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.

I think I’ve picked up more new music in the last year simply by virtue of having the guys from Milk Maid in the house and by finding the YouTube channel belonging to Manchester band Former Bullies than I have by any other means.  And in the video at the top of the page, the two things rather happily coincide.

Weird Era and Easter are two bands you’ve heard me mention here before, and both are bands I was introduced to by the guys from Milk Maid, back when we recorded their Toad Session last April.  I don’t mention Daily Life as much, but I heard about them at the same time – and in fact Luke from Milk Maid plays in the band as well – but the above video for Alabaster is a fucking pop tune and a half.

Both Waiters and Sex Hands, two bands we have been recording with for a Song, by Toad Records release, have videos on the same channel.  Joe (who happens to play in both of those bands) has also had one of his other projects featured recently as well, in the form of the relatively recent upload Kids Gone Wild by Feel Right.

In fact, this whole channel is better than pretty much any blog I’ve read recently for finding new and interesting stuff.  The flat wail and relentless pace of the brilliant new Float Riverer song is bloody awesome, and despite continual support by the likes of The Gentle Invasion up here in Edinburgh, I am ashamed to say that it is only recently that I find myself starting to get into Glasgow/London band Golden Grrrls.

Music commentators and music journalists may worry about their place in the world these days, but this is pretty clear confirmation that the need for good curators will always exist.

My parents introduced me to The Clash and the Dead Kennedys, but I would nevertheless say that I think they probably hate punk.  They listened to The Pogues play London Calling with Joe Strummer and weren’t happy with the amount of guitar-bothering going on.  The first stuff I used to play in the house which I didn’t get directly from their music collection might have been Pearl Jam, and they really weren’t into that either.

I say this not as a sly means of criticising my parents’ taste in music, because given how many of my favourite bands I owe to them that would be ludicrous, but to question where I developed my love for boisterous, abrasive guitar pop.  Had I been alive in England during the punk era I am sure I would have fucking loved it.  Or, potentially, listened to pleasant pop music because it was less scary and then insisted that I loved punk later on, once I realised it was cool.  But hopefully the former.

The Bat’s Pajamas got in touch quite recently and they seem to very much scratch a particular itch I am feeling at the moment, because despite all sorts of jaded PR victim red flags, I really enjoyed the stuff they sent me through.  A bit too much stylised ‘attitude’? Check.  A pretty girl acting all femme fatale in the video?  Check.  And yet, despite these normally reliable signals, the music was very much Not Shit.  Not shit at all.

It’s funny how YouTube is turning into a playlist as much as a video station these days.  I know full well, from experience, how valuable a decent video is, but when people send me promo videos through I tend to open them in one tab and listen to the audio while I do something else in another.

Anyhow, this is all an entirely unrelated ramble, because the reason for this post is that The Bat’s Pajamas sent me through some stuff, I know nothing about the band, and I thought the two tunes they sent me were bloody brilliant.  Much more old school punk as my parents would recognise, and entirely fail to enjoy, than a lot of the retro-inspired stuff I’ve been listening to recently, but nevertheless some first rate short, sharp pop songs.

As per last year we shall once again be streaming the Song, by Toad New Year’s House Gig live for those of you who are either at home sick or in a different time zone and hence grateful of the entertainment.

Again, as the player slows the whole page down I’ll put it below the break, so just click through and you’ll be able to see Kev from River of Slime play a short set around 10pm, Neil from Meursault play solo acoustic from about 10:45pm and then another half hour set (or so) from Kev at about half past midnight. Do say hello in the chat thingy too, so I know you’re there. I may have to type very quietly, but I will respond! Live stream player below the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

The guys from La Blogotheque have been incredibly supportive of both Song, by Toad and, in particular, Meursault over the last few years, but due to their living in Paris and I in Scotland I’ve never actually met them in person.

Nevertheless, on their last European tour Meursault managed to finally take advantage of their long-standing invitation to record a session, although it was something of a stretch to actually manage it.  Having played their last show in Berlin the night before, and with a ferry booking later in the afternoon, Sam drove for eleven hours to get the band to Paris, dozed in the van while they recorded the session, and then carried on to the ferry and then Oxford without stopping.

Just in case you thought we didn’t work the little fuckers hard enough…

La Blogotheque have just published the session, and it looks fantastic. They’ve been doing this for a long time now so the sessions are bloody great, and their archive is truly amazing.  I’d like to thank them for their patience in waiting for this to finally happen, and also for the amazing support they’ve given us over the last few years.  Enjoy!

If you know me at all (and after nearly 3000 posts over seven years you fucking well should do by now) then you will know that I am not one to post novelty seasonal music.  In fact, the one benefit of the approach of Christmas is that, a little like during SXSW and CMJ, a quick scan of the subject line in the avalanche of emails I have to wade through every day tells me that a splendidly high number contain Christmas music and can thus be happily deleted without so much as the burden of having to read them.

