Alright, I know that by the end of January you are supposed to stop using terms like ‘new year’ but I reckoned it was about time for an update on these matters, and that seemed the most appropriate way of phrasing it.

So, with a flurry of album launches coming up in the late Spring/early Summer, we have a small but exciting fistful of gigs to tide us over until then, which I will list below.  Apart from the aforementioned launches, which we’ll generally try and do somewhere a bit strange, I am looking at putting on as many of my events as possible at Henry’s this year.

This is for numerous reasons, but chief amongst them Nora and Claire have been there at every gig and have been a real pleasure to deal with.  When you’re a relatively rookie promoter, having sound engineers and venue managers who just take care of shit in the calmest possible way makes a huge difference, leaving you to panic about attendance at your leisure.  Also, I just kinda like the place.  It’s scruffy, sure, but in many ways it’s a classic dive bar – it’s where gigs should be taking place.

Anyhow, our first gig is in a few weeks and it will be Armellodie Records’ Chris Devotion and the Expectations but umm… well, I’ll write down a handy list for you because, maybe even more than it loves kittens, the internet just loves lists doesn’t it. And as per usual, all tickets will be available from Brown Paper Tickets, and from Avalanche Records down on the Grassmarket.

Saturday 18th Feb: Chris Devotion and the Expectations, My Tiny Robots & Morris Major.

Chris Devotion and the Expectations have a new album out on the brilliant Armellodie Records, and will be playing some dates to support the release.  Their smart, slight stylised indie pop should work well with My Tiny Robots, who are also rather stylish indie poppers, albeit in a rather different way.

Friday 24th Feb: The Pineapple Chunks, Brown Brogues & Zed Penguin.

Er, ramshackle and idiosyncratic – is that the best way to describe this lineup?  I think it might be.  Zed Penguin have a new EP and a new full band lineup, and Brown Brogues a new single on the way, so this should be perfect timing.  All these bands make a bit of a racket, and none of them seem entirely right in the head, which er, well, should probably make for a brilliant night I reckon.

Saturday 25th Feb: Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six, Skeleton Bob (I think) and Lee Patterson at the Third Door.

Louis Barabbas were absolutely mental and absolutely brilliant when they last played Edinburgh, in the middle of last year.  They’ll be joined on the bill by Lee Patterson, who I first happened across at this year’s Antihoot in the Summer, and hopefully Skeleton Bob.  Actually, for all they said ‘yeah, awesome’ when I asked them to play, I have yet to get proper confirmation from Skeleton Bob actually, so I’d better get on top of that, now that I think about.  Also, please note that this gig is at the Third Door, not Henry’s.

Friday 9th March: So Many Wizards and LeThug.

This will be a pop night, sort of.  All the bands take their pop and make it weird, be it by fuzz or by skewed eccentricity.  So Many Wizards are over touring from the States, and LeThug are a really promising new Glasgow band I wrote about on Song, by Toad recently, and if you haven’t already checked out their stuff then you should.

Saturday 24th March: Post War Glamour Girls, Dolfinz and Slowcoaches.

Two Leeds bands accidentally ended up on the same bill here, so I hope they get on. Dolfinz are favourites of ours already, as you know, and they are touring with Slowcoaches, so you can expect some fine, garagey racket from those two.  Post War Glamour Girls are just a tad more restrained and stylish I think

 With one EP already to their name, out for free on Glasgow’s brilliant Wiseblood Industries, this is the debut album proper by Now Wakes the Sea.  Contrary to what their name might hint at, they aren’t a nasty emo band, in fact a wonderfully muffled, slow-moving lot.

Most bands who use these atmospheric, lo-fi productions methods do so to produce music which is raw and aggressive, daring you to tease the tune out of the static if you have the stamina.  Now Wakes the Sea, on the other hand, for all they have a couple of upbeat guitar pop numbers like the brilliant Seven Apples, use the muffled fuzz of the recording to create a gorgeously intimate feeling around their slow, pained songs.  It feels like a fireside confessional half the time, but the occasional bursts into full band beef and drifts into what borders on whimsy with songs like Subside make sure you don’t just get drowned in swamp of self-examination.

