Song, by Toad

Small Town Boredom

Sometimes people come into your life and touch you with their music in a way that’s hard to explain.  Sometimes they write more miserable songs than you.  Sometimes they smoke like a chimney.  Sometimes they write the most heart wrenching tunes imaginable.  Sometimes they are from Paisley.  Sometimes they just happen to be one of the most important people you’ve met through music.  Sometimes they deserve much, much more media attention than they get.  Sometimes you get the opportunity to write about them and let a wider audience know about them.  Sometimes these things happen.  Sometimes they don’t. 

Small Town Boredom are Fraser McGowan and Colin Morrison who create ‘ whiskey soaked tales of loss & longing providing constant reminders of what was & what could have been.’  They have a new album out sometime in the future (not sure what date as yet – probably a year away knowing Fraser!) entitled ‘Notes From The Infirmary’.  I have been told by Fraser that I’m not allowed to review it on pain of death, or perhaps just some mild bodily harm.  Given his Paisley roots, I have no intention of breaking my word.   However, I do have a track to let you hear from the new album called ‘Void Lighting’ and can confirm that the album is brilliant.  I will also post a track from their wonderful debut album ‘Autumn Might Have Hope’ for your enjoyment.    This record was as Fraser describes ‘a testament to sorrow and self pity, a brutally truthful account of a functioning alcoholic and the loss of his so called loved ones.’  It’s content may be dark but the music is simply breathtaking.

I met Fraser through Bart, who as it happens plays for STB live and also appears on the new record and yet strangely has not heard it yet.  Fraser works in mysterious ways!  Anyways,  he has recorded a number of demo’s for me in the past and we’ve become really good friends over the years.  He even named his son after me.  Joke Fraser!  Anyways, Small Town Boredom are a wonderful band who deserve so much more.  The chorus of ‘Void Lighting’ gives me goosebumps.  Genius.  Under-rated genius.

Void Lighting – Small Town Boredom

Elliott Smith. An Education For Mr. Toad

Well now, I’m in the mood for this!  Given Matthew’s admitance last week that he knew very little about Elliott Smith I thought it would be a good idea to write about him and to play some tunes by him,  for his benefit upon his return from holiday, for those of you who have little knowledge of him, and also for everyone who reads this site and loves his music.  Cause let’s be honest, there’s never a point when you can have had too much Elliott Smith now is there?

 I guess there’s no point delving into his tragic death – was it murder or was it suicide?  I guess we’ll never know, but his death shook me to my core because he was one of the most important musicians for me growing up and still is essential listening for me.  I’ve been listening to him since I was at school and there’s not a huge amount of artists I can say that about.   Whilst Kurt Cobain’s death shocked me, Elliott Smith’s death totally saddened me.  Thinking that he’ll never produce new material is quite a disappointment, but then fortunately we have plenty of amazing material to enjoy from his all too short life .  I think it was Mr Bear who said last week that there are no bad Elliott Smith albums, let alone mediocre.  And I completely agree.

The starting point for me was XO, his 4th studio album working my way back through Either/Or, his self titled album and his debut Roman Candle. I remember his 5th album Figure 8 coming out when I was living in the Netherlands and making my way to the indie record store to get my hands on it.  I remember this particularly well as Mule Variations by Tom Waits and Come On Die Young by Mogwai came out about the same time.  These 3 albums are still 3 of my favourites – though my copy of Figure 8 has gone missing since.  If anyone borrowed it off me could I get it back please, I will buy another copy, but that one had sentimental value!  And then we have his final album From the Basement On the Hill, which was never actually finished by Smith himself prior to his death.  And finally his pothumus release New Moon, a collection of rareities and b-sides from the Either/Or, XO period of his life.

None of these albums is bad.  Not one.  I love them all.  But if I had to pick one that has stuck with me then it would definitely be my starting point of XO.  This was the first time that he truly fleshed out his songs.  The bare bones and stripped back lo-fi of the first 3 albums was replaced with a more produced sound and fuller use of instrumentation on this particular album and was the change in direction that would continue on both Figure 8 and From a Basement on a Hill.  I think most fans are divided at this point.  They either love Either/Or and everything before it or XO and everything after it.  I fall into the second bracket.  However, I do love the first 3 albums as well.

Anyways, this post was never about whats better or whats worse because its a moot point.  He simply was a genius and I love everything he’s done.  His music deserves to be heard by everyone and he should be more widely credited for the wonderful albums he produced.  So please, sit back, relax and enjoy a variety of his tunes.

