DC is giving away all sorts of goodies on The Waiting Room this week. In fact, he’s giving away all sorts of things that I would rather like to win myself, bar a couple of things which I have already. I was supposed to write this last week, but given it appears I have some sort of Black Belt in Fuckwittery, I managed to miss it by a week. Idiot.

Anyhow, all you have to do is listen to last week’s episode and email DC with the weight, pounds or kilos, of his suitcase when he flew back from the States the other week. The podcast itself is mostly about that trip and the bands he encountered there, so there should be bags of good things to listen to. I’m just downloading it myself, so I’ll be listening in a wee while.

Last week’s Waiting Room – the one with the competition.

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Anyway, the goodies to give away are as follows:

The Builders & Butchers / Loch Lomond split 12″ – signed by The Builders & The Butchers
The Builders & Butchers Debut CD Album – signed by The Builders & The Butchers
Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers T-Shirt – size Adult Medium (US)
Anni Rossi CD Albums Scandia + Insects Kissing
Parethetical Girls 7″ Picture Disc + CD Album Safe As Houses
The Jones Street Boys CD Album Overcome
Or, The Whale CD Album Light Poles & Pines

I can promise you, that Builders & the Butchers album is still the best thing I’ve heard since I tiptoed in to the blogosphere a couple of years ago, and Loch Lomond are brilliant. Samantha Crain is bloody marvellous too, and I’m really looking forward to seeing her at Pickathon in a couple of weeks, and to hearing her new album. When Mrs. Toad and I get drunk, The Builders & the Butchers is pretty much the first thing we reach for in the evening. The only row is whether to play Black Dresses or Spanish Death Song first.

The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake
Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Bananafish
Loch Lomond – Nothern Knees, Trees, and Lights

The missus and I got pished and did a podcast! Huzzah! It was a lovely Summery day on Wednesday and we sat out and had a meal in the back garden and then when it got chilly we came inside and did a podcast.

There’s not much of a theme this week because I can get a little bored of them, and from time to time it’s nice to just throw some tracks together that you like. And then get hammered and ramble on about them at interminable length. Sorry about that.

Toadcast #29 – The Summercast

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01. Lemonjelly – Nice Weather For Ducks (01.47)
02. Elbow – Station Approach (10.47)
03. The Eighteenth Day of May – Cold Early Morning (19.07)
04. Aberfeldy – Tom Weir (25.56)
05. Tiny Tim – Tiptoe Through the Tulips (27.47)
06. Uncle Moon – Pepper (34.41)
07. Lo-Fidelity Allstars – On the Pier (41.32)
08. The Boo Radleys – Find the Answer Within (48.17)
09. The Libertines – The Good Old Days (56.41)
10. The Undertones – Teenage Kicks (65.51)
11. The Von Bondies – C’Mon C’Mon (68.11)
12. The Builders & the Butchers – Spanish Death Song (76.41)
13. The Walkmen – The Rat (82.59)
14. Calexico – Corona (93.33)
15. Lloyd Cole – You’re a Big Girl Now (106.46)

People fall in love for lots of reasons, some good and some bad. I don’t know why I fell in love with my midget companion, but I did and now I’m stuck with her.

What is the reason for this post then? I’m not entirely sure, but it’s late and I am pished and I am feeling a rush of elated giddiness about my sheer good fortune in ending up with this lass. Happiness is an elusive thing too, so I think you have to note the occasions when life is good to you, if just out of gratitude. A doff of the cap to the fates, if you will, because bad luck is always ready to make things shit the minute you take anything for granted.

People who are miserable fuckers, I am always tempted to conclude, don’t recognise the happy times when they have them. I never want to be someone who doesn’t acknowledge his enormous and entirely undeserved slices of luck when they materialise. I hate people who don’t know how lucky they are.

Anyhow, the point, yes of course. Well we have just come back from a friend’s house having had a delicious meal (grey sole and queen scallops on a bed of spaghetti with lemon, parsley and purple sprouting broccoli – what a cunt I’ve turned into!) and watched an amazing film. It was Death Watch with Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider and Harry Dean Stanton and is shot in Glasgow in 1980. Try finding it anywhere – I bet you can’t. French Amazon is where we eventually tracked it down.

Anyhow, after all this grown-up middle class bollocks what does my darling girl want to do when we get home? Turn the stereo up fucking loud and plough through the vinyl. Play music, play it fucking loud, get mashed and act like idiots. Like I needed any encouragement. So the gins are poured, the amp is bursting at the seams and the neighbours are praying for the SAS. God I love this girl!

The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses Play this really, really fucking loud. Really fucking loud. Break something, you played it that loud.
The Sequins – Patients
Billy Bragg & Wilco – Hesitating Beauty This is just a love song. I make no apologies. I am besotted. Fuck you too.
White Rabbits – Kid on My Shoulders
The Shaky Hands – Whales Sing

1. Grinderman – Grinderman

Oh yes indeed! While other artists fall away in their old age and run out of ideas, Nick Cave just gets worse, which generally means better. This is a snarling, strutting, menacing, virile beast of an album and perhaps the only hotly anticipated major record all year to deliver the goods like a sack of spanners. Guitarist Martyn Casey describes it thus: “It wasn’t consciously two fingers to maturity but I remember thinking, all the way through, “This isn’t bad for a bunch of old farts.”" No, Martin, it isn’t bad at all.

Grinderman – No Pussy Blues

review | website | buy

2. The Builders & the Butchers – The Builders & the Butchers

Ragged, ramshackle, raucous and fucking brilliant. Imagine shaking every last skeleton out of your closet and them all coming to life, burning down your house and dancing round the inferno, guzzling bourbon. I want to move to Portland.

