Song, by Toad

This is a free download (from here) of a demo recording by a band about whom I know next to nothing: Waskerley Way.

The EP is basically just shoegaze, but as far as I am concerned pretty much most stuff is ‘basically just’ something, and it really doesn’t matter if it’s done well.

In this case, the guitar riffs are engaging, the pace changes subtly but effectively throughout the record, and those buried, scuzzy melodies get me humming.  To be absolutely frank, I am not sure what else you should ever really have to say about anything.

I like this kind of stuff: a fuzzy, fairly monotonous din, with the good bits nice and buried, so that it’s not so much about the riff or the hook particularly as the slow emerging and submerging of loveliness from within a sea of noise and mess.

This makes it sound like this is actually a difficult record to get into, but actually that isn’t true.  In the case of Waskerley Way the melodies are actually pretty up-front, so for all I have taken a long time to review this, I knew I liked it pretty much from the first listen.  It never gets boring either, not that it should over five songs.  But the mood shifts back and forth from insistent to brooding to slightly manic and back, making sure it continues to nudge your ears back to where they belong every once in a while.

It’s straightforward enough, this, but it’s well-executed and I like it.  A very promising debut.

Waskerley Way – Yonder

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Waskerley Way – Little Victories, Little Defeats

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Well well well, this is extremely good indeed.  King Post Kitsch is an exiled Weegie currently residing in London, and was recommended to me by Lloyd from Peenko.  I’ve been a little slow on that count, I suppose, because everyone and their blogger seems to have been chattering about this EP for a while now actually, but er… well, you know how it goes around these parts.

It’s hard to really describe this music for some reason, even though what you hear isn’t exactly going to confuse or shock you.  There only seem to be three songs to be found anywhere, all from an EP which is free to download from their Bandcamp page, and whilst they all hold together as a group, they really are all quite different as well.

Alaska starts out as a rolling ramble, pinned down with brief interruptions of guitar, and slapped around by a scuzzy synth headache which could as easily be My Bloody Valentine as it could Grizzly Bear.  Move on and Modern Times is stumbling, stop-start drunkard, all thumped piano keys and discordant guitar.  Then, after all this, Fante’s Last Stand is peculiar falsetto dream, with its plucked refrain and splashes of (presumably digital) glockenspiel bordering on both the twee and the macabre.

It’s short, and there’s not much to go on here, but this is a really fucking excellent little EP and I am really looking forward to where this may go – very, very promising.

King Post Kitsch – Alaska

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Bandcamp | Website

Mitchell Museum have an album finished and simmering away (and sounding extremely good).  By way of warming us up and also giving a home to some of the songs which became orphaned along the way, the band are giving away EP, which you can download from their Bandcamp page.

Mitchell Museum first grabbed my attention with a couple of quirky demos which I heard on their MySpace page about a year and a half ago, and a couple of those have actually made in onto this EP.  They’ve been given a bit more spit and polish since I first heard them, and that subtle shift is one of the reasons I think I didn’t quite grasp Mitchell Museum the first time around.

Put simply, I seemed to largely think of them as quite an experimental band, with some of a pop egde, whereas in actual fact now I’d probably describe them as a pop band with a somewhat eccentric edge.  That may sound like a silly distinction, and to a degree it is, but I think it left me expecting them to make some very weird music as they added to those early recordings. As it is they made a bunch of mental pop songs, and it took me a while to adjust to the confounding of my (entirely groundless) expectations.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself and end up reviewing an album which isn’t released yet, so I’ll try and stick to this EP for now.  Basically this is a really good showcase for a band who absolutely bristle with energy and whose songs are playful and basically just stare at you from the stereo with manic grins on their faces.  They are looking for a label to release their debut album and this EP should hopefully go a long way towards securing that deal.

Mitchell Museum – Arthur Loves the Shadows

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Braden J McKenna is an interesting character.  I’ve never had an email from him which was much longer than a single sentence.  Even after naming his Navigator album in my top two favourite albums of 2009, all I heard from him was a one line ‘thanks very much, here’s something new we just released’.

There’s absolutely no need to say any more than that, of course, and in fact any sort of thanks is really nice, but I’m not just talking about emails.  Look at the MySpace pages of both Navigator and Weighted Pines, and there’s not exactly a surfeit of information.  The label on which all of this brilliant music is released is called Magic Goat, and their website has recently been redesigned to actually include less information.  Have a look at that site and try and imagine anything more minimalist.

This music is described as being inspired by nineties US indie bands, and it’s certainly a different animal to the fuzzy full band setup of the Navigator record. The guitar here is more pecked at, often producing quite a staccato sound, compared to the distorted background of noise which characterised Bad Children.  The percussion seems to have a little more rattle to it as well.

In general, though, this, for all I love an awful lot of it, does need something of a health warning: it really, really is fucking rough.  Some of the tracks, like Twentyfive and Small Town, for example, are extremely lovely, and show that McKenna’s voice has the capacity to be tremendously sympathetic when he chooses it to be, but there’s still an awful lot of cacophonous fuzz on this album which will probably put all but the most rapid fans of confrontationally messy recording off completely.

