Edinburgh does cold, clear, sunny days better than anywhere I remember being. It really is just a stunning day today – the kind which makes me wonder about bunking off this afternoon, getting a coffee and going for a stroll up the Water of Leith.  Anyone?

Did anyone order the Whitehaus Family Record I reviewed a while back?  I did, and it just arrrived, including a double vinyl album, a 7″, two tapes and about a dozen CD-Rs.  Bar-gain!  That’s my weekend’s aural pleasure taken care of, then.

This weekend we shall be doing… not very much actually.  If it keeps up being this sunny and nice then I reckon we might venture out into the garden and finish the rather slapdash job of cutting everything back ready for Spring, which we made a bit of a half-arsed job of in November.  I think the best part of having a garden is the really early stuff – watching the first shoots emerge after all the dark and the cold.  It’s actually, dare I say it without seeming like a right stuffy old fucker, kind of exciting.  We threw in a heap of new bulbs in the Autumn and I am really looking forward to seeing which ones come up.

Oh, and yes, I do own a pair of slippers, and you can stop making that face and fuck off.

So, here’s the usual opportunity to talk pish and waste time on the internet on a Friday afternoon.  And well done to Andy Murray, by the way.  Not that I really care about tennis, but for some reason it seems nice when he wins.  It cheers the Scots up anyway.

1. Level of interest in professional tennis, as a percentage.
2. Most old-fogey thing you really enjoy.
3. Suggestion for wasting a sunny afternoon.
4. Suggest an old record from your childhood for sunny Sunday afternoon listening.
5. What do you have with your cuppa?

These five songs are from the year I spent in a swanky flat with the Wrong Girlfriend just after I moved to London in about 2001 or so.

Interpol – PDA

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Chris Coco w. Nick Cave – Sunday Morning

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Bob Mould – Semper Fi

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Sondre Lerche – Dead Passengers

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Brendan Benson – Folk Singer

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I love videos like these.  Some Australian chappie made loads, and I stumbled across them a few months ago and just couldn’t stop watching them.

You know, the funny thing about quitting my job is how incredibly easy I have found it to be disciplined about my new job.  I don’t sleep in, I still work late, although not as crazily late as I used to have to, and I don’t even skive and piss about on the internet during the day.

This morning, however, I slept in.  Shit.  Until eleven, which is quite bad, and even then I had to drag myself out of bed like a member of the living dead.  I’ve always been a sleeper, however.  I can miss out on all the sleep in the world by staying up late, but for some reason getting up early is absolutely beyond me.  To tackle this, Mrs. Toad makes me get up and drive her to work in the morning these days, which ensure I am out and about by nine every morning.

This makes plenty of sense, because once you’re up, you’re up, really, aren’t you, and it seems to work… until a band buggers off in the van meaning that whatever my good intentions, I can’t drive her to work, which is what happened this morning.  And there’s something deeply unsatisfying about sleeping in when you are your own boss and the only person getting cheated is YOU!  Dammit, world, what have you done to one of my great pleasures in life?

So yes, wake up, rub your eyes and de-lurk, for ’tis Friday, the day for drinking, fornicating and snoozing at your desk in the mid-afternoon!

1. Do you have a really bad sleeping in story?
2. Would you rather work late or get up early if you have a lot of shit to do.
3. Favourite sleeping place.
4. Which dead music publication do you miss the most?
5. If you were starting a music magazine, name one thing you definitely would or would not do.

This Friday’s five tunes are all from the covermount CD of an old Comes With a Smile issue.  The late, very much lamented Comes With a Smile.

Low – Walk into the Sea (Acoustic Version)

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Jens Lekman – No Time for Breaking Up

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Dolorean – Holding On (Live)

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Brendan Benson – Between Us (Uncensored Version)

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The Eighteenth Day of May – Sir Casey Jones

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After all the hoo-ha surrounding the helter-skelter release of this album and the refusal to allow reviewers to have advance copies and all of that gubbins has died down, I think we can now safely address the question of whether or not it is actually any good without tripping over wordy Music 2.0 chatter at every turn.

I’ve already been accused of anti-mainstream snobbery once today, so I am a little hesitant to say this, but I actually do not think this album is especially good. Jack White’s dirty blues are still in evidence, as are some of the more eccentric digressions that decorated the last White Stripes album. And once again Brendan Benson brings just enough pop sensibility to the record to take it a clear step away from other White enterprises.

The thing is that somehow they seem to have landed in the sort of Rawk territory that lacks something of the bite of Broken Boy Soldiers. Many Shades of Black, for example, may be an excellent song but it has more than a whiff of Queen about it, particularly in the chorus. It’s weird.

You know what I think may have happened? I think some of the pace has gone out of their music. Broken Boy Soldiers seemed to distill the excitement of a new project into music that drove forwards excitedly onto the next riff, or the next song, or whatever else they came up with next. This seems to lack a little of that bubbling energy and consequently the album comes across as more than a little bit sluggish.

Am I being an anti-mainstream snob again? I don’t know, possibly, but I am just not very excited by listening to this record.

The Raconteurs – The Switch & the Spur
The Raconteurs – Carolina Drama

The Fun Police have made an appearance and music has consequently returned to the 19th Century, where it will presumably remain until someone rolls a much-needed hand grenade into Web Sherriff Towers.

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