Song, by Toad

Tonight Mrs. Toad and I are going to Glasgow and I am NOT ALLOWED to take the opportunity to go to a gig, apparently.  Mean old bitch.  Still, we are staying in a posh hotel for a couple of nights, before popping up to somewherenearglasgow for a wedding on Saturday.  We are going to Rogano’s for oysters on Saturday lunchtime before pottering off in our suits and hoping that everyone else will be so smashed they won’t notice what a couple of dickheads we are when surrounded by large groups of people.

We love Rogano’s actually.  The decor is Art Deco and absolutely brilliant, and it’s full of people who look like they’ve been coming there since their glamorous youth in the seventies.  We go there, drink champagne and martini’s and eat lots of fish, and it’s brilliant.  It actually makes even me feel slightly glamorous, which is no mean feat, I promise you.  I just hope we are a little restrained and don’t turn up at the bloody wedding off our tits.

In other Hoping Not to Offend People news, my mother’s birthday is coming up, but she and my dad are off gallivanting somewhere exotic and mercifully hard to reach, so I will not be able to forget to send her a present this year, a little ritual we have which routinely results in floods of tears and plaintive cries of “Why do you hate me?”  Every single fucking year – honestly, you’d think either I’d start remembering properly or she’d just get the fuck over it, but neither of us seems to be able to sort it out, it’s ridiculous.

Anyhow, please de-lurk and say hello.  And remember to take your hipster pics of people being Incredibly Cool so you can win a vinyl copy of the Communion Compilation.  Judging will be on next Friday’s Five, so find your pics and email me at songbytoad at hotmail.co.uk.  In the meantime, Christ, please let the day be over so I can get a fucking pint.

1. What do you do which routinely causes family histrionics?
2. Apart from the Smiths, these songs are all starting to feel nostalgic now, despite only being about five years old.  Where does current stop and nostalgia begin, for you?
3. What do you wear which makes you feel distinctly Not Like You?
4. What generally disgusting foodstuff do you love.
5. Favourite childhood boardgame.

Richmond Fontaine – The Warehouse Life

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Eels – Sweet Li’l Thing

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The Smiths – Bigmouth Strikes Again

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Andrew Bird – Lull

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Bright Eyes – Gold Mine Gutted

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The Excast is so named because I am playing a lot of people’s former bands.  There’s Shane MacGowan’s Nipple Erectors, Phil Chevron’s Radiators, Shilpa Ray’s Beat the Devil and Billy Bragg’s Riff Raff.

I concentrate so much on new music these days that I often decide whether or not I like a band on the basis of a handful of demos, maybe a single, sometimes a debut EP, stuff like that.  And of course, bands don’t stumble into the world fully-formed, it takes some of them ages to become brilliant, and a lot of the time the initial forms of a band can be really strange, presumably because the people in question were still casting around a bit for their sound.

So there’s a bit of that here, but it’s not all that rigid a theme, and the playlist is a bit messy but, erm, well never mind.  There are some great songs, so enjoy!

Toadcast #96 – The Excast

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01. Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers – Beating St. Louis (04.07)
02. Beat the Devil – Plea Bargain (11.09)
03. Bright Eyes – Neely O’Hara (19.56)
04. Richard Hawley – Naked in Pitsmoor (26.16)
05. The Young Republic – The Alchemist (33.20)
06. Construction & Destruction – The Signal (41.24)
07. The Nipple Erectors – Nervous Wreck (48.34)
08. The Radiators – Walking Home Alone Again (50.39)
09. The Pogues – Lorca’s Novena (56.37)
10. Riff Raff – You Shaped House (63.33)

This is not a fully fledged rant, it is a review. But the review leads me onto topics that irritate the shit out of me, so you are going to have to put up with a bit of anoyed, off-topic rambling if you read all this lot. If, on the other hand, you can’t be arsed then here is the short and sweet review: not very good; and you can skip to the bottom for an mp3 to download. I can’t be much fairer than that.

For most of us Bright Eyes burst onto the scene in early 2005 when he released I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and the only slightly less excellent Digital Ash in a Digital Urn simultaneously. The thing is, as true fans knew, Bright Eyes didn’t exactly spring up from nowhere – he had a history.

Or, more importantly, he had a back catalogue. ‘Oooh!’ said his label execs to one another, positively faint with pleasure as images of large stacks of dollar bills and oral treats from executive gentleman’s companions swam before their eyes. ‘Now that our little chappie is popular, people will give us their money and we will be rich beyond our wildest dreams, the world will be our oyster and that walking celebrity spaff-bucket Kim Karda-wotsit will want to shag us!’

Well actually, that’s unfair. Conor Oberst was, and to his and their credit remains, signed to indie label Saddle Creek Records. They are neither big, nor evil, but they learned a rather slippery trick from the biggies. Having just coughed up two albums’ worth of superb new material there was precious little chance of Mr. Oberst cranking out anything else for quite some time, so they were left with the conundrum of how to capitalise on what, for an indie label, was a fairly unusual level of public interest in one of their hitherto rather obscure artists.

The answer: live recordings and b-sides – those time-honoured fleecing weapons that every big label brandishes with ruthless efficiency – could potentially be wielded here rather effectively. So they released, at carefully staggered intervals, two albums. One called Motion Sickness: Live Recordings and another called Noise Floor: Rarities 1998-2005. The thing is, the majority of live recordings are just like the record, but with crap sound and b-sides tend not to make the real albums because they’re mostly rubbish. These obviously aren’t cast iron rules, but they are pretty good guidelines.

In this case they were indeed shit, I was fleeced of thirty quid and I was hugely negatively disposed towards the new record before I’d even heard a single song. On the other hand, if they’d just left well enough alone (not easy, I understand, when everyone’s clamouring for your hot new act) then I would have been drooling at the thought of the new album like Pavlov’s Dogs in Winchester Cathedral on Easter Sunday*.

As it is, I don’t actually think the new one is very good. It’s got a certain dadrock quality to it, without the scratchiness and raw emotion of his earlier stuff. But I don’t even know, any more, if I dislike it because the music doesn’t agree with me, or if I’m incapable of liking it because I have been so annoyed by the dash for cash by Saddle Creek.

Ultimately, even if an artist is popular, you can’t justify abandoning the quality control. Releasing rubbish will surely damage the artist more in the long run than will be gained by the short term influx of cash for an inferior product. I don’t know, maybe you lot liked those two filler albums more than I did, but I thought they were shit, cynical and completely needless.

Bright Eyes – Middleman

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*Do they ring the bells a lot on Easter Sunday? I assume so, but I have no idea so would you mind just pretending they do? That makes it much funnier.