01.Easter – Somethin’ American This might be the first time such an unknown song by such an unknown band has ever been given top spot on any of my end of year lists, but they were absolutely brilliant live when they played up here in September, and this song is just fantastic, as are the other two songs on their Soundcloud page.  It’s less lo-fi than a lot of the DIY stuff I’ve listened to this year, and the squalling solos which tease Easter’s songs to an end evoke loads of old school US indie music.  This gives quite tight pop songs a loose, expressive, emotive finale and when they get going live these bits really are amazing.

02.Crystal Swells – Patent Trolls This is another absolute peach of a song which went straight from a PR email to the very front of my brain for the entire year.  I had this on tape in the van for months, and I go back to it again and again.  This one is probably more menacing, compared to the reckless pace of the rest of the album, but that opening riff and the crescendo to which the song builds are just absolutely fucking blinding.

03.Ringo Deathstarr – Do It Every Time Alright, this is the highest-placed pure pop song on this list.  A simple guitar rhythm and a simple tune, delivered with plenty of pace and energy.  This is one to leap around to, pure and simple, and just about the best one of its kind this year.

04.The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 I played this on the podcast last week and struggled to introduce it then, as I probably will now. Firstly, I have hardly heard anyone sing anything about the twin towers attacks without sounding just a little bit forced and uncomfortable when doing so, but this manages it with some aplomb.  And then to have that kind of subject matter twinned with such and incredibly rousing song is an odd and absolutely brilliant juxtaposition.

05.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit This was one of those ‘what the fuck am I even listening to?’ moments, the first time I heard it. It’s old fashioned music, what I can only really describe in my cultural ignorance as soda-stream pop, and it’s not that unusual exactly, there’s just something weird about it.  It’s a bit unsettling, a bit out of focus somehow, and at the same time absolutely brilliant.

06.Josh T Pearson – Thou Art Loosed The solo album may not hark back to Lift to Experience all that much, but this song, the first on the album, seems to have just enough of that shimmering texture to link the two eras of Josh T. Pearson’s music together.  And that repeated “I’m off to save the world” seems to rather sadly presage the tales of personal failure which make this album so uncomfortably compelling.

08.Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon A muffled, growly mess, but it’s got such momentum and drive that I can’t stop listening to it.  It’s rough, muffled, growly shoegazey guitar stuff with a great riff.

07.Jonnie Common – Photosynth Alright, it’s possible I might have included this when it was a Down the Tiny Steps song, so including it again seems like a bit of a cheat.  Doesn’t matter though, this is pop brilliance.  And the video was shot in our back garden too!

09.Timber Timbre – Woman Is that seriously a sax on there?  Why yes, yes indeed it is, and it’s brilliant.  This is one of the biggest songs on the album and one of the most surprising too, given the relatively extravagant instrumentation.

10.Milk Maid – Back Of Your Knees I am absolutely delighted with the band’s Toad Session recordings, not least because I was so apprehensive about the actual recording process.  This might be my album highlight, as much for its more raucous live incarnation as this excellent version.

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1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

11.David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got No Sole The first song we heard from DTB’s fantastic album, and perhaps the poppiest of the lot.  Catchy, unusual and immensely hummable.

12.Kurt Vile – Baby’s Arms Another album from which it is tricky to extricate just one song as a highlight, but for some reason I’m giving this the nod above Jesus Fever or Puppet to the Man. I think it’s the most late night and glass of red winey song on the album, but it’s close.

13.The Sandwitches – Lightfoot Are you still allowed to describe songs as joyous romps these days?  Because that’s what this feels like, an idiosyncratic, gleeful romp of a song.

14.Josh T Pearson – Country Dumb It’s hard to pick out just one song from this record, but this one seems to stand out for some reason.  Maybe it’s related to the number of times I’ve heard it and the circumstances, but there’s an unsettling fatalism to this which lifts it above the autobiographical confessional of the rest of the album.

15.John Knox Sex Club – Above Us the Waves This kind of sincere, epic grandiosity is really difficult to pull off without coming across as a bit po-faced or joyless, but this is just spell-binding.

