Song, by Toad

Sorry, I know this is going up late, but I have been working on the promotional material for the Jesus H. Foxx EP release.  There’s a fair bit still to be done, but for the time being I am cautiously optimistic that it is going to look fucking brilliant.  There will be a lot of painting to be done though, so putting the final touches on the thing is going to take bloody ages, but I think it is going to be easily worth it.

In other news, this week’s podcast is a prolonged chat with Euan (of Kays Lavelle, Trampoline, Steinberg Principle and Woodenbox fame) as a way of rounding up the excellent fortnight he spent feeding and changing Song, by Toad whilst Mrs. Toad and I were off gallivanting.  So, rather than make his usual grouchy, joyless comments on posts I thought I might invite him to make his grouchy joyless comments on a podcast.  So he came round and complained and complained and generally sulked his way through the whole thing, which was nice.

Oh alright, of course he didn’t. But it just wouldn’t be fun for me if I didn’t make fun of Euan for being grouchy long past the time anyone else has ceased to find it funny.

Oh stop sulking.  You’re turning into him.  All of you.  Shame on you, people, shame on you.  Cheer the fuck up for God’s sake.

Toadcast #77 – The Grouchcast

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01. Wilco – Bull Black Nova (06.39)
02. The Kays Lavelle – Scars From the City (15.14)
03. There Will Be Fireworks – We Sleep Through the Bombs (27.37)
04. Beerjacket – Father (31.46)
05. iLiKETRAiNS – Terra Nova (39.36)
06. Andrew Bird – The Giant of Illinois (50.10)
07. Finn – The Fourth the Fifth (61.47)
08. Fleet Foxes – Oliver James (65.29)
09. Tom Waits – Temptation (74.12)

Robin Pecknold is more widely known for his Fleet Foxes stuff, but he appears to have a solo project as well, covering folk songs.  To call it a solo project may be exaggerating things slightly, because there’s little evidence of this being much more than a name given to a MySpace page so he can post a couple of solo versions of stuff he just fancied recording.  Maybe not, of course, there could be more to it than that.

I’m no great Fleet Foxes fan, I have to confess.  I think they have a few utterly gorgeous tracks and a lot of pretty unremarkable ones, as far as I personally am concerned, but this stuff I really do like.  Pecknold certainly has an utterly beguiling voice, and when singing these classic old songs he imbues them with a loveliness all his own.

False Knight on the Road was originally a Fleet Foxes b-side, I believe, and I’ve included that here, along with Silver Dagger, and a couple of other versions of that song.  I’d be mildly but pleasantly surprised if there were any plans to take this any further, but it’s the kind of project which doesn’t need to be any more than this kind of small, low key exercise.  Lovely, lovely stuff.   There are a couple more to be enjoyed on their MySpace page, if these tickle your fancy.

White Antelope – False Knight on the Road

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White Antelope – Silver Dagger

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Silver Dagger

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Bob Dylan & Joan Baez – Silver Dagger (Live 1964)

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Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

Now, I know I played nicey-nicey with the previous parts of this list, and it is certainly true to say that there is barely any real difference between places fourteen and twenty-eight, but at the business end I think that some of it is a bit more definite.  Certainly, having thought it over, I think that Now You Are Pregnant is my favourite song of the year.  How or why it edges out the superb Wonderful Life I couldn’t quite tell you, but I know it would feel wrong to have put them the other way round.

The other rather obvious point that needs to be made is that, of course, I have no objectivity left whatsoever as regards the Meursault album or any of the songs on it.  I didn’t have anything to do with making the thing, of course, but I’ve worked so closely with that album over the course of the last six months or so, since it became a part of Song, by Toad Records, that my relationship with it is totally different to anything else I’ve been listening to.  So I am being honest when I feature Meursault stuff so highly, I’m not lying to you of course, but there’s no way I could be objective anymore.

