Song, by Toad

I often struggle to write about Art Pedro, because I never quite know how to phrase exactly what it is I want to say.  Basically, I almost always find myself thinking ‘okay, lots of good stuff going on, not quite sure I’d say it was entirely clicking for me, but I like a lot of the ideas happening here’.

When I interviewed Jamie from The Japanese War Effort for Fresh Air Radio the other week he talked about how much work he would produce early on – throwing around ideas, sketching out songs, and generally just working through exactly what it was he was trying to do.  Art Pedro had a very prolific period a couple of years back which seemed to be to be a little similar: very prolific, but really quite patchy.

A year or so ago Pete Mason announced that he was retiring from music altogether, which he has a habit of doing from time to time, apparently, but you can’t keep a good mentalist down and he’s just recently come back to me with a whole album of new material.

Anyone with the foresight to invest in a cellist farm in the last few years would now be a very rich individual indeed because pretty much every damn band in the world seems to have one at the moment, and there’s one on this as well.  It’s all added with a pretty subtle touch though, I have to say, so it’s hardly all that obvious most of the time, generally just bringing a comforting warmth to the songs in question.

Art Pedro’s songs tend to come across as the inner monologues which meander around inside your head late at night as you stare at something on your desk you’re supposed to be doing but can’t face starting.

The extra time spent over this album has been well worth it, though, I’d say.  It has the right combination of a melancholic mood with little hooks and twists which spread themselves around enough to make this sound like a whole album, rather than a collection of ideas which just got trapped in the same place by accident.

Art Pedro – Nothing Happened

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Art Pedro – Abiosis

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Art Pedro on MySpace

The 28th Toadcast is all about the Fence Collective. People who read this site regularly must know them, I assume, but I’ve been intending to do this post for a while as they might be my favourite label in music at the moment.

After Kenny Anderson’s last band fell apart about ten years ago or more, he started releasing his own stuff on hand made CD-Rs under the name of King Creosote and between him and his brothers and some of the other local musicians he’d grown up with in Fife, a collective started to form which has grown and grown. Now, thanks to the spotlight cast their direction by Kenny’s brother Gordon’s involvement with The Beta Band and The Aliens, the success of King Creosote and James Yorkston, and the rising of KT Tunstall (also a Fence alumnus, believe it or not) Fence Records have turned into one of the most beloved record labels in the country.

And actually, I think their approach of building a community rather than just pimping product might just have the potential to make them one of the success stories of Music 2.0, although that’s another story. So this podcast is all about Fence Records and the bands I have discovered due to their hard work, and why I think they’re great. What an arse-kisser I’ve turned into.

(Warning: I’m drunker than I sound and there is way too much talking in this one.)

Toadcast #28 – The Fencecast

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01. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Our Last Needle (03.17)
02. King Creosote – You’ve No Clue Do You (09.21)
03. James Yorkston & the Athletes – St. Patrick (16.33)
04. Art Pedro – Joanne (21.19)
05. MC Quake – It Feels Good to Be In Scotland (27.57)
06. Down the Tiny Steps – Handstand (36.44)
07. Adam Beattie – Bank Street (46.39)
08. Player Piano – Mercy (AC Mix) (49.35)
09. Candythief – A Good Day (56.47)
10. Rob St. John – Tipping In (60.06)
11. Adrian Crowley – Star of the Harbour (65.11)
12. Eagleowl – This is Not Your Lucky Day (67.47)
13. OLO Worms – Fingers & Thumbs (77.04)
14. HMS Ginafore – You Built a City Inside of Me (85.41)
15. Gummi Bako – She’s the Carrot & I’m the Stick (87.44)
16. The Pictish Trail – Words Fail Me Now (94.39)
17. Rich Amino – Chicken & Chips (99.02)
18. Sara Lowes – Uniform Days (104.22)
19. Magic Arm – Outdoor Games (108.11)
20. King Creosote – I’ll Fly By the Seat of My Pants (115.32)

Day Two >
Day Three >>

The reason the truly excellent Campfires & Battlefields took over all things Toad this weekend is that I was away with Mrs. Toad, and he very kindly volunteered to keep things ticking over in our absence. You will surely all join me in thanking him for his excellent job, and I guess you may be at least slightly curious as to what exactly we were up to.

