Anyone remember when I wrote about Dame Satan?  Well it’s a little over two years ago now, so no reason you should, but I thought they were rather good.  Well, a slight lineup reshuffle, a bit of a rethink and two years under their belts and they have now resurfaced as Sands. And they are still excellent.

It’s been a while since I wrote about this kind of music actually.  If you’re looking for a mish-mash of genre words to only half pay attention to, then I’d say it’s the kind of slow, dark, gothic stuff halfway between moody West Coast folk and slow-burning bluesy psychedelia.  Don’t let clumsily bastardised description fool you though, this genuinely is good stuff.

Their first release is an EP called Sea of Trees, which you can get from their Bandcamp page, and it’s a short, sharp, four-song EP which touches on all the aspects I mentioned above, without ever trying to cram them all into the same song, and hence making a mess.

Signs opens with a slow, no actually, a really slow building grumble which might be more familiar to Dame Satan fans, before giving way to the crisp gallop of Fingers. Fares and Tolls is a less dark, and altogether more wistful beast, brought home beautifully by a gorgeous duet. Then, by the time the woozy guitar solos of Favors arrive the smorgasbord is complete.

In their press material and the self-description on their website the band reference their home environment quite a lot, from the landscape and countryside of California to the music environment of psychedelia, old blues and soul music.  Their own songs showcase this confused jumble of influences, but in a manner which always seem economical and coherent, despite the broad array of ingredients they juggle.

In short, well worth your five dollars.

Sands – Signs

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6.Elvis Perkins in Dearland
This album is greatly helped by kicking off with the best song I’ve heard for bloody ages, and actually that threw me off for a little, as did the subtle shift in emphasis since his brilliant debut Ash Wednesday.  Once songs like Hours Last Stand and Dresden settle into your head though you won’t hear an album with more intricately interwoven senses of both sadness and optimism for quite some time.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Hours Last Stand

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7.Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
I am perpetually surprised by just how much I like so many songs on this record.  I keep thinking of Wild Beasts as a band I alternately love and then really don’t like at all, but you’ll wait to the last couple of songs of this to find a track I’m even lukewarm on.  It’s all chiming guitars and yearning vocals and there’s just enough purpose to the rhythm to suggest that you could be dancing to it, and just enough woe to make you think, well, maybe not.

Wild Beasts – We Still Got the Taste Dancing on Our Tongues

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8.King Creosote – Flick the Vs
There is a sense in which Kenny Anderson can pretty  much write what he likes, because he wields one of my favourite singing voices of all time.  After the bombast of Bombshell and the sidestep of They Flock Like Vulcans, he seems to have combined a little pop from the former and a fair bit of bleeping from the latter and mixed them together to deliver another classic King Creosote record.  It has a really distinctive character, coupling his touching songwriting with just the right amount of weirdness.

King Creosote – No-one Had it Better

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9.Dame Satan – Beaches & Bridges
This is a bit of an out of the blue sort of placing really, given how little I know about the band and given that they are hardly well-known in general, but as I tired of other records or failed to find the excitement in them that some of my peers managed, this one simply sat there pretty much near the top of the pile and remained confidently there for the duration of the year.  It doesn’t slap you across the face with brilliance in the way that some do, just builds a steady, consistent relationship with your need for succour as the day ends.

Dame Satan – Ghost Dance

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10.Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion
I still find this an infuriatingly inconsistent album.  There are at least three songs in the second half I really find completely needless, but a combination of how much I love the rest of them and the sheer ubiquity of this album still make this one of my favourite this year.  For a change, people playing it all over the place hasn’t put me off, because those places were places like The Bowery and friends’ houses and stuff like that, so somehow it’s ended up being a good thing for a change.

Animal Collective – Also Frightened

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This stuff is lovely: ghostly Americana with broken, desolate vocals full of heartbreak rather than rage, and the most bare-boned of backing.  Yes, I know, I cover a lot of this stuff.  In fact you may have heard fragments of this music before, as there is a connection with Dame Satan, whose album I reviewed very positively a couple of months ago.  Basically, this is the work of Andrew Simmons of that band – it’s a project, not a band, as his MySpace page informs us.

I’d be pleasantly surprised if anyone reading this remember Lincoln, apart from Tim from The Daily Growl, but that is the immediate comparison which springs to mind.  They were a London-based band who recorded two great EPs, Barcelona and Kibokin, and a great album, Crooked Smile, before disbanding roughly four years ago or so.  The sounds were quite similar: with relaxed splashes of organ, a casual drum beat and lazily played guitars creating the atmosphere, augmented with care by banjo, some deep strings and the odd bit of what sounds like a melodica.

The distinctive character, however, comes from the tentative, slightly reedy male vocal and the gorgeous female support which decorates it.  There is a sincere yearning to the vocal sound which makes this EP sound just a little desperate at times, with the warmth of the female more mocking and tantalising than comfortable.  It is the voice of the slightly malevolent fairy you think you glimpse in the reeds as you slowly drown, who may be the one to save you, or a jilted spirit who has lured you to your death out of vengeance – you’re never quite sure.

In some senses I’d say that this record needs a little patience.  It starts quite slowly, with the excellent Memphis clocking in at a stiflingly unhurried seven minutes.  The pace picks up later, but it this does give things a slowish start, and many of the songs themselves follow this lead.  It grips you, this EP, though, just in a paralysed and uneasy way rather than a manically excited one.  It makes me slightly uncomfortable, but I really like it.