So here’s the final installment of the Toad Festive Fifty.  DC will be posting his Christmas extravaganza tomorrow, and that will be the last you hear of Toad for a few days.  In between Christmas and New Year I will be going through my album of the year countdown and trying to move Toad over the self-hosting in order to avoid the horrors of DMCA harrassment.  This way I can host the fucking thing in China if need be, and they can all just fuck off.  So Happy Christmas all, and we’ll try and get things up and running as normally as possible right after the changeover. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, more Toadcastery. I’ve, erm, focussed on Dadrock for this one. Not too much of it on the playlist, fortunately, although there’s a couple of well-known names on there. In my defence though, I couldn’t bring myself to feature Coldplay, so I was forced into the compromise of playing an almighty butchering of one of their songs by the splendid Richard Cheese.

Basically I spend most of this podcast trying to justify the presence of so much bland music in the charts and how the hell that came to pass. There’s plenty of chatter about how music is used as a sort of social glue as well, in which case the quality of the stuff becomes almost secondary. There are some really good new bands on this as well – The Velcro Quartet are particularly brilliant, as are the songs by Mumford & Son, Yoshimi! and Honeytrap. Enjoy responsibly.

Toadcast #32 – The Tribecast

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01. Hercules & Love Affair – Hercules Theme (01.32)
02. The Velcro Quartet – Dead Dog’s Hill Replaced with Johnny Cashback, at the band’s request. (07.53)
03. Seabear – Teenage Kicks (11.17)
04. Athlete – Shake Those Windows (21.02)
05. Richard Cheese – Yellow (30.31)
06. ESL – Czarne Oczy (31.59)
07. Emiliana Torrini – Me & Armeni (39.50)
08. Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal (43.24)
09. Snow Patrol – Last Ever Lone Gunman (48.11)
10. The Killers – All These Things That I’ve Done (58.17)
11. The Pictish Trail – All I Own (66.52)
12. Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page (73.01)
13. Honeytrap – Song For Nona (82.17)
14. The Velcro Quartet – How to Kill Your Wife (87.04)
15. Yoshimi! – Song For Suzy (Demo) (94.34)
16. Frank Turner – The Outdoor Type (100.34)

There’s something of a slightly proggy, vaguely psychedelic folk-pop vibe permeating this album which I rather like.  It’s dreamy – I suppose sun-drenched is the easy cliche to reach for in this situation – and lush, blissed out and slow.

Songs like Ragged Wood take that basic premise, speed it up, nudge the rhythm up a notch and and add some vaguely Band of Horsey vocal stylings, resulting in a more exultant energy that bursts from the album more than pretty much any other.  Not that the more gentle stuff is less good, but it is quite introverted a style, made all the more thick and glutinous by the multi-layered vocal harmonies.  They vary the pace pretty effectively, crucially, and avoid the perils of monotony that bedevil albums with such a dominant style as this one.

It’s music that fits very squarely with the general vibe of Song, by Toad.  In fact, anyone doing their market research would certainly pop this right square in the middle of Things For Toad, I am sure.  Somehow though, it’s perhaps a liked album rather than a loved one.  I don’t know why, but somewhere in the middle I find myself starting to drift a little and by the end it’s not unusual for me to fail to notice two or three tracks at a time.  Maybe this will change in time, but for the time being I think I’ll file this under good, rather than great, and wait and see how things change as it seeps in more completely.

Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
Fleet Foxes – Your Protector

MySpace | More mp3s | Buy the album from Sub Pop

Well I didn’t appear in this particular episode of The Waiting Room, and somewhat amazingly the whole thing didn’t go instantly to the dogs, as you might have imagined.

The Waiting Room – Wednesday 30th April 2008

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In fact, DC has sent me a couple of excellent tracks to use in my traditional plug for the show seeing as I can’t do my usual ‘I nearly chose these’ thing.

The first is by a group called Heathers who I’ve never heard of at all, but the real highlight for me was the Fleet Foxes song.  There’s been a fair bit of blog whispering about Fleet Foxes for quite a while now, and I’ve never quite got round to tracking them down and having a listen.  This, it seems, was a mistake.  Just listen below – what a fine song indeed.

Fleet Foxes – Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
Heathers – Bloodpact