Song, by Toad

Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

Now, I know I played nicey-nicey with the previous parts of this list, and it is certainly true to say that there is barely any real difference between places fourteen and twenty-eight, but at the business end I think that some of it is a bit more definite.  Certainly, having thought it over, I think that Now You Are Pregnant is my favourite song of the year.  How or why it edges out the superb Wonderful Life I couldn’t quite tell you, but I know it would feel wrong to have put them the other way round.

The other rather obvious point that needs to be made is that, of course, I have no objectivity left whatsoever as regards the Meursault album or any of the songs on it.  I didn’t have anything to do with making the thing, of course, but I’ve worked so closely with that album over the course of the last six months or so, since it became a part of Song, by Toad Records, that my relationship with it is totally different to anything else I’ve been listening to.  So I am being honest when I feature Meursault stuff so highly, I’m not lying to you of course, but there’s no way I could be objective anymore.

So here’s the final installment of the Toad Festive Fifty.  DC will be posting his Christmas extravaganza tomorrow, and that will be the last you hear of Toad for a few days.  In between Christmas and New Year I will be going through my album of the year countdown and trying to move Toad over the self-hosting in order to avoid the horrors of DMCA harrassment.  This way I can host the fucking thing in China if need be, and they can all just fuck off.  So Happy Christmas all, and we’ll try and get things up and running as normally as possible right after the changeover. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you like your gentle Americana sparkling with handclaps and drenched in some of the loveliest, most soulful vocals you’ll hear this side of, erm, Shane Macg… no, er, Tom W…  no, er right.  The most soulful vocals you’d ever be shocked to hear at a site so dedicated to miserable old grumblers as Song, by Toad.

It sways and spins, dancing blissfully around, like a combination of The Cowboy Junkies and early Rilo Kiley and the summery sound is at times old-fashioned at times sunny and at times wistfully melancholic.  Not in a depressed way you understand, just in the manner of a winsome sigh escaping the lips of a beautiful girl who, sad as she might be, knows as well as you and I that all her best days are yet before her and for all the sky may be cloudy now, it won’t last for long.  Maybe not even until sundown.

Up Up Away is from their previous album, Our Roots Need Water and embodies the happy clappy side of things, whereas Coolie Trade, the title track from their forthcoming Spring release, is one of the loveliest songs I’ve heard in ages.  There’s such soul in the country and such warmth in the sadness that if your heart has cockles, this will warm them from the inside out.  I can’t wait for the album, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be hearing more from this lot soon enough.

Bear Country – Coolie Trade
Bear Country – Up Up Away

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