I feel really weird this morning.  Partly I am whizzed off my tits on painkillers, which at least makes the back pain manageable, and partly I took the advice from this thread a little too seriously last night.  Ouch.  Pills, Caol Ila and Ardbeg: not a winning combination by the time the morning after comes around.

So there’s no chat this week, you’ll be pleased to know.  Here are some gigs.  Go to them.  But good luck picking what to do on Wednesday, because I’ve no fucking idea myself.

Wednesday 23rd September 2009: David Thomas Broughton and several other chaps at Sneaky Pete’s.

Actually David Thomas Broughton is being supported by Debutant, Twi the Humble Feather and Ross Clark, I just liked the phrasing of that little place marker, so I left it in.  ‘Several other chaps’ – spendid.  See, I told you the pills were working.  Anyhow, David Thomas Broughton is mental and brilliant.  He has a black belt in the use of loop pedals, a gorgeous voice and a strange knack for peculiar physical theatre to accompany his musical performances.  He’s sufficiently eccentric, actually, that he is a good one for sorting the men from the boys because a lot of people really don’t like David Thomas Broughton.  These people are wrong, it is as simple as that.

Wednesday 23rd September 2009: Withered Hand Album Launch at the Leith Dockers’ Club, with special guests.

You know I like this album, don’t you?  You also know I have an awful lot of time for Dan, don’t you.  And I’ve not read a bad review for the record anywhere – not even a merely lukewarm one.  So expect a big old hairy metal-hippie love-in at one of Edinburgh’s more idiosyncratic venue choices.  I would tell you who the Very Special Guest is, but I am not allowed.  You’ll just have to keep your Ear Against the Wireless.

Withered Hand – Cornflake (Demo)

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Wednesday 23rd September 2009 (or Thursday): Jesus H. Foxx & the Pineapple Chunks at the Wee Red Bar.

The Wee Red website seems to think this is on Thursday 24th, whereas I am pretty sure the bands think it’s on the 23rd.  I don’t know – personally I would go along on Wednesday if I were you because the venue is there all week and it’s probably best to turn up when the bands are actually intending to play.  Besides, at least if you go on Wednesday and you’re wrong, there’s time to put it right.  There will be lots of guitars and drums at this gig,

Friday 25th September 2009: Julie Doiron, Construction & Destruction and Former Utopia at the Bowery.

Julie Doiron is folky, quiet, French Canadian and stuff like that.

Saturday 26th September 2009: Occasional Flickers, French Wives & Cancel the Astronauts at Sneaky Pete’s.

The Occasional Flickers are probably best and most lazily described as pleasant twee-pop.  Which is nice.  My head hurts too much to write anything more about this.

The Occasional Flickers – A Medal Won in ’84

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Saturday 26th September 2009: The Low Miffs & Malcolm Ross at Cabaret Voltaire.

The Low Miffs are a fucking great live band, and their album is excellent.  It’s art rock, to a degree, old school indie to a degree and camp as tits in some senses.  I’ll be here with bells on, depending on certain potential Manchester-based excusions.

The Low Miffs & Malcolm Ross – Cressida

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Sunday 27th September 2009: Strike the Colours & Zoey Van Goey at Electric Circus.

Zoey Van Goey are another band I have inexplicably yet to see, for no really obvious reason.  They have an album out and an increasing national profile, so I really should get my shit together and check them out.  Strike the Colours is the vehicle for Malcolm Middleton’s fiddle player, and a band I kind of like, but perhaps no more than that.

Strike the Colours – Strangernight

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I love Homegame.  Have I mentioned that before?

For the uninitiated, the Fence Collective‘s Homegame Festival is held once a year in the small fishing village of Anstruther in Fife (well, it used to be a fishing village but it seems to be largely touristy now – neighbour Pittenweem seems to be more of a working harbour).  A huge pile of Fence Records acts, bolstered by friends and neighbours, get together and play lots of gigs in the town halls, school halls and beer halls of the town, and about six hundred or so lucky punters get to go along.

