Song, by Toad

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)