Do songs titled Lullaby, which include lines about goblins, make you just a little bit wary?  Yes, me too, but don’t worry because I promise you that this is really good.  What it recalls for me the most is perhaps a much more minimal, less electronic version 0f Goldfrapp’s breakthrough Felt Mountain, and this is a very good thing.

The music isn’t so much frivolous as seductively flighty.  It recalls the deceptive innocence of Barry Adamson’s wonderful song Vermillion Kisses, where the impression of childish simplicity is never so convincing as to fail to convey its own sense of menace.  I wouldn’t say that this EP is quite so macabre as all that, but it nevertheless generates a close relative of that particular atmosphere of playfully tantalising darkness.

It manages to be be quite cute without ever being annoyingly cutesy, and this is a pretty difficult line to tread in this kind of an area, particularly as recent music has given us quite a lot of fairly dismissive tags we could easily apply to someone whose style ticks a number of quite familiar boxes.  Music in this kind of territory can annoy the shit out of me, quite frankly, but throughout this record Frivolous Laura never tries to be too twee or too giggly, so all of the common failings of bands like this seem to have been quite deftly avoided – it’s delightful where others in the past have been grating.

The fact that the last three tracks on this EP are more akin to three movements of the same song makes it a little difficult to draw many conclusions other than ‘Hmm, very promising indeed’ so I think I might leave it at that, but I’d certainly say that I am very much looking forward to more where this came from.

Frivolous Laura – The Worker’s Song

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Barry Adamson – Vermillion Kisses

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MySpace | Buy from Fat Badger Recordings

This week I welcome you to the absolutely 100% guaranteed non-controversial podcast.  Nothing to see here. Move along.  Although, it might be slightly controversial, just possibly, around two thirds of the way through if you are excessively religious or perhaps if you have some objection to pointing and laughing as Jade Goody dies of cancer or Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse slowly expire in the full and relentless gaze of the public eye.

Has anyone seen the film Deathwatch?  It’s set in Glasgow in the 1980s and almost entirely obscure, despite an amazing cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow.  What it amounts to is that a woman discovers that she is going to die, and then a TV company ask to buy the rights to film her last weeks.  It’s a bit over the top at times, but a pretty visionary movie nevertheless.  It’s always disconcerting where something like that makes a prediction which proves to be so uncannily true.  I think the scariest thing about 1984 is how utterly determined the species seems to be to make sure that it comes true.

If you can find a copy, I’d recommend that you watch it.  It’s pretty hard to track down though – we had to get ours from Amazon France for some bizarre reason, so good luck to you.

Toadcast #60 – The Blandcast

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1. Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm (04.41)
2. Clem Snide – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience (09.00)
3. Pree – Light Falls (17.05)
4. Frivolous Laura – A Lullaby (20.22)
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Statues (27.27)
6. The Low Anthem – Oh My God Charlie Darwin (37.18)
7. Kill It Kid – Burst its Banks (41.31)
8. Pete Doherty – The Last of the English Roses (49.03)
9. R.E.M. – Perfect Circle (59.41)