Jesus ear-fucking Christ this fucking hurts to listen to.

The Willow Garden is a song I first came across as a b-side to Where the Wild Roses Grow by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  I didn’t know it was a traditional song at that point, but I didn’t care where it came from.  I didn’t even know who Warren Ellis was, but the fiddle playing on the song was some of the best I had (and still have) ever heard.

It’s amazing – managing to sound mournful, morbid and creepy all together.  Like a lot of Warren Ellis’ stuff it is really quite horrible and utterly beautiful at the same time

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Willow Garden

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Anyhow, at some point I twigged that it was actually a traditional tune, probably when I was browsing through eMusic’s amazing collection of stuff from Smithsonian Folkways.  This kind of horribly macabre tune suits that style perfectly.  Nothing quite seems to deliver the gleeful brutality of old folk and fairy tales quite like the screech of those pre-war folk voices, and the harsh, sawed violin which tends to accompany them. It fits well with Ellis’s approach to the violin as well actually, and to The Bad Seeds’ approach to folk songs and murder ballads: they revel in the discord, the casual malice, the horror, the almost cartoonish evil of it all.

Hobart Smith & Texas Gladden – Down in the Willow Garden

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

One thing a lot of this old music doesn’t fit too well with, however, is soft pop.  Sam Amidon, for example, is hardly hard on the ears, but his voice has character, and where Cave and the like bring cheerful brutality, Amidon brings a lovely sense of empathetic sadness.  The intensity of the emotion is still there of course, and it is always a rather grim emotion to embrace.

I have heard these songs sung with a degree of beauty however, and sometimes it works.  Kind of.  Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes snuck a couple of covers onto MySpace a few years back under the name White Antelope.  They were simple recordings, and although they were pretty unembellished I really quite liked them.  I find his songwriting rather boring, I have to say, but he has a lovely voice and I really enjoyed hearing his versions of songs like Silver Dagger, Wild Mountain Thyme and things like that.

White Antelope – Wild Mountain Thyme

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And then this fucking happened.  Jesus donkey-fucking Christ, what an awful, awful thing to have heard.  I should have known better, frankly.  It was fucking stupid of me to click on the link anyway, to be honest, but like a Presbyterian surfing child porn on the internet all day, I knew just what I was going to get and a large part of me was just dying feel the outrage.

Bon Iver’s first album For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t too bad.  It had a couple of nice tunes, and the minimal arrangements suited his vocal delivery, making it seem ghostly rather than just weak.  The new album was a fucking awful soft-pop horrorshow though.  The lush, utterly objectionable arrangements were abysmal enough in themselves, but they made his voice turn from lip-wobbling emotion to a sort of pathetic, needy bleat.  And now he’s taken to giving The Willow Garden the mother of all public shamings with this dreadful, wan, weak, lifeless version.

Is it fair to call the Chieftans the Elton fucking John of folk music, given the sheer number of people they’ve collaborated with?  I know that collaboration and cover versions are a central part of the folk tradition, but honest to God I wish there was some way I could unhear this fucking song.  And to make matters worse, I keep playing it again and again, just to remind myself that I am not exaggerating the scale of the horror.  And if you’ve got the Bad Seeds’ version, and that gorgeous old version by Hobart Smith and Texas Gladden in your head already, it sounds even more utterly abominable by comparison.  Sing with some fucking spirit man.  Sing as if something, anything, depended on it for the love of fucking God!

Justin fucking Vernon & the Chieftans – The Willow Garden

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Ruth and I were back on Fresh Air Radio last night, but due to all sorts of massively annoying database problems with the site, I couldn’t put up one of those live playlist updatey things like I usually do, which was really kind of frustrating.

After spending last term more or less missing one another every single show I must confess I am looking forward to getting things right in 2011 and the chance to spend an hour and a half every week bickering with the old trout about music.

So given you had no opportunity to agree with Ruth about how fucking awful my taste in music is, I thought I would at least post the actual playlist online so you can see what we played and have a think about whether or not you can really be arsed tuning in next week, by which time my Toady IT problems should be well and truly behind me.

01. Mountain Man – How’m I Doing
02. Ringo Deathstarr – Do it Every Time
03. Rob St. John – Whites of Our Eyes (Toad Session Sneak Preview)
04. P.S. I Love You & Diamond Rings – Leftovers
05. Fleet Foxes – Hopelessness Blues
06. Active Child – I’m in Your Church at Night
07. Francoise Hardy – This Little Heart
08. Dad Rocks! – Nothing Keeps Up
09. Lach – I Won’t Miss You
10. Nana Grizel – Blackbox
11. The Good Ones – Sara
12. The Honorable Worm – Wouldn’t Mind Dying
13. Owen Pallett – Lewis Takes off his Shirt
14. Black Tambourine – Throw Aggi off a Bridge

Mrs. Toad has been stranded in God Bless America by that infernal cloud of Icelandic ash, so I am home alone for the last week and all of the next one.  This is very much Not Fun, because as much as she’s a mean old bitch, I do seem to have developed a grudging affection for the silly old mare so a fortnight apart is very much unappreciated.  It’s about time those Icelanders re-established some bloody discipline, honestly.

Anyhew, there is some excellent stuff on this podcast, even though it really doesn’t hang together around a particular theme as they sometimes do.  In actual fact, I don’t think I’ve done a themey one for a while – might give that a go next week.

Toadcast #118 – The Ashcast

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

01. Johnny Flynn – Kentucky Pill (4.11)
02. Burnt Island – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (10.51)
03. Draw Me Stories – Becomes the Hunted (18.25)
04. Haunted Stereo – Lock the Doors (22.29)
05. Ragged Claws – Lamed Wufniks (30.44)
06. Fleet Foxes – Silver Dagger (36.07)
07. Hezekiah Jones – I Love My Family (40.13)
08. Cocorosie – Lemonade (42.14)
09. Br’er – Crocus (50.41)
10. Devolver – Promise (56.24)
11. Giant Sand – Anarchistic Bloshevistic Cowboy Bundle (58.44)

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

White Antelope – Silver Dagger

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Silver Dagger

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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