Frankly, I’ve no fucking idea what Friday is this week.  Between our Electric Circus gigs (yes, good guess, the second of which is indeed tonight, and look, only a fiver in – what value!) keeping up with the blog and the minor matter of actually trying to run a record label I don’t know whether I’m bloody coming or going at the moment.

One of things I like about putting on gigs at the Electric Circus is that I get to DJ inbetween and after the bands.  It’s much like writing a blog, releasing records or putting on gigs – effectively you’re trying to insist to everyone how awesome all the music you like is.  I don’t know if the actual audience enjoys it as much as I do, but umm… well, they were very patient with me at the gig on Wednesday anyway.

I am also just about managing to preserve a sliver of Festival bonhomie, despite the associated bollocks, but it is hanging on by the skin of its teeth.  There is fun, to be sure, but the whole thing is such a carnival of over-priced commercialism I can’t help but wonder if it might start to suffer from the malaise afflicting many of the big music festivals this year.  The Fringe has become such a juggernaut that people felt obliged to start the Free Fringe, just so the Fringe would itself have some sort of Fringe – sort of a festival ouroboros in a sense.

Ah well, balls to that.  Get thee down to the Circus tonight and we’ll have drinks and party like it was early June.

1. If you were DJ what would you insist on playing that no-one would really get.
2. What was the last thing you slept through and shouldn’t have.
3. Name a really pointless album reissue.
4. And a really good one.
5. What’s made you laugh recently?

This week’s five songs are daft cover versions:

Richard Cheese – Rape Me

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Clem Snide – Beautiful

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The Lance Gambit Trio – Barbie Girl

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Me First & the Gimme Gimmes – Stand By Your Man

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The Flaming Lips – Can’t Get You Out of My Head

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My little brother is in town visiting, and he is the sound designer for the Boston Ballet, and on Wednesday night (I think) we got obliterated on gin and had something of a musical duel; each taking turns on the stereo, me playing some of the weirder stuff I listen to and him playing bits of classical music.  Honestly, it was fucking ace.  As a DJ set it would have absolutely delighted me anyway, even if everyone else ended up fucking off, but nevertheless, that evening was what music fandom is really about for me.

So this podcast isn’t really a recreation by any means (we are far, far too sober and nothing like argumentative enough for starters) but I thought it would be nice to do a podcast along those lines.  Personally, it’s maybe not even as classical as I might personally have liked it to be, but never mind, I really like it.

And, as usual, there is a correction to be made.  We describe the them tune to Star Trek Deep Space Nine as Theme for the Common Man, and apparently it isn’t that at all.  What it is is heavily, heavily borrowed from Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.  So the bit of classical music Ben describes hearing before we play that song must actually have been Fanfare for the Common Man, which only reminded him of the Deep Space Nine theme without actually being it.  Whoops.  Next time research before talking!

Toadcast #130 – The Poshcast

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01. Mozart – Requiem in D Minor (02.40)
02. Yann Tiersen – La Lettre d’Explication (16.18)
03. The Flaming Lips – Watching the Planets (23.33)
04. Theme to Star Trek – Deep Space Nine (28.47)
05. Les T̻tes Raides РManuela (38.49)
06. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – The Proposition #1 (49.13)
07. The Books – S is for Everysing (52.29)
08. Nico Muhly – The Only Tune (64.00)

So, erm, yes, this podcast should really have happened on Sunday, but it was so unspeakably bakingly hot (alright, in all honesty it was only about 28 degrees, but it felt much fucking hotter, okay) that there was basically no fucking chance it was going to happen.

I’ve also been adjusting to not having a day job, which in its own way made this easier.  I’d write posts when I could during the day, but at the moment my only job is Song, by Toad so I have focussed entirely on the important jobs, not on the day to day business of posting on the site.

Also, this is late and it may be (early) Thursday, but there will still be a podcast on the weekend, but I thought this was an opportunity which should not be passed up.  It’s Glastonbury for fuck’s sake, and it really did need its own podcast pretty sharpish, even if just to wonder why on Earth Glastonbury needs its own podcast when there are so many better festivals out there!

Toadcast #128 – The Glastocast

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01. Radiohead – Idioteque (06.55)
02. Flaming Lips – God Walks Among Us Now (19.26)
03. Eels – Looking Up (24.06)
04. The Avett Brothers – Murder in the City (39.57)
05. The National – England (42.57)
06. The Books – A Cold Freezin’ Night (57.02)
07. Devendra Banhart – The Charles C Leary (70.57)
08. Broken Social Scene – 7/4 (shoreline) (73.34)
09. Wild Nothing – Your Rabbit Feet (81.06)
10. LCD Soundsystem – All Your Friends (96.59)

16.Richard Hawley – Truelove’s Gutter
There’s something incredibly intimate about Richard Hawley.  See him perform, and he’s a lively, witty raconteur, but on record that is all dialled back to a deep, comfortable and incredibly domestic sort of warmth.

Richard Hawley – For Your Lover Give Some Time

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17.AA Bondy – When the Devil’s Loose
AA Bondy has similar qualities to Richard Hawley, in that he conveys a confidential sort of intimacy, but there is a lot more weariness about this stuff. It didn’t really make much impact on me the first time around, I have to confess, but the general aching sadness of this record is just inescapable.

AA Bondy – False River

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18.The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
I confessed in my review that I don’t love every song on this by a long shot, but the almost confrontational refusal to be inhibited or even all that disciplined has resulted in an album with a real feeling of integrity and individuality.

