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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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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 Here we are at the penultimate podcast of the year, and the one immediately preceding Christmas.  I really don’t like 99% of Christmas music so there’s pretty close to none of it at all on here, although I have made a couple of exceptions as a lazy sort of nod to the season.  Let’s face it, if the druids can be arsed dancing about like idiots around Stonehenge and people can fall out over half-defrosted turkeys then I can probably make the effort to shove a couple of token musical nods onto a single podcast, can’t I.

I actually take a lot of this podcast from my recently-published albums of the year list, and from my as-yet-unpublished Festive Fifty, so it’s a bit of a yearly roundup as well.

And in fact, seeing as Christmas is a Sunday, I won’t actually be posting until Boxing Day now, so this will be the last post before Christmas so umm, in the off-chance I don’t bump into you on Facebook, Twitter or down the pub, I better wish you Happy Christmas now, hadn’t I.

Direct download: Toadcast #206 – The Scroogecast

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01. Tom Lehrer – A Christmas Carol (00.23)
02. The Black Tambourines – Bad Days (05.09)
03. The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 (10.42)
04. Timber Timbre – Woman (13.31)
05. Sons of Joy – Pig (20.25)
06. The Japanese War Effort – Our Land Could be Your Life (24.51)
07. Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand (31.37)
08. Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams (35.39)
09. Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon (41.37)
10. The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name (47.46)
11. Sons of Joy – In the Bleak Midwinter (58.07)
12. Sons of Joy – Coventry Carol (60.00)

 Right, all the amateurs have had a go, and we’ve seen disturbing amounts of Bon Iver and PJ Harvey on lists from Bradford to Boston this year, but it’s time for those of us who really know what’s good and what isn’t to step up and set the record straight.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the definitive list of what’s been good this year, so you can all stop pretending to care what Drowned in Sound or Pitchfork think, and find out what you should really be thinking about music.

That’s all bollocks of course, and I am not stupid enough to believe that my list is any better than anyone else’s (apart from not having PJ Harvey, Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes on it of course), this is just a list of what I have been enjoying the most in 2011.  As I’ve been listening to a lot of DIY garagey stuff, I’ve actually listened to an awful lot of EPs and mini-albums and stuff like that, so I’ve been pretty loose with my definition of what an album actually is, so you might well think a couple of these picks are cheating a little bit.

 20: Horsecollar – You’ve a Big Heart, Sweet Tiger For a DIY pop album recorded on what appears to be the tiniest of budgets, this record more than makes up for its technical shortcomings by having charm, wit and pathos all engagingly interwoven to produce an album which is both hummable and incredibly likeable.

Horsecollar – Courtland Street

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  19. John Knox Sex Club – Raise Ravens I actually think this record is slightly uneven, which may enrage a few people I know who think it is entirely brilliant.  When these guys hit the heights, though, they are absolutely spellbinding, both on record and live.

John Knox Sex Club – Katie Cruel

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  18. The Quiet Americans – Medicine Alright, alright I know that I suppose I should strictly call this an EP, but I told you I was going to be a bit loose with that particular definition on this list.  I bought this on tape a month or two ago and it has hardly been out of the van stereo ever since: simply awesome pop tunes, and that’s why it’s on this list.

The Quiet Americans – Be Alone

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  17. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – New Youth Bible These guys have rather inevitably gone a little quiet since they lost a guitarist to the charms of London earlier in the year.  Nevertheless, before he left, they fortunately found time to crank out this ambitious, epic bit of grumbly shoegaze.

Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Love is Terminal

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  16. Dirty Beaches – Badlands This is perhaps the pinnacle of my fad for unlistenably muddy recordings, which has rather dominated my listening this year.  It’s murky as fuck, but there’s something enthrallingly obtuse about it at the same time which, even months later, I still can’t put my finger on exactly.

Dirty Beaches – Sweet 17

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  15. Powerdove – Be Mine This is an incredibly beautiful record of wonderfully constructed music.  A combination of the skeletally minimal arrangements and the whispered, barely audible vocals just draws you in, to the point you’re almost staring at the stereo.  Also, unlike a couple of other albums which employed this approach this year, it is short enough and varied enough to be constantly engaging from start to finish.

Powerdove – Impact

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  14. Former Bullies – Golden Chains Former Bullies have been around for a good few years now, and I am admittedly rather late to the party.  They are part of a Manchester scene which I have really, really enjoyed exploring this year, and this album couldn’t have been better timed.  It’s as lo-fi as a lot of their contemporaries, but less garagey or loud, opting more for a laid back pop vibe instead.

