Song, by Toad

Before you break out into a cold sweat about having to sit through another list of the best albums of the decade, don’t worry, this is not one of those.  Although most of these songs would be there or thereabouts if I were actually compiling a favourite songs of the decade list, that’s not why they’re here.

Basically, rather than try and rank anything against anything else, all this is is a meander through the last ten years and me chattering about how my relationship with music has changed and what sort of stuff I was into at what times of my life.

Basically, this is the soundtrack to a perfectly normal, albeit enthusiastic, music fan’s descent into full-on deranged internet mania.

Toadcast #99 – The Decade

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01. Eels – A Daisy Through Concrete (04.09)
02. Goldfrapp – Pilots (10.04)
03. Grandaddy – The Crystal Lake (14.17)
04. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (23.13)
05. Interpol – NYC (30.46)
06. Tom Waits – Kommienezuspadt (34.57)
07. The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle (40.41)
08. The Walkmen – The Rat (44.06)
09. The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid (51.20)
10. Broken Records – Lies (Demo Version) (57.07)
11. The Savings and Loan – Christmastime in the Mountains (64.11)

I am stumbling towards the Christmas break like a punch drunk boxer dreaming of the bell.  I made up my to-do list for the rest of the year and it’s pretty fucking terrifying.  Still, time spent in France with my Mum fussing like a bloody mother hen and being determined for Christmas to be just so and me ruining it by being rude and too busy to be festive.

There tend to be some musical disagreements in our house around Christmas time.  Mum likes her festive shit, even if it is bordering on being a parody of itself at times.  I like what I consider to be relaxing music – that downbeat, morose stuff which is both warm and comforting.  Stuff like The Willard Grant Conspiracy, Micah P. Hinson, Leonard Cohen, that kind of stuff – The Boatman’s Call by Nick Cave is a favourite, for example.  Not for Mum, though, it seems.

So we both have pretty definite ideas of what kind of music should be played around Christmas time, but it just happens to be in total opposition to the other’s.  The difference being, of course, that I am right and she is not.

Last week we had the top five songs vote, probably just shaded by something by Withered Hand, but I’ll do all the proper counting before the new year and make some grandiose declaration of electoral triumph.  Which leaves this week for us to vote for our favourite album of 2009.  So that’s all the Friday Fives are this week – just list your favourite five albums released this year.  And for anyone wondering, voting for The Low Anthem is just fine, if that’s one of your favourites primarily because I can’t be arsed splitting hairs about self-releases, re-releases and all that other shit.  So please de-lurk and say hello and have a vote – these things are always more fun when more people join in.

Meursault – Salt Pt.2 2008

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Grinderman – No Pussy Blues 2007

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The Veils – Not Yet 2006

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The Decemberists – We Both Go Down Together 2005

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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Cannibal’s Hymn 2004

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I recently did an interview with Billy from The Scotsman’s Under the Radar blog (amongst other venerable organs) which took the form of an interesting chat about the current tension between  bloggers and professional journalists.  He has played off my opinions against those of his friend Mike Diver, who is currently the online editor for (the excellent) Clash magazine.  The whole thing can be found here, along with plenty of comments from Ally and Milo, professional writers from around these parts, and myself and Tart, on the side of the bloggers.  The comments on that thread make for some rather interesting reading in themselves, I have to say.

It’s an interesting debate, frankly, and one which, as a blogger with aspirations, as opposed to someone who is happy to simply chat for the sake of it, I have applied a fair deal of thought to.  Ultimately, though, I think it is something of a false dichotomy: some of the best reporters keep blogs as ways of expressing themselves outwith the constraints of the editorial policy of whatever rag pays their wages and a lot of the best bloggers end up parlaying their writing skills into professional careers in journalism.  And of either side there is a vast amount of detritus, professional and amateur.

So, yes, the Toad once again holds forth passionately on subjects he knows far too little about and may in general be making a fool of himself once more.  The, erm, songs are good though.

Toadcast #76 – The Presscast

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01. Billy Bragg – Which Side Are You On? (03.17)
02. The Decemberists – Cautionary Song (Live) (11.03)
03. Jens Lekman – No Time For Breaking Up (14.09)
04. The Meteors – Out of Time (22.21)
05. Franz Ferdinand – Darts of Pleasure (32.47)
06. The Dead 60s – Horizontal (35.17)
07. Sleepy Horses – Lubbock Love Song (42.27)
08. Eels – I Write the B-sides (52.05)
09. The Replacements – Unsatisfied (62.30)
10. David Cross – My Kids are Amish (68.09)

Well as you read this I will be in a day-long meeting with one of Proper Job’s most important clients.  The product, about which I really can’t divulge all that much, is a really interesting one.  It’s one of those things which may well in some form be essential in about five years time but at the moment is really rather embryonic and still basically on the drawing board.  It makes for a very interesting day’s work however, albeit a very argumentative one.