The Flaming Lips – See the Leaves

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19.Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard – Em Are I
Jeffrey Lewis has a lovely turn of phrase, and a habit of simply following his trains of thought wherever they might lead.  I’d maybe call this album a little inconsistent, but when it’s good it really is excellent, and Lewis himself is so personable as a narrator that it’s hard not to warm to his music.

Jeffrey Lewis & the Junkyard – Whistle Past the Graveyard

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20.Ambulances – The Future That Was
I really enjoyed their live performance at Sneaky Pete’s in August, and I realised then what I like so much about this band: restraint.  There are an awful lot of them, but they keep everything really tightly under control.  The album is like that too – an economically assembled and really well executed record of guitar-based indie music.

Ambulances – Cease to Exist

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The first time I heard this album I didn’t pay that much attention, I have to be honest, and it really didn’t help.  I think it’s fair to describe Embryonic as a great big mental sprawling mess.  It really is just all over the place; noisy, jarring, weird and oddly melodic.  You can tell they can write hooks, because they’re all over this album, simmering beneath the surface of the smothering cloud of noodling, offering just enough succour to the listener to keep that thread of engagement intact.

When Wilco used to go off on big experimental tangents – I’m particularly thinking of Spiders (Kidsmoke) and Less Than You Think on A Ghost is Born at this point – they tend to have an underlying structure from which they depart, fanny about for a bit, and then return to just as you think they’ve lost it altogether.  By contrast, on Embryonic the Flaming Lips seem to shoot song after song through with a little glistening silver thread of killer hook which they rarely ever abandon, no matter how weird everything around it becomes.  That hook just sits there glittering away through the mess to reassure you that you are actually listening to a very capable pop band here, not just some mentalists who have never seen a guitar before in their lives.

I am not actually a massive Flaming Lips fan.  I never particularly loved Soft Bulletin particularly, and that was the first time I even became aware of them, Yoshimi I really did like, but then At War With the Mystics didn’t seem to quite know what it was doing.  The way they have been described to me by friends is as a band who were never a pop band, really, but who happened to make two really poppy albums.  On first listen I found this way too full on, and apparently that is the kind of band they always were until so many people imitated Soft Bulletin that it now sounds kind of pedestrian, which apparently it most certainly was not at the time.  That’s the view from a long-standing Lips fan, and it’s an interesting perspective, I think.

From my own point of view, this sounds like a group who wrote two pop records, got bogged down a bit with At War With the Mystics, and have just decided ‘Fuck it, we’re making whatever kind of fucking album we want this time – let’s go for it’.  And that they bloody well have.  A great big double disc of guitar wig-outs, noise, strange, shrieking electronic sounds, drums played by Animal’s wilder cousin – they really have just cut loose and blown out every last cobweb.

The freedom, confrontation and confidence in that approach give this album real unity – it sounds like the right record, executed the right way, one that is entirely comfortable with itself – it just works as a whole.  Oddly, that means that although there are loads of bits where I really don’t enjoy the sounds being made, and all sorts of stuff which completely rubs me up the wrong way, I actually think it’s brilliant.  It may alientate you at times, but that just makes the reconcilliation all the sweeter.

I can give you preview songs, but they really don’t give you much impression of what Embryonic is actually like.  This is one where separating the songs from their neighbours really does rob them of a great deal, but hopefully it’ll give you some idea.

The Flaming Lips – I Can Be a Frog

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The Flaming Lips – Aquarius Sabotage

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Mrs. Toad and I might be gallivanting about the Italian countryside, but we are still thinking of you, our loyal Toadlings. We may be relaxing by the pool, but we understand that life might not be quite so easy for those of you at home. Actually, fuck it, life is never this easy for us either. This is like some bizarre anomaly for us – time, peace, reading books… it’s all so fucking restful I’ve almost forgotten to swear at the locals.

The place we’re staying is just plain ridiculous. We are living in what amounts to the tiniest of little comedy garden sheds imaginable, but the outside space is some great big gigantic plaza. It’s just ridiculous.

Fortunately, there is something to lower the tone. Nature is basically a great big urinal, as we all know, and I have been doing my best to maintain a time-honoured male principle of ‘no place being too sacred or picturesque for having a sly piss’. So when the bladder beckons, so does the wall, and there I go to water the olive groves of Puglia. It feels like a public service, really it does.

Thanks again to Euan and the lads for keeping things going while we’re away. The connection here is so damn slow I really haven’t been able to read it all, but Mrs. Toad periodically checks up on things on her Blackberry (the woman’s insane) and lets me know how things are going. This news I generally treat with an indifferent grunt, before returning to the pondering of precisely which sort of cheese I most fancy for lunch, but I appreciate her efforts.

Toadcast #74 – The Poolcast

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01. The Shaky Hands – Summer’s Life (03.26)
02. Lemonjelly – Spacewalk (12.45)
03. Grandaddy – Ghost of 1672 (19.44)
04. Billie Holiday – Good Morning Heartache (24.36)
05. Animal Magic Tricks (with Neil from Meursault & Pete from The Leg) (34.42)
06. Edith Piaf – C’etait Une Histoire D’amour (38.11)
07. The Flaming Lips – Can’t Get You Out of My Head (48.12)
08. Wilco – Jolly Banker (52.17)
09. The Laurel Collective – No Pirates Left (63.04)
10. Yoshimi! – Philosophy For Fangirls (69.12)