Song, by Toad

Given I have now sworn off festivals with a population over about five thousand, I think it’s only fair that I start noseying around some of the smaller ones and seeing what they have to offer.

I have loved Homegame and Pickathon, narrowly missed out on the Insider and Kelburn, but I think I will be making it to this one: Doune the Rabbit Hole on the 30th and 31st July.  I don’t really know the organisers, but they’re two young lads from Glasgow taking a chance, apparently, and my friend Ed from the Roxy is now helping them out too.

Add to that the fact that there are two Toad Records bands on the bill – Meursault (who are at Truck this weekend too) and Inspector Tapehead – and two Fence ones too – Francois and the Atlas Mountains and Rozi Plain – and I think that this will do very nicely for me indeed.  Oh and Doune Castle is, I believe, the location of the insulting Frenchman and the English knight whose mother was a hamster and whose father smelled of Elderberries (see below).

And if you fancy it you can get discounted tickets from me, here, now. Generally they’d be £48, but you can get them from the link below for £38 if you fancy coming along.

It’s time for some video fun here on Song, by Toad.  It seems that as well as allowing more and more people to record their own music, the relative affordability of digital equipment has also allowed more and more bands and other enterprises to make surprisingly good videos on their own as well, be it music videos, live sessions, video blogs or whatever else.

Above we have the official (*ahem*!) video for Trips and Falls‘ moment of genius ‘And in Real Life He Wears Corduroy Pants”.  This is from their debut album on Song, by Toad Records ‘He Was Such a Quiet Boy’, which can be bought here and which I absolutely love.  But then, I would say that, wouldn’t I.

When we first saw Bombadil play live it was at Pickathon in 2008, and they were brilliant.  For the most part they played songs from their debut album A Buzz, A Buzz but there was one standout which I had never heard before: Marriage, which ended up on their second record, Tarpits and Canyonlands, which was released last year.  Below is a live session with Scott Avett from the Avett Brothers, who were label-mates of Bombadil’s during their years on the wonderful Ramseur Records, before they left recently to sign to Columbia.

Below we have the official Silver Columns video for their new single Cavalier.  I am really looking forward to hearing this album, because far from being a disco-pop novelty act, their new stuff really sounds like it’s going to be a varied, excellent record.  And a video with Johnny Pictish acting all cool like a pop star is always worth a good chortle.

When we started the Toad Sessions I think I might have had something like this video below in mind, if only we lived somewhere as cool as that.  It’s by Adam Arcuragi, and it just looks so incredibly lush, the sound is good and I envy anyone actually being there.  How dare their lives be so brilliant!

It’ll be back to music and the sharing of illegally pirated copyright material next, but for now I thought a wee visual interlude was in order.  Enjoy!

We’re in Anstruther this weekend for Homegame, and so we got incredibly pissed late at night and recorded a podcast for you all, just as a special extra Sunday Supplement.

This should give you a taste of our Homegame fun and, sadly, also an idea of just how much of a wreck we all make of ourselves in Fife once a year.
Honestly, this is my favourite festival in the fucking universe, possibly only equalled by Pickathon, which is incredibl e.

Toadcast #113 – The Anstercast

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01.Withered Hand – No Cigarettes (01.34)
02.Silver Columns – Yes and Dance (Silver Columns Remix) (08.31)
03.Findo Gask – Wrapped in Plastic (Live) (14.00)
04.Adem – Everything You Need (20.02)
05.Django Django – Love’s Dart (29.52)
06.FOUND – Freaky Freaky Chancer (33.37)
07.Cold Seeds – The Perfume of Mexican Birds (43.43)
08.Love.Stop.Repeat – The Ghost of What You Used to Be (50.52)
09.FOUND & eagleowl – Some R. Kelly Cover (58.52)

Bombadil are a fucking lovely group of guys, and they just emailed me through their first music video.  I’ll be honest, I’ve seen more polished productions in the past but frankly it’s such a good song that I just don’t care.  Listen and enjoy.

If you want to hear or read a little more, we interviewed them at the Pickathon Festival a year and a bit ago.

I have been mulling this record over for some time, because it is something of a progression from Bombadil’s previous, brilliant album. Consequently it has taken me a little time to adjust, and I didn’t want to rush out a review based entirely on my initial reaction, which was the standard precious music fan’s – “Er, different, why, what have you done?”.

Where A Buzz, A Buzz was mental with stomping folky brilliance, this is more of an eclectic pop album by comparison, ringing with piano, harmonies, handclaps and thumping drums. They are an exuberant band, and this sincere enthusiasm is slathered all over this record. Songs go berserk in the middle, much like their live shows, arrangements have all sort of things thrown at them – big choruses, glittering strings, crescendos of rhythmic shifts and all sorts of other things.

At other times, Bombadil are downright sentimental. Reasons and Marriage are really rather sadly lovely. I remember sitting in the middle of one of the most insane and brilliant live shows I’ve ever seen, at Pickathon last year, when they suddenly stopped leaping and prancing around the place and Daniel sat at the piano to play Marriage. Give the kind of set which the song seemed to stop clean in its tracks, I’ve rarely seen a song make such an impact on an audience.

