Best covers band? Sandy Thom?

Not having attended I have no idea how cringeworthy or awful it might actually have been in reality, but it is only the first year, and nothing of this sort is going to be perfect the first time around, so they do deserve a bit of slack.  But any new music award whose ceremony is compered by some X-Factor reject has at least one or two fundamental questions to be asked about it.

As for the Mercury Prize, well, as I freely admitted on Twitter in amongst all the hubbub, I wanted King Creosote to win for two reasons.  Firstly, he is a pal.  Not a close pal, but a pal nevertheless, and a nice guy.  And secondly, it’s pretty much the only album on that list that I know all that well.  You see what I mean by how little interest I actually had in any of these awards?

The chat after the Mercury Prize was interesting, some people accepted the result with resignation, some with good grace, and others with outrage at the corruption or ineptitude of the judges.  Mike Diver wrote a really good piece about it all on the BBC website, actually, pointing out that something as artistically focussed as the Mercury Prize is really good for music irrespective of your opinion on the final winner.

The arguments about the winner, the debate about the shortlist, the countless alternative lists, the bafflement at some of the nominations – all of this generates massive interest in music.  Actual interest too, and proper engagement in the art, rather than the tawdry commercialism and cultural vaccuum of the Brits. For example, I am now going to make an effort to see if my historical ambivalence towards PJ Harvey actually holds up under closer scrutiny

He wasn’t quite right about the entry process though, and inaccurately trivialised how prohibitive the submission costs are for small labels.  The £200 he quotes (it was £500 last time I was invited to submit anything) is a bargain for all the publicity a Mercury nomination generates, but it is a little more considerable when you consider the statistical likelihood of actually achieving that nomination.

£500 and a large pile of actual albums for the judges to listen to is a lot of money to throw down the drain on the off-chance, especially if you have a few releases that year which you might wish to nominate. Even at £200 I would think twice about it, depending on how many albums I had to nominate for that year, but then again we are a tiny, tiny label and probably a wee way away from seriously having to worry about this sort of shit.

In terms of the actual decision, though, the combination of the Scottish New Music Awards and the Mercury Prize in the same week highlights the problem with taking any of this shit seriously at all.  These awards are decided by either large or small groups of people, public vote or committee decision.

When it’s a small group of people then it’s basically some random yahoo passing judgement on your work, and why the fuck would you care what some random asshole thinks of your shit?  Even if one of my heroes thought the music we released was shite, would that bother me?  Of course it wouldn’t, I’d just file their opinions under ‘not interesting’ and get right back on with it.

But if you broaden these things away from an exclusive cabal of decision makers then you get the situation Diver discusses in his article: of course the Mercury Prize is kinda populist – it’s decided by committee, and anything really obscure and challenging is unlikely to attract the attention of more than a couple of people, making it highly unlikely that it will be nominated. I fucking hate 99% of music which is actually properly popular, so why would populism be a criterion on which I would ever judge my own work?  It isn’t, so fuck it.

So either way you lose: small numbers of people make decisions which are too subjective, and if you try and negate that by making it more democratic then you just end up with predictable populist tripe.

The only reason that I can think of that we don’t discard this whole bollocks and walk away altogether is that almost none of us can resist the little teeny-tiny thrill of piqued vanity when we are either nominated or agree wholeheartedly with a nomination.  We are being validated one way or another, either for being right or for being awesome, and most of us really can’t resist that, so award ceremonies will persist and probably even proliferate for the foreseeable future.

‘You know that new girl?  She’s such a stuck-up bitch, and she’s not even all that pretty, and she’s so dumb, did you hear what she…”
“You don’t like her?  She told me she thought you were kinda cute.”
“…what she said in English toda… wait, what, she said I was cute?”

So, after the chaos of the Festival, we are back to normal service here in Ides of Toad HQ (which looks suspiciously similar to Song, by Toad HQ and bears a more than passing resemblance to Song, by Toad Records HQ).

Actually, I thought I managed to get myself horribly waylaid by the Festival, but it turns out I have most of the Autumn’s lineups already filled and ready to go, with only a few gaps here and there.  This level of organisation rather shocks me, I have to confess, but I am sure I will find some way to have a last-minute panic in the end.

Anyhow, apart from next week’s Japanese War Effort, Animal Magic Tricks and Yusuf Azak gig, on Saturday 17th at the Wee Red Bar, we have the following:

Saturday 1st October, just confirmed: John Knox Sex Club, Plank! and Easter at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
This is going to be a cracker.  JKSC have a new album to promote, which sounds amazing, and Plank! and Easter are coming up from Manchester.  It’s going to be one of those evenings where none of the bands have that much in common exactly, but I still think the lineup will work really well.

Saturday 22nd October: Rob St. John album launch, with Meursault and eagleowl.
The venue is TBC on this one, but we are looking for somewhere a bit interesting, rather than your usual gig club bar venue thingie.  And I would imagine that readers of this site need little introduction to eagleowl or Meursault, but as Rob plays in both those bands as well, I do find myself wondering if he’s given any thought to just how much work he’s going to have to do on the night.

Saturday 5th November: Dad Rocks! and Shoes and Socks Off, with one more TBC, at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
This will be an evening of smart acoustic pop, and we have one more band still to add to the bill. I may try and add a full band to the headline slot though, just to make sure everyone stays on their toes.

Saturday 19th November: at the Wee Red Bar, and it’s my fucking birthday as well!
The whole lineup for the 19th is TBC, because I am trying to get Manchester’s Weird Era and Glasgow’s Battery Face onto the same bill, but we are just in the process of juggling dates, so none of this is confirmed yet. I am confident it will work out though, because everyone involved is keen to make it happen.

Sunday 27th November: Withered Hand, Samantha Crain and Michael McFarlane at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
I think Withered Hand will be playing solo acoustic, although I’m not sure, and I am absolutely thrilled to get Samantha Crain here for a gig, some three years after regular commenter and sometime contributor Campfires and Battlefields introduced me to her music. And finally, Michael McFarlane is someone I knew absolutely nothing about, but he’s a local lad who played Lach’s Antihoot this Summer and I thought he was bloody excellent, so I asked him to open.

Saturday 10th December: Song, by Toad Records Christmas Party.
This entire thing is TBC, but I think this is the best date for it.  It should at least give us time to clean up the house in time for the New Year’s House Gig, in any case.

So, umm… there you go.  I have to confess I never thought ‘putting on the odd gig’ would lead to this, but er, they should be really, really good shows.  And it would be nice if you all came to them too, otherwise I am going to be in all sorts of money trouble!