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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Get it – Festive Fiddy! Oh I do crack myself up sometimes, I really do.

So here endeth the Festive Fifty for this year.  As anyone who has compiled this kind of list will know, the whole process is more than a little arbitrary, and were I to start from scratch tomorrow I would probably end up somewhere notably different.

The interesting thing for me personally is to note how strongly the advantages and disadvantages of nepotism have made themselves known.

The advantages are obvious – would there be so much Withered Hand, Meursault, FOUND and all the rest so high on this list if I didn’t have a much closer personal relationship with their music than most other music?  Well I doubt it.  I am being a hundred percent sincere when I say that these are my favourite songs this year, but I do know that being as close to music as I am does change how you feel about it, so I have to acknowledge that.

On the downside, bands like Broken Records, Sparrow & the Workshop, Withered Hand and even Meursault to a degree have suffered from how early I became familiar with certain songs.  I have a demo version, a Religious Songs EP version and an album version of New Dawn, for example.  So while under normal circumstances songs like that, Devil Song by Sparrow, Eilert Loveborg by Broken Records and even Nothing Broke by Meursault would normally have figured very prominently indeed on this list, I already expressed my enthusiasm for them at least a year ago and consequently they are on other lists and I don’t really feel I can put them on this one.

And before anyone complains about Trips and Falls being another Song, by Toad Records band on this list, remember that, as with Meursault last year, it’s not that they’re on this list because they’re a Song, by Toad Records band, it’s that they’re a Song, by Toad Records band because they’re on this list.

01.Elvis Perkins In Dearland – Shampoo
There just something about the rhythm of this song which I cannot get away from.  When I first played it on my Fresh Air Radio show Dylan commented that it had a sort of cocky swagger to it, and it really, really does.  Then there’s the deep, foreboding harmonies which break in at the end.  There’s strut to the rhythm, a crack to his voice, belligerence and tragedy in the mood of it all – it’s just a fucking special, special song.

02.Meursault – William Henry Miller Pt.2 (Single Version)
When Neil first played us this apparently he though ‘Fuck, I’ve finally written a song they don’t like’.  Mrs. Toad now plays this single at least once a day in our house, and if ever there was a song to break your speakers for it’s this one.  The cello is gut-shaking, the piano is chiming and gorgeous and those vocals are just about the most heart-wrenching I’ve heard anywhere, ever.  So if he wants to write a song we don’t like he may have to try a little harder.

03.Navigator – Work is Done
This sensitive, emotional song interrupts an album which is basically an onslaught of overloaded mics and distortion and when this suddenly appears it hits you right between the eyes, largely because you’re so unprepared.  It doesn’t depend on its surroundings though, because even in isolation this is every bit as heartbreaking a song.

04.Trips and Falls – And In Real Life He Wears Corduroy Pants
This was one of those moments where the very first second you listen to something you know for certain that you are hearing something a bit special.  This is a genius combination of massively infectious pop song and really peculiar atmosphere.  There’s something just plain creepy about this album, even the sugar-sweet Prelude to a Shark Attack, but this song perhaps embodies that better than any.  And it really is one to be played loud as well.

05.FOUND – Mullokian (Toad Session)
I remember sitting there while they were recording this and thinking ‘What the fucking hell is going on here, this is amaaaazing!’  The gently rolling guitar refrain, the simple heartfelt chorus (if you can call it that) and Tommy’s phenomenal backing vocals – there’s just so little actually there, and even that is used with such economy.  Brilliant.

06.Withered Hand – No Cigarettes
The first time I heard this I remember a grin slowly spreading over my face.  Dan’s songs can often be about little in particular other than a weird sense of something really not being right, and this seems to be one of those – describing a general sense of malaise with such simple music and a deft turn of phrase, you can’t help but let this get to you.

07.Auld Lang Syne – Where My Fortune Lies
This is as rousing and uplifting as any church music could ever be, and has even more impact for shrinking back into such quiet in the middle.  Some fucking voice as well.

08.The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
The album may have disappointed, but this is stunning.  It’s that voice, the slow piano, the… just the sheer sadness of it all.  It sounds like the demoralisation of someone coming out the other end of a midlife crisis and surveying the wreckage of their lives, although it may not be about that exactly, it does feel that way to me I have to confess.

09.Navigator – Blood
This embodies Navigator’s brilliant album Bad Children, for me.  It’s a song which is full of pain, but is angry and belligerent with it.  There’s an underlying aggression to it which really batters out at you from within the noise, and prevents the song, or indeed the album, sounding at all self-pitying or maudlin.  He’s hurting and he’s fucking angry, and the resulting music is absolutely superb.

10.Alela Diane – Age Old Blue
Age Old Blue may be from another album I wasn’t that keen on overall, but this duet with friend Michael Hurley is beautiful.  I remember seeing them perform it for the first time after her performance at the Bongo Club a couple of years ago and having no real expectations when they took the stage, only to have my jaw drop at the combination of his nasal, grizzled accompaniment to her gorgeous voice.

