Okay, angry mob of the Toad readership, do your very worst.  Today, as promised, is the day we vote on our five favourite songs of the year so there will be no foolish questions as per usual, but what there will be is the chance for you to write down your favourite songs, in no particular order, and I will count them up and find out which songs the readers of Toad have enjoyed the most this year.

There aren’t any real rules, although the song should have been released in 2011.  And also, just to help me count, I’d appreciate it if you could write in in the form Artist – Song Title please.  Other than that, umm… well, do your worst, I suppose.

And, as per usual, El, Brian and myself will be live on Fresh Air Radio from about half three in the afternoon.  We have special guests this week, but they were invited by El and I have no idea who they are, what they do or why they are there.  I guess I will find out when I get there.

Live on Fresh Air Radio from 3:30pm UK time – listen here.

Now, to get you in the mood for voting for your top five songs, here’s a quick recap of last year’s winners, as well as a link to the thread itself where the voting took place.

1. The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio

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2. eagleowl – No Conjunction

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=3. Meursault – What You Don’t Have

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=3. Broken Records – You Know You’re Not Dead

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=3. Foals – Spanish Sahara

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And the playlist for this week’s show shall appear live below, as we play the songs:

1. Whirling Pig Dervish – Bawjaws
2. The Cure – The Love Cats
3. King Creosote & Jon Hopkins – John Taylor’s Month Away
4. Ringo Deathstarr – Do It Every Time
5. Twin Shadow – Slow
6. Hooray for Earth – True Loves
7. DZ Deathrays – Teeth
8. Joanna Gruesome – Lemonade Grrl
9. Class Actress – Weekend
10. Shirley Ellis – The Clapping Song
11. Blondie – Hanging on the Telephone
12. Rob St. John – Sargasso Sea
13. Foals – Spanish Sahara
14. The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio
15. Diana Ross – Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

 It’s tough to do this kind of thing off the top of your head, so I thought I should probably warn you about the Song, by Toad readers’ Best Of votes this year, so you can have a wee think before the spotlight falls upon you and you have to make a choice.

This Friday: Top 5 Songs On the Friday Fives this week, instead of the usual nonsense, I will be asking you to list your five favourite songs of the year.  Then I will add them up, and on Sunday afternoon I will announce the winners.  Simple.

Next Friday: Top 5 Albums Next Friday we’ll be doing much the same thing, but with our five favourite albums this time.  I think the concept of an album can be treated pretty loosely, so if something’s a mini-album or a longish EP then I reckon it can pretty much count.  No point being a fussy fucker about this kind of thing.

I will be counting the votes of course, but I won’t actually be voting myself.  That’s because I will as usual be publishing my own top twenty albums of the year, as well as my favourite fifty songs, but that will all be coming a bit later and I don’t want to ruin the (unbearable) suspense.

And finally, as a salute to the absolute fucking genius who decided to describe the storms hitting Scotland today as ‘Hurricane Bawbag’, I thought I’d include some Bob Dylan.  Being English I can’t even pronounce bawbag properly, but that’s still the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages.

Bob Dylan – Shelter From the Storm

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A Small Collection of Folk Tales is more literal a title than you might think – it is a mini album which is actually based on an old book of folk tales, rather than just an appropriation of their narrative style, which is a little more common.

Generally, music which is inspired by old folk tales (back before Disney, when they were actually worth a pinch of ‘coon shit*) tends towards the apocalyptic hell-stomp of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at full throttle.  Or perhaps that deranged carnival stomp which merged so comfortably with the passion for Balkan folk which was such a fascination a few years ago.

This, on the other hand, is just spooky.  It’s not threatening or unpleasant at all, but there are times when it really is downright eerie, and it’s a nice take on a familar idea.

Perhaps a little like a lusher, more constructed version of Bon Iver, before he went so utterly shit with his latest album, this has an atmospheric, misty, drowsy feel to it, and soothing vocals which can feel almost like they are singing a lullabye.  Like most lullabies though, that soothing impression can swiftly become a little creepy, as anyone familiar with Ka, the snake from the Jungle Book, will know.

The vocal delivery renders the lyrics somewhat indecipherable, so you are left with impressions – fleeting glimpses of movement and shapes in a fog of questionably benign atmospherics. There are times when that very fog becomes a little all-consuming, and perhaps the atmosphere can dominate at the expense of the actual songs, but for the most part this works really well.

