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

I always get twitchy talking about kinds of music which I don’t really know well enough to say anything about with real confidence, well this is another of those occasions.

This kind of crunchy, math-y, thumping drums over harsh electronica stuff is generally just slightly out of my reach for some reason.  I tend to want to like it, and there are often large elements of it I do like, but in terms of actually enjoying whole songs and whole EPs or albums, it just never quite happens.

People who know more about this genre than I can tell you if Eels on Heels are producing a particularly mellifluous, mainstream version of this kind of music, but I really don’t think they are.  In fact a lot of this seems harsh as hell to me, but for some reason I fucking love it.

Opening track G really does fucking batter you when it really gets going, which is only sporadically, lending the furious passages all the more impact.  Following track, N, see video below, seems to concentrate on pace, rather than alternating waves of force and lull, and the final song Y (the EP is called letters – buy it from their MySpace page) trills electronics along with flattened vocals, bursting occasionally into a ferocious battering of drums and guitar.

This isn’t exactly melodic, and like much of this music, it bears no real structural resemblance to most music I am into or would understand as pop, but for some reason I find it really exciting, and love this whole EP.  People have been doing this kind of thing in my back yard for the last few years, and it’s a little ridiculous that it has taken a group from Italy for me to really get it, but there you go.  I never said this stuff makes sense.

Eels on Heels – G

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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.

Direct download: Toadcast #158 – The Refreshcast

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)