I think that the only reason I think this album doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor is perhaps because the band haven’t quite hit the heights with the most upbeat songs on this one. One Two Three and Trip Out West have their match on Tarpits & Canyonlands, but Cavaliers Har Hum and Rosetta Stone do not, in my personal opinion. Maybe that comes from the the slightly sprawling nature of this record. It’s only forty-five minutes long, but there are fifteen songs and it somehow feels just a little bit messy, in terms of sequencing. Then again, maybe I’m just being silly, because listening through, this is absolutely full of brilliant songs. So Many Ways to Die, Oto the Bear, Honeymoon, Reasons… so much to love. If you ever get the chance to see these guys live, believe me you’d better not fail to take it. And if after seeing them you don’t want to buy everything they have or ever will release, then I’ll eat my fucking hat, quite frankly.

Bombadil – Sad Birthday

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Bombadil – Marriage

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

This is not so much the holiday podcast as the pre-holiday podcast because, for all we are away now, I recorded this on Thursday night before going away, as we prepared ourselves for the unspeakable burden of doing absolutely fuck all for two weeks.

I am taking a pile of books and a pile of new music and we are going to do pretty much nothing at all.  My parents used to do really adventurous travelling when we were young, but honestly I don’t have the energy.  I am so incredibly fucking exhausted from constant Toadery that actually, despite having a holiday inferiority complex, pretty much all I can cope with at the moment is a couple of weeks of fuck all.

Even last year when we went to Portland for a couple of weeks, we took all the technology and recorded interviews and all sorts at Pickathon.  It was relaxing and nice, but I still got a hell of a lot of work done.  This time I will take along some tunes which I have been meaning to catch up with, perhaps record a podcast or two, and basically spend the rest of the time lying in the sun by the pool.  My folks might not be all that impressed, but the recharging of the batteries is the sole purpose of this trip and I think we might manage just that.

Toadcast #73 – The Holiday Podcast

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01. MJ Hibbett & the Validators – Being Happy Doesn’t Make You Stupid (04.17)
02. Midnight Oil – Bushfire (10.06)
03. Headless Heroes – Hey, Who Really Cares? (Jon Hopkins Remix) (16.56)
04. Alela Diane – Pieces of String (21.05)
05. Inspector Tapehead – A Fillet of Bozo (25.42)
06. Maxwell Panther – Shiver on a Twist of Fate (33.19)
07. Jack Richold – Lady of the Calico (37.00)
08. Grant-Lee Phillips – Calamity Jane (41.16)
09. Billy Bragg – Bread & Circuses (50.20)
10. The Divine Comedy – Les Jours Tristes (57.45)

I received a leaked copy of this album ages ago, and I was so intent on not leaking it any further that I’ve ended up completely missing the release date, and consequently only now writing a review I should have penned weeks ago – sorry!

It’s fair to say that I’ve been waiting for some time for this.  One of my readers, Campfires & Battlefields, introduced us all to Samantha Crain over a year ago and since then she has become one of my favourite emerging artists on one of my favourite record labels – Ramseur in North Carolina.  We interviewed her and guitarist Jacob at last year’s Pickathon Festival in Portland, and they were genuinely lovely people, so I’ve been looking forward to this album for ages now.

Miss Crain sings with a remarkable amount of world-weary pathos for someone only twenty-two years old, and that sense of tristesse permeates this album.  It gives it a degree of gravitas and also, crucially, makes it incredibly emotionally engaging. The combination of beautifully penned lyrics and her lovely voice – rich yet vulnerable – convey an integrity and a sincerity few have matched, to my ears, for some years now.

In terms of the arrangements and how the music is actually assembled, I do have a couple of minor quibbles though.  Apart from the vaguely punk-tinged Bullfight, this whole album is a basic guitar/bass/drums setup with pretty consistent fundamental rhythms throughout – slightly folky, slightly country.  There is definitely a uniformity of sound from start to finish which I think could perhaps have done with some breaking up here and there.  Something a bit rockier perhaps, a little fiddle or banjo maybe, or perhaps a fiercer number where they rock out a little – just something a little different.  There are also a couple of tracks I would accuse of being a little stodgy, not least the title track which is just about my least favourite.

Not withstanding that small criticism, this album contains some of the best songs I’ve heard in fucking ages.  Rising Sun, Let the Fever Out, Long Division, Devils in Boston… the list goes on. They have just the right pace to them, mix sadness with a kind of silent optimism, and a gentle base with a more biting instinct which producesa kind of defiance which is genuinely uplifting.

So whilst I don’t quite hear an album that I would call a Great Record, I definitely do hear a lot of truly great songs written by a genuinely talented performer and songwriter who I firmly believe has a talent which is really quite special.  Very good work indeed.

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Rising Sun

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Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Devils In Boston

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Ramseur Records

I was contacted a couple of days ago by a group called Hello, Broken Arrow.  I almost titled this post Hello, Hello, Broken Arrow, but the explanation would have stripped away whatever thin humour was there to begi… never mind.

