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.
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
This is one of those weeks where there could be two of you and you’d still probably not quite manage to get to all the decent gigs in the city this week. Personally I am going to try and keep it a bit calm, but I have my doubts as to whether or not I am likely to succeed. Mrs. Toad, no doubt, will be wildly impressed.
I had fun down in London last week, incidentally. As I mentioned, I did a quick interview with Tom Robinson for BBC 6Music while I was there and, in typical fashion, talked for about twenty minutes, forcing them into copious editing to get things down to the requisite couple of minutes of actual airtime. You can listen to the whole thing here if you like – it’ll be up for the next week or so I think, and my bit starts just over half an hour in.
I’ll be absolutely honest, I don’t know too much about these guys, apart from the fact that they were really quite buzzy a year or so ago, and have a new album coming out, so I am rather interested to hear what it’s all about.
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Limbo really are back with a bang in 2011. Having gone incredibly quiet last year, I wasn’t sure if we were going to see them back again, but with something like six or seven shows booked for the first couple of months of the year already it seems I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’ll be nice to see the Chunks back in action again as well.
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In association with Let’s Get Lyrical, this is a night of Dylan appreciation (and covers) starring Yusuf Azak, Esperi, The Sundancer, Shock and Awe, Norman Lamont, Hookers for Jesus, Edinburgh School for the Deaf, Issac Brutal and the Trailer Trash Express, and Tribute to Venus Carmichael.
Another Let’s Get Lyrical show, this one looks gorgeous, and I think is part of James Yorkston’s tour to promote the recent publishing of his tour diaries.
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We music fans can be an ungrateful shower at times, and Come on Gang have just about had enough of us. They are calling it a day, but going out with something of a bang – having a big old farewell bash at Pilrig St. Paul’s which is doubling as an album release show for their debut album. Sort of an epitaph, I suppose.
I think I have figured out why Fence Records hate the internet. Or at least, I feel like I am starting to get some insight into what is an intensely troubled relationship. The two of them just don’t get along at all, and the mutual antipathy has boiled over into outright hostility this afternoon, with the rush to buy Homegame tickets from the Fence website actually breaking the whole internet.
So while I wait for normal service to be resumed, and with it the opportunity to buy tickets for Homegame this year, I thought I might record a podcast. Or at least, so I thought. But it turned out the Facebook chat about the interminable (three hour) wait was too entertaining, and the paralysing fear of the site suddenly coming back online and me missing out on tickets was too much.
So I faffed about, went out and got pissed, and ended up recording this after our gig tonight, sorry.
01. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Love is Terminal (00.17)
02. Black Tambourine – Throw Aggi off the Bridge (07.34)
03. The Great Valley – Tall Smoke (11.53)
04. Hezekiah Jones – I Love My Family (Album Version) (20.47)
05. Lift to Experience – These are the Days (29.14)
06. Titus Andronicus – Fear & Loathing in Mahwah, NJ (33.09)
07. Byrds of Paradise – Touch Tunnel (42.54)
08. Eels on Heels – G (48.59)
09. Balkans – Edita V (52.40)
10. The Caulfield Sisters – I See Your Face (59.37)
I never really knew much about Edinburgh band Deserters Deserve Death, never mind seriously getting into their music. They appear to have vanished now, and in their place appear Edinburgh School for the Deaf.
Going to their MySpace or Facebook fan pages there seems to be little reason given for the change of name, whether it be simply a new direction for what is essentially the same band, or a re-jig enforced by a shuffle in personnel.
In any case, I was in Avalanche Records on the Grassmarket the other day (getting my traditional lecture from Kev about how I was doing everything wrong and destroying the nation’s independent record shops in the process) and I happened to catch a glimpse of a very nicely designed EP, just out of the corner of my eye.
I know nothing about the band, but a lot of my friends whose music taste I trust seem to have been ‘liking’ them on Facebook recently, so I thought that for three quid I should give it a go. And a good thing too, because these guys seem to have some really promising stuff.
The first thing I noticed was of course the extreeeemely fashionable growl of ultra lo-fi recording, particularly in the guitar sound. I have grown to be a bit wary of my own enthusiasm around this kind of grumbly noise, because I suspect there are times when I can be sufficiently smitten by the engineering of a record that at times I neglect to check whether or not the actual songs are any good.
In the case of Edinburgh School for the Deaf, generally, it works. Listening to the EP as a whole I might be tempted to suggest that I think they could do with a few more moments here and there where something breaks through the overall fug of the scuzzy, shoegazey sound. That’s more my way of saying that they might not be quite there yet, but they most certainly seem to be heading in the right direction, rather than a pointed criticism.
In fact, if you go to their MySpace page then you can have a wee listen to a couple of tracks – Love is Terminal and Of Scottish Blood and Symphonies – which are, in my view, at least as good as if not better than the tracks on the EP, with the former a cracking pop tune, and the latter a slow-building epic This is a very promising sign, and suggests there might well be plenty more to come from these guys.
I think that with this kind of music the biggest challenge is not to let the songs be overwhelmed by the sound. Melody isn’t always the first thing you think of growly shoegaze but, however minimal, I think a judicious use of melody is often the key to making the songs stand out from one another properly. Edinburgh School for the Deaf have certainly got the sound nailed, and if they can continue to write good songs then I reckon we could have another very promising band on our hands here.
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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.