There are a few things I love about this festival, so here are a couple, put as briefly as possible:
- Anstruther is small, so the festival itself has to be small, or the town wouldn’t be able to cope.
- Fence Collective music is fucking brilliant.  There will be no sets by the View, not even acoustic ones.
- It’s actually in a town, so if it pisses down you can just stay in the pub and not get wet.
- The bands themselves are all relaxed, friendly and as interested in seeing good music and getting plastered as the rest of us, which makes for a really nice, communal atmosphere.
- It’s in a seaside town so if you ever get all musicked out, you can pick up a paper, sit on the promenade and read for a bit.
- Did I mention the relaxed atmosphere?  It’s the nicest festival in the world to be at.

This year Mrs. Toad and I rented a couple of cottages in Pittenweem – we were too slow to get Anstruther – which ended up being absolutely full of bodies at the end of every gin-sodden night of debauchery.  And when I say full I mean full; every inch of floor and ever sofa or cushion covered with some passed out drunkard or other.  Fuck me it was fun. Read the rest of this entry »

David Thomas Broughton is a bit of a genius, really.  I’ve only seen him once before, at the End of the Road Festival two years ago, and for some reason I had been nurturing the impression of a short, slightly awkward chap who bumbled around the stage as a way of masking a slight social unease.  Talking to him before the performance in Glasgow I was somewhat surprised to meet a fairly tall, rather dapper and quite a handsome chap with no more social awkwardness than a slight suspicion of being unwelcomly accosted by a loud mouthed muppet burbling about some blog or other.  Funny how these impressions can form, largely out of nowhere.

Once on stage, Broughton is a genuinely unique performer.  His flair for musical subtleties is uncanny.  He’ll record the faintest tap on a microphone stand and loop it into the textures of the sound he slowly builds, combining guitar phrases, guttural noises and ghostly moans until he feels he is arriving somewhere, and then loosing his beguiling voice into the middle of it all.

He has yet, to the extent of my knowledge, to manage to quite capture the magic of this in a recording, although I’ll admit that I am not anything like familiar enough with his back catalogue to say that with any authority.  Also, quite how you capture his subtle and infectious physical humour, and the magic of seeing his music slowly, carefully and unpredictably assembled in something as one-dimensional as an audio recording is something I couldn’t really imagine trying.  And I can’t imagine being made to think that mere music is desperately inadequate to really convey a musical performance, but watching David Thomas Broughton perform, it seems that’s exactly what it is.

David Thomas Broughton – Ambiguity

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David Thomas Broughton on MySpace

Someone here just isn’t thinking.

I was just sent a promotional email by someone acting on behalf of Sony BMG, one of the most clueless and technologically retarded megacorps that the world has ever seen. I have never know any marketing department be more stupid than Sony’s, and their tentative little tippy-toes into the world of online viral publicity show they have lost none of their flair for Gold Medal levels of bone-headed and almost comically obtuse attempts to deal with the evolving nature of communication. Bless ‘em, it’s hilarious:

If you should encounter any difficulties or have any questions regarding this download, please feel free to contact your RCA Label Group Representative and we will be happy to assist you further. Please find attached a hypertext link to a digitally encoded file of the above-referenced music, which you may reproduce for the sole purpose of publically performing such music on your radio station. Any other use, including, without limitation, the reproduction, distribution, modification, display or transmission of the music or file without the prior written consent of Sony Music is strictly prohibited. It is our understanding that you will delete the digital file in its entirety from your computer hard drive or such other storage medium employed by you within thirty days of the date stamp of this electronic mail. Digital song distribution is not intended to replace current physical music deliveries you may receive now. Its simply another option available to you for convenient access to our music. If you are currently on our radio promotion mailing list, you will also be mailed a physical copy of this material.

What the fuck are they on about? I don’t even have a radio station for fuck’s sake.

So, I assume they’ve clued onto the fact that blogs are a major way to share music, generate word of mouth and generally publicise emerging artists, because we have built up quite large networks and we share and talk about things we like. Cool. So they’ve sent some blogs some stuff so that they can have some of that word of mouth thing that we give them, because that sounds like a Good Thing. But The Internet is also where all these Bad Things happen, right? Like sharing, and stuff, and terrorism and other definitely Bad Things. So we’d better make sure these internet guys don’t share our music because that’s like Bad, as we’ve already proved with charts and graphs, so we’d better tell ‘em we’re not taking any shit on that one. Can’t have these guys sharing our music for free because that stops people buying it, and when they buy it, it’s Good, right?