No Name#1 from the album Roman Candle – Elliott Smith

Ballad of Big Nothing from the album Either/Or – Elliott Smith

Waltz#2 from the album XO – Elliott Smith

Twilight from the album From a Basement on the Hill – Elliott Smith

And here’s one for you, taken from New Moon in an early state, but later used on the sound track for Good Will Hunting and nominated for an Oscar for best original song in 1997.

Miss Misery (early version) – Elliott Smith

Tunnel Vision

Whilst I’m still constantly amazed by how many obscure indie bands I’ve never heard of and how many legendary ones I’ve barely ever listened to (Sonic Youth and the Jesus & Mary Chain for example), I still assume that my depth of knowledge must be pretty impressive when it comes to left field independent music.

I suppose it’s almost inevitable that, as a consequence of this depth, my breadth of awareness has suffered an awful lot.  I look back on my Best of the Year lists for 2004 and 2005 and there are bands like the Killers, Bloc Party and Maximo Park on there.  Now, I make absolutely no apology for that whatsoever.  All three of those albums are brilliant pop records, and a little more in the case of Bloc Party, however badly they followed it up.  There’s no shame in liking stuff which happens to be popular, and I still listen to all of that music with enjoyment.

So what’s my point?  Well, look at my Top 10 for 2007 (Part 1 & Part 2) and 2008 (Part 1 & Part 2), and the difference is huge.  Grinderman are big and famous, and the Twilight Sad have done pretty well here and there. Umm.. Elvis Perkins is on XL I guess.  But there’s basically no-one on either list who your average punter in the street would be likely to have even heard of, never mind like.

More noticably, however, there is no pop.  I know that all music is essentially pop, just for slightly different audiences, but there’s nothing that I would describe as populist.  A lot of those albums do work really well as pop albums, of course they do, but Maximo Park seem to have the sole goal of writing irrepressible pop tunes, and they were all over the radio, as were the Killers and Bloc Party.  I don’t even know which bands would be the equivalent of that today.  Who is all over XFM and 6Music and Radio1 all at the same time?  I guess Vampire Weekend count, possibly.  And, erm… I don’t know.  I actually have no idea.  Who fills the Corn Exchange these days?

There are loads of reasons, of course.  Partly bands becoming so broadly popular seems less frequent these days, people’s listening habits are changing and how people access music is changing.  And, as Campfires & Battlefield said on a previous thread on this topic some time ago: who cares?

I am not apologising, of course: back then I listened to lots of music I loved, now I do the exact same thing.  It’s just interesting how far away from the mainstream I find myself wandering.  And if you think I’m exaggerating just imagine what the difference in total album sales between the old lists and the new lists would be – that more than anything drives the point home, as far as I am concerned.

Maximo Park – Going Missing

Bloc Party – This Modern Love

The Killers – Believe Me Natalie

Who Will Remember Me, When I’m Gone?

Well, not me obviously, because the answer to that is no-one.  But Mrs. Toad and I were purchasing a little wine on our way home from the pub tonight and instead of going into some sort of warehouse off-license we ventured into the Edinburgh Wine Shop, which is small, friendly and, I suppose, slightly dorky.  It’s the sort of place where the staff know about wine, where they sell lots of real ale and no fucking Fosters whatsoever and where, generally, they play classical music.

Classical music has always kind of baffled me, not out of general dislike or anything, more out of pure ignorance.  I don’t know it, understand it, or anything.  Nor could I hope to intelligently critique it.  However, I wonder sometimes about what causes stuff to stick in the memory, or to stand the test of time.  Great classical musicians, once they achieved fame, found their music performed to royal courts; to the largest audiences available at the time.  A bit like Britney Spears.

So was Mozart really the best available to his time, or was he just Madonna – some pushy, stringy old lady whose thirst for celebrity and knack for manipulating the press far outweighs any measurement of talent.  I don’t, as I’ve said, have the knowledge to really answer that question, but the people who read this blog are all fans of alternative music.  Not alternative in the sense of being NME readers rather than MTV fans, but in the sense of genuinely loving really alternative music.

Even fucking Celine Dion has performed to royal audiences.  Britney Spears, Take That, Madge, all these people have achieved something akin to the twenty-first century equivalents of patronage – the barometer for the best and best-remembered classical composers.  So, without wishing to enter into an argument about which classical composers truly deserve to be remembered at the expense of which others, what have we actually lost?