Former Bullies – Golden Chains

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  13. Earth Girl Helen Brown – Story of an Earth Girl The first song I heard from this release dazzled and thrilled me in equal measure.  Following up on how the record came about introduced me to Sonny and the Sunsets, to The Sandwitches, to the 100 Records project, to Endless Nest and Empty Cellar, and was as such probably the single most effective mp3 emailed to me by a PR person since I started the blog.  And as for the album/mini album/EP/whatever itself, well it really is just fucking brilliant.

Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit

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  12. FOUND – Factorycraft It’s hard to tell what I actually think of this album.  I’d already danced like a fool to most of these songs so many times by the time the album came out, that it felt entirely familiar pretty much from the word go. But we had friends visit recently, and played them this, and it was the act of playing it to people entirely unfamiliar with the band that I remember exactly how good this record is. It is straightforward indie, by FOUND’s standards, but by anyone else’s it’s a really fascinating pop record, full of surprises and weird bits, but still, crucially, hooks as well.

FOUND – I’ll Wake With a Seismic Head No More

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  11. Sonny & the Sunsets – Hit After Hit This is one of those titles which almost entirely sums up the record itself: one pop gem after another.  I described it in my review, if I remember, as ‘Hill Valley 1955 doesn’t give a fuck’ because it is an odd combination of soda pop funtimes and a weird, slacker undertone which is maddeningly hard to pin down. Neverless, with tunes like this it can be what it bloody well wants, because this album is excellent.

Sonny & the Sunsets – Heart of Sadness

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Sonny Smith, of Sonny & the Sunsets fame (or by now, in our house anyway, I should probably say ‘of Sonny & the Sunsets legend’), has gone from my not even being aware of his existence in 2010 to suddenly becoming something of a musical icon, and we’re only half way through 2011.

I first heard about the 100 Records project when I was contacted about the absolutely brilliant Earth Girl Helen Brown EP (the 500 copies of which they seem to have torn through at a pretty brisk pace), and through that I found Sonny Smith, whose project it was.

Then, when recording the Fat Possum podcast I realised that as well as being one of the most energetic and restlessly creative artists out there, he also happened to be signed to one of the finest independent record labels on the planet.  Some bastards are just born cool as fuck I guess.

Sonny & the Sunsets sound a little bit like the soundtrack to Dirty Dancing just couldn’t be arsed, going through the motions with a fag* hanging out the side of its mouth and one eye on the clock.  When this works well you get a wonderfully arch take on an old-fashioned style – music played with a slow, confident swagger and the suggestion that if you ever want to stop being Daddy’s little angel and get nasty round the back of the bike sheds then that would be just fine.

Funnily enough, though, the first track on this record really doesn’t do it for me, after all the excited anticipation.  It takes the above ingredients and just ends up sounding a little lifeless.  This happens on a couple of others – Girls Beware doesn’t quite do it for me either – but these are isolated hiccups, and the rest of the album is just fucking great.

Sonny and the Sunsets – Home and Exile

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Sonny and the Sunsets – Heart of Sadness

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*Dear Americans, I know how funny you will think this turn of phrase is, but you can fuck off. It’s our language.

No, no, don’t worry this isn’t some sort of chillout special (although we did actually do one of those once upon a time).  The only reason this is called the Chillcast is because on what was a beautifully sunny day for the rest of Scotland, Edinburgh performed its age old trick of drawing a freezing sea mist off the North Sea – the haar, as it’s called – and turning a lovely Spring day into a damp, chilly sulk.  Bastard.

I realised a while back that I don’t actually cover all that much Scottish music, despite the location of this blog being quite a prominent feature of the thing. This week, though, we have something like five Scottish (or Scottish-based) bands on this, and all of them relatively under the radar ones as well.

Anyhow, I am off to play nicely with Mrs. Toad’s colleagues for the rest of the day, in some sort of horrific bonding exercise.  Ah well, it pays the bills I suppose, and it’s not like she doesn’t have to spend an awful lot of time hanging out with my ‘colleagues’.

Direct download: Toadcast #171 – The Chillcast

01. The Sandwitches – Summer of Love (00.11)
02. The Japanese War Effort – Pool Attendant (7.41)
03. King Post Kitsch – Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone (10.42)
04. PAWS – Summer Wipeout (16.22)
05. Marcy Playground – Wave Motion Gun (25.05)
06. The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 (33.40)
07. Horsecollar – Christopher (39.12)
08. Morris Major – In Amongst My Ideas (47.11)
09. Plastic Animals – It Fell Apart (Demo) (50.34)
10. Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams (59.06)

Yes indeed, I am back on Fresh Air tonight, once again sans Ruth, but she will be back next week apparently, which is good news.