So whilst I am choking on shit sandwiches and bursting with excessive coffee intake, please sit back, relax, gently stroke your mouse and fire in your five frivolous Friday fuckwitticisms.  It’s not about being first, funniest or anything like that, just chip in.

Tonight there will be monumental levels of drunkenness for myself and my darling girl Mrs. Toad.  We are going to the Bowery to see Rob St.John and Broken Records singe everyone’s eyebrows with all sorts of raucous nonsense.  Well, maybe not Rob.  But he’ll still be good, I can promise you that – I’ve never sen Rob play live and not been impressed.  Broken Records will be different.  In a room that small they might just make your ears bleed.  I, for a change, will not be reviewing or filming or anything like that.  Mrs. Toad and I will be down the front enjoying ourselves and nothing more.  We will be drunk, we will be grinning like fools and staggering about like muppets and in general we will be warming up for a splendid weekend.  There are still tickets available, should you want to join in, just swing by the City Cafe some time tomorrow.

Now, in case you were intending to be so foolish as to attempt anything productive on a Friday, stop right now.  Before you go any further do you love me.  Will you love me forever; do you need me?  Will you… oops, sorry, that was a Meat Loaf lyric.  I’ll stop.  Right now.  Delurking is required, and the filling in of five of the most frivolous answers you’ve ever produced in your life.  Have a good weekend, Toadlings.

1. Best blag you’ve ever pulled off.
2. Most fortuitous ticket.
3. Biggest waste of an expensive ticket purchase.
4. Most unexpected brilliant day.
5. Forced participation which actually turned out okay.

The Decemberists – Mariner’s Revenge Song

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The White Stripes – I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart

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Fanfarlo – Fire Escape

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Island in the Rain

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Barenaked Ladies – One Week

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I sort of have two reviews for this album: one from a music fan, which I am, and one from a ‘reviewer’, which I’m not really but bear with me.

The music fan, simply, says that this is pretty rubbish, really.  Stodgy, lumpen, and with the odd exception devoid of tunes.  It’s not lovable.  It may be an album you can respect for its ambition and all that sort of stuff but when I stick an album on the stereo I want some sort of sense of satisfaction or enjoyment or something, and all I feel with this is the urge to kick them in the bollocks and tell them to just bloody well stop poncing around and get on with it.

Put simply, whilst I presume it is very high on intellectual achievement, the instinctive, artistic side – the side which irrespective of anything gets you tapping your feet and humming the tunes – is thinner than Calista Flockhart on the last day of Lent.

If I am trying to be a music critic then there’s a lot to praise.  The exploring of themes, the over-arching concept, the boldness, the bravery of forging on into new territory when you could just trot out some more Neutral Milky alt-folk; all these things are to be praised.  In fact they are to be really loudly praised.  The proggy guitar stuff, the shameless embracing of the idea of a concept album, this all requires more than a little bit of balls, particularly when aloof irony is the chief currency in the world of the hipster, so I really do salute them for their creativity and their artistic integrity.

I want to like this album, really I do, and I do respect it.  But music is for enjoying and at this, I am afraid, it fails miserably.

The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)

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The Decemberists – The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

No, we’re not doing that this week actually, although Five Ways to Leave Your Lover would be a fine Friday Five at some point in the future.  Nothing too insulting, nothing too pedestrian, and points given for believability combined with strangeness.  Nice idea actually but, well, maybe later.

This week’s five were suggested by the excellent Mr. Team Turnip on the Pains of Being Pure at Heart review, I think.  It was all about bands who develop their songwriting and those who simply consolidate once they have found a style with which they and their fans are comfortable.

This is a nice one actually, because it exposes our prejudices.  The sum total of all music criticism pretty much boils down to ‘I like this… and I don’t like that.’  It’s an instinctive decision and as much as we can try and rationalise it afterwards, no amount of good argument can make you like or dislike anything much more than you do instinctively.  I suppose being pointed out that something was ripped off from somewhere or that such and such is a dickhead or so on can make you cool on something, but basically I think we’re mostly left with just a gut reaction, as far as music is concerned.

So for all we praise bands for developing, complain that they are derivative or criticise them for standing still, there are always plenty of groups we love who make total hypocrites of us for doing so. So chip in with yours, please, and take this opportunity not to worry about the fact that 90% of the comments on this site come from the same ten or fifteen people.  Ignore them, they’re harmless, and I’d be delighted to be introduced to a new lurker, should you fancy it.  Take the plunge, the water’s lovely.

