It’s taken me ages to review this, primarily because I honestly wasn’t all that convinced at first. I’ve covered Dolfish before, actually, and pretty enthusiastically as it happens, and for some reason on first listen this album generated one of those disappointed ‘oh’, reactions which music fans know all too well.

Don’t worry though, it didn’t last.

Listening to this, as you can do in its entirety on Bandcamp, you’d probably laugh in my face if I confessed that what put me off was that it sounded rather more polished than the EP I wrote about before, but honestly, it’s true!

It’s still rough as balls though, so I will confess that was a pretty silly reaction, and all the original elements which made me love the band are clearly present and accounted for. The acidic turn of phrase, the hard-edged tenderness of the vocals, and unapologetic minimalism of the arrangements… it’s the kind of music which seems entirely resistant to polish.

If I were to try and call a comparison to mind, there are plenty of bittersweet, sharp-tongued, lo-fi troubadours to bandy about, but the one I might suggest would be John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. I have to confess I don’t know much about the earlier, rougher Mountain Goats stuff, but there’s a definite similarity in the underlying feel of the songs of the two bands, despite Dolfish being an awful lot less lush and lovely these days.

This music, on the other hand, moves from lovely, rolling, finger-picked acoustic guitar to full band racket, albeit the latter only rarely.  This gives you an album which erupts in sneers from time to time, and at others, takes all this agitation and turns it into lovely songs which seem to simultaneously capture the fear and warmth of being in love, and that is not an easy trick.

I doubt the vocal delivery, which rises to a squawk at times, nor indeed the relatively blunt musicianship of the louder songs will appeal to everyone. This is a raw, idiosyncratic album which doesn’t exactly give the impression of craving approval. You can pick up a copy on vinyl from Afternoon Records, and those of you in London or within easy reach of York on Monday can see him play live.

There are some US dates after that too, and they are all handily listed on the band’s Facebook page. I am not sure a drive to York on Monday is really wise, but I would love to see Max Sollisch translate these awkward but defiant songs in a live setting. In recorded form they’re immediate and unvarnished enough as it is, but live and in the flesh I get the impression they could be absolutely brilliant. Or a little too rough, you never know!

 Anyone with the balls to start an album with two minutes worth of tuneless drone tends to arouse my interest. It may not always signpost an excellent record, but it’s surprising how often it does, and it also tells me that someone is trying to build an actual album rather than keeping one eye on the reviewers.

There are two elements on this record which you’ve read a fair bit about on Song, by Toad over the years, although rarely ever in the same review: distorted drones, and demented carnival accordion.

The two elements sit together a little uneasily, but not in a bad way, more in the way that causes an initial furrowing of the brows to break into a broad grin within a song or two.

It’s odd. Is this abrasive grumble, or eccentric flamboyance? It seems to be both, and it becomes pretty clear pretty fast that this is something Lonesome Leash are capable of carrying off with more than a little to spare. In fact, this album is fantastic.  The drone in Riddle is gorgeous, the dancing accordion and flat, pie-tin crash of the drums in Pelican absolutely brilliant, and the vocals manage to be hesitant, harsh, bitter and pleading all at once, particularly on the lovely Fade Away.

Throughout this album the accordion strikes me again and again as odd. Without it, you have a nice, lo-fi album of alternative pop, but with its constantly urgent presence at the forefront of most songs, it’s a bit like being taken on a tour of an empty school at night by a demented banshee hopping about in winklepickers and a top hat.

I’m told there’s a comparison to be made to early Bright Eyes here, and that might possibly be the case, but to my shame I have never listened to much early Bright Eyes so I can’t tell you if there’s any merit in the comparison. What I can tell you is that the chiming reverb on the vocal and the twitching energy of the accordion make this an unusual and nervous listen. There’s something brilliant about it though, something tangentially charismatic, even if you’d rather not look it straight in the eye.

I Am No Captain can be downloaded for $6 or more from Bandcamp, and it is well worth doing so. It took a while to really grow on me, but after sitting in my new music folder long past the point at which I lost the email introducing me to this music, I have just found it better and more gleeful with every listen.