For today, however, you are stuck with me sitting in a room by myself blethering away about nothing at all, which is pretty much par for the course, but I promise that as of next week that blethering will be interspersed with liberal helpings of Ruth telling me that my music taste is fucking shit.  We’re a cute little double act like that.

Live on air from 8pm UK time – listen live here.

As per usual I will be updating the playlist live below as we go along, so feel free to chip in in the comments and let me know how incredible (no really, incredible, no matter what you think) the playlist and chat just happen to be this week.  Anyone mentions the word shit and they’re getting punched.  Through the internet.  Punched through the internet.  Oh dear.

01. Li’l Daggers – King Corpze
02. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide
03. Josh T. Pearson – Sorry for the Song
04. Bob Dylan – Girl From the North Country (Witmark Demos)
05. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – 11 Kinds of Loneliness
06. Ringo Deathstarr – Imagine Hearts
07. Earth Girl Helen Brown – I Wanna Do It
08. Rob St. John – Phantom Limb
09. Warm Ghost – Claws Overhead
10.  The Great Valley – Tall Smoke
11.  Eels on Heels – G
12. Range Rover – Mind
13. Taxrat – Burn Down Slow
14. Tom Waits – All the World is Green

Well it’s rare indeed these days that something lands in my inbox and I wet my knickers with excitement and post it pretty much immediately. But um… yes, it’s nice to feel that ‘oooh my goodness, what is this?’ feeling again.

It’s not often I copy and paste a press release – I hope you know this by now – but once you’ve read this one you’ll understand why:

“Helen Brown was born in Vancouver, Canada, but raised in an Athens, Georgia-based religious cult, and was blinded in one eye from a childhood baseball injury. As an adult, she dropped out of Evergreen and traveled the country for a while as a nomadic psychedelic folksinger, before forming her first band One Eyed Tramps.

For years, she lived alone in a mountaintop in southern Alaska, where she befriended a Cherokee Shaman (later revealed as a fake) who encouraged her to pursue a frustrating academic career. Rampant drug use, frequent fainting on stage, and occasional self-inflicted knife wounds on stage led to more interest in her stage antics than her music.

However, a few sides did emerge in the late ’90s (recording dates unknown), which feature a unique mix of country, girl group, R&B, and ghoulishness. Crude and amateurish at best, these recordings are appreciated for their sincerity and intensity of feeling.”

If you’re anything like me you’ll be trying to digest that barrage of unlikely information and figure out exactly how all that stuff (at once) can meaningfully influence your understanding of the music.  I honestly don’t think it can, really.  The story is just too odd to really parse effectively, although the lyrics to songs like Story of an Earth Girl do embrace a rather *cough* peculiar aesthetic which perhaps seems a little less odd when this background is taken into account.

Musically, what we have here is a varied, wonderfully lo-fi mish-mash of old fashioned girl-group, soul and R&B.  It’s the slightly warped edge that moves genres not normally within my (admittedly rather narrow) taste range to a position where this music clicked with me immediately.

This may, from the looks of the press release, have been recorded in the late nineties, but the lo-fi guitar in songs like Girls of My Dreams is not a million miles away from a lot of the lo-fi guitar production in an awful lot of music these days, so I guess the leap wasn’t an enormous one for me to make.  It’s not just that, though.  The indistinct vocals, vinyl crackle and uncertain, wobbly peaks in the vocal on the gorgeous Hit After Hit just grabbed me immediately.

The whole EP may not, admittedly, be quite as good as that song, but the aforementioned Girls of My Dreams, Story of an Earth Girl and I Walked All Night are just fucking great.  What a truly splendid find.

Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit

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Pre-order from Forest Family Records (Americans only – GRRR!)
Apparently this will be available on Rough Trade over here at some point.

[Update from the Toad-is-an-Arse department: Campfires and Battlefields has pointed out in a comment something I really should have found myself before posting this, but I was in a rush and, well, there you go.  Anyhow, apparently Earth Girl Helen Brown is part of a project called 100 Records, where Sonny Smith (of Sunny & the Sunsets) set himself the task of inventing a hundred new bands, complete with profile and songs, and commissioning artists to create individual cover art for each. What a ridiculous, awesome project!]