In a Wild Deep – Regarding the Fox and the Wolf

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Website | Buy from Bandcamp

*Before anyone gets over-excited, ‘coon shit is an old expression I picked up from my dad, and ‘coon is short for raccoon, not a racist term.  Pull yourselves together, people.

 This is rough, chaotic and bristling with cheerful energy. There are elements of all the usual lo-fi garage stuff that you’ve heard me discuss at length, with shades of early Britpop, albeit from back when that genre was still heavily indebted to C86 indie, and before it turned to shit.  And it is, of course, slathered in feedback, fuzz and distortion.

At its best it’s also just… well, reckless, I suppose. The pace, and the deadpan female vocals remind be a little of The Just Joans in some ways, but Joanna Gruesome themselves clatter along like they’re making it up on the spot and fear the whole thing might fall apart if they slow down.  It’s not all like that, but the best bits are!

You can download this whole EP for whatever you choose to pay by going to their Bandcamp page, and I recommend doing so, because it is absolutely full of good bits.  Pantry Girl mightn’t do it for me particularly, but the drumming on Lemonade Grrl is brilliant, the classically-indie riffs of Madison and Candy are terrific.

They seem to be a bit of a fusion between early nineties US indie and mid eighties UK indie actually, with the choruses reminding me of the latter, and the sudden snarls of the guitar the former.  When they slow it down there’s an awful lot of shoegaze in there too, such as the excellent Candy.  It’s a good mix, and delivered in some style.  As introductions to a new, very promising band go, this EP is very much the business.

And if you want to see them play, they’ll be up here with The Black Tambourines and Dolfinz, playing and Ides of Toad gig at Henry’s Cellar Bar on Sunday 18th December.

Joanna Gruesome – Lemonade Grrl

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 I was introduced to A.A. Bondy some years ago, by a regular reader of mine who goes by the name of Campfires and Battlefields, when he wrote a guest post and included the awesome Vice Rag to illustrate his point.

Since then I have gone on to become a firm A.A. Bondy fan, although never in that outspoken, evangelical way I can be about music.  And three gorgeous albums into his career I find myself wondering why.

A little like Kurt Vile, perhaps his music just doesn’t deliver a slap around the chops like some stuff.  He rarely writes songs which excite you, as such, more ones which slowly envelop you.  It’s music which, I suppose, just feels right.

On this album there is more of a band aesthetic at play than the usual stripped down arrangements, which generally works.  The extra instrumentation is never overbearing, and in fact just bring an added level of warmth and depth to songs already rich in empathy and pathos.

With music like this you have to be a little careful not to demand instant satisfaction.  This can be more of a problem when reviewing things than when just listening for enjoyment, but even now, when I pop a couple of songs up for sampling purposes, you won’t really get the full feeling of the slow, comforting embrace of sadness which you get from listening to this album.

Despite the overall feeling being consistent, they never fall into the trap of monotony, and here the band is a big help.  After the lush loveliness of DRMZ, everything lifts for The Twist, which breaks you out of your melancholy beautifully, with a brisk drum beat, a steady, growly guitar riff, and an organ backing which feels like an ominous choir.

Like all of his albums, this will sink in slowly, and won’t absolutely demand your attention necessarily.  But if you give it, you will be rewarded.

A.A. Bondy – The Heart is Willing

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A.A. Bondy – DRMZ

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Fat Possum

 I’m sorry that this blog has become a bit of a platform for me to rant about political shit rather than music recently.  I know it’s not really what Song, by Toad is supposed to be here for, and I am aware that I really had better get some music recommendations out there soon, but… well, fuck it, this shit needs to be said, by everyone, really fucking loud, so those stupid twats get the fucking point eventually.

For those who wish to skip the ranting, please go here immediately and do your part to protect both equality and the family by completing this consultation asking the Scottish government to legalise same sex marriage.  This is a massively important issue, so please take action now.  It’s barely believable we’re still having this fucking discussion, frankly.

What am I on about?  Well Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond intends, full credit to him, to put same-sex marriage on an equal legal footing with heterosexual marriages, which is an improvement on the current ‘civil partnership’ status and something to be applauded.