To download all these songs as a single  zip file, click here.

1-10 / 11-20 / 21-35 / 36-50

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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Apart from being brilliant from a musical perspective, Homegame was brilliant for a great many other reasons.  One of which was seeing semi-official Toad photographer Dylan walking around glowing like a well-spanked arse throughout Sunday.

How did this happen?  Well, sleeping spots were at something of a premium over the weekend, and Mrs. Toad and I hosted well over a dozen people, spread between two tiny and massively over-populated cottages in the town of Pittenweem.  This was all very well, except that on Saturday night, after a prolonged and somewhat industrial drinking session, we acquired a couple of hangers-on.  Dylan, having departed to spend the evening with a couple of other friends of ours, returned to the cottage he was supposed to be staying in to find the floor entirely covered in bodies.   Seeing as how he’s actually far more sensitive and nice than you would think, given he reads this pish every day, he didn’t just hoof out the interloper or decide to sleep on top of him, no he spent the night wandering the streets of the East Neuk and eventually fell asleep on the beach in Anstruther.

This would have been fine, of course, apart from the fact that it was gloriously, joyously sunny on Sunday.  So much so that a certain gentleman of leeky persuasion spent the entire day with a face as red as our little simian friend in the picture.  And there was much tittering.  There’s nothing quite so funny as the misfortune of your friends, is there, for some reason.  Maybe it’s just gratitude that it was them, not you, who was made to suffer.

I bumped into ex-lurker Dan at Sneaky Pete’s on Wednesday at the Casiotone gig, which was really nice, so do feel free to follow his example and emerge from the woodwork.  You don’t have to make any sense or be all that witty or anything, you just have to fill in your five and then natter about total horse manure with the rest of us.  And come to Yusuf Azak and Enfant Bastard at Sneaky Pete’s tonight, because it will be brilliant.

1. Beetroot – pickled, roasted, not at all..?
2. Worst sunburn you’ve had.
3. Ever fallen asleep somewhere inappropriate.
4. What is your activity of choice at the beach.
5. Ever cooked a lobster alive?

The Avett Brothers – At the Beach

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Eilen Jewell – Too Hot to Sleep

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The Shaky Hands – Sunburns

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Elvis Perkins – While You Were Sleeping

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Maximillian Hecker – Sunburnt Days

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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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Well here we go.  The new year is yet to quite take hold or take off, but I promise you that things will kick back into gear this weekend.  There are some fine love shows appearing on the calendar, slowly but surely, and eventually 2009 will get going.  No rush though.

This Toadcast is a bit of a mix.  I’ve got some of this year’s favourites, I look back at some of last year’s favourites, and I also poke away at a couple of the bands I hope will make their mark in 2009.

In that sense, examining last year’s favourites makes a lot of sense.  I’m always curious about how well our fads and fancies bear up to the passage of time.  I’ve not been too fickle in recent years, which is sort of nice, so I don’t mind looking back like this.  There aren’t too many embarrassments to be had, so it’s kind of nice to take the chance to look backwards, look forwards a little and generally just take the opportunity to pause for breath and enjoy the new year.  As should you, toadlings, as should you.  Happy new year, folks.

Toadcast #52 – Let’s Go

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01. Bombadil – Cavaliers’ Har Hum (02.24)
02. Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta – The Ragged Garden of Your Eye (08.57)
03. Aidan John Moffat – The Boy That You Love (12.19)
04. Mitchell Museum – Extra Lives (18.11)
05. The Savings & Loan – The Virgin’s Lullaby (24.36)
06. The Builders & the Butchers – When it Rains (28.06)
07. Elvis Perkins – It’s Only Me (34.30)
08. Mother & the Addicts – Are Others (38.21)
09. The Pictish Trail – Winter Home Disco (46.27)
10. The Low Lows – Dear Flys, Love Spider (54.49)

Yes, it’s that time of the week once more. I am off to do my slot on Fresh Air, the Edinburgh student radio station, who have kindly granted me a slot to blether on about all things musical which exercise my mind. I’ll then swing by the pub on my way home to catch the tail end of their meeting and say hello to everyone, before going back to the house to do some desperately needed cleaning.

Neil from Meursault was round the other night to get all the artwork sorted for the official release of the Meursault record (which will be at the Toad Christmas Party, with any luck) and it honestly looked like the worst student flat you’ve ever been in. Mrs. Toad was tense for about three seconds before looking around and deciding that the situation was hopeless. We need a cleaning lady. Not just for the cleaning, but because it will force us to keep the place in some semblance of sensible order for the week.