Not that I don’t enjoy sifting through new music, but I hate my inbox, mostly because it fills me with guilt.

I also get a little irritated with bloggers who seem to forgo any desire to contribute to the world around these times and just slap up any old novelty song which may or may not have some sort of tangential relevance to the event at hand.  St. Patrick’s Day is bad for this too.  And as much as I love In the New Year by The Walkmen, if I post it in the first week of January please just fucking punch me in the face.

This, however, is a little different.  Mostly, because it’s awesome fun, but also because it is verging on the sacrilegious and would probably make the little baby Jebus cry.

When the kindergarten arm of Christianity pisses and moans about the War on Christmas they always seem to focus on the wrong targets.  Surely the biggest offence to the true meaning of Christmas is not whether or not someone wishes you Happy Holidays, Happy Christmas or Happy Hannukah (Happy Kwanzaa is a fucking offence against human dignity though, I’ll give you that), rather the rampant and voracious consumerism we are all harangued into at this time of the year.  And, of course, Away in a Manger by Louis Barabbas & the Bedlam Six. This song should in fact be the marching song of the secular battalions in the War on Christmas from now on.  Someone make it so!

It’s no secret that a lot of my favourite bands this year have come from Manchester.  And coincidentally enough, four of them seem to have come up with new releases pretty much simultaneously, so given how rarely I mention single releases on this blog I thought that made for pretty much the ideal opportunity to compile some sort of Toad vs Manchester Funtimes Omnibus.

Now, if any of you ungrateful cunts had bothered to come along to the Electric Circus on the last weekend in August you would have seen awesome performances by two of these bands, and you would know why I am so excited by them.  But you didn’t, did you.  Twats. I am almost too embarrassed to invite them back now, but I will try if you promise to turn up this time, because you really should see them.

First, up there at the top of the page, we have Ghost Outfit, whose debut single is now out on Salford’s brilliant Sways Records. The deluxe edition includes all the amazing things in the picture below:

And Tuesday sounds like this:

Ghost Outfit – Tuesday by sways

Also on Sways are the excellent Louche FC.  We also happened to have them booked to come up to play Edinburgh last year, but work commitments prevented that happening unfortunately, which is something I would like to put right this year, if at all possible.

They have their second single out around now, which can be pre-ordered from here. If you want a listen the video is below, as well as a Soundcloud embed of Hands, which they are giving away as a free download.

The Louche FC – Hands by sways

Next up we have the fantastic Brown Brogues, who have a new single out on a Swedish label called Kenrock Records.  For obvious reasons I can’t give you any free downloads here, but the band are streaming the single on their Bandcamp page, and it is available to purchase here. For those unfamiliar with their sound, it’s a bit like Oscar the Grouch singing rock ‘n’ roll songs from inside his dustbin, whilst a wind-up monkey plays drums on the lid. And it’s awesome.

And finally, after all these singles, a whole album at last, and this time from Former Bullies. The band make dreamy, lo-fi pop music, have a penchant for DIY but nevertheless excellent videos. The album is going to be available in relatively limited numbers, and can be purchased either direct from the label or from Soft Power Vinyl, who are a highly-curated online record shop based, I believe, in Livingstone of all places. Their shop is very much worth exploring. They don’t seem to stock much, but what they have is absolutely excellent. And if you want to hear more Former Bullies stuff, their Bandcamp page is here, and has all sorts.

So there you go. So many embeds and pictures and bits and pieces, the whole post is a bit of a mess isn’t it? Sorry about that. Still, there’s enough good stuff there to keep you busy for a few hours.

Well well well, this was a bloody great event. Alan Lomax, for those of you who don’t know, is (to borrow from his own institution’s language) considered to be America’s foremost folklorist.  In normal English, he is a guy who went out and made hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of field recordings, documenting the folk culture of communities across the States, and later further afield.

The event at Word of Mouth just off Leith Walk on Wednesday was a screening of selected clips of unseen footage from later journeys where he was able not only to record the music, but to shoot accompanying video as well. It was hosted by Screen Bandita and thoughtfully introduced by Nathan Salsburg, who works for Cultural Equity, the association charged with preserving and disseminating Lomax’s work.

Now, I went to see the Sigur Ros film INNI a while back, and in all honesty I thought it was pretty fucking boring.  I enjoyed the music, and the visuals were nice, but that is a long, long way from being a compelling film.  I sometimes think that when people make movies like that that they are woefully underestimating the craft of a film-maker.  And, actually, of a good, brutal editor, which seems to me to be just about the most important role of the lot.

So, I was a little apprehensive when this started off and it swiftly became apparent that it really was just a collection of songs, rather like a stream of YouTube clips, rather than a single film in its own right.  There was no need to be nervous though, because the diversity of music and the fascination of some of the performances made sure this was utterly compelling from start to finish.