So we generate word of mouth because we share and we encourage and we talk, so they want some of our action. But we’re also bad because we share, and we can’t have that. “Gnnnn… *Sony person’s head explodes* would someone please tell me what this internet thing is because I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!1!”

Brilliant.

David Thomas Broughton – Circle is Never Complete
Fiona Apple – Never is a Promise

[Disclaimer: Before anyone asks, this is not directed at the PR person who had to send this shit out. They didn't write anything themselves, so I am guessing they knew as well as anyone that this email was just getting deleted immediately without any attempt to even listen to the song. I've learned my lesson on that one, so stop laughing, this is entirely dedicated to the lawyers at Sony BMG and the marketing department who holds their collective leash. Brilliantly remedial lunacy. So stupid I almost sprained something just reading it.]

My what a splendid festival. You’ve read what I had to say about the thing (overview, day one, day two & day three), now here’s the ‘downloadable in one easy to digest chunk’ version, with more tunes.

I had a splendid time at this, I really did. The line-up was spectacularly good and, despite being not much more than a well-executed variant on the standard festival format, I would highly recommend it to those of you sick of the exercise in cattle-herding and aggressively intrusive marketing that the modern festival has become.

Anyhow, I’ve gone through the festival in chronological order, playing songs from artists in the order in which I attended them over the weekend. Hopefully I give you a decent overview of the festival itself as well as a taster of the quality of the lineup, from the indie legends to the connoisseur’s selection of emerging acts that made this such a quality bill. No ranting in this one either, or at least, very little. What a relief for you all.

Toadcast #12 – The End of the Roadcast

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1. Midlake – Young Bride (02.08)
2. Yo La Tengo – By the Time it Gets Dark (07.43)
3. My Brightest Diamond – Dragonfly (14.17)
4. King Creosote – You’ve No Clue Do You (23.19)
5. Monkey Swallows the Universe – Sheffield Shanty (28.29)
6. David Thomas Broughton – Unmarked Grave (34.56)
7. British Sea Power – Remember Me (46.11)
8. Port O’Brien – Five & Dime (51.39)
9. The Young Republic – Excuses to See You (56.14)
10. The Wave Pictures – Long Island (63.28)
11. Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Tickle Me Pink (70.44)
12. Paris Motel – My Demeter (77.20)
13. Charlie Parr – Worried Blues (80.53)
14. Howe Gelb – Get to Leave (88.34)
15. Lambchop – Up With People (95.35)

Well Saturday started with a fair bit of confusion. I was supposed to be interviewing Howe Gelb at 11am but that fell through (in a tremendously tedious and long-winded game of telephone tag) and has now been downgraded to an email interview and the promise that I can have another go the next time Howe is in the UK which, given there is a new Giant Sand album relatively close to release, should hopefully not be all that long.

So that one didn’t happen but I did end up, at about one-ish, having a lovely chat with Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond which I shall be writing up over the weekend some time, I hope. I am not sure what these rock star types make of my interview technique, to be honest. Instead of trying to come up with questions I tend to just try and talk to them about music for a bit and see what sort of stuff makes them tick and what kind of people they are and find out how they approach their music. It probably comes across as a bit unstructured, which it is, but lists of questions don’t really interest me at all, so until I get blacklisted this is what they’ll get.

Anyhow, after talking to Shara (please note: first name terms there – ooh yeah!) I pottered about a bit, caught the tail end of Slow Club at the Bimble Inn, and found some salad and a smoothie to help ameliorate my hangover. My tent neighbours led me astray with – not a word of a lie – tequila and pink champagne on Friday night so I was still a little tender by the time the gigs started on Saturday.