Tabernacle – Memphis

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Tabernacle – Lady Bird

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Lincoln – Great Wall of China Just because they were really good.

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This is beautiful.  At times like a slightly more ethereal version of the Cave Singers, at times even evoking seventies British psych-folk, they even end up with spooky, reverby guitar growls reminiscent of the Low Lows from time to time.

It’s not an immediate hit, however.  This is the kind of album you have to ease yourself into with a few listens, I think.  The pace is very, very slow for the most part, and it leaves you prone to distraction as you listen.  The vocals are like some desert choirboy gone badly astray, which makes the excruciatingly slow washes of guitar even more threatening.

The dance between folk and low-fi indie is a well judged one, it has to be said.  The way the album slips back and forth between the two mirrors the way the layers of the songs build in gentle, yet insistent gusts as more and more tension is steadily added to the mix.  Dawn & Delta is a classic example.  It starts out at a barely conscious whisper, and builds to the most restrained of crescendoes, embellished with just a little guitar noodling which could have come from the guitar of Richard Thompson.  It is followed by Puget Sound, possibly the song most remimniscent of that sound on the whole album, switching gears just a little, after sounding more closely related to Americana for the first handful of songs.

Why is this important?  Well, it’s more to illustrate the richness of what’s going on here.  I honestly was in danger of dismissing this when I first heard, with a casual ‘all the same’ shrug.  The variety really is there, however, if you give it the chance to make itself known.  It would be a real shame to dismiss this record too easily, because it really doesn’t deserve it.

Dame Satan, incidentally, is the name of a bomber from the Second World War, in case you were wondering.  It is slightly misleading in a sense, but once you know the provenance then it fits, in its own way.  I like this band, and I look forward to hearing more.

Dame Satan – Suffering Daughter

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Dame Satan – Country Thief

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As you might expect from the title, this is one ungodly clusterfuck of a podcast.  It was recorded well into the early hours of the morning with Dylan, Neil and DC who were all in the house by virtue of Homegame being imminent (happening already by the time you hear this) and the Meursault EP being in the final stages of completion.  DC stopped by the house on his way to Fife, Neil was around to put CDs into card envelopes and Dylan, er, just likes beer I think.

There’s was also some heinous Norweigan anus cheese being eaten as well.  Toffee-flavoured cheese.  Fucking toffee-flavoured fucking cheese.  Honestly, it is the most disgusting substance known to man and looks just a little bit like brown plasticine.

Anyway, please don’t expect anything coherent or, frankly, even anything listenable.  Four of us sat around and bellowed incoherently into a microphone for a couple of hours, and frankly that’s exactly what it sounds like.  There are some good songs, though, and some really good new music but, erm, honestly you might want to skip the talky bits.  Actually, you know the first time anyone talks any sense whatsoever on this podcast?  The last link.  Really.  We get drunker and drunker and more incoherent, and then right at the end there’s an utterly shocking outbreak of common sense.

Toadcast #65 – The Clustercast

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01. Eels – Fresh Blood (02.27)
02. Jeffrey Lewis – Don’t Be Upset (10.10)
03. Slim Twig – Young Hussies (17.07)
04. Queens of the Stone Age – No One Knows (21.04)
05. Dame Satan – Suffering Daughter (33.03)
06. Eagle Winged Palace – Hand of Doom (36.21)
07. Arab Strap – Fucking Little Bastards (43.49)
08. Graffiti Island – Wolfguy (53.47)
09. Graham Coxon – In the Morning (66.12)

Spring makes a fucking colossal difference, doesn’t it.  People have been tripping around Edinburgh with a spring in their step for the last week, when the sun has come out and the air, whilst it may still be a little chilly, is notably warmer.  It’s gentler, I suppose, is the main difference.  There’s something of a release about Spring, as if all the uncomfortable restraint of Winter no longer has to be acknowledged.  Does anyone remember that episode of Northern Exposure when the ice melted?  Everyone went nuts, and the relieved exhalation we all express on the coming of the sunshine does remind me in many ways of a tame version of the exact same mania depicted in that episode of, erm, a serialised drama from the, er, mid ah nineties…  anyone still reading?  Never mind.

In any case, this is a purposeless but musically excellent podcast which is something of a lazy one, if I’m honest.  Frankly though, I think I deserve it after the effort put into the Pictish Session, so fuck you if you have an issue with that.  Tee hee.  There’s a lot of new release stuff on here, a couple of bands reviewed recently on the site, and a couple who are going to be reviewed later this week.  Next week I’ll think of a theme. Promise.

Toadcast #63 – Sprrring is Here!

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01. The Soft Pack – Right & Wrong (01.33)
02. Maxwell Panther – A Shade Away (08.24)
03. Phil & the Osophers – They Threw a Shoe at You (11.16)
04. The Felice Brothers – The Big Surprise (15.34)
05. The Empty Set – Alice & Bob (Forlorn Photo Love) (24.01)
06. The Van Allen Belt – The Revolution Will be Merchandised (27.24)
07. Meursault (no, not that Meursault) – Blindfolds (33.31)
08. Outlaw Con Bandana – Rainy Season (37.16)
09. Dame Satan – Ghost Dance (39.25)
10. Peter Doherty – 1939 Returning (49.30)