 I’ve written about bagelproject before, and with the release of this new EP my confusion remains, but my fascination is equally just as strong as before. Fuck me this music is a total mess, and sometimes it’s barely music at all, but there is something about it which I find absolutely fascinating.

Just about the only other person on the whole internet who seems to have written about Funmi Wittle’s stuff is Joe from A New Band a Day, which is reassuring because of who Joe is, but still a little depressing, because I think this deserves a bit more attention than it seems to be getting. Quite a bit more, in fact.

I agree with Joe, though, in that the difficulty with this music is that for large parts of it there is not the slightest semblance of structure at all. It’s just a messy collage of samples, drum beats, unfathomable vocals and off-mic chatter.

Some of this dissolves completely, and sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t. Mia Rambling doesn’t do it for me, for example, but the title is entirely literal, so I can’t say I wasn’t warned. This kind of stuff is most prominent on Soundcloud, where more or less every little experiment and half-idea seems to end up, pretty much in no discernible order.

On Bandcamp, however, there are a handful of EPs which, just about, sound like proper collections of (vaguely) proper songs. And you know what, somehow I think it kind of works. It is, as I have said, all over the place, but from this fug of wobbly snippets of vocal and lurching samples there does indeed emerge something which is a pleasure to listen to.

It can be self-conscious and, I suppose, a little overdone here and there, but that’s sort of the way this kind of music works – if it didn’t follow every whim and digression it would lose its charm pretty quickly, I think. On the other hand, if you just sit back and let it take you wherever it’s going, then there are loads of moments of melody and fumbling beauty to be enjoyed.

 I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, not quite knowing what to write about it. I like it. It’s not one hundred percent in tune with my taste, but for a new band releasing a free EP on Bandcamp (unless of course you want to pay more, which would be nice of you) I think there are some good things happening here.

The more upbeat pop tunes on here, like Screens, the highlighted song on the Bandcamp player, are perhaps less my cup of tea.  But the odder ones like Lift and Hard Boiled Wonderland are really good.

Unlike the disinterested mumbling of a lot of the vocals I’ve been listening to recently, here there is a clean, tremulous quality to the singing which can be as boldly pop as it can quaveringly uncertain.

They’re a band who, with the exception of the staccato drumming on Keep Your Eyes Down, make very atmospheric music which seems to be forever suggesting that you’re listening to ambient electronica, but you aren’t. It’s not fuggy, either, like a lot of atmospheric music. There’s no narcotic quality to this, more a sense of anxiety and a constant battle not to let it become overwhelming.

As I said, the pop end of Laces’ spectrum maybe ain’t for me so much, but the tenser and more uncomfortable they get the more I like it.

 Alright, let’s be straight about my subjectivity here: Johnny Lynch is a pal, and as tends to happen when my friends release music, I was terrified I wouldn’t like this.

Friendship apart, that wasn’t a totally unjustified fear.  One of Johnny’s favourite bands is Hot Chip, who I think are fucking dreadful, and his last big release was the disco-tastic* Silver Columns album.

Now, I loved Silver Columns but a Pictish Trail album which explored more Hot Chip leanings might very well not have been my cup of tea, and with the band’s recent penchant for huge, full-band wig-outs I was nervous that the idiosyncratic charm I find so engaging about The Pictish Trail might be a bit smothered.

I have to confess that my fears were not entirely allayed by the pre-release teaser track Of Course You Exist, which I don’t mind and which makes sense in the context of the whole album, but is nevertheless not my favourite Pictish Trail song.  I would have said the same about Michael Rocket actually – although that’s a song I have come to really like subsequently, I wasn’t smitten the first time around.

In fact, when you think about it, it’s sort of an odd tribute to this record that so much of it is comprised of songs I knew well before the release, and yet the album still managed to surprise me. Michael Rocket, The Handstand Crowd, Of Course You Exist and I Will  Pour it Down (see a really early Toad Session recording of that one below) make up much of the backbone of this record, but having heard those songs I still had little idea of how it would actually feel to listen to Secret Soundz Vol. 2 for the first time.

