Okay, so today we start our lists.  I have made my own list of my top twenty albums of the year, but in all honesty I am still struggling to pare down my Festive Fifty to, er, fifty.  At the moment it’s more like a Festive three hundred and seventy six, which won’t do at all.  It is, as my father (and W.C. Fields) used to say, no use to man nor beast.

This is your chance, however, to put your five favourite songs of the year into the comments, and we’ll see who the readers of Song, by Toad have been loving the most over the course of the year.

And for those of you preparing for the Weekend of Alcoholic Annihilation next week, you might be interested to hear about something just a little bit classier happening tomorrow night, to which my pal Pete Harvey has asked me to give a quick plug.  And he’s a nice chap, so why not.  Besides I still nurture an intellectual inferiority complex about classical music which presumably stems from my traumatic childhood.

Saturday 11th December 2010, 7.30pm at the Canongate Kirk – Macmillan: Seven Last Words from the Cross & Byrd: Motets.

The Rose Street Ensemble with the Calton Consort – Conductor: Jason Orringe.
The Facebook event is here if you would like to investigate further, and a nice handy Google Maps link here.  And no, I doubt it’s that Jason Orange.  And no, of course he’s never heard that joke before.

So, we are all doing our five favourite songs of the year vote this week.  Last year I was quite bad about adding it up, but this year I promise to keep a running total (at least, of everything with more than one vote, anyway).  I can’t add mine because obviously I don’t want to jump the gun on my own Festive Fifty, but I thought I might revisit my top five songs from last year, and then sit back and do my sums while you let me know what has been exciting you the most in 2010.

Looking back at my top five from last year, I do notice a couple of Song, by Toad Records bands in there, and that is one thing which will be different this year: I am banning Song, by Toad Records bands from any of my lists.  It was fair enough to include them when we hadn’t released that much, but we’ve had a very busy year and so there would be a definite danger of the label swamping the list this year, and besides, I could hardly put one of our bands’ debut albums in the top five while another barely scraped the top ten, now could it?

So just take it as read that I love our bands the most and that if it weren’t for this ban, everyone else would be scrapping over tenth place at best.  So anyway, ladies and gentlemen, nerds and nerdettes, your votes please…

Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo

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Meursault – William Henry Miller Pt.2 (Single Version) (Buy on clear vinyl 7″ here)

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Navigator – Work is Done

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Trips and Falls – And In Real Life He Wears Corduroy Pants (Buy here)

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FOUND – Mullokian (Toad Session)

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It’s not going to surprise anyone at all that I am being an absolute slob today, is it?  Mrs. Toad got back from Australia around lunchtime, and after a few hours of pottering about she crashed out with jetlag, so I snuck off to record the podcast.  I am sure that soon enough she will wake and start demanding attention and general servitude soon enough, so I better get this over with quickly.

After that I am going straight back to bed to watch stupid films while my sweetheart dozes by my side, awaking occasionally to tell me off for not being comfortable enough, or to send me to fetch her things, or to just swear at me for taking all the covers or some other such sweet nothings of the kind she is wont to come out with from time to time.

Direct download: Toadcast #148 – The Slobcast

01. Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo (00.21)
02. Elvis Costello – Couldn’t Call it Unexpected No.4 (06.24)
03. Billie Holiday – Good Morning Heartache (13.17)
04. Smog – In the Pines (16.22)
05. My Tiny Robots – Ballad of the Mapmaker’s Daughter (23.17)
06. Randolph’s Leap – Going Home (32.19)
07. The Japanese War Effort – Face Like a Lemon (Ivor Cutler cover, live on Fresh Air Radio) (36.50)
08. Grass House – Lazy Bones (43.01)
09. Bob Dylan – I’ll Keep it With Mine (49.23)
10. Bettye Swann – Don’t Look Back (54.47)

I managed to miss last week’s Fresh Air show because… well I somehow failed to realise that the bloody station was back on the air, which is spectacularly dumb. This week I present Toad and Ruth’s Toad and Ruth Show With Toad and a Little Bit Less Ruth Than Usual, or indeed any Ruth at all because the lovely herself can’t make it tonight, so you will be treated to the wonderful pleasure of listening to me burble on to myself about tunes and stuff and stuff and some tunes and then probably some more stuff just to cap it off.

Live on Air 8.30pm-10pm – Listen live here.

01. Langhorne Slim – I Love You, But Goodbye
02. Saint Etienne – Nothing Can Stop Us Now
03. The Left Banke – Evening Gown
04. Bettye Swann – Don’t Look Back
05. Lee Dorsey – My Old Car
06. The Scottish Enlightenment – All Homemade Things
07. Super Adventure Club – Hip Hop Hot Pot Pot Noodle
08. Sam Amidon – Fiddle Mayhem (Toad Session)
09. The Shaggs – What Are Parents
10. Nico Muhly – The Only Tune
11. Phil & the Osophers – Uses of a Man
12. David Tattersall – The Old Family
13. Grandaddy – Fuck the Valley Fudge
14. Elvis Perkins in Dearland – I Heard Your Voice in Dresden
15. Songdog – Obediah’s Waltz

Next week we have the splendid Loch Lomond live in session, and to tide you over until then the videos from Mammoeth’s session on the show are below the jump.  The tracklisting for tonight’s show will appear below live as we go along, and feel free to heckle in the comments.