The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake

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3. The Twilight Sad – Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

Imagine every stereotype of indie miserablism you can muster and this album is it: brooding, ambitious and intense. There’s no hedging their bets with face-saving archness either, just a collection of brutally emotional songs delivered with the kind of relentless wall of guitar noise that threatens to shake your house to pieces as you get drunker and drunker and turn it up louder and louder.

The Twilight Sad – Walking For Two Hours

review | myspace | buy

4. Mother & the Addicts – Science Fiction Illustrated

An amazing, hugely infectious record that manages to stuff funk, disco, new romanticism and a bit of glam into a brilliantly fuzzy indie album. A professional reviewer (I can’t remember who, sorry, or I’d give credit) said that this album could have been released in 1986, 1992 or 2003 and it wouldn’t have sounded out of place. This sums it up far better than I can. A total joy.

Mother & the Addicts – So Tough

review | website | buy

5. Elvis Perkins – Ash Wednesday

For someone who loves downbeat emotional music as much as me I can’t believe this is the highest placed album of acoustic loveliness on the list. Perkins manages to wield wistful, heartbroken melancholy in that wonderfully intimate way that makes even the most depressing of tales sound bravely hopeful. It’s possibly the least depressing album of unhappy music I’ve heard in a long time. Catch him live too, if you can, he’s superb.

Elvis Perkins – It’s Only Me

review | website | buy

My dearest Toadlings it is with enormous pleasure and brimming pride that I present the light of my silly life, the bright and shining star at the centre of my universe and the bad tempered little Scottish strumpet to whom my every waking hour is devoted.  That sounds sarcastic, but it isn’t.

She treats the music I play with a sort of contemptuous indifference and has some truly shocking stuff in her rather limited collection.  But she has a punk side, she loves Bob Dylan and has taken to some unexpected groups recently, like The Sequins, The Builders & the Butchers and Grandaddy.  It slowly started to dawn on me that actually, Dolly Parton aside for the moment, she could probably put together a better playlist than I could, and I was absolutely mortified to be proved absolutely right.

So I thought I’d get her along to co-present too, which seemed like it might be fun.  It was a bit odd at first, but we warm up a bit by the end and it turns slowly into what I think it a pretty decent podcast, all told.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to talk her into doing this too often, but if it proves a success I promise to do my best.

Toadcast #13 – The Mrs. Toadcast

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01. Lambchop – Dallas Theme Song (00.00)
02. Sham 69 – Borstal Breakout (03.10)
03. The Clash – I Fought the Law (06.49)
04. Stiff Little Fingers – Alternative Ulster (10.53)
05. Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Enough (16.18)
06. The Cure – Just Like Heaven (19.50)
07. Ennio Morricone – The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (26.14)
08. Nirvana – Sliver (33.02)
09. Guns ‘n’ Roses – Get in the Ring (38.32)
10. Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue (48.21)
11. Eels – Fresh Feeling (53.58)
12. The Von Bondies – No Regrets (61.31)
13. The 63 Crayons – Spoils For Survivors (66.16)
14. Honeytrap – Andy the Freefaller (71.15)
15. The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses (76.11)
16. Night Jar – Poor Man’s Son (81.46)
17. The Indelicates – Waiting For Pete Doherty to Die (89.54)

It’s all gone a bit American this week, Toadlings. I have no intention of putting out a series of strictly themed podcasts, but it’s still early days and there are so many massive chunks of my music collection I want to poke about in that this may happen a couple of times before things settle down. So I started with a couple of vaguely American-sounding tracks this week and before you know it I ended up with a podcast with a definite Americana theme.

I’m quite happy with how it’s all turned out though, I must confess – a nice combination of classics and small, small bands, so the playlist is working quite well by itself. And actually handling the microphone is getting easier as well. I am quite liking this podcasting business, I’d say!

Toadcast #3 – With added Americana

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1. The Band – The Weight (02.16)
2. Hem – Half Acre (09.18)
3. Elvis Perkins – While You Were Sleeping (12.38)
4. Cherry Ghost – Mathematics (20.27)
5. The Holy Modal Rounders – Hey Hey Baby (25.30)
6. Night Jar – Sweet Annie Lee (28.30)
7. Caramel Jack – Lincoln Jackson Incident (33.45)
8. The Builders & the Butchers – Spanish Death Song (39.27)
9. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Ballad of a Thin Man (49.51)
10. Rick Redbeard – Blood (54.06)
11. Billie Holiday – Georgia on My Mind (59.26)
12. Night Jar – Big Black Horse (64.05)
13. Broken Records – Lies (71.45)
14. DeVotchka – The Enemy Guns (77.57)

Another Cable & Tweed band makes an appearance on Toad, this time one pinched from this post on The Builders & the Butchers. As per usual, taking musical suggestions from Rich will rarely lead you astray, and this one is another corker.

They have a similar infatuation with old time American folk music to quite a few bands at the moment, but in their case it sits more in the spiritualist gothic camp than some of their contemporaries. It’s nothing like as arch as The Decemberists, nor as gospel as the Howe Gelbs and Jenny Lewises of this world. What this has is a real rattle and stomp rhythm, battered out on banjo, washboard and fiddle. There’s also an impassioned vocal performance that never allows itself to lapse into anything like a comfort zone and fills the music with a kind of desperate urgency throughout.

To an extent they are more to be associated with the sort of dark, macabre folk tales of the Willard Grant Conspiracy, although the music is at once more low-fi and more insistent, rather than the mournful quality of much of Robert Fisher’s output. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant and I really recommend you pop over to CDBaby and buy yourself a copy immediately.

The Builders & the Butchers – Spanish Death Song
The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake

myspace | cdbaby