The Church of  Scotland, however, has decided to try and ruin it for everyone by coming out* strongly against this plan.  They suggest, somewhat bafflingly, that the change could have “significant and, as yet, inadequately considered repercussions for our country, for the wellbeing of families, communities and individuals” without giving the slightest hint as to what on Earth they’re talking about. Read the rest of this entry »

Well folks, here we go, our last release of the year! Happy Christmas and all that, and feel free to forget about presents for the kids and buy one last lovely piece of vinyl instead.  Honestly, they’re just kids, they probably won’t remember and they’ll end up resenting you anyway, whatever you do, because kids are ungrateful little shits like that.

Anyhow, Song, by Toad Records’ final act of 2011 (apart from our awesome all-day label Christmas Party on Saturday) is to release the self-titled debut album by Miami’s Lil Daggers.  It’s a nasty record, and my favourite review so far (well, apart from the 5* one we’re apparently getting in Artrocker, which is awesome) was published in Subba Cultcha, where Emma Rochford produced the following little gems:

“this is music which is unashamedly ugly and hostile and it works all the better for it.”

“There are points when, for me, Lil Daggers push it too far and border on the unlistenable which makes this record a bit too much of an uncomfortable listen but I guess that’s pretty much the point. You’d be hard pushed to find a band that can give you the creeps quite like Lil Daggers.”

Now, I might suggest that it’s a little bit more of a pop album than that, but then I have a fairly well developed taste for this kind of growl these days.  Actually I reckon it’s a pretty hummable record, with the possible exception of the ungodly snarl of Ghost Herd, and to prove this we hereby present our usual enticement of a free download, this time of Dead Golden Girls, which can be snagged from the Soundcloud widget below.  And the album, should this tickle your fancy, can be bought here or in Avalanche Records down on the Grassmarket, either on black vinyl or very limited edition grey marbled vinyl.

Dead Golden Girls by Song, by Toad

Well the BBC have their list, the BAMS sort of have theirs and now we have ours: hot tips for bands to make it big in 2012, in this case as chosen by a selection of music bloggers designed to give a decent cross-section of opinions and some sort of reasonable alternative to the pap peddled on the Beeb.

Now, to be entirely fair, although it is easy to make fun of the BBC’s Sound of 2012 list (here it is, so you can compare, contrast and make snide remarks on Twitter), it’s not something I really tend to do because… well who cares, really.  That list is for the commercial, pop side of the industry and for fans who give a fuck about that kind of thing.  I don’t particularly think I or anyone reading this website is likely to fall into those categories, so why on Earth would any of us care that it’s full of bands we’ve either never heard or think are shite.  Of course that’s what we think, it’s not a list written for people like us.

The scary part about that list, and something which does bother me about it, is the effect making it or, more importantly, not making it can have on the levels of attention and effort given to artists by their record labels.  This is hardly the fault of the listmakers of course, and it is very much the nature of the nettle you grasp when you choose to play around at that end of the music industry, but it is nevertheless pretty fucking sickening.   Mind you these labels are very clearly not artistic enterprises, so a commercial entity acting in a commercially ruthless way shouldn’t stir even the tiniest eddy of surprise in anyone.

So I feel I should point out that this list is not intended in any way to be a dig at the BBC list, nor a vehicle for criticising it, Andy from Von Pip simply thought it would be an interesting thing to try, just to see what we came up with, and if our list perhaps brought some interesting, slightly different bands to the fore.  And with the shortlist to be announced in a little while, without any further ado, here is the long list: Read the rest of this entry »

THIS WEEK IS THE MOTHERFUCKING SONG. BY TOAD CHRISTMAS PARTY!  OH YES IT IS! And isn’t that jolly exciting.  You’d best all be very excited indeed or I will be most upset – I’m a sensitive soul after all! I’ve also just realised that although I ordered tickets, I forgot to take them down to Avalanche, because I am a fool, so I will do that today.  And you can buy them online too remember.

However, firstly, a spot of boasting, if that’s okay.  I know I just did this last week but a couple of things have come up which are rather good, so umm… well, I’ll keep it brief.

Firstly, Song, by Toad has been voted joint third favourite music blog, along with Gorilla vs Bear, in the music bloggers’ favourite music blogs poll 2011, as conducted by the Recommender.  Strangely enough, I finished level with GvB last year as well, although we were joint fourth, but we were also behind a second-placed Pigeons & Planes too, which gives this year’s list an oddly familiar look.

