More boisterous rock ‘n’ roll music on Song, by Toad.  This has slacker overtones, frantic crescendoes of frenzied guitar-playing and clattering drums, and is all available to download for the princely sum of sweet fuck all from Boring Girls’ Bandcamp page.

Now, I’ll be honest, this is quite patchy, and the band have split up since I first heard the album, but there’s nevertheless some cracking stuff on here.  Oh, and a couple of them have gone on to play in a band called Ill Murray, who have a couple of songs on their Bandcamp page to check out.

When it’s not really working for me, I tend to hear just a mess of guitars, standard effects applied to the vocals, and a relatively unvarying pace across large patches of music.  I might have been tempted, in other words, to cut a couple of songs.

Having said that, the cracking pace of the excellent opening track Tin Foliage is just fucking great, as is Bambinos, which follows it. The songs don’t exactly outstay their welcome, either – all twelve clock in at under half an hour in total, and only two creep the merest fraction over three minutes.

These guys are borrowing from thrash, from punk, from indie rock, from garage and lo-fi and almost every other kind of alternative guitar music which has been knocking around for the last twenty or thirty years, and it works really well.  It’s loose and unprecious and when they really cut loose and go for it, on songs like Stefan Wilberforce and Big Society, it’s like a kick in the balls.  In a good way.  Boring Girls may be an inconsistent album, but there’s shitloads of good stuff here, and it’s a real shame they packed it in.

Boring Girls – Tin Foliage

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Boring Girls – Bambinos

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Download for free from their Bandcamp page.

Fast because I need to squeeze eleven songs into an hour because I just didn’t want to trim the playlist, fast because I want to get out into the back garden asap to enjoy the sun, and fast because um… well, just because.  I dunno.  Fuck you, anyway, this is the one-hundred-and-eighty-first stupid name for one of these damn things I’ve had to come up with.  The names were bound to get worse over time really, weren’t they.

Anyhow, once this is done, I expect to get a couple of hours out in the garden before buggering off to Henry’s for the Edinburgh School for the Deaf, Zed Penguin and Spook School gig.  These things have to happen on bloody glorious days, don’t they. Ah well, at least it wasn’t a Toad Session this time, like it usually is the moment we get a sunny day.

Direct download: Toadcast #181 – The Fastcast

01. Yo La Tengo – Outsmartener (00.25)
02. Enfant Bastard – Demo Scene (06.40)
03. Lambchop – Came Home Late (12.34)
04. Smog – Teenage Spaceship (16.35)
05. Castor – Watcher Buckles (21.56)
06. Boring Girls – Tin Foliage (27.57)
07. Mitchell Museum – What They Built (32.15)
08. Plastic Animals – It Fell Apart (35.27)
09. Seafieldroad – Cramond Island Causeway (40.56)
10. Sun Glitters – Things Are… (47.11)
11. Little Deadman – Post Helado Madness (52.31)