16.Jonnie Common – Summer Is For Going Places There are so many incredible songs on this Jonnie Common album I could easily have picked four or five for the Festive Fifty, but I didn’t want the whole thing to be dominated by one or two artists.  Summer is For Going Places is as laid back and infectious as the rest of Master of None.

17.Crystal Swells – Mellow Californian Another masterpiece of feral, overloaded lo-fi brilliance.  And no matter how messy they make this stuff, Crystal Swells always make sure the pop song isn’t lost, so it may not sound like it, but I reckon they know exactly what they’re doing.

18.Yoofs – John Actor is Monkfish I love the chorus on this, the vocal refrain, how well-controlled the momentum of the song is – and once again we have an unknown DIY band with two songs in my Festive Fifty.  Keep an eye on Art is Hard Records in the new year.

19.Hookworms – Teen Dreams For unheard of DIY bands to produce stuff with this much oomph is unusual.  This is from a self-titled 12″ now out on Faux Discx, and it’s, well, epic, I suppose is the best way to describe it.

20.Easter – Damp Patch For a band with three songs on a Soundcloud page and nothing else, I am a bit wary of over-stating my own enthusiasm for this band.  They have a sort of slow-burn to them, but then that spills over into raucous endings, a bit proggy, a bit krauty and all messy.  This track isn’t their most aggressive, but it’s bloody great.

21.Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Of Scottish Blood And Sympathies Epic, post-rocky, shoegazey awesomeness from a band who threw their biggest beast of a track down right at the very beginning of their debut album.

22.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams The weird sense of otherworldly fuzz on this record made it absolutely compelling from the first listen.  It’s like listening to a lost gem from the sixties with a brain so addled you can barely make out the stereo.

23.Jarad Miles – Miles Away Rocketship is a lovely record, and there are some gorgeous, touching songs on it, but perhaps the quietest, most low-key one of the lot caught my attention the most – touching and full of pathos.

24.Pillars and Tongues – Thank you Oaky Grandiose and beautiful, rich and enveloping – if one song sums up why you should own and love this album then I reckon it might be this one.

25.The Sandwitches – Heaviest Head In The West As much as the jaunty, carefree pop songs on this album caught my attention, one of the best songs on the album is this one, which is both far darker and contains one of the most arresting, enigmatic squeals in pop history.

26.Elbow – Lippy Kids I am not all that into the new Elbow album, but this track is an absolute blinder.  It’s gorgeous, and contains some of Guy Garvey’s most poignant lyrics.

27.Crystal Stilts – Shake The Shackles It wasn’t all that consistent an album, but there are some cracking songs – sort of like the Ringo Deathstarr album in that sense – and this is the best of them.  The crooned delivery almost has a New Romantic edge to it, but the rest of the song is shoegazey, garagey goodness.

28.FOUND – Machine Age Dancing The wonky breakdown in this had me sending text messages to the band the first time I heard it.  Songs like Vincent Gallo and Anti-Climb Paint may have been well familiar to FOUND fans by the time Factorycraft came out, but they kept plenty of gems to themselves, and this is one of them.

29.Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce This is far from a vintage album, but the deranged crashing about of this song is probably as close as Bad as Me gets to vintage Tom Waits.

30.Palms – Wolf Despite the really, really rough recording (those cymbal crescendoes actually quite hurt my ears) this is still clearly a brilliant song.  It’s a more brooding approach to garage rock (and I use that term, as with all genre terms, extremely loosely) than some of the more frantic stuff I’ve heard this year, and is a song I played something like ten times consecutively the first time I heard it.

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1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

 So, ta-daaah, here we go, what all right-thinking people have been enjoying most this year.  And if you haven’t been enjoying these most this year, then dammit, what do you do when I tell you what opinions to have about music, ignore me?  Surely such a thing is inconceivable.

As those of you who listened to last week’s podcast, where I played two songs from the more forgotten albums on my first ever Albums of the Year list (2004), I am actually more fascinated by these lists in retrospect than at the time.