Where are the Nick Caves of that era, compared to the Coldplays?  Do we really need to remember Eric Clapton?  I mean, his politics are fucking detestable, but was he good enough to deserve immortalisation?  And even if you take the attitude that might means right – that being that popular is justification enough in itself – then what of the bands who would be the equivalent of Jeffrey Lewis.  Or the Wave Pictures.  Or even Wilco.  How long will these guys live in human memory without that massive groundswell of popular approval which ends up sanctifying an artist for all time.  And what of the likes of Daniel Johnston, for example, who is barely known in his own era and might so easily disappear within a couple of decades, once he passes on, because apparently All fucking Saints were invited to perform at the fucking Royal fucking Variety Show and he was not.

Pearl Jam – Jeremy (Yeah yeah, Nirvana, yadda yadda…)

Giant Sand – Flying Around the Sun at Remarkable Speed

Eef Barzelay – Ballad of Bitter Honey

Lady Rock

On the subject of women in indie, I remember that I never did get into much female fronted music as a kid.  It was all R.E.M., Billy Bragg, The Pogues, Bob Dylan and stuff like that.  Not much that was current and, for no obvious reason, not much stuff made by women, particularly with lead female vocals.  Maybe if I’d been more into Motown and soul that might have been different, but I never really crossed paths with Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez or Marianne Faithfull either, who were all working in the same basic territory which I was exploring at the time.  Sandy Denny was one of the most conspicuous exceptions, but I can’t think of many others off the top of my head.

This didn’t really change until I went to university.  All that was really different there was that I became considerably more aware of popular music which was popular away from the dominance of the likes of MTV and so on.  So I started getting into bands like Saint Etienne and their ilk and I was sort of interested in the Cranberries without ever really clicking with them.  The real sea change was of course the explosion of sassy, lady-led groups which came with Britpop.  It became such an obvious phenomenon that I seem to recall Louise Wener of Sleeper wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Just Another Female-Fronted Band’ at some point, although my memory is far from definite on the subject.

Anyhow, I got really into Sleeper (although perhaps only really from their second album onwards, rather than their first), I loved the first two Echobelly albums and I really liked Belly as well.  Elastica were around at the same time, but I never quite got into them, and the Cocteau Twins were really good too, but not quite Britpop I guess.  If you follow those links then you’ll be able to pick up almost any of these albums for a pittance on Amazon Marketplace, and there’s some amazing stuff there.

Maybe it’s because it was the first popular movement I engaged with at the time, but I still have a real affection for Britpop, despite its foisting the likes of Menswear on us.  It was brash and confident, and maybe that was the attitude which I responded to the most in this plethora of female-led rock bands.  I know that same attitude was largely the undoing of the movement as a whole in the end, as it got all tangled up in itself.  And with the decline of Britpop most of these groups disappeared from the scene to a large extent.

It was fun though – lots of fun.  It was the first time I’d really engaged with the thrill of anticipating new music, as opposed to exploring what was already out there.  It sounds dated as hell listening back to it now, and maybe that’s why those albums are all so cheap, but there are too many memories for that to matter much.

Sleeper – Lie Detector

Echobelly – King of the Kerb

Belly – Untitled and Unsung

Cocteau Twins – Tishbite

Hello, Broken Arrow

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)

Hello, Broken Arrow – Golden Fools (Demo)

News-O-Rama! Elvis Perkins, Neko Case, The Decemberists & Aidan Moffat

This is a Muppet News Flash.  It isn’t, but there is certainly news afoot at the moment.  The larger labels appear to have woken from their brandy-induced Christmas comas and managed to poke their spotty interns into action once more.  And the result: we have inboxes with Important News once again.  In order, not of how famous the band is and therefore how how highly the news scores on the Official Indie-Kid Excitement Scale, but in order of just how excited I personally am about the release of each track I bring you:

Elvis Perkins in Dearland:

Elvis Perkins’ last album was blindingly brilliant.  Aching, sad, uplifting, and literate enough to be beautifully crafted, but never arch.  To say that I am looking forward to this release is an understatement.  Shampoo is brilliant, with enough stomping funeral blues and ghostly choirs of the underworld to give it massive presence, and fucking hell his voice is in g0od form.  I love this, and I can’t wait.  A couple more tracks can be streamed from his shiny new website.
Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo

Neko Case:

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was so beautiful that I hurriedly scampered through her back catalogue, only to be slightly disappointed.  It was a bit too Lady-country-lite in places, and I find myself slightly fearing that Fox Confessor was an aberration of brilliance, surrounded by a sea of above-average music.  Listening to this song doesn’t reassure me all that much, I have to confess, but I still have hope.
Neko Case – Maneater

The Decemberists:

