THIS WEEK IS THE MOTHERFUCKING SONG. BY TOAD CHRISTMAS PARTY!  OH YES IT IS! And isn’t that jolly exciting.  You’d best all be very excited indeed or I will be most upset – I’m a sensitive soul after all! I’ve also just realised that although I ordered tickets, I forgot to take them down to Avalanche, because I am a fool, so I will do that today.  And you can buy them online too remember.

However, firstly, a spot of boasting, if that’s okay.  I know I just did this last week but a couple of things have come up which are rather good, so umm… well, I’ll keep it brief.

Firstly, Song, by Toad has been voted joint third favourite music blog, along with Gorilla vs Bear, in the music bloggers’ favourite music blogs poll 2011, as conducted by the Recommender.  Strangely enough, I finished level with GvB last year as well, although we were joint fourth, but we were also behind a second-placed Pigeons & Planes too, which gives this year’s list an oddly familiar look.

And Secondly, The Scotsman asked me to write an article for them about ‘A Year in Toad’, or something like that, this weekend, and the results can be read here.  It’s odd how editing the writing as brutally as I had to to fit it into the 900 word limit changes the feel of it.  I am not sure if I didn’t try and cram too much stuff in there, at the expense of that friendly, readable style I generally aim for.  Still, not a bad discipline to engage in every once in a while.

It’s odd though, because they barely changed what I submitted, albeit a couple of changes which seem oddly meaningless. In the first paragraph ‘in our living room’ was changed to ‘in the living room of my Edinburgh home’ which, despite sounding somewhat constipated and wrong when those particular words are put in my mouth, also seems like an oddly inefficient way to get the information across when they could have just added the word ‘Edinburgh’ before ‘indie label’ in the intro bit they put at the top.

So it was nice that they changed so little, but the changes they made were a little baffling. In almost every case it was just a marginally different way of saying what I had already said.  So none of it was at all bad – the changes weren’t really better or worse – but it was a little odd, because it mostly seemed needless. The only reason I even mention it is because I don’t exactly write for grown up publications a lot, so I am still kind of fascinated by the process.

Anyway, the ramping up of the Christmas boozemageddon continues this week, with plenty of gigs and far too many opportunities to get yourself into a drunken mess.

Monday 5th Dec: Franz Nicolay, Chris T-T & Billy Liar at the Banshee Labyrinth.

I don’t know much about this, but it looks like it might be rather interesting. Nicolay used to play piano in The Hold Steady, and you can still hear a lot of that kind of stuff in his solo material.  Nevertheless, it clearly has its own character, maybe a little more frenzied and tangential than the conversational realism of Hold Steady stuff, so this could be a really interesting gig.

Tuesday 6th Dec: Broken Records, The Douglas Firs & R.M. Hubbert at Cabaret Voltaire.

Broken Records will be test driving some new songs, which is exciting enough, and with The Douglas Firs and R.M. Hubbert also booked, this bill is an absolute corker.

Broken Records – Modern Worksong

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Friday 9th Dec: John Knox Sex Club at the National Portrait Gallery.

The John Knox Sex Club were described to me as the best live band in Scotland, and after their Ides of Toad gig with Easter and Fuzzystar, I can’t disagree.  It was brilliant, and they are in Edinburgh again on Friday at the National Portrait Gallery, playing at the launch for a book called Rough Cut Nation.

Saturday 10th Dec: Song, by Toad Records Christmas Party at the St. Stephen’s Centre.

With a couple of exceptions we will have every band on the label playing on Saturday. Lil Daggers and Trips and Falls are across the pond, The Savings and Loan don’t really play live, particularly, and Charlie from King Post Kitsch has had to go down to London for work-related reasons.  Other than that, we are all present and accounted for, so please join us for a day (and evening) spent celebrating our year’s work with increasing levels of drunkenness.

 Apart from the gig stuff happening this week, I will be on this panel in Glasgow tomorrow. It is about the use of social media in music, and although I am not entirely certain quite how qualified I am to give actual advice, I do notice for example that our social media-based stuff for the record label tend to yield a lot more interest than our mailing list, so I guess there are a few things to talk about.

And then on Saturday we’ll be recording a Toad Session with the truly awesome PAWS.  Quite how we’re going to get away with the enormous racket they make I have no real idea, but umm… well, we’ll see, won’t we.  Fortunately Philip sings quite loud, so hopefully we won’t just end up with drums in everything.

However, for those of you who care not for Toad Sessions, nor indeed for social media seminars, here are some more traditional musical diversions for you over the next seven days.