And Secondly, The Scotsman asked me to write an article for them about ‘A Year in Toad’, or something like that, this weekend, and the results can be read here.  It’s odd how editing the writing as brutally as I had to to fit it into the 900 word limit changes the feel of it.  I am not sure if I didn’t try and cram too much stuff in there, at the expense of that friendly, readable style I generally aim for.  Still, not a bad discipline to engage in every once in a while.

It’s odd though, because they barely changed what I submitted, albeit a couple of changes which seem oddly meaningless. In the first paragraph ‘in our living room’ was changed to ‘in the living room of my Edinburgh home’ which, despite sounding somewhat constipated and wrong when those particular words are put in my mouth, also seems like an oddly inefficient way to get the information across when they could have just added the word ‘Edinburgh’ before ‘indie label’ in the intro bit they put at the top.

So it was nice that they changed so little, but the changes they made were a little baffling. In almost every case it was just a marginally different way of saying what I had already said.  So none of it was at all bad – the changes weren’t really better or worse – but it was a little odd, because it mostly seemed needless. The only reason I even mention it is because I don’t exactly write for grown up publications a lot, so I am still kind of fascinated by the process.

Anyway, the ramping up of the Christmas boozemageddon continues this week, with plenty of gigs and far too many opportunities to get yourself into a drunken mess.

Monday 5th Dec: Franz Nicolay, Chris T-T & Billy Liar at the Banshee Labyrinth.

I don’t know much about this, but it looks like it might be rather interesting. Nicolay used to play piano in The Hold Steady, and you can still hear a lot of that kind of stuff in his solo material.  Nevertheless, it clearly has its own character, maybe a little more frenzied and tangential than the conversational realism of Hold Steady stuff, so this could be a really interesting gig.

Tuesday 6th Dec: Broken Records, The Douglas Firs & R.M. Hubbert at Cabaret Voltaire.

Broken Records will be test driving some new songs, which is exciting enough, and with The Douglas Firs and R.M. Hubbert also booked, this bill is an absolute corker.

Broken Records – Modern Worksong

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Friday 9th Dec: John Knox Sex Club at the National Portrait Gallery.

The John Knox Sex Club were described to me as the best live band in Scotland, and after their Ides of Toad gig with Easter and Fuzzystar, I can’t disagree.  It was brilliant, and they are in Edinburgh again on Friday at the National Portrait Gallery, playing at the launch for a book called Rough Cut Nation.

Saturday 10th Dec: Song, by Toad Records Christmas Party at the St. Stephen’s Centre.

With a couple of exceptions we will have every band on the label playing on Saturday. Lil Daggers and Trips and Falls are across the pond, The Savings and Loan don’t really play live, particularly, and Charlie from King Post Kitsch has had to go down to London for work-related reasons.  Other than that, we are all present and accounted for, so please join us for a day (and evening) spent celebrating our year’s work with increasing levels of drunkenness.

Bleerch, bleurgh…  I feel completely disgusting. I had a really good sleep last night, but that translated into a day spent wasting my time fannying about and just lolling in that way that seems like a good idea at the time, but invariably ends up making you feel completely disgusting by the end.

Also, to make matters worse, we ordered pizza, which is something we hardly ever do and something which we absolutely always regret.  So here we sit on a Friday evening feeling bloated and slightly soiled and wondering whether at this time of the night there’s any point really trying to redeem the day, and perhaps it’s best just to forget it and wait for tomorrow.  Bleuch.

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01. Joanna Gruesome – Madison (00.27)
02. The Mutton Birds – Anchor Me (06.36)
03. Monster Island – Pilot Whales (14.42)
04. Former Bullies – It Might Be Okay (17.36)
05. Video Thrills – Our Plush Selection (21.05)
06. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Some Candy Talking (Peel Session) (25.16)
07. Bottle of Evil – I Can See Your Face (31.20)
08. The Black Tambourines – White Album (39.37)
09. Dolfinz – Teenage Doom (42.47)
10. The Ramones – Psycho Therapy (48.50)
11. Samoan Punks – Everyday (51.42)
12. Waiters – Black Stuff (59.27)