If the barely-structured ambient daze of The Fire on Hold pulls Fluoxetine Morning in one direction, and Seven Apples pulls it in another, what these songs chiefly serve to do is bookend the emotional range of the album.  Fluoxetine is an anti-depressant, and those two songs seem to express the barely-conscious narcotic daze at one end of the spectrum, and the bursts of determination at the other end, but it treats them like struggling insects who will never escape the spider’s web – one still fighting to get out, and the other on the very cusp of giving up altogether.

I think a couple of things make this stand out for me.  Firstly, on a purely technical level, the acoustic guitar, brief glimmers of noise and occasional use of things like drums cut through the fug of the downbeat, muffled body of the instrumentation, meaning this is a long way from just being a depressing dirge of an album, and never feels one-paced.

Then, in terms of emotional connection, there is something about the vocal delivery which is absolutely gorgeous.  It’s slow, barely even a singing voice half the time, and delivered with near perfect ambiguity between confidence and indifference.  It’s not an intimidated, halting delivery, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to presume that you give a shit. The depression hinted at in both the album and the song titles, whilst it seems present throughout the record, doesn’t feel like something which drags it down.

So, treading a lot of very fine lines indeed, this has ended up being an absolutely fantastic record.  For all the noise and ambience employed, it is still an album defined by its songs, and for all the morose themes explored it still feels like an album defined warmth and caring, and by its relationship with others, rather than just itself.

Now Wakes the Sea – Propranolol

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Now Wakes the Sea – Seven Apples

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The Muppets win at everything.  That’s all I have to say on the matter.

In other news, Mrs. Toad and I went out into the garden this weekend, to try and tackle the small jungle which has slowly been developing since the Summer.  The weather has been so spectacularly shit since July and August that we just haven’t been out there, so our window boxes have all died and every bed was overrun with weeds.

Still, due to our particularly indelicate methods of gardening – a little closer to slash and burn than anything you might see on Gardeners’ World – we managed to get through an awful lot and also to shove some rather late bulbs into the ground, albeit more in hope than expectation.  It was nice though, especially because we haven’t been out there for months now.  Although fuck knows what we’re going to with all the piles of cuttings and various other crap we generated.

Anyway, after the extreme rock ‘n’ roll of a spot of gardening, I’m not sure that booze and drugs and gigs will impress me all that much.  But let’s give it a go, eh…

Thursday 2nd Feb: Born to Be Wide Festival Seminar at the Electric Circus.

The guests for this one include Dave Corbet (T In The Park/The Edge Festival), Katch Holmes (Knockengorroch Festival), Gordon Reilly (Insider Festival), Shaun Arnold (Go North). So if you want to know how best to get on festival bills and to hear some chat about what it can actually do for you, then I strongly recommend you come to this one.

Thursday 2nd Feb: Lady North play Sick Note at Cabaret Voltaire.

This is a late night club show, and I actually think this might be one of the best ways to experience Lady North’s thumping rhythms and hypnotic guitars.  And for those of you getting soused at Born to Be Wide ealier, then this would be an ideal place to stagger onto next.

Saturday 4th Feb: Love Your Library Day at Penicuik Library, with The Last Battle and Matt Norris and the Moon.

Ed from 17 Seconds has organised a couple of great events for National Libraries Day.  The first is a comedy night involving Frankie Boyle and Miles Jupp, but that’s sold out now, and the second is a musical event out in Penicuik, with a couple of 17 Seconds Records bands.  The 37, 47 or X47 will take you there really easily from the centre of Edinburgh, so I don’t want any whinging excuses about the enormity of the journey, it’s just not that hard.

Sunday 5th Feb: Dam Mantle plays Superclub at Sneaky Pete’s.

Dam Mantle is probably on the fringes of my taste for electronic music, truth be told, but for those of you with better knowledge of this kind of stuff I reckon this should be a very good bet.