Monday 19th September 2011: Slow Club & The Last Battle at Cabaret Voltaire.

If you can’t enjoy yourself at a Slow Club gig it must simply be because you are incapable of fun and therefore not a very worthwhile person. Their tunes are infallibly catchy, the band themselves seem to have a brilliant time playing and they are also obviously incredibly nice people, and that makes their gigs even better! And for a band who perform with simply dual vocals, guitar and a very, very stripped back drum kit they don’t half make a racket when they want to.

Slow Club – Let’s Fall Back in Love

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Wednesday 21st September 2011: North Atlantic Oscillation, Miaoux Miaoux & Discopolis play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

Another solid Scottish lineup from Limbo, who are approaching their fourth birthday as promoters, somewhat incredibly.

Saturday 24th September 2011: The Tidal Wave of Indifference presents Star Wheel Press, French Wives, The Douglas Firs and Lost Telegrams at the Wee Red Bar.

Stu from Tidal Wave of Indifference has slipped his head into the gig promotion noose, and I intend to be along to kick away the stool this Saturday. It’s an ambitious, four-band lineup with strong acoustic pop sensibilities running through it, but quite big sounds nevertheless.  Should be good, and I will be there!  Somewhat pished after recording the PAWS session, I would imagine, but there nevertheless.

The Douglas Firs – The Quickening

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It’s kind of funny that Song, by Toad Records is known, if it is know at all, by our strong association with Edinburgh and the Edinburgh music scene. And yet, when you think about it, almost none of the best Edinburgh bands release with us; from Broken Records on 4AD, FOUND on Chemikal, eagleowl on Kilter, Withered Hand on Absolutely Kosher (for the States anyway), The Leg on SL… and now The Douglas Firs on Armellodie.

As with FOUND and David Thomas Broughton already this year, Happy as a Windless Flag is a surprisingly conventional album.  For some (probably silly) reason I expected it to be much more confrontationally experimental, perhaps because of the battering main man Neil Insh used to give his drums when he played in Jesus H. Foxx.

In the end, for all the layering of sounds, the structure of the songs and the sounds themselves are quite abstract at times, there is such an overwhelming atmosphere of comfort about the album that it never feels at all harsh. In fact, there’s a lush, enveloping feel to this record which feels somewhat at odds with the contemplations of mortality and despair described on the band’s website. A Balance of Halves perhaps best embodies the creeping unease in a musical sense, with just a slight discord in the harmonies creating a feeling of foreboding more in keeping with the album’s central themes.

For the most part the rest of Happy as a Windless Flag, even at its most meanderingly abstract, still feels less like the contemplation of life’s darker side, and more like the hug your mum might give you to make such bleak thoughts go away.

In terms of arrangements, this is a record which sounds very much at home amongst Scottish contemporaries, at times sounding like a close relation of the Pictish Trail or King Creosote, and at others more like the precise collages of Conquering Animal Sound.  There is even a moment, in the chiming piano, brass and harmonies of Grow Old and Go Home where you can hear shades of Neil’s previous band, Jesus H. Foxx, although the moment is fleeting.

I’ve been wrong-footed quite consistently by The Douglas Firs actually, which is one of the reasons I like them.  Initially I heard a band who seemed to be most at home creating ambient, experimental soundscapes, punctured occasionally with floods of harmony.  Then the first time I saw them live I was surprised by how much of a conventional acoustic pop band they were – albeit this was either their first or second ever gig.

And now this album, again nothing like what I expected, but gorgeous.  Rich, comforting and lush.  It embraces abstraction and experimentalism enough to make it sonically fascinating, but the real core of this record for me is the shimmering warmth which washes over almost all of it, extinguishing all feelings of anxiety or unease.  It is, in short, really really good.

The Douglas Firs – A Military Farewell

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The Douglas Firs – Grow Old and Go Home

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from the band’s Bandcamp page

I think Tom Waits could be playing in Edinburgh this week and I would strongly consider missing it.  I have already spent a day sleeping it off, but I am still not convinced I have entirely dealt with the damage of Homegame just yet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t.

What I have done though is just about pull myself together to the point where I feel emotionally capable of dealing with our excellent lineup at the Bristo Hall tonight: Francois, This is the Kit and Babe.  With the exception of Babe I made the effort to avoid them all at Homegame, just to make tonight’s gig more special.

Then I am going to sleep again.  Lots.

Tuesday 10th May 2011: Francois & the Atlas Mountains, This is the Kit & Babe at the Bristo Hall.