1. Band who just knock out the same old shit time after time, but you love them anyway.
2. Band who have impressed you by continuing to develop, despite having a lot to lose.
3. Band who have become better and better with time.
4. Band who are a total rip-off, but you don’t fucking care, thank you very much.
5. Band you love who make you feel like a total hypocrite.

Eels – Sweet Li’l Thing

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The Strokes – Vision of Division

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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – We Call Upon the Author

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The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle

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Babyshambles – Delivery

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Well, kids, it’s been a strange old sleepless week & a bit. Of course, what with the Presidential pageant all a hoo-ing & a hah-ing at every turn, I managed to mince about pretty much unnoticed for the most part.

The weather has been atrocious to say the very least. Did I pack for ground frost? Torrential rain? Near hurricane-strength winds? Like fuck I did. Added to that, I’ve been averaging 2am to bed (a foldout in the livingroom of the rented space – sharing with 4 others) & 5.30am wake up calls.

Ed, my (un)usual USof travel companion, has insisted on cooking breakfast for us every morning at 5-cunting-am. The smell of slowly charring bacon has gagged me awake every fucking day – including my one & only day off. On Monday, at 6am, he set the smoke & fire alarms off in the whole apartment complex as he set fire to the electric oven hob with another of his dodgy homegrown concoctions.

The cooker was ruined &, as the rental is billed to my credit card, I’m expecting a sizable bill in the near distant to repair or replace. I’ll go into the finer details of our latest adventure on next week’s show.

So, then, to this week’s show, which has been done on the hoof, via laptop, as I flitted about the States like a ninny. There’s not so much chatter – I was knackered most of the time & the mic I had wasn’t up to much & I am to much of a tight arse to buy another just for one show – but the music more than makes up for it. Some of it, in my humble, is nothing short of astonishing.

Expect, then, many brand new tracks from as yet unreleased albums by the likes of: hillary & the democrats, brooke waggoner, little boots, anna kramer & the lost cause, pete & the pirates, meursault, babian, the welcome wagon, hurray for the riff raff, the cotton jones basket ride, andrew bird, plants & animals, raise high the roof beams, jolie holland, bobby bare jr., hari & aino, the kazoo funk orchestra, warpaint, climber, alela diane, anya marina, the decemberists, basket of figs, miss emily brown, ragged claws, clem snide, & samantha crain & the midnight shivers.

You know what to do.

The Waiting Room: Wednesday 21st January

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This is a Muppet News Flash.  It isn’t, but there is certainly news afoot at the moment.  The larger labels appear to have woken from their brandy-induced Christmas comas and managed to poke their spotty interns into action once more.  And the result: we have inboxes with Important News once again.  In order, not of how famous the band is and therefore how how highly the news scores on the Official Indie-Kid Excitement Scale, but in order of just how excited I personally am about the release of each track I bring you:

Elvis Perkins in Dearland:

Elvis Perkins’ last album was blindingly brilliant.  Aching, sad, uplifting, and literate enough to be beautifully crafted, but never arch.  To say that I am looking forward to this release is an understatement.  Shampoo is brilliant, with enough stomping funeral blues and ghostly choirs of the underworld to give it massive presence, and fucking hell his voice is in g0od form.  I love this, and I can’t wait.  A couple more tracks can be streamed from his shiny new website.
Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo

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Neko Case:

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was so beautiful that I hurriedly scampered through her back catalogue, only to be slightly disappointed.  It was a bit too Lady-country-lite in places, and I find myself slightly fearing that Fox Confessor was an aberration of brilliance, surrounded by a sea of above-average music.  Listening to this song doesn’t reassure me all that much, I have to confess, but I still have hope.
Neko Case – Maneater

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The Decemberists:

Their last album was hardly a classic, despite several great moments.  Something, somehow, didn’t quite click with it, and there were a couple of really duff songs; Summersong and The Perfect Crime were gratingly bad.  The Rake’s Song isn’t all that great, I have to say, and it sounds like it has been prematurely terminated to serve as a preview.  The song doesn’t feel over when it fades out.  But again, I have hope, albeit just a little less in this case.
The Decemberists – The Rake Song

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Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs:

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect smart lyrics in this release, although what we can expect musically might be less predictable.  After last year’s filthsterpiece he seems to have returned to a more textbook songwriting format, and the instrumentation of this seems pretty straightforward as well.  Not sure what to expect – this is a pretty good song, and I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a really good, enjoyable album with plenty of wry internal laughs to be had.
Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Big Blonde

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I don’t usually offer fashion advice on this website, but I feel I might just dip my toe in those shark-infested waters for a change because this is just brilliant.