Their last album was hardly a classic, despite several great moments.  Something, somehow, didn’t quite click with it, and there were a couple of really duff songs; Summersong and The Perfect Crime were gratingly bad.  The Rake’s Song isn’t all that great, I have to say, and it sounds like it has been prematurely terminated to serve as a preview.  The song doesn’t feel over when it fades out.  But again, I have hope, albeit just a little less in this case.
The Decemberists – The Rake Song

Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs:

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect smart lyrics in this release, although what we can expect musically might be less predictable.  After last year’s filthsterpiece he seems to have returned to a more textbook songwriting format, and the instrumentation of this seems pretty straightforward as well.  Not sure what to expect – this is a pretty good song, and I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a really good, enjoyable album with plenty of wry internal laughs to be had.
Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Big Blonde

Keanundrum

What a quality heading for this post – absolutely splendid!  And sorry, but that’s the only Keane picture I could face posting.

So, Keane, how did they come up then?  Well last week’s Friday Fives started out as a conversation in the pub the previous night.  Can’t Stop Now by Keane came on and I remember confessing that actually, if it existed in total isolation, I wouldn’t mind that song especially.  The vocal melody around the chorusy bit it fairly unusual and all-in-all I don’t particularly mind it.

This reminded me of when Keane first made the breakthrough – something like five years ago, give or take.  A massive swell of excitement caught a lot of people.  I wasn’t all that aware of it because I didn’t really buy singles at that point, and the album was yet to emerge, so I didn’t think much about it but I do remember just how excited the NME were. more »

Why Aren’t They Moaning About the Fucking X-Factor?

In amongst all the hoo-ha over Christmas about that karaoke bimbo’s brutal bum-rape of Leonard Cohen’s wonderful Hallelujah, and the brewing legal nightmare caused by indiscriminate wielding of DMCA legislation, I started to wonder a little about the music industry, who is fighting who and why, and so on.

Of course I entirely accept the music industry’s position that evil free music is killing babies and committing acts of terrorism and so on, and that it is largely people like you and I who are to blame for Britney Spears and Robbie Williams having to lead the deprived lives of poverty and servitude into which they have so cruelly been forced in the last few years by the unlimited evils of ‘right-click, save as’. I mean, it’s just obvious, really.

One thing I don’t quite get, though, is why it is only filesharing that they hate. Apart from the impact of the music-as-data model replacing the music-as-product model, which has clearly confused and annoyed the shit out of everyone with any sort of vested interest in the latter, there has been another pretty seismic shift in the music industry in the last few years: karaoke pop shows. more »

Toad Top 20 Albums 2008: 1-5

1. Meursault – Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues

I know I can’t be objective with regards to this album, but believe me I am being honest when I tell you that it is the best thing I’ve heard all year.  Whether it’s the obvious hits, the peculiar interludes, the perfect blend of pop songs and experimental electronica, or the trajectory and integrity of the album as a whole, I don’t think I’ve heard better than this for years.
Meursault – Salt Pt.1

2. The Felice Brothers – The Felice Brothers

A warmer, more immediately emotional album I couldn’t really imagine.  The voice and the slow pace are so rich and arresting that you find yourself overcome by sadness almost immediately, and that hold on your emotions is never once loosed for forty minutes.
Felice Brothers – Greatest Show on Earth

3. Langhorne Slim – Langhorne Slim

Of this top five, all but the Felice Brothers have firmly enhanced their reputations with me with superb live performances.  With Langhorne Slim it wasn’t the emotive power of bands like Meursault, Shearwater or the Low Lows, it was sheer charm.  Sean Scolnick delivered his songs with such easy charisma that you just couldn’t help but warm to him.  Like Barton Carroll, this is an album whose style is far from revolutionary – more a familiar mish-mash of  what I would vaguely describe as Americana.  That familiarity is something which turns out to be a bonus in the end though, as the album worms its way under your skin like few others.
Langhorne Slim – Diamonds & Gold

4. Shearwater – Rook

Occasionally beautiful, but often thunderous, this album was an immediate success with me, building up to all sorts of crescendos oozing a ferocity you rarely expect.  I still don’t know if it’s the loveliest or the angriest album of the year.
Shearwater – Leviathan, Bound

5. The Low Lows – Shining Violence

This is another album I didn’t necessarily expect to find this high on the list when I first heard it, but for some reason it’s just grown and grown on me this year, while more highly anticipated records have kind of dropped away.  It broods and snarls, growling it’s tunes at you from behind a wall of reverb.
The Low Lows – This Modern Romance