Song, by Toad

Erm, really sorry that this is so very, very late, but life rather caught up with me this week.  So I never quite managed to find time to get my shit together until this evening, unfortunately.

It’s surprising how much of my time these weekly podcasts seem to take up – it can be quite hard to find an evening every single week to record these things.  What I find amazing is that I don’t run out of blather.  I don’t recall ever saying anything profound or all that intelligent either, so this little collection must represent hours and hours of inconsequential rambling.

On Friday a nice young lady in the pub asked me “Has anyone ever told you that you talk loads and loads.”  I suppose, looking back at a hundred and some podcasts the miracle is that actually the answer to that question is ‘no, not really, not that I can remember’.

Oh, and yes, that is Tina Turner and Kim Carnes you see there.  Suck it up, hipsters.

Toadcast #107 – The Tardicast

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01. The Walkmen – This Job is Killing Me (03.30)
02. Grandaddy – Hey Cowboy, the Phone’s For You (09.57)
03. Comaneci – Satisfied Girl (15.51)
04. Tina Turner – Private Dancer (17.50)
05. Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – England (27.33)
06. Ruth Theodore – False Alarm (34.09)
07. The Waterboys – Sweet Thing (40.54)
08. Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes (48.04)
09. R.E.M. – Half a World Away (53.55)
10. Radiohead – Creep (Acoustic) (59.59)

This is something of a surprise find; a band from Ravenna in Italy named after a Romanian gymnast. They are nothing like the band called Comanechi who played in Edinburgh the other day either. Where that band were described by Nick from Sneaky Pete’s as “a tiny Japanese girl screaming and drumming plus a seven foot beanpole in a wooly sweater playing sabbath riffs across two amps”, this is a very still kind of indie-folk which wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

It’s based around the twin treats of Francesca Amati’s gorgeous vocal and Glauco Salvo’s barely-played-at-all electric guitar, giving it just a little of the mood of early Portishead, and maybe a touch of the likes of Mazzy Star as well. There are other elements added too – a tiny amount of picking on an acoustic guitar, a little banjo here and there, and I think I heard some cello at one point as well, but there’s really not very much of that, as the arrangements are kept to a bare minimum.

I have to confess I always admire groups with that sort of instrumentation at their disposal and who show the restraint to use it so very little. I was going to say that it seems to demonstrate a certain confidence, but then Comaneci are no raw debutants so I don’t want to be condescending. Their first self-released EP came in 2004, and they have since released another EP, and album and worked on a movie soundtrack, so they know what they’re doing by this stage.

A whole album of slowly teased electric guitar and thick, hypnotic female vocals could get a bit dull after a while, but this is where the extra instrumentation is so well deployed. It may barely be there, but it is used extremely cleverly to break through the prevailing atmosphere and subtly shift the feeling of the album at just the right times. It would be wrong to say that it changes the pace or texture of the music all that much, but it does give the album the variation it needs.

I went through a spell of hearing from plenty of groups from Italy I almost liked enough to post, a year or two ago, but I’ve not heard anything from there for a while now. There are maybe a couple of songs where the actual tune itself could do with a little more dynamism on this album, but for the most part I really like it – a very pleasant surprise indeed.

Comaneci – A Pair of Glasses

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Comaneci – She

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