Video: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr
Audio: zip download: right-click, save as

This session was recorded in Glasgow before Josh’s performance at Oran Mor on 22nd November last year.  The first attempt to record a session with him was at Stereo, but recording in a venue really didn’t work out, so this time we decided to take up the kind offer of Phil from PAWS to record it in his bedroom instead.

Again we were a little pressed for time, because Josh had a marathon day, recording a session with the BBC and conducting an interview before doing our session, and then having the gig to play afterwards.  So we only recorded three songs, and for simplicity’s sake we did the interview in one chunk and I have just chopped bits of it into the podcast where appropriate.

Given the incredibly punishing schedule he tends to have I really do appreciate Josh taking the time to re-record this session, as well as the infallibly good humour and cooperative nature showed by both himself and Peter and Tom, his management team.  It may have been tight to get done, but this is a really, really nice session if you ask me.

As usual, the videos can all be found on our Vimeo and YouTube pages and the photos, which were jointly taken by Stephanie Gibson and Dylan Matthews, are collected on our Flickr page.  The session mp3s can be downloaded below, or in a zip file here, the session podcast can be played or downloaded below too, and the tracklisting for the podcast can be found at the bottom of the page.

Direct download: Toadcast #211 – Josh T. Pearson Toad Session

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Josh T. Pearson – Woman When I’ve Raised Hell (Toad Session)

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Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb (Toad Session)

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Josh T. Pearson – Covers Medley (Toad Session)

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01. Josh T. Pearson – Woman When I’ve Raised Hell (Toad Session) (02.54)
02. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (12.30)
03. Perfume Genius – All Waters (19.06)
04. Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb (Toad Session) (25.26)
05. The Dirty Three – Some Summers They Drop Like Flys (31.43)
06. Papa M – The Lass of Roch Royal (38.17)
07. Judy Collins – Wild Mountain Thyme (53.03)
08. Howe Gelb – Can’t Help Falling in Love (55.37)
09. Josh T. Pearson – Covers Medley (Toad Session) (61.54)

Fucking typical. We spend the day recording with PAWS for the split 12″ I’ve been going on about so much recently, and then I spend two or three hours getting preliminary mixes together for them before heading up to their show at the Electric Circus.

Then, because I am a fucking idiot, I come home and start faffing about with the mixes. Never mind your actual judgement, your hearing actually changes when you get drunk (I think you perceive the upper registers far less, but I’m not sure, it could be the other way around) so mixing music is a pretty stupid thing to be doing.

I don’t think I did much damage of course, mostly because I didn’t really change much, and also because I have found the bit in Logic where I can rewind to an older version of the file, but I did sit up until half three in the morning mostly just because I am so excited about the record. Muppet. It’s a good thing to be this excited of course, but given how shite I feel this morning I am not sure it was the best way to express it.

Anyhow, I dearly wish someone could be made to go and fetch me coffee.  Sometimes these basic personal maintenance tasks seem so completely unreasonable – maybe it’s a hangover from being either a student or a child, but I honestly think that the sink could be overflowing at the moment and I couldn’t be arsed to get up and stop it flooding the house.

So, please do de-lurk, answer the following five stupid questions, and then waste what little productive time there is in your average Friday afternoon by fannying around on the internet with us.

1. What do you get so obsessed with you stay up far too late doing it?
2. What is the one trivially simple task you really can’t be fucked with when you’re having one of those ultra-lazy moments?
3. Back to basics snack you could really do with at the moment.
4. If I offered to buy you any album at all right this minute, what would you choose?
5. If you could obliterate all your responsibilities this afternoon, and be entirely free to do as you please, how would you spend it?

 Hmmm, reading the email I was sent by Shift-Static, there is a definite emphasis on their Edinburgh associations which seems entirely absent from any of their other PR material.  So if they were trying to prey upon my nepotistic instincts then they, erm, probably had a point actually.

It’s hard to resist the idea that somewhere round the corner from you there exists a collection of talented fuckers making amazing music entirely out of the view of the world’s music chatterati, so despite the fact that this lot are clearly far more from Newcastle than they are from Edinburgh, I will confess I felt just that little bit more curious when opening this email than when opening many others.  Not least it’s unusual to hear about a band from Edinburgh who no-one’s told me about already.  Even if *cough* they’re really from Newcastle.