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Tomorr… yesterday I flew out to Paris to see Mrs. Toad, who has been stuck in God Bless America for the last two weeks because of Iceland’s seismic indiscipline.  We are going to have dinner and walk together and hold hands and generally act like a couple of idiots.  More or less like we always do.  For a couple of curmudgeonly old fuckers who spend their entire lives swearing at one another, we are a pretty sentimental pair, really.

This podcast is mostly based around my Dad and his music.  For my early years I was well into my Mum’s stuff, but as I got older I got more into my Dad’s kind of stuff – Tom Waits, Dylan, Neil Young and all that.  When I really, really got into music it was never into contemporary, modern or trendy stuff, it was always the old shite my parents were into.

I repay them the favour nowadays, or at least, I try to, but I never really picked up on music from my peers, it was always from my folks.  Hence this podcast.

Toadcast #119 – The Popcast

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01. Bruce Springsteen – Thunder Road (05.16)
02. The Band – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (13.27)
03. Willie Nelson – Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys (16.53)
04. Kate & Anna McGarrigle – Walking Song (24.12)
05. Tom Waits & Thelonious Monster – Adios Lounge (32.54)
06. Elton John – Ballad of a Well Known Gun (41.21)
07. Bob Dylan – Days of 49 (46.07)
08. Elvis Perkins in Dearland – I Heard Your Voice in Dresden (53.49)
09. The Builders & the Butchers – Barcelona (57.51)
10. Jackson Browne – Fountain of Sorrow (66.15)

6.Elvis Perkins in Dearland
This album is greatly helped by kicking off with the best song I’ve heard for bloody ages, and actually that threw me off for a little, as did the subtle shift in emphasis since his brilliant debut Ash Wednesday.  Once songs like Hours Last Stand and Dresden settle into your head though you won’t hear an album with more intricately interwoven senses of both sadness and optimism for quite some time.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Hours Last Stand

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7.Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
I am perpetually surprised by just how much I like so many songs on this record.  I keep thinking of Wild Beasts as a band I alternately love and then really don’t like at all, but you’ll wait to the last couple of songs of this to find a track I’m even lukewarm on.  It’s all chiming guitars and yearning vocals and there’s just enough purpose to the rhythm to suggest that you could be dancing to it, and just enough woe to make you think, well, maybe not.

Wild Beasts – We Still Got the Taste Dancing on Our Tongues

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8.King Creosote – Flick the Vs
There is a sense in which Kenny Anderson can pretty  much write what he likes, because he wields one of my favourite singing voices of all time.  After the bombast of Bombshell and the sidestep of They Flock Like Vulcans, he seems to have combined a little pop from the former and a fair bit of bleeping from the latter and mixed them together to deliver another classic King Creosote record.  It has a really distinctive character, coupling his touching songwriting with just the right amount of weirdness.

King Creosote – No-one Had it Better

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9.Dame Satan – Beaches & Bridges
This is a bit of an out of the blue sort of placing really, given how little I know about the band and given that they are hardly well-known in general, but as I tired of other records or failed to find the excitement in them that some of my peers managed, this one simply sat there pretty much near the top of the pile and remained confidently there for the duration of the year.  It doesn’t slap you across the face with brilliance in the way that some do, just builds a steady, consistent relationship with your need for succour as the day ends.

Dame Satan – Ghost Dance

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10.Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion
I still find this an infuriatingly inconsistent album.  There are at least three songs in the second half I really find completely needless, but a combination of how much I love the rest of them and the sheer ubiquity of this album still make this one of my favourite this year.  For a change, people playing it all over the place hasn’t put me off, because those places were places like The Bowery and friends’ houses and stuff like that, so somehow it’s ended up being a good thing for a change.

Animal Collective – Also Frightened

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Finally, finally, an album to which I was hugely looking forward manages to actually cut the fucking mustard this year.  He’s managed to change gears from Ash Wednesday without making anything that you would really describe as a dramatic break from his existing sound.  It sounds, I suppose, like a slightly weird take on a New Orleans funeral band.

When we played Shampoo on Fresh Air Radio, Dylan, who was co-presenting at the time, mentioned that there is something about the beat of this album which gives it an air of swagger.  He’s right.  Even the quicker rhythms seem to be underpinned by something a little more laid back, and you can almost imagine Perkins himself sauntering casually along at the heart of the aforementioned funeral procession whilst the rest of the band cavorted gaily around him.

It’s not, of course, a jolly record, so don’t let me give you that impression.  It’s just that whereas his last album found the sadder moments all-enveloping, here they appear to be something to be faced head on, given a twirl around the dancefloor, and then sent firmly home at bedtime before they get too giddy.  Hours Last Stand is gorgeous like that, as is Hey.  But it’s the whole record, really, so there’s no point picking on individual songs.  It’s hard not to, though.  Shampoo and Doomsday make me want to laugh out loud, their mood is that infectious.

I don’t know how some people manage to change without alienating their audience behind, whilst others seem to just head off into the distance leaving the rest of us behind to wonder what they’re up to. Maybe it’s just a personal thing, but this is as good a sophomore record as I have heard in a long time.  The second album is supposed to be difficult but, honestly, it seems like Elvis Perkins in Dearland was the most effortless waltz in the world.

Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo

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Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Hours Last Stand

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

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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