Alessi: She is painfully, painfully shy and with a really rather odd voice. She hated the mic and the amp, casting it off and playing unplugged for a song, and throughout the show looked a little like one mean spirited heckle could have reduced her to tears on the spot. That said, I actually thought she was ace: engaging, charming and a talented songwriter. I can’t exactly foresee fame and fortune, but if she’s playing I’d say she is certainly worth going along to see. Gentle, personal acoustic songwriting, and a genuinely lovely lass to boot.
MySpace

Alessi – My Bedroom

My Brightest Diamond: Christ on a bicycle this woman rocks. A wee slip of a lass, knee high to a dragonfly, metes out some serious guitar punishment in-between bouts of alternate vocal gymnastics and vocal loveliness. It’s quite dazzling to see, and she really plays and sings with quite genuine ferocity. If you are even a casual fan, honestly go and see her live if you get the chance. She’s touring the UK with the Young Republic at the moment and I can’t suggest a better way to spend your money.
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My Brightest Diamond – Magic Rabbit

The Young Republic: This was my first chance to see these guys live, and I’ve been excited about them for ages and indeed *clears superior indie-snob throat* writing about them since before they were signed, so I feel I have paid my dues in terms of patient waiting. They had three different shows pencilled in for EotR so they started the set with Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You by Dylan, which came from a set of Dylan songs they were working on for the following day. It was the Rolling Thunder Revue version as well, not the Nashville Skyline one, which I actually found shed some light on them as a band because they did seem just like the Rolling Thunder Revue at that point. Still, an excellent set, and they came across as very confident and entirely comfortable on stage, which impressed me for a band on their first international tour.
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The Young Republic – That Won’t Change the Sight (Of Your Heart Rolling By)

King Creosote: On the back of his new album of splendid indie pop album Bombshell, the King is touring with a genuine spring in his step. Uncle Beesly on Bass was arsing about with a sheep mask (I have no idea, don’t ask), The Pictish Trail was forever interjecting with smart-arsed banter and Kenny himself was bouncing around like a man having the time of his life. They just look like they’re having so much fun at the moment, it’s brilliant. So boo sucks to Tim and his mates for not liking the new amped-up sound – I think it’s a fucking blast.
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King Creosote – Twin Tub Twin It may sound hushed, but this was an absolute riot live.

Monkey Swallows the Universe: Apart from being mildly threatened by a not very intimidating looking fellow as I tried to squeeze into a packed gig, this was just gorgeous. These guys may be largely unheard of but they had a big, big crowd and when they played Jimmy Down the Well there was a polite acoustic folk uproar. Everyone knew the words, everyone knew the songs. These guys play a rather lovely kind of music – personal storytelling and charming delivery. And in the most pastoral, lovely way imaginable, they kind of seem to rock. Amazing!
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Monkey Swallows the Universe – The Chicken Fat Waltz

Danielson: In their matching uniforms they looked a bit weird and, although I like some of the tracks’ I wasn’t that taken. The performance was good though, so if you’re even slightly a fan, get stuck in and see them live. I keep expecting to like this lot more though.
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Danielson – Ship the Majestic Suffix

David Thomas Broughton: A genuine revelation. One of the few people I saw this weekend that I knew absolutely not one tiny thing about, and he was bloody incredible. He is classic Fence Collective actually, sort of a cross between Art Pedro and The Magic Arm, and spends time setting up his loops and samples at the start of each track before letting it all loose and following the rabbit down the hole. His music is a kind of low-fi folky electronica, quite atmospheric and rather abstract as well. It’s rarely clear where the songs start and finish, and we ended up just clapping in the quiet bits because there had to be some way to show this chap some appreciation – he was completely and utterly mesmerising. I have ordered albums and there will be reviews approaching.
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David Thomas Broughton – Ambiguity

British Sea Power: They were bloody late but they were worth it. I heard a lot of criticism, mostly valid, of this set including accusations of self indulgence and and needless fannying around. Both are undoubtedly accurate. They ended with a completely insane twenty-minute wig-out that left my ears ringing until the following morning. But what they did do, which very few groups do these days, was blow my socks off with a blazing onslaught of indie fucking rock. They played well, and with passion and with rage and bile and spite. And they fucking blew us all to shit. And that was all I could take for the evening – just brilliant.
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British Sea Power – Carrion