The other thing this lot have managed, which is really rather funny, is to make a total hypocrisy of my recent post decrying remixes. I know I joke about it, but this is where the local nepotism possibly did come into play after all.  Generally, finding sentences like ‘here is our amazing song and here is a remix of it’ sends me straight to the delete button, but in this case the combination of Shift-Static being a local band, of the email being nicely worded and the remix being attributed to Waskerley Way, who are a band I know and like, meant that I felt I really should listen.

And if they are reading, the poor fuckers in Shift-Static are probably wondering why I’ve got to the fourth paragraph of a writeup of their music without mentioning the slightest thing about it.  I apologise for this, but I suppose I just wanted to give you some sort of impression of what surfing my inbox every day is actually like.  Things get deleted so fast that even I myself am fascinated by what it is that nudges me to listen more closely to something.

Anyhow, now that I have (apologies to the band) finally got round to discussing the music, it’s not a thousand mile away from the LeThug stuff I wrote about last week.  It’s definitely electronic pop music, although there is perhaps a little more shimmering than shoegaze going on here.  In fact, for all Il-1 is glitchy and uncertain, by the time the second song – Thanks, Thugs -  kicks in, we are into the kind of territory which Goldfrapp and The Pet Shop Boys managed to straddle so successfully: that particular kind of electronic music which, whilst I assume it will please its core audience of electronic pop fans, will also thrill conservative and relatively narrow-minded indie kids like myself.

The remix mention came about because the band themselves highlighted both the original version of Sky Burial as well as the aforementioned remix of the same song, both of which take centre stage here as a one-two in the middle of the EP.

I’ll admit that the clean, clear female vocal delivery of the original, for all it is lovely, strays a little too far into the polished pop world for my own personal taste.  Not that far, because I still really like the song, but perhaps a little further than anything I am likely to end up truly loving.

The Waskerley Way remix, however, for all it doesn’t do much, just seems to add both enough haze and enough heft to get me to really love what really is a simple, excellent song.  By this point Saint Etienne are strongly evoked, or possibly even the briefly incredible Dubstar, and I find myself looking back wistfully to that period in the mid-nineties when I first started to explore electronic music.  This has a lot in common with a lot of the things I first took a chance on when trying to expand my listening palette from indie to broader sounds, back when I was a teenager.  Yes, it was that long ago.  Fuck off.

So whether they’re from Newcastle or Edinburgh, whether you’d call them electro-pop (shudder) or alternative-indie-elec.. oh alright, I’ll stop now.  Whatever you reckon this stuff is, it’s very, very good.  When the band got in touch their only sales patter was “I really think its in your ballpark”.  And they were right, it really is.

Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way Remix)

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You have no idea how many times I’ve read about people referencing Captain Beefheart when describing the music I love, but for some inexplicable reason I have never really explored his music.

The other day someone shared the video above on their Facebook timeline thingy and for the first time I actually listened to some Beefheart.  And you know what, pretty fucking good don’t you think.

After that I happened across this phenomenal video for The Blues Are Still Blue by Belle & Sebastian.  I am not convinced they gave permission for this directly, so it is yet another case of the sort of thing SOPA and IP fundamentalists will be stopping.  Nevertheless, Stuart from B&S is clearly chuffed to bits with the video, which goes to show that a large amount of grey area exists in copyright violation between what dying commercial behemoths want to demand from the government and what artists actually feel harms them.

Anyway, after that I was buggering about on the internet some more (I told you this was going to get tedious, didn’t I) and then I happened across some early Nirvana videos.  Really early Nirvana videos.  In fact, if the YouTube blurb is to be believed, some of the very earliest ones.

Those of you who listened to the Slackercast this weekend will know that I am in the process of digging back through some of the early US indie rock and slacker rock which is inspiring so many of today’s lo-fi garagey bands.  I was kind of aware of this stuff at the time, but only vaguely.