I was struck by so many aspects of these recordings, and I don’t want to write an epic here, but for the sake of it I did want to mention a few things.

1. The difference between the performances when being filmed and when simply being recorded seemed immediately obvious.  People acted up considerably for the cameras, in ways I strongly doubt they would have for someone with a tape recorder.  I’m am not saying this is a bad thing however, and when you are documenting folk traditions and folk music, showing the role of that music in the communities which created it made the feel you got for the whole infinitely richer.

2. Commercial and folk approaches to music are at pretty direct odds.

2.1 The old lie peddled by entertainment conglomerates that if we don’t buy their records then we will lose great art is clearly bollocks.  People make art because they are compelled to do so and they gain a great deal from doing so.

You can be sure that pretty much no-one covered in this series was making a penny, but the music was stunning, and it was pretty clearly a joy based on participation, not remuneration.  I am not saying that artists shouldn’t be entitled to their share of commercial exploitation of their music, but if people cannot make it commercially viable, we will still have plenty of great art.

2.2 The way copyright is being used to prevent sharing, copying, remixing and reworking is clearly and obviously detrimental to the fundamental culture of music.  Stopping Rihanna from nicking someone kid’s killer riff and warbling over the top of it without compensating them is a compelling case, but many of the rest are not.

Listen to the following clip of Little Margaret – these particular lyrics occur paraphrased and in fragments all over the place in folk music. This makes the music richer, not poorer. If you clamp down on this too much you throttle the creative process.

3. So many old people! The folk world may not be all that ageist, but the pop world is, despite the recent surfeit of ‘heritage acts’. I know wrinklies won’t sell Heat For Music NME quite as well, but the way the voice changes with age (and I mean proper old age, not just middle age) was wonderfully clear watching these performances.

The old voices we saw wavered with fragility or burst forth with surprising strength, but they all had tremendous character and impact.  More old fuckers  in music please.  No Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Turds, and not another cynical reunion back-slapping circle jerk-a-thon, but properly old people singing beautiful songs.

4. The ‘over-supply’ of music is not a new thing.  This is a common whinge of people who are sadly desperate to be an authority on All Of Music, and also of those who feel the need to be told what to listen to by experts, but honestly, grow some fucking balls, both groups of you.  But looking at these films, there is clearly music absolutely everywhere in these communities.

Now, clearly there are more ways to express your creativity and urge for social and cultural participation these days, but that would imply that, infinite wastelands of the internet or not, there should be less music not more.  It’s just that back then we rarely, if ever, had access to the grass roots community level music from a hundred miles away, so we got on with enjoying what was going on in our own communities, even if it was no more worthy than an old dude blowing a tune on a half-empty Pepsi bottle.

So stop worrying about listening to everything, it makes you look a bit silly. Enjoy what’s happening around, whether your community is geographical or virtual or a combination of the two. Yeah, you’re going to miss out on some stuff, dry your eyes.

5. Last, but very much not least: fuck me, some of this was bloody amazing. Remind me again, why does anyone actually watch the X-Factor? The Alan Lomax Archive profile already has seventy-eight videos uploaded to YouTube, so go and watch them instead.  And thanks so much to Screen Bandita (whose mailing list I recommend you sign up for here) and to Nathan Salsburg for an amazing evening.

This is going to be one of those annoying write-ups which irritates the living shit out of the band for not actually being even slightly about their music. I’ll explain later.

Firstly, though, this wouldn’t be on the site at all if I didn’t actually like the song, so I don’t mean to give the wrong impression.  You Can Be a Wesley release their Nightosphere EP digitally on the 1st November 2011, and if it maintains this level of sprightly, eccentric pop then it should be rather good.

However, I promised a faintly ridiculous digression, so here it is:

When I hear a band called You Can Be a Wesley, something somewhere inside me automatically thinks they mean that you, too, can win the European cup with Hartlepool.

What the fuck are you on about? you might reasonably be thinking.  Well, when Championship Manager, the football management game to which I was utterly addicted during my university years, first came out, it was really quite trivially easy to set up a formation* which did the trick so effectively that you could quite honestly win the European Cup with Hartlepool if you could be bothered to wait for the successive promotions.

For non-football fans, this is an act of giantkilling so completely unfeasible that it is somewhat akin to the Latvian armed forces sailing halfway around the world and mounting a successful invasion of China.

In fact, so reliable was this formation that my best friend used to joke that you could win the European Cup with a team of Wesleys if you really wanted to – that is, a team composed entirely of people called Wesley.  I don’t know if he ever tested it, but I think he might have, so you can imagine that far from being a slightly crap band name, ‘You Can Be a Wesley’ seems more like a triumphant rallying cry for the hopelessly outmatched underdog to me.

As well as a sheepish reminder of why I got such a shit degree.

The band are going to be thrilled with this write-up aren’t they.  Sorry guys.

*4-3-1-2, no wingers, passing style set to ‘direct’, since you ask.