The songs are lovely, but their MySpace page is so sparse that I could have done little more than re-post the music here and say ‘here ya go’, which somewhat defeats the purpose of mp3 blogging if you ask me.

So, a little more detail: they are a group of Seattle musicians who started getting together once a week to try writing songs with different people.  Initially, the idea was simply to generate a kind of creative freshness which would improve their own individual projects, but it turned into something with a life in and of itself.  The participants come from bands like Huma and Shenandoah Davis (who introduced herself to me only recently), and they haven’t quite got as far as finding labels to release anything yet, but they’re thinking about it.  They’re also applying to play Pickathon this year, which would be brilliant, but it’s still clearly very early days indeed.

I love the sound of this.  It’s West Coast alt-folk, in the broadest sense, and does sound to have obvious kinship with so many other bands from the Pacific Northwest: sparse, and slightly otherworldly, but with a good rhythm to keep things moving along.  You can’t be too definite about anything with only two demos around, but I’d say this sounds really promising.  More please!

Hello, Broken Arrow – Mine is a Light (Demo)

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Hello, Broken Arrow – Golden Fools (Demo)

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Hello, and welcome back to the slowly restarting new year of swearing and complaining here on Song, by Toad.  Don’t be too perturbed by the look of the thing.  This is not the final design, but as I am not a web designer it will have to do until I can figure out exactly what I want, lay it out properly, and then ask someone to code it for me.  That won’t be for a month or two though, so settle in for now and just ignore some of the crapper elements of the design – they won’t be permanent.

In other news, we have some splendid plans for 2009, so it should be another exciting (exhausting) year.  We are trying to get Meursault moving and arrange a couple of tours for them, which will be tedious.  We have a whole list of new releases for this year, including two Meursault 7″ singles, a split 12″ with the The Builders & the Butchers and Loch Lomond, the Loch Lomond album Paper the Walls is getting a UK release, Maxwell Panther and The Savings & Loan will be releasing records… and that’s just the ones we already know about.

In news more related to this site, rather than the label, we have Samamidon and The Pictish Trail now firmly booked in to record Toad Sessions before the end of January, there are plans to expand our coverage of Pickathon, Homegame and the End of the Road Festival, and of course increase the number of interviews and get a bit more video onto the site, as discussed in the previous thread.

So, I am not one for new year’s resolutions, but I am also incredibly lazy, so that’s what you’re getting for this Friday’s Favourites, as pinched from GUT.  If you want to suggest a Five at any point, just email me.  The music is taken from five of my favourite EPs from last year, as a sort of apology for not having a list on which they could be included.  I’ll try and put that right in 2009, but… ah, fuck it, that’s ages away.  Enjoy the new year, Toadlings.

1. Give us a new year’s resolution.
2. Recommend one for someone else.
3. Most anticipated 2009 release.
4. First gig of the year.
5. Suggest a quote for Toad t-shirt of the week.  T-shirt of the week you say?  Why yes, that’s just what I said.

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – The Last Stanchion Goes Belly-Up

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The Avett Brothers – Murder in the City

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Passion Pit – Sleepyhead

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The Young Republic – Shiloh

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Over the Wall – Thurso

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6. Barton Carroll – The Lost One

I know nothing about Barton Carroll, I wasn’t looking forward to this album at all, and then when it landed in my lap I still refused to quite get it for ages; maybe it’s because it’s stylistically quite unadventurous. The big difference, though, is that absolutely every single song on this album, despite flirting with cliche rather frequently, is compelling. They all have you perking up when they come on in their turn, thinking ‘oh good, this song’.
Barton Carroll – Those Days are Gone, and My Heart is Breaking

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7. Donny Hue & the Colors – Tell Tall Tales

This is another album which rather arrived out of nowhere. I wasn’t even aware it was in the pipeline when the promo copy was emailed through in November or so, when the album turned out to be quite so brilliant it was like an early Christmas present. It’s wry and witty, sad and playful and a simple pleasure from start to finish.
Donny Hue & the Colors – Good Time Happening

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8. Bombadil – A Buzz, A Buzz

I liked this album enough all on its own, but when I saw these guys play live at Pickathon in August I was just floored. I haven’t enjoyed a live performance so much in years – it was just overflowing with fun and zest and exuberance, and only the clinically dead could have failed to be swept away.
Bombadil – Cavaliers’ Har Hum

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9. Pale Young Gentlemen – Black Forest (Tra La La)

This is just a fantastically rewarding album to listen to. It’s delicate at times, wistful at others, and thumping at others. It’s also more instrumentally accomplished than pretty much anything else you’ll listen to for a long time.
Pale Young Gentlemen – Coal/Ivory

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10. The Pictish Trail – Secret Soundz Vol. 1

For someone who I’ve seen on stage so many times, and seen play for other people’s bands so many times, this record still still wasn’t anything like what I expected. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this ever-surprising dance from sad to playful to downright bizarre wasn’t it. It’s a cracking record though, almost because it seems so surprising.
The Pictish Trail – Winter Home Disco

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