This is the perfect opportunity for those who missed Homegame to figure out what we’ve all been going on about, and I can tell you that Babe (who are Gerard from Findo Gask’s new band) were absolutely storming on the weekend.  Also, Francois has just signed to Domino, so there will be excitement all round.

Tuesday 10th May 2011: Fucked Up, Black Lungs and Iceage at Cabaret Voltaire.

I actually know almost nothing about Fucked Up, but on Record Stor SHOP! Day they released the rather excellent David’s Town, which is a compilation of fictional bands from an equally fictional British seaside town.  This idea, and the execution of it, were brilliant enough in themselves that I thought this gig definitely merited mention here.  But of course you’ll all be at Francois right?  RIGHT?

Animal Man – Do You Feed? From Fucked Up’s Record Shop Day release David’s Town.

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Friday 13th May 2011: The Douglas Firs, Le Reno Amps, The Scottish Enlightenment & Iliop at Old St Paul’s Church (the one in town, not the one in Leith!).

Somewhat reversing my habit of releasing Glasgow bands like King Post Kitsch, Yusuf Azak and Inspector Tapehead from the other side of the M8, Al at Armellodie have done with The Douglas Firs what Chemikal did with FOUND earlier in the year, and turn the traffic in the opposite direction. This is the album release celebration for The Douglas Firs

I feel I could start these listings posts with ‘Christ, 25th October, already?’ pretty much every single week at the moment.  Not that the world is getting away from me exactly – in fact it all seems to be slowly locating some semblance of normality after a couple of months trying to get my head around my new full-time responsibilities – it’s just that I have been constantly busy since I left Proper Job and in those circumstances time just buzzes past at a frightening rate.

This weekend we finally got into the territory of proper cold.  Not uncomfortably cold, or really cold, or even very cold, just that the weather is now officially cold.  You need a jacket to go outside, and it’s probably time to put the heating on and stuff like that.  It’s the end of October, Winter is most definitely around the corner, and it’s dark by the time you get home from work.

I like the cold, actually.  This Winter just gone was excellent.  I was raised in Austria where, amongst other things, you most certainly have proper seasons.  The idea of these chilly, wet, rainy British Winters has always disappointed me, and finally getting a freeze and some snow (although there was admittedly very little actual snow in Edinburgh itself) felt like we’d finally had a Winter at least vaguely worthy of the name, so come on Scotland, let’s go one better this year and actually get some snow onto the streets of the city, eh?  Alright, alright, maybe not one of my more popular rallying cries.

That song at the top of the page, incidentally, is by a gentleman who records under the name of Pregnant.  More can be found here, for those wishing to investigate.  I have a new album to listen to some time soon, but it can all be previewed by following that link, so… well, you’re not going to be doing anything better on a Monday morning, are you?

Oh, almost forgot.  Some live shows.  Monday seems to be popular this week, for some inexplicable reason:

Monday 25th October 2010: Meursault, Port Royal and Enfant Bastard at the Caves.

Meursault are, as I mentioned on Sunday, kicking off a national tour with a gig at The Caves.  I love the Caves, and I just wish I had the balls to put gigs on there more often, because it is a gorgeous venue.  There are rumours of proper drum kits and early REM infatuations in Meursault’s immediate future, but I have no real idea if that’s what we’re in for tonight, or if it will be some time before this shift in direction becomes obvious.  You’d think I’d be on top of this shit really, wouldn’t you.  But no.

Meursault – Sleet

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Monday 25th October 2010: Lichens, The Douglas Firs & Iliop at Sneaky Pete’s.

Of all the unfortunate timing… I’d really like to see the Douglas Firs again, having missed their Retreat! performance due to work commitments.  This lineup is a little more experimental, perhaps, but continues the very promising work being done by Powan Presents.  There’s a pretty worrying dearth of active promoters in Edinburgh at the moment, and it’s good to see a couple of promising new enterprises starting up.

The Douglas Firs – The Quickening

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Sunday 31st October 2010: Our Ladies of Sorrow Halloween Party at Sneaky Pete’s.

Our Ladies of Sorrow’s Halloween Party is an Edinburgh institution, merging perversions of popular local bands with perversions of Halloween-inspired cinematic collages, and presumably even bigger perversions of the Department of Health’s recommended daily alcohol intake.  This will sell out, I would think, so I’d get there early if I were you, as I can’t find a ticket link anywhere.