Looking back at this list in five or ten years, the interesting albums won’t be the ones I am still listening to, but the ones I am not.  I am sure practical details, like whether I have them on vinyl or tape or just digitally, will play a role, as will drifting fads and fashions.  But sometimes it really does just seem to be random – albums just drift out of favour for no really obvious reason.  Or, as has been the case with Kurt Vile this year, some albums seem to remain favourites for ages, despite not necessarily being the ones which grabbed you the first time.

So enjoy, this is what I have been mostly enjoying this year.  And a fine list it is too, I hope you will agree.

 10: The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient This is a very late entrant to this list, because for some reason I didn’t really listen to this album at all until the last month or two, but it’s bloody brilliant, managing to drift from ambient dreamers to Springsteen-like rockers to melancholy acoustica perfectly seamlessly. And the other joy of it is: another back catalogue to explore, too!

The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name

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 9: Pillars & Tongues – The Pass and Crossings This is a stunning album from what I think must be my favourite record label of the year: Empty Cellar.  They have released three albums in my top twenty this year, and worked with the artist who released another, and that’s before we get into the singles.  This album is grandiose, beautiful and all those words like sweeping and elegiac which journalists love to use so much.  Except in this case it actually is.

Pillars & Tongues – Palms to Tell

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 8: Milk Maid – Yucca This record is actually a collection of lo-fi home recordings, but somehow the end result has got real style. Not charmingly rough and ready style, although it has that too, but a real sense of swagger.  It’s not as frantic and noisy as a lot of its lo-fi brethren this year, either.  Recording Milk Maid’s Toad Session was probably one of my favourite things this year.

Milk Maid – Can’t You See

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 7: The Sandwitches – Mrs. Jones’ Cookies A little like Sonny & the Sunsets, this album doesn’t entirely click on every single song, but it does on most.  And beyond the pop tunes, there’s a wild, wailing quality to this which had me scrunching up my face in incomprehension for the first few listens.  ‘What the f…  did they just… are they…serious?‘ It didn’t take too long for it to click though, and I have since been foisting this record on visitors to our house all year.

The Sandwitches – Summer of Love

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 6: David Thomas Broughton – Outbreeding This is a disciplined and polished pop record from a man more commonly known for spending most of his gigs figuring out just how much he can antagonise his audience before they give up altogether.  A favourite of mine since I first saw him at the End of the Road Festival in something like 2008 or 2009, I couldn’t have been much more surprised by this album, but it’s fucking brilliant nevertheless.

David Thomas Broughton – Nature

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  5: Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for my Halo I am getting into ‘every damn list on the internet has this album on it’ territory here, but balls to it, I still love this record.  I actually struggle to explain why though, because it’s not gripping, weird, striking or anything.  It is, in fact, an entirely straightforward collection of songs crooned over fairly minimal guitar, bass and drums, at a relatively middle of the road pace.  But for some reason I find the whole album one I have gone back to again and again and again all year.

Kurt Vile – Puppet to the Man

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 4: Crystal Swells – Goethe Head Soup This is one of the mostly ferociously-recorded things I’ve heard all year, with barely the slightest quarter given to the listener’s more delicate aural sensibilities.  But underneath all the buzzing, distorted racket, and despite the headache-inducing nine-minute kick in the ears that is the title track, this mini-album holds a half dozen of the finest pop songs I’ve heard all year.

Crystal Swells – Waco, Wasilla, Waikiki

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  3: Jonnie Common – Master of None Pure genius, this one.  This album has charm to spare, but it’s not as straightforward as it seems.  The actual sounds Jonnie uses in assembling his songs are really quite unusual, but the results are pure, joyous pop.  He seems to have pulled off the trick of being an experimental musician, but keeping that fact completely undercover, and making us all think he’s created the pop record of the year.  Which of course he has.

Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand

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2: Timber Timbre – Creep on Creepin’ On I don’t know what it is about the ghostly voodoo stuff these guys do which I love so much.  Certainly with the increasingly deep arrangements there is a certain theatricality to this record, but then instrumentals like Obelisk and Swamp Magic could as easily be found in one of Tom Waits’ more flamboyant nightmares as they could on the stage, or indeed a contemporary pop record. Creep On Creepin’ On is never pompous or overblown though, and displays a remarkable deftness of touch, particularly with the more

Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On

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  1: Josh T. Pearson – Last of the Country Gentlemen I hesitated a long time before putting Last of the Country Gentlemen at the top of this list. Apart from the fact that at times the word enjoyable isn’t exactly the right one to apply, the whole album seems to belong in a slightly different category to everything else.  It’s just different to all the other albums, and it feels difficult to actually compare the emotional response to this to the emotional response I’ve had to everything else.  But in the end, between SXSW, Homegame, an aborted and a successful Toad Session, the number of times I’ve heard these songs and the effect they’ve had on me, there is little doubt that this, even if it isn’t my favourite album of the year per se, is still the album which dominated 2011 and is almost certainly the album by which I will remember it.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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11-20

Video: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr
Audio: zip file (right-click, save as)

The Toad Session I was probably most nervous about recording was Milk Maid, I think.  It was arranged at the last minute, they are a full, four-piece rock band, their profile is riding relatively high at the moment and I’d never really recorded anything so loud in our house before.

As it was, it turned out pretty fucking well, if you ask me, so when PAWS came in I was confident enough that we’d get decent recordings, but I have to confess I was a little nervous about how we’d get away with the racket and the general lawlessness of their performances.

There were some changes to the team this time as well, as a lot of the usual suspects couldn’t make it.  Wee Matthew was helping out on cameras again, and Rory from Broken Records was back for a second batch of filming.  But we also managed to coax former ace Edinburgh gig photographer extraordinaire Nic Rue out of retirement to take the pictures, and Rory ‘brought at friend’ to help out with the filming.  And his friend just happened to be Chris Park.  Who just happens to be a serious professional.  So if you’re wondering why this isn’t as shit as usual, that’s probably why.

As per usual, all the session mp3s are available to download for free, either below or in this zip file, we have videos of the songs and of the interview here, photos here, Nic’s slightly larger portfolio of pics here, and of course the interview podcast below, with the playlist at the bottom of the page.  Enjoy.  And pity our poor neighbours.

Direct download: Toadcast #196 – PAWS Toad Session
Subscribe to the Toadcasts on iTunes

PAWS – Jellyfish (Toad Session)

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PAWS – Bloodline (Toad Session)

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PAWS – Bird Inside Birdcage, Ribcage Inside Bird (Toad Session)

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PAWS – Winners Don’t Bleed (Toad Session)

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01. PAWS – Jellyfish (Toad Session) (07.17)
02. Bronto Skylift – Cobblepot (15.50)
03. Mr. Peppermint – Carp Act (20.25)
04. PAWS – Bloodline (Toad Session) (26.47)
05. Ultimate Thrush – Complex Cat (35.31)
06. Crystal Swells – Waco, Wasilia, Waikiki (36.41)
07. PAWS – Bird Inside Birdcage, Ribcage Inside Bird (Toad Session) (42.35)
08. Pavement – Gold Soundz (48.59)
09. Dolfinz – Blowhole (51.44)
10. PAWS – Winners Don’t Bleed (Toad Session) (61.49)

The reason this is called the Nukecast is because I am pretty irritated by the exaggeration of just how horrible it is to be alive in 2011.  2011 is a total piece of piss.  It’s easy, unthreatening and perfectly comfortable, and the idea that the modern world is in any way topsy-turvy is just plain silly.

I am not all that old, but even the eighties, when I was a kid, were far rougher than this.  There was actual genuine menace, the world might just have been about to end in a nuclear fireball, and no-one had anything you could honestly call a proper job.

So I complain about this for about an hour, while Mrs. Toad calls me an idiot.  Welcome to the drunken Toadcasts.  Again.