A couple of songs get close to being two minutes in length, but only a couple.  The rest last roughly a minute or so, and that’s yer lot so, for all you might think that some of the more abstract pieces are a bit frivolous, there is absolutely no buggering about here at all.  None.

So if you are starting to feel like you want to run a million miles from the attention whoring on things like the X-Factor, or from the polished tedium of Vampire Weekend, or the desperate cackling of T4, or the appalling smugness of Jules Holland, then this is about as far from anything even slightly commercial as you can get.  Everything’s downloadable for nothing from the label site: Magic Goat Music, a bizarre oasis of talent from Bone Valley, Utah, one of the most unexpected labels and unexpected places and unlikely groups of people I could possibly imagine.

Weighted Pines – Small Town

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Weighted Pines – Grow Old

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MySpace | Download from Magic Goat Music

As has been the trend recently, I have been very, very slow to post about these lads, despite having first heard and liked their stuff bloody ages ago.  I honestly don’t know why, either, because I liked them from the very first time I heard them.  Sometimes these things just happen, I guess.

Anyhow, they have a single out already, a double a-side of Love’s Dart and Storm, which I picked up at Pure Groove last week, and a new one out very shortly containing two songs: Wor and Skies Over Cairo, both of which can be previewed at their MySpace page, should you be so inclined.

You can talk about the combitation of electronic beats with something akin to a Spaghetti Western-inspired acoustic feeling, and whilst that does describe the style, it doesn’t really get across what’s good about this stuff, from my perspective anyhow.

Basically, for me, it’s about the rhythm.  Whether it’s the constant thumping of drums, or the skittish clicks of the electronic persussive sounds, all this stuff has a really insistent, infectious rhythm, which purely and simply makes you want to dance (even a wooden-backed, stand-at-the-bar toe-tapper like me).

These lads are playing Homegame in March (sold out, sorry) with a night in Edinburgh at the Wee Red on Friday 12th March – the same weekend.  I am really looking forward to seeing them actually, and finding out what this stuff is like live, because I have a hunch it could be absolutely superb.

It’s funny – for all the talk about indie-folk at the moment, some of the bands which excite me the most for the coming year are actually the heavily rhythmic ones with a really good beat to them – whether than be the eccentricity of Jesus H. Foxx or the Tapeheads, the glitchy electronics in evidence on the new Meursault album or the eminently danceable stuff like this or Findo Gask.

Django Django – Love’s Dart

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MySpace | Django Django Webshop

Little Matthew, who helps us out with the record label and filming of Toad Sessions and guzzling of gin and whatnot, wrote about a band called Glaciers a little while ago, the musical and artistic project of a Mr. Nicolas Burrows.  And here is a little more news.

Burrows recently recorded a session with The Golden Owl, which is one of the loveliest looking music blogs I’ve happened across in a long time.  The results included a long interview, which I highly recommend reading here, and three lovely new recordings.

The performances are very simple – just an acoustic guitar, the gentlest of vocals, and lots and lots of empty space – but they really are lovely.  His voice reminds me a lot of local gentleman Thomas Western, actually – there’s just something in the inflections and slightly glutinous nature of it which sounds rather similar to me.

In any case, both of these projects look really interesting to me, both The Golden Owl and Glaciers.  Both seem to pay incredible attention to detail and put great love into their work.  I tend to be more focussed on giving myself as much work as possible, so it’s probably only natural that I end up nursing a sort of envious admiration for people who slow it down a bit and really do things properly – Kilter Records here in Edinburgh spring to mind as well – but it really does warm my heart to see this kind of wonderfully considered and beautiful work being done.

There are three mp3s to download from the session, including a splendid cover of Paper Planes by MIA, of all things, but you are going to have to go to The Golden Owl to find them.  Trust me, it is well worth your time to do so.

Glaciers – Meeting of Tides (Live for The Golden Owl)

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Bear Claw are a band from Austin, Texas with a distinctly Irish-sounding (that’s not just me, is it?) lead vocal and a bloody excellent line in low-fi acoustic pop.

The recording is pretty basic as well.  I may not be an audio expert, but the drums sound pretty raw to me, and there is very little more to the instrumentation than simple guitar, vocals and a little melodica from time to time. The female backing vocals add an awful lot of depth and prettiness, but in general this is a really basic, no-frills record.

When it’s used this well, though, the low-fi nature of it and the uncomplicated arrangements really don’t matter; in fact I’d say they add to the charm.  The tunes are invariably good, and the rhythm rolls nicely, lulling me into that sort of satisfied headphones head-nod you get at work when listening to something that tickles you.

This EP was originally self-released on cassette, but it is now being repressed on 10″ vinyl, I believe, by the really rather intriguing-looking Monofonus Press, a DIY Austin record label and art collective in whom fans of Song, by Toad Records should find an awful lot to love.