So, a holiday coming up (an actual one this time – no computer, no work, no nothing) and so many things to get done.  I reeled them off in the van this morning when I was driving Mrs. Toad to work and she asked me if there were actually enough hours in the day to get everything done, and I had to answer in the negative.  Not even if I didn’t actually sleep at all.  So now it’s just a case of choosing what to neglect, which for an obsessive like me is not a comfortable decision to have to make.

So, if anyone has ever wanted to write anything for these pages, this week would be a splendid time to get in touch.  Dylan can be reached at sunday@songbytoad.com – just email a post through as he has kindly offered to generally administer the site in my absence.  It can be anything, from a gig review to a band recommendation, to a rant about something, to just a general ramble about something in your musical past – anything really.

Anyhow, after an enforced absence of several weeks due to holidays, Haarfests and suchlike, it is time to get back to the Wark of a Friday evening.  Mrs. Toad and I haven’t been there for bloody ages, and we are both starting to get twitchy with withdrawal symptoms.

Oh, and of course, the Festival is nearly over, so if you want to take one last chance to catch some things then this is the last week you’ll have the chance.  Lach’s Antihoot finishes this weekend, and they are getting in sort of a greatest hits lineup to mark the finale.  And of course, the Retreat Festival is this weekend at Pilrig St. Paul’s Church in Leith.  If you like music and you don’t go, you are an idiot, it is as simple as that.

So all that remains is for me to ask you to delurkify and chip in your answers to five stupid Friday questions, and then piddle away the rest of your day bickering with people because, let’s face it, you were never really going to do any work on Friday afternoon were you?  Honestly?  Nah, of course not.

1. Chore you will avoid doing this weekend.
2. Biggest treat in store for the weekend.
3. Tune for the afternoon.
4. What should you be doing at the moment instead of fannying about on the internet?
5. Bit of really mindless entertainment you will enjoy most this weekend.

Five bands from the Retreat Festival sampler, which can be downloaded here for free:

Enfant Bastard – Twix Party

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The Wee Rogue – I Cross My Heart

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eagleowl – Eat Hats

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The Douglas Firs – Soporific

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The Leg – Switches

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This is called the Dolecast for… well, for obvious reasons.  I am on the downward slope to imminent joblessness, with my last day at Proper Job now pencilled in for the 23rd of June – the day before Glastonbury, rather handily.

Actually festivals are something of a feature this Summer, as there’s that one, Kelburn, Rockness, Fusion out in Germany, and then Knockengorroch, which I will be driving out to the very second I hit ‘post’ on this.  We’re also looking at going out to Musicfest Northwest this year as well, and of course the rather splendid Fence Away Game.

So erm, yes, maybe I should have called this the Festcast or something like that.

Toadcast #124 – The Dolecast

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01. The Wave Pictures – I Shall be a Ditchdigger (03.09)
02. Fur Hood – Tweetle Beetle Battle Beetles (12.27)
03. Fear the Fives – Devil’s Tongue (15.39)
04. Southern Tenant Folk Union – South Ythsie (20.19)
05. Benni Hemm Hemm – Retaliate (29.11)
06. The Douglas Firs – Grow Old and Go Home (33.09)
07. Magic Bullets – Lying Around (37.12)
08. Perfume Genius – Lookout, Lookout (41.25)
09. The Effort – Adjust (46.54)
10. Tusk Tusk – Crazy Little Birthmarks (55.56)

The Douglas Firs played their first ever set a month or so ago, in support of eagleowl at the latter’s EP launch.  And just in case you didn’t think that the Edinburgh alt-folk scene was so incestuous that it is probably fucking itself, never mind a close relative, what is nominally a solo project was fleshed out by notable band-whores Owen Williams and Bart Owl.  The slightly less promiscuous Steve (Jesus H. Foxx) played guitar and the definitely-not-promiscuous-at-all-cos-her-fella-will-fucking-kill-me-if-I-say-so Emma Jane (St. Jude’s Infirmary) tackled vocal duties.  I didn’t recognise the gentleman playing bass guitar, so it’s possible he’s the only chaste one amongst the lot of ‘em, although given the company he was keeping I doubt it.

Joking (and tortured analogies) aside, it’s really rather cool that, having worked away on the Douglas Firs as a solo recording project for so long, Neil was able to find so many people to offer encouragement and support for his band.  Those first steps out of the bedroom are generally so daunting that Edinburgh has a (really rather good) open mic night named after them, and although Neil is hardly a blushing debutante as far as live performance is concerned, it must still take some nuts to give a new project its first outing.