So, having added a remarkable number of caveats and mean-spirited asides, it’s probably time to admit that I love this album.  Funnily enough, it’s not so much the big songs which I have ended up loving, as much as it’s been the filler.  Not that there is filler on here per se, but when people call things ‘album tracks’ it sort of implies the same thing.  Here there are a good few ‘album tracks’ which, in my view, absolutely make the record.

You probably couldn’t take them out of context all that easily, but songs like Sequels and Wait Until are far less insistent than others on the album, and yet they manage to simultaneously be my favourite to listen to in and of themselves, and also to anchor the rest of the record.  Tunes I wasn’t as keen on to begin with, like Michael Rocket and The Handstand Crowd, find a place amongst songs like that which seems to make more sense.

The Pictish Trail – I Will Pour It Down (Toad Session) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.

I may have known I Will Pour it Down before this album, but honestly, I didn’t know it as it sounds now. The recording on here is absolutely gorgeous, and perhaps hints at what I mean when I talk about certain songs providing the context.

The Pictish Trail can produce big old pop songs, but whilst they are good, and whilst they flesh out the range of the sound, they are several layers away from what makes this music genuinely special.  There is a simple, personal warmth about Secret Soundz Vol. 2 which mirrors its maker, and which gives the listener a real sense of belonging.  The slower, more elusive tunes seem to embody that more, somehow.  The wobbly synth and twinkling electronics, instead of adding coldness to the more organic elements of guitar and gorgeously delivered vocals, seem to add an approachable charm.

There’s a documentary about the making of this record embedded below.  For the last year and a bit Johnny has been living up on the Isle of Eigg, in the Inner Hebrides, which is where this album was recorded. It’s easy to superimpose impressions retrospectively once you know the provenance of a record, but instead of imbuing his album with a sense of the bleakness or grandiosity of the Scottish countryside, or indeed of the isolation of living in a static caravan on an island with a sparsely distributed population of eighty people, instead this seems to embody the warmth of having a cosy wee home and the increased intimacy of the friendships you make in situations like that.

I’m still not sure about Of Course You Exist, I suppose, but everything else which I wasn’t as keen on in isolation makes sense when pulled back into the eddies of the album. This is a gentle, odd record of strange detours, and one with moments of genuine tenderness and emotional impact.

And by happy c0incidence, the band happen to be playing at The Caves tonight with eagleowl, as the final night in an epic month of touring.  You can buy this record there on vinyl, of course, or you can go to the Fence Records webshop and do so there instead.  I strongly recommend you do one or the other.

*Yes, yes, I know no-one says disco-tastic anymore.

 This is an odd little release.  Cuckoo Chaos, a band with a handful of low-key EPs and singles, have made a short album of bits and bobs available on their Bandcamp page.

This kind of thing doesn’t normally appear until a band is a good few albums into their career, and at a minimum of ten dollars it seems a little pricey, but this isn’t a mid-career desk-clearing exercise, it’s actually a plan to raise funds to finance the recording and release of the band’s debut full length album and as such deserves to be seen a little differently.

For my part, this was actually my introduction to Cuckoo Chaos’ music, although I am not sure if a bunch of demos and home recordings is always the best way to start off with a band – it’s easy to become a little too attached to the rougher recordings and then fail to be as enthused with the real thing, when it appears.

Listening to the more polished recordings on Bandcamp, I have to confess this is precisely the trap into which I have fallen as well, because I think these rougher songs are absolutely brilliant. I know that bands would probably cheerfully beat a reviewer to death for using terms like ‘kooky charm’ to describe their music, but I am tempted to give it a go here.  There is just an odd, charming, off-kilter character to this stuff which I find hugely engaging.

As well as scratchier songs, like the wonderfully rough guitar so quietly rumbling in the background of Pick the Bugs Off there are splendidly light-stepping pop tunes like The Ballad of What Was and Me and Ewe, which shuffle along at a carefree rhythm and with minimal instrumentation create this wonderful aura of a relaxed Summer beneath the palm trees somewhere nice and warm.