Well a large number of people in the Fence Collective have known each other since childhood and, despite gathering many other folk along the way, are still very firmly rooted in the Fife town of Anstruther where many of the original members grew up. So, despite the increasing prominence of the Collective’s musical endeavours, with the success of King Creosote, Found and James Yorkston, they all still like to get back together once a year for a weekend, get completely cabbaged and play lots and lot of music.

Mrs. Toad and I have been to the last three of these and we both love them, but for different reasons. She likes going to a seaside town for a weekend, where she can go to one or two gigs, but basically abandon me to my musical enthusiasms and read the FT from cover to cover. I like going to a festival where half the bands are mental, half are inspired, half are awful, half are beautiful and you genuinely have no idea what you’re going to see from one gig to the next. I don’t think I know anyone other than the Fence lot who take even a fraction as many chances with music, or who are anything like so confident to put on something completely left field and bizarre, safe in the knowledge that it will get a fair listen and genuine appreciation from their audience.

One of the things about being married of course is that I was not just travelling up to Anstruther as a music fanatic, I was also going there as a (briefly) dutiful husband. Mrs. Toad and I have gone for a meal at the absolutely fucking wonderful Cellar Restaurant every one of the three years we’ve been to Homegame, and so we did again. It’s expensive, but it’s a ritual and a treat and we love it. You have a seat with a G&T, browse the menu and the wine list, and eventually wander through to the dining room and spend all night over one of the best meals you will eat. They don’t turn the tables, so generally we’ve been the last out. This year we went along early though, and after a lovely few hours where things were a little more Mr. Creosote than King Creosote, Mrs. Toad returned to the cottage and, for me, the festival commenced.

I’d rather disappointingly missed Art Pedro unfortunately, whose set coincided with our esculent* escapades, but that was a sacrifice which had to be made. I am determined to see him play at some point however, but this was not to be the time.

Art Pedro – Girl From School

I did make it for Down the Tiny Steps, fortunately. You should all know how highly I rate these lads by now, so I won’t go into it too much, save to say that their lineup is even more slimline now than it was the last time I saw them. The hole in the lineup left no corresponding hole in the music however, which is a sort of bizarre Scot-hop folktronica. Sort of. It’s superb for late in a day of drinking and listening basically, because it’s eminently danceable and gorgeously wistful at the same time. Ideal for that reserved indie sway, which is about as close to dancing as I get most of the time. Fortunately for the Tinies, others were not so shy.

Down the Tiny Steps – Revenge

After the Tinies and before we repaired to the Pink House – for a party where I ended up swilling whisky from a hip flask out of one hand and red wine from the bottle with the other and presumably talking monumental amounts of garbage throughout – there was time for a show-closer from Jon Hopkins. I doubt many of you know of Mr. Hopkins, and neither do I, particularly. I know he is a very steeply rising star in the world of production and has been faithfully described as being a thoroughly down to earth and friendly chap despite this. I also know he has done a number of superlative remixes of Fence songs, in particular King Creosote’s Circle My Demise for a De-Fence release last year. I am not massively into laptop music most of the time, but at that stage of the night, drunk and giddy, I really enjoyed his set.

The rest of the evening, as you can imagine, was a bit of a blur.

Jon Hopkins – Circle My Demise

* I have to confess that I dug this one up in the thesaurus. What an excellent word, though, don’t you think?

Me? Hip-hop?  A genre I know absolutely nothing about, and can barely tolerate most of the time?  Well yes, actually, this week on The Waiting Room I have a go at hip-hop.  I fucking hate hip-hop with a passion for the most part, but this is basically due to the fact that it is a genre I don’t understand and know very little about.

Imagine if all you knew of indie was Coldplay, Kasabian and dickheaded antics of Pete Doherty – you’d dismiss it as empty cock-waving by middle class white cunts, wouldn’t you?  Well all I really know of hip-hop is the exact equivalent – the awful, awful commercial side of the industry with bitches, hoes and that peculiar form of homophobia that is just a bit too passionate to be entirely above suspicion.  Anyone who looks at the modern commercial hip-hop industry and doesn’t find it to be pathetic, contemptible and utterly disgusting is a cunt, simple as that.  It’s grotesque, infantile and insulting to everyone involved.