I very much enjoyed the gig, although I confess that the extra instrumentation wasn’t always as mysterious and glacial as they more enigmatic demos I had already heard, but the extra subtlety will hopefully develop as the band get a little more practise, and as main man Neil Insh (Jesus H. Foxx – slut!) spends more time on the live arrangements.

Musically, this project is a winner, frankly.  I am listening to the Haunting Through EP which I picked up on the night (acquire one here for the princely sum of 50p) and every single song is good.  There are a couple of odd Jesus H. Foxxy moments – most notably the piano on Grow Old and Go Home – but presumably Neil wouldn’t be in that band if he didn’t like the sound.  In general though it is far dreamier than anything you might already recognise, prefering a sort of drifting sonic mist to the rising rhythms of his other band.

Lovely harmonies and swells of vocals are used to cut through the clouds, which tend to be alternately smothering or meandering, but which then swirl into clarity around these vocal eddies whenever they gain enough momentum to break through.

I doubt this music will ever bother the mainstream.  It’s not really insistent enough for that, but it sounds increasingly like Neil is working on an album I am going to enjoy immensely, and I am grateful to Owen, Bart, Stevie, Emma and their mysterious bass-playing friend for helping nudge this most ephemeral of projects that little bit closer to bearing fruit.

The Douglas Firs – The Quickening

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This year’s Toad Christmas Party will be a bit sad really, despite still being a big old celebration, as it is the last night at the Bowery, my favourite underground music venue in the city.  They will be closing their doors after giving Toad Records and a great many of my friends a venue to call home for the last year, and this is a very great shame.

Nevertheless, this is not the season for sulking.  The Bowery will go on, just more as an itinerant hobo than a furtive squatter, and this is our chance to give them a hell of a send-off.  We have music in the bandstand from Toad Records band Jesus H. Foxx, hopefully soon-to-be Toad Records band Inspector Tapehead, and some chancer named Rory Sutherland, more commonly known as the scruffy one in Broken Records, who has put together a unique set of violin looping and erm, well I’m not sure what, to be honest.

On top of that there will be acoustic stuff through in the bar, where The Douglas Firs, Tisso Lake, Thomas Western and the returning prodigal son Rob St. John will be performing, as well as some celebrity DJs (more likely to be some of Ruth, Jane or my pals who we manage to blackmail into helping out).

Because it’s the last night, because it’s Christmas and because we have a lot of bands, everything will be starting earlier than usual, with mince pies and mulled wine from about five or so, and the first acoustic stuff should be starting at about six or seven, to make sure we have time to get everyone on stage.

It’s going to be fucking brilliant, and remember, as it’s the last night:

the bar must be drunk absolutely dry!

Inspector Tapehead – Humdinger

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Jesus H. Foxx – Matter

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Today I’m going to introduce you to a couple of under the radar projects which are both related to Song, by Toad Records bands.  In both cases I don’t really know what the future of the respective projects might be, because I don’t know how far either is going to be pushed, but they are both very good and I thought they needed sharing.

Firstly we have The Douglas Firs.  This is a side project of Jesus H, Foxx drummer Neil Insh, and has been bubbling under for years.  He’s been working on this album for ages, but his work hasn’t really seen the light of day outside a small circle of his friends, in part because he really isn’t all that up for performing live.

It sounds, on the face of it, like quite experimental music.  You might call it math-folk if you wanted a bodged mental shortcut for getting a picture of it.  You can hear a lot of the bursting harmonies and repetitive percussion of Jesus H. Foxx’s music, but the sounds are not really all that similar.

This has more of an atmosphere of experimental, almost ambient electronica a lot of the time, but there are surprisingly traditional Scottish folk influences in the fiddle and some of the rhythms which I wouldn’t expect from a leather-jacket-sporting drummer who batters the shite out of his drums in quite the way Neil does.

The nice thing about both the use of vocal harmonies and the more traditonal folk influences is that they are really beautifully used to bring the songs into focus.  The more experimental aspects drift and rumble along, and can become quite meandering until these details emerge, sometimes quite suddenly, to bring everything into relief.

These mp3s are just rough-cut demos, so not yet the finished article, but they give you a flavour of what’s going on here.  It’s no pop album though, and but if you have patience for your music and like to sit down and absorb it then this all looks like it could be very good indeed.  If he ever finishes the bloody thing!

The Douglas Firs – The Quickening

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The Douglas Firs – Grow Old and Go Home

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Oh, and it appears that there are a couple of other Douglas Firses on MySpace, which might complicate matters, should this ever come to fruition.