There’s not a lot of info out there on the band, but if you check their MySpace page and their profile page on Monofonus you’ll see an awful lot of seminal Scottish bands name-checked, including Edinburgh’s own Shop Assistants, as well as The Vaselines and The Pastels.  This stuff doesn’t really have the harsh edge which defined much of the output of those bands, but there’s definitely a flat, deadpan delivery to their recordings which is evocative of that era of indie music.  More like this please!

Bear Claw – Warm Winter/Cold Fall

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MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from Monofonus Press

I don’t normally post a lot of videos, but I have been on the verge of posting some Orouni material for a while.  In general I find their output a little inconsistent, but there’s no debating the fact that they have some really excellent songs.

This happens to be one of them: a lovely piece of twee indie-pop, with a nice beat, a catchy chorus and nice, subtle use of female backing vocals to accentuate the chorus.  The video is by Marisa Lai and, although I love claymation and this is lovely, I do find that the pace of the two pieces of work (i.e. tune and film) doesn’t quite match up at times and they can feel a little disconnected.

Nevertheless, it’s a really nice animation and a band with a lot of potential and some very good songs – MySpace here, enjoy, and while you’re there check out related project The Limes, particularly the brilliant Dead Furniture.

I’m not sure, writing this review, whether or not you’re going to think that I’m completely mental, but in all genuine honesty, I really like this record.  It’s fucking weird though.

This sounds a little bit like a balloon full of words has been released into the air and is whooshing about, divesting itself of its contents in a great big torrent until it finally collapses, a shrivelled shell of its former self, entirely spent.  It feels almost as if Ersing himself could collapse and dissipate into thin air at the end of this record; dam burst, thoughts poured out, deflated and exhausted.

Never mind the sheer pace, the delivery is bloody weird as well.  There are times when it’s so odd that you wonder how it ended up ever being committed to record as a form of music.  It feels more suited to the surreal environment of cartoons, with their exaggeration and charicature and bizarre internal logic.

Quite what the fuck he’s even on about half the time is far from obvious.  The relentless flow of words – often spoken, sometimes sort of sung – is so garbled and rushed that divining the actual lyrical content is a fairly insurmountable challenge, never mind sitting down to figure out what exactly he’s trying to say with it all.

However, like all clever weirdos serving up a gigantic portion of strange, Ersing does offer a little bit of relief.  After one of the craziest songs on the album he slips suddenly into a strange sort of piano ballad – one with muffled and rough production perhaps – but still something of an olive branch to the listener who, by that point, must surely be wondering what the fuck has hit them.

Past the vocals, the guitar playing is just as wrenched and spasmodic.  I suppose you could just barely characterise this as being a little like really early Hammell on Trial material being covered by the Animaniacs – it’s as close as I can get anyhow, despite it being something of a tenuous comparison.

It’s not entirely a great big ‘haha, fuck you, deal with this if you think you can’ to the audience however.  Songs like A Prior Instance of Teething, Under an Umbrella and Pause Fruit are genuinely lovely so, as I said, it’s not like he doesn’t know how to break the texture of a record this confrontational, to give people a way in.

And that’s how it works, I suppose.  I was fascinated with the sheer surprise of this album to begin with.  But then a couple of those songs got under my skin and before I knew it (and it took surprisingly little time, actually) even the strangest stuff seemed to have its place in the universe.  This might not work that well with individual preview songs, but when you listen to the entire album all the flights of fancy are actually very well anchored.  So listen past the initial ‘What the fuck??’ moments and give this one a bit of a chance.  You may well still hate it after that but I have really come to like it and I bet there’s quite a few of you out there who will do the same.

Mike Ersing – Pause Fruit

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Mike Ersing – Mood Dependant Retrieval

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MySpace (Buy the album here too – you’ll have to email the man himself, but it’s only three dollars.)

I am going to end up using that dreaded word ‘nice’ to describe this band, unfortunately.  Not because I intend it as any kind of indictment of their music, simply because there is a very easy going feel to this EP which almost reminds be of really early Beautiful South (by this I mean before they turned into music for people too boring to cope with Coldplay).

It’s more a vague impression than a striking resemblance, and maybe it’s just the vocal intonations at times, or perhaps the interplay of the vocal and the slightly plaintive plucked ukulele which appears at times, most notably on Goodnight Moon.  There’s a vein of feisty spirit running through this, particularly on the title track, and it makes for a nice interplay with the the sense of pleading inherent in Casey Chandler’s voice.

I have to confess that on the first few listens it all seemed a bit too pleasant for me, really.  But  on better acquaintance it turns out I get on quite well with this EP – sort of in the manner of someone who has been a decent, solid friend for a long time.  You never spend that much time with them and then suddenly it dawns on you that you’ve known each other for years.

If anything, I think what makes this record is the combination of the songs together.  Taken alone, I might not have taken the first track all that seriously, treated it as no more than a pretty good indie song, but the next couple of tracks are slower, emptier and seem to emphasise certain nuances in Lost Generation which I might not have noticed had the pace remained the same throughout.  So I nearly missed it due to rushing my musical enjoyment just a little too much these days, but this is actually a really enjoyable EP.

Galapaghost – You’re All I Need

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MySpace | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon mp3