Most of the music I was into, even in my last years of high school, when you’re supposed to be being all rebellious, owed more to my parents than my peers, so I actually didn’t get as deep into this kind of stuff as you would think.  Pretty good videos though, eh?

Oh, and while I was buggering about I also happened across this trailer, which takes the form of a parody of recent low-budget British films.  And let’s face it, whilst it’s a little heavy-handed it’s still pretty funny, and rather accurate.

And so umm.. yes. I’ve been buggering about on YouTube. Fascinating, this shit, isn’t it.

This weekend’s podcast will be the Josh T. Pearson Toad Session, so I thought I might offer up a wee teaser just um… well, I’m not really sure actually, it just seems to be the done thing these days.

This session was actually filmed through in Glasgow before Josh’s show at Oran Mor in November.  To avoid the pitfalls of trying to film the session in a venue where people are trying to do other jobs, we decided this time to record in Phil from PAWS‘ flat, which happened to be just down the road.

The full session, along with the usual ten minute mini-documentary, interview podcast, song videos, mp3 downloads and photo gallery, will all go up on Saturday, but in the meantime here’s the Toad Session version of Country Dumb, played sitting on Phil’s bed next to a distinctly disinterested Stephanie, who also took most of the pictures for the session.

Apart from the number of my friends who work there, it’s difficult to feel any real sympathy for the lumbering dinosaur that is HMV.  Nevertheless, I do find the company’s struggles quite fascinating, and they really do seem to be on death’s door at the moment.

Generally when I end up discussing this with anyone it tends to be solely within the context of music retail.  What will the slow death of HMV do for smaller independent shops?  What will it do for music sales when the only remaining large high street retailer finally vanishes?

These are valid and interesting questions of course, but they tend to lead to quite narrow discussions about what little remains of their business model.  HMV is struggling not just because music retail is fucked, but because the whole retail sector is in turmoil.  In the wake of the disruption caused by the internet, out of town aircraft hanger superstores seem to be fine and high-end boutique retailers seem to be fine, but HMV is neither of these things, so it is facing difficulties both by virtue of its place within the retail environment, as well as the more sector-specific issues caused by the fact that the selling of mp3s quite simply makes shops redundant in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Shaw told me about this album when he played up here last August.  He seemed simultaneously hesitant and excited about it, telling me that is was much more layered with noise that his previous EP.

I think he was a little nervous about how people would react to it, and in general I think Shaw's relationship with how people react to his music is a funny one.

However much I enjoyed his performance, there was nothing I could say which would persuade him that he wasn't shit.  And when he introduced 10,000 Sentinels he awkwardly added that it was a 'crowd pleaser' in a way that implied that he had difficulty actually believing people who get excited about his stuff. It's not that I think he wants to be disliked of course, but I do get the impression that if there is one side of the artistic deal with the audience that most discomfits him it is the tacit courting of praise.

Consequently, the noise he mentioned seems more a product of this kind of awkwardness rather than a particular stylistic contrivance, which means that for all there are times when it isn't all that pretty to listen to, it is never as jarring or intrusive as this kind of thing can be.  In fact it fits as naturally and comfortably into the music as the acoustic guitar and piano with which you might more normally associate this kind of internal monologue.

And that seems to be pretty much what this album is: a sort of stumbling, but insistent internal monologue - a sort of stream of consciousness, mixed with a large element of both mea culpa and self-administered pep talk. It's music you have to meet halfway, for sure, and won't just grab you and announce itself unless you yourself make the first steps, but it is an utterly gorgeous record if you pay it some time.

Creaking doors and scraped forks, and self-analytical subject matter could make for something rather uncomfortable, or potentially self-indulgent, but the music is so slow and understated that you feel more lulled into it than forced.  The gentle delivery also diffuses any real sense of self-indulgence, as Shaw seems more weary than angst-ridden, and doesn't sing as if he requires your exculpation. It feels more like a post-catharsis album than one which in and of itself is required to free the singer from anything in particular, and that makes it warm, approachable and a really lovely listen.

Benjamin Shaw - How to Test the Depth of a Well

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