That said, the original rap scene from which hip-hop evolved was a serious underground movement, full of intelligence and subversion.  And a movement can’t be that big without having a significant number of really thoughtful, artistically inclined bands in there somewhere, so I know it is just my ignorance of the scene that keeps me from finding them.  There are a couple of things in my library that are vaguely that way inclined and so I thought I’d throw them into The Waiting Room this week.  Change being as good as a rest and all that.

So have a listen to this week’s Waiting Room, and see how DC and that Fisk character react to my choices:

The Waiting Room, Wednesday 26th March 2008

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And here are a couple of songs I didn’t put into my selection this week, but could have:
Roots Manuva – Witness
Jazzy Jeff – For Da Love Of Da Game

Oh, and DC has discovered the wonderful Art Pedro.  Huzzah!  Listen to this and then go and buy his albums from Fence Records.
Art Pedro – You’re a Twat

I’ve invaded The Waiting Room, DC’s show on Error FM, once again, with familiarly disastrous results.  It’s all quite British folky this week.  This is a movement I’m really, really enjoying at the moment, and have been for some time, so I thought I’d go all lovely this week in preparation for a bit of a departure next.  He’s even thrown on some of my favourite local bands, The Byrons and Down the Tiny Steps, as a peace offering for hating Billy Bragg.  It’s too late, DC mate, I’m going to hate you forever now!

So, if you’d like to hear me put my best foot forward, only to have it ungratefully stamped upon by that horrible Welshman and his drunken sidekick-du-jour, then head over here and have a listen.  Alternatively, listen here:

The Waiting Room, with English Folk From the Toad[audio http://crack.podbean.com/medias/web/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhMS5wb2RiZWFuLmNvbS8xOTkzL3UvMTkwMzA4Lm1wMw/190308.mp3]

Actually, I liked the one with The Woman of the House last week.  She was far kinder about my choices, mate, so can she come back?  And isn’t it annoying to be upstaged by your wench on your own turf?  Anyone who introduces herself with lines like: “Who do I have to fuck around here to get a cup of tea?” is alright by me.

Here are some songs I could have picked for this episode, but didn’t:

Jake Flowers – Take Me Home
Art Pedro – Hangover Blues

The 2008 Plug Awards have been announced, so go along and vote. They are pretty much the best awards going if you ask me, but I am not particularly excited by the nominees this year. That album list, for all it contains an awful lot of very good albums, is pretty lacking in imagination. There are no nominations there that didn’t make me think ‘ah yes, them’ when I read them. The list of best blogs is largely the same. It’s like someone Googled music blogs and wrote down the top five results. That’s not what happens, but you get my drift. Half of them are on the Wikipedia mp3 blog page, which pretty much sums it up. Not much from the old Song, by Toad blogroll, sadly.

Be careful where you say this, though. I stirred up a right old episode of handbags on the bloggers’ message board over at elbo.ws for saying that I thought it was a crap list. I must confess I didn’t express myself very well when I first said it – accusing the nominees of by and large lacking a personal voice, when what I really meant might have been better said thus: they tend not to have that personal journal aspect that I like about my favourite blogs, which makes them as much about the person doing the writing as it does about the music.

Either way, the ensuing kerfuffle would have done a bunch of twelve year old girls proud: the next time I logged in I was ‘the worst poster on these boards’ and ‘retarded’ and found myself fending off the rather pompous, and not a little bit comical, outrage of half a dozen premium bloggers. So I got stuck right back in myself, as I’m sure you can imagine, and the whole thing descended from there. In any case, if the hierarchy of bloggers counted for anything, which it fortunately doesn’t, I would be entirely finished in the blogging world as of this morning.

It was a bit silly really, as there was a perfectly useful discussion to be had in there somewhere, but the ensuing nonsense was classic internet message board: absolutely everyone over-expressing themselves and calling each other ‘tards and so on and so forth. I called someone a cock smoker at one point myself, which I think is one to be particularly proud of. The Aussies really do bring a panache to the world of the casually vulgar insult that the rest of us can only aspire to. I told another gentleman what his writing tended to substitute sincerity for writerly knob-cheese, which perhaps mightn’t have been the most diplomatically adept way to get the discussion back on course. And, almost inevitably, I think I called them all a bunch of whores at one point as well.