Now, I am guessing not everyone who reads this site is as depressingly shallow as I am so I am going throw this question open to the audience: what exactly would you think of a girl who wore leggings with pads on the knees? Exactly. What else is there to think? Would you even have to buy her a drink first, or do you reckon you could get away with just whipping it out in the middle of a crowded pub, because I’d be surprised if the girl in question was going to be picky enough to demand a bit of attention first. Or even basic civility.

The leggings in question can be viewed here. Yes, you read that correctly, they go by the name of Mr. President. But surely no amount of ironic nomenclature can make up for the fact that you are basically suggesting that a girl walk around in public dressed in a manner that pretty much says ‘I swallow on the first date. Maybe even in the first quarter of an hour if you’re lucky’. I’ve known some pretty easy women in my time, but even the most loose-winged of them all liked to keep up some sort of basic pretence for at least a few hours.

The irony of it all is that these garments of horror were designed by World Championship Sperm Guzzler Lindsay Lohan, who has pretty much abandoned the world of pork swords for the world of beef curtains these days, and somehow that is way less sexy than you’d think. Either she designed these things a while ago or she is delivering something of a coded warning to her girlfriend Samantha Wotshername not to get too comfortable, because she could be off at any minute, fellating the next random stranger who catches her eye – much like the old days.

Either way, leggings with knee-pads! Are you fucking joking? That’s crazy talk.

The Decemberists – A Cautionary Song
Gavin Friday – Baltimore Whores

I read an interesting but slightly frustrating article in The Scotsman the other day, all about kids’ top ten favourite and least favourite things to read. There was a fair bit of hand-wringing about the emergence of blogs and lyrics websites in the favourites, and the inevitable presence of Shakespeare in the least favourite – not among the writers, funnily enough, but among the parents of the kids in question.

This is an age-old conservative reactionary mistake (we all have a conservative reactionary inside us somewhere, this is not a political dig) of confusing the medium with the content. There is nothing inherently good about a book, nor superficial about a website. There are some pretty shitty books out there, there really are, just as there are a massive number of pointless, vacuous websites. I have learned a lot recently from excellent blogs and sites written by the exact same professionals that write the books.

It is one of the things that people who lay into the online world as full of lies and fluff (which it certainly can be, I am not denying that) tend to forget: a lot of the time the actual, genuine experts cross media quite happily, often so they bring to bear the full weight of their knowledge and expertise unshackled by editors and sponsors with agendas and word counts. And then of course there are some very talented amateurs to be found as well.

Aside from that, the idea that books are inherently good because they are books is also silly. Have any of you seen some of the empty headed, badly written, poorly conceived, scantly characterised and just plain fucking inaccurate stuff that gets published? I have read some genuinely awful, awful books in my time.

Websites are interesting because they drive home what is going to become one of the central skills of the internet era: the ability to interpret the quality of information. Anyone who thought history class was pointless is suddenly going to have to think again, because the concept of primary and secondary sources and the ability to evaluate the agenda of the writer is becoming crucial. This always existed with books, but people tended to be less aware of it. Political and historical books in particular have always needed careful scrutiny for the bias of the author, and often the publisher as well.

This is even more the case with websites, not because they’re so unreliable, but because a lot of them are very good indeed. If it was all bollocks this would be obvious fairly quickly, but it’s actually the good ones that make the crap ones harder to spot.

There is some evidence that kids are getting pretty good at evaluating what they are reading (note lack of source: bad information) and I would honestly have more faith in the abilities of people who have grown up in the internet world than people who have not. Adults are proving particularly bad at critically evaluating what they are being fed online as well. Forming little echo-chambers of people who will never challenge your opinions is pretty easy on the internet, and even when people do use evidence to add weight to their views by linking to papers and studies, they are often able to lie blatantly about the contents, safe in the knowledge that no-one will ever follow up.

So rather than teaching our kids that the internet is bad and books are good, or that people in chatrooms are paedophiles (honestly, it’s just not that easy to pick up teenagers in chatrooms, and believe me, I’ve tried) we should instead be focussing on a lesson absolutely all of us need to learn: how to tell the good shit from the bad shit and, when someone tells you something, to make sure that it is true. When the differences can be very subtle indeed and there is always someone with a lot to gain from fooling you, it is becoming both harder and way more important.

Eels – Old Shit/New Shit
Belle & Sebastian – Put the Book Back on the Shelf
The Decemberists – Billy Liar
Gene – Truth, Rest Your Head (Live)
Fela Kuti – Truth Don Die