What has that to do with radio? Well nothing at all really, just rambling. So yes, go to freshair.org.uk and click on the big ‘listen live’ button on the left hand side to hear what your friendly neighbourhood gin-based life-form sounds like in the absence of the three-quarters of his vocabulary which has been deemed unfit for public consumption. It’ll be fun – I have some great new stuff to play this week which has yet to feature on the site so there’s plenty in it for you. And here are a couple of songs to whet your appetite:

Elvis Perkins – All the Night Without Love
Thos Henley – The Wife

1. Grinderman – Grinderman

Oh yes indeed! While other artists fall away in their old age and run out of ideas, Nick Cave just gets worse, which generally means better. This is a snarling, strutting, menacing, virile beast of an album and perhaps the only hotly anticipated major record all year to deliver the goods like a sack of spanners. Guitarist Martyn Casey describes it thus: “It wasn’t consciously two fingers to maturity but I remember thinking, all the way through, “This isn’t bad for a bunch of old farts.”" No, Martin, it isn’t bad at all.

Grinderman – No Pussy Blues

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2. The Builders & the Butchers – The Builders & the Butchers

Ragged, ramshackle, raucous and fucking brilliant. Imagine shaking every last skeleton out of your closet and them all coming to life, burning down your house and dancing round the inferno, guzzling bourbon. I want to move to Portland.

The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake

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3. The Twilight Sad – Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

Imagine every stereotype of indie miserablism you can muster and this album is it: brooding, ambitious and intense. There’s no hedging their bets with face-saving archness either, just a collection of brutally emotional songs delivered with the kind of relentless wall of guitar noise that threatens to shake your house to pieces as you get drunker and drunker and turn it up louder and louder.

The Twilight Sad – Walking For Two Hours

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4. Mother & the Addicts – Science Fiction Illustrated

An amazing, hugely infectious record that manages to stuff funk, disco, new romanticism and a bit of glam into a brilliantly fuzzy indie album. A professional reviewer (I can’t remember who, sorry, or I’d give credit) said that this album could have been released in 1986, 1992 or 2003 and it wouldn’t have sounded out of place. This sums it up far better than I can. A total joy.

Mother & the Addicts – So Tough

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5. Elvis Perkins – Ash Wednesday

For someone who loves downbeat emotional music as much as me I can’t believe this is the highest placed album of acoustic loveliness on the list. Perkins manages to wield wistful, heartbroken melancholy in that wonderfully intimate way that makes even the most depressing of tales sound bravely hopeful. It’s possibly the least depressing album of unhappy music I’ve heard in a long time. Catch him live too, if you can, he’s superb.

Elvis Perkins – It’s Only Me

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It’s all gone a bit American this week, Toadlings. I have no intention of putting out a series of strictly themed podcasts, but it’s still early days and there are so many massive chunks of my music collection I want to poke about in that this may happen a couple of times before things settle down. So I started with a couple of vaguely American-sounding tracks this week and before you know it I ended up with a podcast with a definite Americana theme.

I’m quite happy with how it’s all turned out though, I must confess – a nice combination of classics and small, small bands, so the playlist is working quite well by itself. And actually handling the microphone is getting easier as well. I am quite liking this podcasting business, I’d say!

Toadcast #3 – With added Americana

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1. The Band – The Weight (02.16)
2. Hem – Half Acre (09.18)
3. Elvis Perkins – While You Were Sleeping (12.38)
4. Cherry Ghost – Mathematics (20.27)
5. The Holy Modal Rounders – Hey Hey Baby (25.30)
6. Night Jar – Sweet Annie Lee (28.30)
7. Caramel Jack – Lincoln Jackson Incident (33.45)
8. The Builders & the Butchers – Spanish Death Song (39.27)
9. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Ballad of a Thin Man (49.51)
10. Rick Redbeard – Blood (54.06)
11. Billie Holiday – Georgia on My Mind (59.26)
12. Night Jar – Big Black Horse (64.05)
13. Broken Records – Lies (71.45)
14. DeVotchka – The Enemy Guns (77.57)

Can you imagine Song, by Toad not being a smart arse? No, me neither. Elvis Perkins – not an arch comedy name even – was born in ’75, the same year as myself and my midget lady companion. His father, Anthony Perkins, played the lead in Hitchcock’s legendary Psycho and died of AIDS in ’92. His mother, a professional photographer, was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Centre on 11th September 2001. Can you think of anything clever to say about that, because I certainly bloody can’t.  Fucking awful.

To his credit, Mr. Perkins has emerged to make a really quite excellent album of folk-pop melancholy. Liberally enhanced with piano sometimes with violin and only occasionally with brass, this is a touching and beautifully written journey of an album. It seems to wander along a private path, exploratory and introverted, but rarely losing its pop sensibilities. For all the emotional stories he tells, Mr. Perkins has a knack for a cheerfully memorable tune that turns Ash Wednesday into a wonderful push-and-pull between cheerful folk-pop and solo confessional. Not all of the songs are brilliant, but there is an awful lot on this album that many have tried to do before and never done it half as well as he does.

It’s not consistent, but it’s often brilliant. The best songs on this are as good as I’ve heard for a long while, and he deserves to be watched, for Monsieur Perkins obviously has talent in spades. Good lad.

Elvis Perkins – While You Were Sleeping
Elvis Perkins – Emile’s Vietnam in the Sky

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