Song, by Toad

It’s teh next Great Depreshun oh noes!  Or maybe we’re just moaning like a bunch of fucking girls.  After the doom and gloom in the papers it seems time to actually compare the current financial tantrum to the Great Depression and tell anyone who makes that comparison to fuck right off and stop being so self-indulgent.

It’s even ridiculous when compared to the rough times in the fucking eighties when Margaret Thatcher eviscerated everywhere in England outside the M25.  She destroyed the country.  Annihilating nationalised industries which were no longer economic makes sense, but completely destroying the industries that keep a town alive at the same time as you destroy the support networks provided by the state and also refusing to do anything to encourage industries to grow that might replace the thousands of jobs you have just made vanish is just slash and burn social policy.

There may be a little too much opinionated political opinion and general drunken rambling between myself and my darling girl Mrs. Toad, but erm, well, fuck it you’re own your own.  Listen if you think you can face it.  But you must understand, we were vewy bewwwy drnk.

Toadcast #44 – The Whingecast

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01. Woody Guthrie – Do Re Mi (04.20)
02. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (12.52)
03. The Specials – Ghost Town (15.31)
04. The Clash – Career Opportunities (25.33)
05. Billy Bragg – To Have and to Have Not (36.04)
06. Jane’s Addiction – Been Caught Stealing (36.03)
07. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (39.25)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Ghosts of Cable Street (52.29)
09. The Willard Grant Conspiracy – Evening Mass (62.44)
10. Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky (68.29)

Final score: Bottles of wine: 5.  Bottles of beer: 3.  Night night bitches.

Well you know how I said I wasn’t so convinced by Toadcast #17?  Well it proved somewhat prophetic, although that prophesy may have been somewhat self-fulfilling of course.  It’s one of my least downloaded podcasts for ages, but this one should sort that out.  There’s some genuinely excellent music on here, although most of it is pretty obscure.  There’s no Arcade Fire or anything to pull in the punters, bar a bit of The Magnetic Fields, but a really good selection of new and emerging music nevertheless.

And why the Homecast?  Well that’s obvious of course: we’re back in our house at long last and I recorded this from my massive old lab bench that doubles as a desk and music centre all at once.  It’s fucking brilliant – I really should take a picture and post it for you so you can see.  The bench is 2.75m long, so I have computer and stuff at one end, stereo equipment at the other and a couple of good sized speakers either side. A music anorak’s paradise!

Toadcast #18 – The Homecast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Eureka Springs (Edit) (00.00)
02. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (02.30)
03. Flashguns – St. George (07.53)
04. George Pringle – Carte Postale (13.52)
05. Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Own Me (16.59)
06. Destroyer – Foam Hands (21.55)
07. Howlies – Aluminum Baseball Bat (28.44)
08. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir – Aspidestra (38.36)
09. Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Leftovers (40.48)
10. Ruth Theodore – Overexpanding (49.22)
11. Akron/Family – Ed is a Portal (55.28)
12. Victor Borge – Phonetic Puncutation (63.22)
13. Josiah Wordsworth – Drive-by Media (70.23)
14. King of Prussia – Spain in the Summertime (74.44)
15. The Magnetic Fields – Threeway (83.07)
16. The Forms – Knowledge in Hand (87.44)
17. Howlies – Smoke (90.14)
18. The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom (95.38)
19. Found – When You Fall (102.09)

This is so late a post on these lads as to be almost entirely pointless.  But this blog isn’t just about news or being at the most cutting of edges, it’s just me rambling about stuff when it occurs to me, so apologies to the news chas… actually, there’s no news chasers reading this in a million years are there?  What was I thinking?

Anyhow, I’m at work at half midnight, and I’ve been listening to The Waiting Room’s Tom Waits fest so it seemed as good a time as any to post about this excellent little single.  I mean little quite literally too, as my copy is on one of those tiny little mini CD thingies.  Nicely done, I thought.

The reason for the Waits business is that, although I obviously can’t post Forever on the Edge itself (preview on MySpace), the song the label have made available as a promo track is a Waitsified interpretation of that song – the last song on this four track single.  It’s ingenious really, and actually a thoroughly good impression.  And really, if you cover a Waits song you always end up doing a lesser job than the great man himself, so I think this is a splendid way to express your allegiance.

The rest of the CD contains the excellent single itself – a pretty standard but nevertheless highly satisfying bit of scratchy indie, with bounce and charisma.  The second track Conversational Karate is not so splendid, although the lyrics are as clever here as they are on the other songs.  But then Orderly Queue is a really good track as well, so all in all I’d say this is a pretty sound investment.

Honestly, I don’t know what to tell you about this that can explain it any more than that.  This is absolutely off-the-peg indie-pop with a bit of growl and crackle, a nice central conceit, spoken verse and a spiky, catchy chorus.  It may be standard but it’s bloody well done, and I really like this track.  If they can keep this sort of thing up, they should be well worth keeping an eye on.

4 or 5 Magicians – Tom Waits Blues

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