Direct download: Toadcast #179 – The Nukecast

01. Tom Lehrer – Who’s Next (00.08)
02. Billy Bragg – Think Again (10.34)
03. Milk Maid – Girl (21.07)
04. Odonis Odonis – Mr. Smith (24.06)
05. Sonny & the Sunsets – I Wanna Do It (31.09)
06. Phil Ochs – Talking Cuban Crisis (41.19)
07. Crystal Swells – Dead Awake (47.43)
08. Male Bonding – Bones (52.07)
09. M.J. Hibbett & the Validators – The Fight for History (63.10)
10. Tom Lehrer – So Long, Mom (72.33)

This week’s podcast is named the Northcast because I was just up in Inverness at GoNorth, which is I suppose the biggest official Scottish music industry chatfest.

I am getting better at these, I have to be honest.  The music industry is heavily based around status and I do not do well when I suspect people might be looking down their nose at me, consequently my first few were quite a challenge to escape from before I picked a fight with someone I shouldn’t, but as my general stature within music, and Scottish music in particular, has slowly grown I am finding these events easier to handle.

It also helped that as well as helping Lloyd from Peenko and Jason from the Popcop curate one of the stages, I did some one-to-one mentoring sessions (yes, I know!) and was on two of the panels myself.  That in itself gives you a kind of status which means people seem less awkward if it comes time to approach them asking about something they can do for you – I suppose it just feels like you’re on a more equitable footing.  And in general this makes me less jumpy.

None of this stops you drinking far, far too much at these things though.

Direct download: Toadcast #178 – The Northcast

01. David Thomas Broughton – Nature (00.06)
02. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Orpheus Descending (07.09)
03. John Knox Sex Club – Katie Cruel (14.57)
04. Post War Glamour Girls – Ode to Harry Dean (Concrete Hearts) (21.00)
05. Tim Minchin – Storm (24.46)
06. The Pineapple Chunks – Look Back in Horror (40.01)
07. Scott Hutchison & Rod Jones (Fruit Tree Foundation) – I Forgot the Fall (45.23)
08. PAWS – Jellyfish (52.40)
09. Kid Canaveral – And Another Thing!! (55.29)
10. Crystal Swells – Goethe Head Soup (63.15)

I am not sure if having ‘Crystal’ in your name is a sure-fire indicator of mastery of the hipster zeitgeist these days or, given how quickly fashion flits from one fancy to another these days, a whimsically retro affectation.  A bit like releasing things on wax cylinder and the like.

The music is fucking ace though.  It’s loud, raging, lo-fi rock and roll with such an incredible about of aural mess added to the guitar that it sounds more like someone gunning a pony car half the time.

I am, as you are probably wearily aware by now, absolutely loving this kind of stuff at the moment.  It’s just loud, boisterous and loose and feels like an absolute shitload of fun to play.  It certainly is to listen to anyway.

Music like this, for all I am a considerable sucker for the growl and the noise, depends more than most on simple, quality riffs and stuff you can hum.  When your stuff is so simply assembled, you really need the elements themselves to be very good, or you’re going to become very boring very quickly.

Fortunately, Crystal Swells are not short of riffs.  From the menacing growl of the first song I heard, Patent Trolls, to the cocky swagger of Dead Awake and the furious bluster of the awesomely titled Waco, Wasilia, Waikiki, this is a foot-tapping, head-nodding, table-drumming pleasure.

Then, just as you could be forgiven for thinking that this is no more than simple pop music with a shitload of noise added (which it is, mostly, but there’s nowt wrong with that) comes the throbbing, hypnotic, headache-inducing nine-minute epic that is Goethe Head Soup‘s title track. Bloody hell this is good.  It touches on shoegaze, C86, CBGB’s and all sorts, and just batters away at your head until you either lapse into a blissful noise coma or you start bleeding from your eyes and run screaming from the room.

LOUD PLEASE!

Crystal Swells – Patent Trolls

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Crystal Swells – Waco, Wasilia, Waikiki

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Buy on download and/or cassette tape from their Bandcamp page.