Either way, without going into the rights and wrongs of the actual argument, it’s amazing how easily this sort of thing seems to happen on the internet. People just don’t seem to have quite evolved the means for preventing this sort of cycle escalating far, far faster than it would in the real world. Sometimes I think people get a bit carried away coming up with a neatly phrased put-down and rather forget the discussion they’re in. I know I went a bit over the top at the time, but then again, I did do some excellent work, especially towards the end when I got a little irritated.

I suppose what it really comes down to is the fact that it is incredibly difficult to be sensitive on the internet. I knew that half those bloggers, whose work I was about to publically declare not all that interesting, use those boards. In a direct personal conversation you can convey a lack of desire to be confrontational and directly hurtful with body language, but it is pretty bloody tricky to do so when writing something down, especially when the content itself is really quite touchy.

The Wedding Present – Getting Nowhere Fast (Live)
Shout Out Louds – Ill Wills
Art Pedro – I’m the Greatest

When I last wrote about the fabulous Art Pedro it was on the back of a quite brilliant Picket Fence release called A Surprising Return to Form.  This terrific little CD wa… actually, CDs are all the same size aren’t they.  Well, most of them.  Well it was short.  And very good.  It’s a little box of tricks actually; eccentric, playful and hugely enjoyable – one of my favourite records of the year so far.

Well his follow up and first proper album Here’s to Everyone I’ve Wounded is less unpredictable, focussing instead on the more melancholy, introverted aspects of his songwriting.  Although the pace and subject matter are slightly narrower this time around, the unusual, slightly atonal delivery remains the same.  It may take some getting used to, especially the slightly furry quality of his voice, but once you do it’s a genuine pleasure.

Some of the lyrics are so personal and alienated it can be a slightly difficult listen at times, feeling like a bit of a confessional or even like a bit of a torrent of dislocated anguish from someone who sits just slightly at odds with the modern world.  Musically the discordant beeps and drones that accompany the gentle guitar and gorgeous droplets of piano frequently serve to heighten the slight sense of unease, but nevertheless it is an intimate and often comforting record.

He’s an odd ‘un, Arthur Pedro, but he has rather surprisingly produced a couple of genuine left field gems this year, out of absolutely nowhere.  I do admit, I rather miss some of the instrumental jauntiness of the first release, but this is still a splendid album.

Art Pedro – You’re (Not) Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone
Art Pedro – Leave Me Alone
Art Pedro – You Smell Nice

myspace | buy from fence records (sold out for now, but keep an eye out – they are likely to print more)

Hmm, I’m not sure what I can tell you about this, in terms of recommending a purchase. It is part of the Picket Fence series, released on a monthly basis by Toad favourites, Fence Records. You have to subscribe to Picket Fence which costs you 50 sheckles so I don’t know, it’s a bit of a risk and might just be for the musical adventurers and those bent on supporting independent music – ie fucking all of you, obviously, I should bloody well hope! Either way, you pay your cash and you get what you’re given, so it’s a leap of faith and given the rather eclectic nature of the Fence fellows it can be a bit of a lottery.

Art Pedro (myspace here) released February’s Picket Fence this year and it’s one of the brilliant ones. A little odd, perhaps, but really good. Beats and a constant electric hum fade in and out of gently plucked guitar and rolling piano which creates a lovely atmosphere – it’s entirely unsurprising to hear he’s living in Cornwall at the moment. There’s loads more going here as well – toy town honky-tonk in Joanne, for example, and a gorgeous piano track called Sommeil Noir Froid.

The most striking, and potentially off-putting if it’s not for you, aspect to the music is the vocal performance. I don’t know if Art Pedro can’t sing, or if he just doesn’t. Either way, there’s no hiding it with a poor vocal performance, instead he makes a virtue of it and almost talks his way through the songs, the rhythm of the vocal and the music seeming to part company entirely from time to time, but they always come back together again. I think it’s superb, but it is a bit unusual, so just be warned.

If the vocal is for you, then the real beauty of this album is its variety – from playful to warm to wistful to introspective and all brought down to earth with a rather heartbreaking thump in the gorgeous closer You’re a Twat.

Things like this little 10-song gem are why I subscribe to the Picket Fence series .

Art Pedro – All I Want
Art Pedro – Joanne