The Treecast is so named because we purchased and decorated our Christmas tree this afternoon.  It is an incoherent mess of all sorts of shite, stupid garish baubles, a weird peacock thingy and some foolish attempts at being tasteful which have been utterly overwhelmed by the utter cack which surrounds them.

My parents always did seriously tasteful trees actually, so I would imagine they will be downright ashamed of the half-arsed mess we have managed to create.  Actually, my dad is the world’s biggest Grinch, so he won’t give a shite, but my mum might be silently disappointed.

Nevertheless it now feels like Christmas has properly started.  We have orded a keg of beer for our Christmas party (our own one, not the label one) and for the New Year’s piss up as well.  We’ll have Jonnie Common, The Japanese War Effort and Neil fae Meursault playing a house gig that evening, and there will, it now appears, be shitloads of very tasty beer too.  Why the fuck would anyone bother with town?

Direct download: Toadcast #151 – The Treecast

01. Grandaddy – Now It’s On (00.21)
02. Jason Lytle – D.U.I. BBQ Checkpoint (07.39)
03. Twilight Hotel – Mahogany Veneer  (12.25)
04. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Heart in Your Heartbreak (18.44)
05. Wolf Parade – Semi-precious Stone (22.36)
06. That Ghost – Older (30.17)
07. Grandaddy – Band Synergy (A Peek Inside the Magic) (35.34)
08. Grandaddy – You Know You’re Fucked Up (38.50)
09. Crystal Stilts – Shake the Shackles (43.54)
10. The Monochrome Set – Jetset Junta (Remix) (48.19)
11. Gobble Gobble – Wrinklecarver (51.20)

Well I am Ruthless and bandless to begin this term’s broadcasts, so you’ll have to wait until next week for the first Toadly Fresh Air Session I’m afraid.

Having said that, however, I have a shiteload of excellent and very shiny new material to play tonight, so people wanting the pop hits are likely to be rather disappointed as there are few old favourites and lots of new demos which I am very much hoping will end up on albums before the end of the year.

Ruth will be back with me as of next week, but she’s currently nursing Michael H. Foxx, who is in hospital with the nasties.  So best wishes to both of them, but we’ll be back in the normal swing of things from next Monday onwards.

Live on Air 8pm-9.30pm – Listen live here.

Incidentally, if you know anyone who you would recommend for a live session, just get in touch in the comments or by email (see the contact page above).

This evening’s tracklisting (updated live):

1. Django Django – Storm
2. Liars – No Barrier Fun
3. Gobble Gobble – Lawn Knives
4. Robin Grey – I Love Leonard Cohen
5. Leonard Cohen – Avalanche
6. REM – First We Take Manhattan (Leonard Cohen Cover)
7. The Burns Unit – Since We’ve Fallen Out
8. The Van Allen Belt – The Way You Look
9. Trips and Falls – That is a Big Door!
10. Sarah Lowes – Night Time
11. Findo Gask – Full Five (Demo)
12. Yusuf Azak – Eastern Sun (Demo)
13. Meursault – All Creatures Will Make Merry

Meursault – Fresh Air Session

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Meursault – Love or Limb (Live on Fresh Air)

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Meursault – Untitled Triptych (Live on Fresh Air)

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Meursault – What You Don’t Have (Live on Fresh Air)

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Meursault – Heaven Waits (Live on FreshAir)

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Gobble Gobble come out of Edmonton in Canada, part of a small but apparently quite determined experimental music community down there under the Hydeaway umbrealla who seem to be doing some very good things.  I was sent a CD sampler by this group a while ago, and it was interesting – it certainly showed that there seems to be a good bit of collective energy forming in that part of the world.

Cecil Frena, who sent me this, has assembled an eclectic and fascinating album of scratchy electronica which casts its blanket of crackling subversion over a few different genres.  This makes Neon Graveyard, for me, rather more than just another collection of indie pop songs smothered in electronic clicks and whizzes and a constant hiss of artificially created background noise.  Yes, admittedly, there is a lot of that particular technique to be found on this album, but it is never treated as the raison d’etre of the whole piece, as can happen in this particular part of the musical landscape.

What defines Neon Graveyard in my eyes is actually more the undercurrents than the surface eddies.  Songs like O Sacred Dandruff and Piles of Salt seem to actually take a lot of cues from contemporary R’n'B, particularly in the style of the vocal delivery.  They sound almost like R’n'B songs which have been put through a rather severe cycle in your dishwasher and this, you will probably not be surprised to hear, I like.  At other times a form of Gameboy pop swirls into focus, then this same approach fixes itself to an interlude of piano (Ash Fountain, for example) which sounds superfically far more like classical than anything you’d happen across in an indie pop landscape.

This flitting from one underpinning genre to another, all held together by a more uniform style at the surface, gives the album both a really solid coherence and a happy variety. The style, in fact, fits the title very well indeed. I like.

Gobble Gobble – Meteor Eschat

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Gobble Gobble – Eggs in Carrion

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