The home-recorded nature of these songs gives them a little something else though, because underneath these idiosyncratic croons there seems to be a layer of something slightly wrong.  It’s just that odd something, a slight sense of unease, which lifts lovely acoustic demos into the realm of something a little darker and more interesting. Listening to the other stuff by the band, it’s possibly just something imparted by the bare-bones recording and production, but for me it’s that little extra dimension which makes this an interesting album in its own right, and something very much worth paying for.

Well on first listen I wasn’t too sure I was going to like this.  There’s nothing wrong with the first couple of tracks, but they are fairly straightforward DIY alt-rockers played at broadly similar pace and with broadly similar arrangements.

The third tune is a faux-saccharine sneer, and a bit of a surprise, truth be told, but it got me listening a lot more closely and that can only be a good thing. It is also the song which signals that you are getting into something rather more interesting than ‘just’ lyrically sharp indie rock.

David Cronenberg’s Wife are what I suppose you would have to call bastions of the UK antifolk scene, although there isn’t anything particularly folky about most of their stuff.  I first heard about them a good few years back when the excellent My Ukrainian Girlfriend was popping around my playlists for a good wee while.

I have to confess that since then I’ve rather taken my eye off the ball, but this album is a welcome reminder of how good this band can be.   I was warned, when this promo material was sent out, that some of the songs might be just a tad close to the bone in the wake of the Jimmy Saville scandal, and tunes like the Pied Piper of Maidenhead are excellent, but still draw a wince, even today.

I have always thought of Antifolk as being a bit more of an attitude than a particular sound, and in that sense you can see the connection with David Cronenberg’s Wife.  This album has its tender moments, I guess, and it has a conscience for sure, but the whole thing is delivered with an attitude which morphs from sneer to snarl depending on the intensity of the song itself, so despite not being shockingly loud or dissonant there’s a real sense of needle to it, a real edge which produces quite a visceral reaction.

Having said that, it’s not like they don’t write good, hummable tunes.  The majority of the album rattles along at an insistent gallop and most of it is genuinely head-nodding stuff (don’t blame the band, that’s as close as I usually get to actual dancing). Between the nasal vocals, though, and a sound which seems to pay no heed whatsoever to the hipster mores of the day, I can’t see this lot blooming to global superstardom anytime soon.  But this is a really good album, with shitloads of character, awesome tunes and plenty to gain from a closer listen, too.  I wish more bands were like this.

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I don’t know if you remember Avital Raz from the Toad house gig she played last year, and her subsequent appearance at Flamin’ Hott Toadz in Anstruther, but umm.. well, you should.

Anyhow, the reason I mention here is that she has a single coming up on Sotones Records, and it’s really rather good.  I remember these two songs from her gigs up here, and the recording of them is really nice – enough to flesh out the songs, but not to detract from what made them good live.

Like a lot of Avital’s stuff these songs are occasionally amusing and occasionally shockingly bitter, and the music itself can be as creepy as it can be pretty, and I think therein lies the charm of her stuff.  She has a couple of albums in the tank just waiting to be released, and if this is a taster, then I am looking forward to them.

Avital Raz on Soundcloud

 I feel a bit like instead of writing reviews, I am basically just writing up my top albums for 2013 at the moment. The next few reviews, including this one, are basically going to be me gushing about music to the extent that you’ll think I’ve turned into one of those tedious backslapping blogs which just fucking loves everything, but I assure you I haven’t.  I’m still a contrarian dickhead deep down.

Just under two years ago I wrote about Lady Lazarus’ last album Mantic, and it was an album which didn’t click entirely with me, despite most of the elements being absolutely spot on.  Not that I didn’t like it, I really really did, I just had a series of small quibbles which for me stopped it ascending from the realms of being really good to being fucking brilliant.

I am going to go into those criticisms a little, primarily because I feel this album embodies why I found the last one slightly frustrating: I think All My Love in Half Light is the album Mantic seemed to be trying to be, but actually came within a whisker of properly achieving.

For starters, Mantic seemed a little long, perhaps more sprawling where this is self-contained.  Not that it was a long album, but this one feels complete – as if all the right songs are there in all the right order, and that’s that.

Also, Mantic at times felt slightly one-paced. It’s hard with an album which is mostly just vocal and piano to give it the variation which it needs, but here that doesn’t seem to be a problem.  There is a bit of accordion here and some cello there, but more than that, there seems to be an emotional rise and fall over the length of the record which means that you always feel like you are going somewhere, never just drifting.

The heavily reverbed piano and clear, unforced vocals are ghostly but never weak, and you end up with the impression of someone who is facing their troubles head on, prepared to suffer, but not to be beaten.  In some ways, although less fragile, there are strong echoes of Perfume Genius here; it’s an obvious comparison, but none the less accurate for that.

The treatment of the piano gives it a tremendous chime when hit hard and a gorgeous shimmer when simply caressed, and this allows the intensity of the music to rise and fall, so that when the minimal embellishments of cello and accordion do appear they are much like the sparkle on the swell of the sea at night. That might seem a little flowery, but there is a dreaminess to this which encourages that sort of stuff.

It feels like it’s coming from a very similar place to its predecessor, actually.  Only in this case all those wonderful ideas have been expressed more concisely, and all the meandering, filigree threads woven more tightly together into something more complete. It’s a lovely record, and I find myself wondering why I’m not reading about Lady Lazarus everywhere.

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I have been waiting so fucking long for this album that first time I wrote about Rick Redbeard doesn’t even appear on the site anymore, because I lost it when a bunch of posts died in the great WordPress changeover fuckup of 2007.

I wrote about his music again that October, and said the following:

“If you put his songs up alongside those of Kurt Wagner, Sam Beam, Robert Fisher and Will Oldham then I defy you to spot the callow newcomer in amongst the indie legends. He is not copying this genre, he is adding to it, with gorgeous music that sits comfortably along far more illustrious acts with every right to hold its head confidently high in such company.”

As frontman of the Phantom Band, whose intervening success I assume has delayed this album as long as it has, you could hardly call Rick Anthony a callow newcomer anymore, but the rest still stands: this is pretty straightforward stuff.  It’s a sort of acoustic pop album with strong elements of folk and country, and if you combine that description with the comparisons I made above you’ll have a pretty clear idea of what you’ll be listening to.

It is a sub-genre which has existed for years though, and despite the additions to its ranks being so voluminous, occasionally someone comes along who creates something with such sparkle it manages to catch your eye, despite being the proverbial needle in a haystack. This is one of those albums.

Could I tell you why I think No Selfish Heart is exceptional? No, I am not sure I can. Subtle technical points can be made, I suppose. The variation of sound and song structure keeps the album interesting, for example, with floaty meandering tunes like the exceptional Old Blue at one end, the more traditional folk structures of Kelvin Grove at another, and more straightforward, acoustic pop songwriting like Any Way I Can at another.

Lyrically this spans the somewhat schmaltzy in Now We’re Dancing and the really rather creepy in Cold as Clay, but there are also moments of humour such as the moment he talks of “standing at the foot of your bed, wearing just my beard and a smile”.

The instrumentation is also beautifully judged, and everything has a reason for being there.  There is little more than what I think is a shruti box or an acoustic guitar at times, sometimes that is embellished with a little piano or some violin, and more rarely a very judicious use of drums and bass, but the latter setup is a rare one. Nevertheless these careful, if subtle, variations mean the album is absolutely never boring, and that for all the this genre has fairly little scope for surprise, it is always moving towards somewhere slightly different from where it is, and this last fact particularly makes it a constantly rewarding listen.

Technical pish aside, however, it helps that so many of the songs on No Selfish Heart are just plain fucking beautiful to listen to. Old Blue, Cold As Clay and Any Way I Can are stunning.  I’ve mentioned them already, but there are plenty of others.  It’s just a gorgeous album, start to finish, and well worth the six years I’ve been waiting for it to materialise.

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