I called myself a novelty-whore in a review a little while back, and it’s something which I’ve been a little wary of for a while now: that I am so absorbed in the small-scale DIY end of the music industry that I have somehow lost my taste for famous bands.  Or worse, that I somehow filter out their excellence once they hit album number three or thereabouts, and henceforth hear only the sound of boredom.

I do wonder, sometimes, what my younger self would have made of disappointing recent albums by the likes of Grinderman, Iron & Wine, Bright Eyes and now, it would seem, REM.  I remember reviewing an album by the Rolling Stones many years ago – one heralded as the tedious “blistering return to form” by the proper music press -  and I think I described it as sounding ‘a bit like The Stones covering The Stones’ or something roughly along those lines.  Well the new REM is a bit like that.

I just can’t help but wonder if the me from six or seven years ago who got most of his music from Uncut or Word might have been more impressed with these albums – maybe I’ve just been pulled away by getting my nose too close to the grindstone, but I have genuinely lost almost all interest in bands of this size.

I just read Sean from Drowned in Sound say this on Twitter: “the Ladytron interview is getting serious traffic on DiS at the moment! And people wonder why we don’t DO little bands”.  I have the same issue here, but Sean is trying to run a business, and I am… well I am kind of, but not really.  Big bands mean more traffic, and the fact that I have stopped caring about reviewing albums by the likes of the above, or the new Mountain Goats album (avvvvverage) means that I am doing without the spikes in traffic these high-interest releases bring with them.

I take the opposite approach to DiS though, which is something you can do if you’re a bit smaller: I am absolutely not prepared to second-guess the content on Song, by Toad by the amount of readership it will attract.  Ruth, who does the Fresh Air show with me, pointed out how blogs haven’t called such and such a band (I forget who) out on being shite, and I said that many probably had, just by omission.

I used to write negative reviews on this site, but in all honesty, at the moment I really just can’t be arsed.  I sat down with that Bright Eyes album, and just couldn’t force myself to listen to it all the way through, never mind actually bother thinking of anything meaningful to say about it.  But I’ll take the hit in traffic just to keep the site focussed on things I genuinely give a shit about.

And this year, that means I have reviewed almost no major bands.   REM, Mountain Goats, Bright Eyes, Iron and Wine… just one really booooring record after another after another.  And I wonder if I have just been drawn so far away from mainstream music that I just don’t have the attention left over to properly absorb this stuff anymore.  But deep down I can’t help but suspect that it’s just down to the fact that some very famous bands have released some very, very average music so far this year.

I am almost shocked to find myself writing that I really don’t like this album very much.  It is growing on me, but only because I’ve listened to it about twenty times, assuming that it is impossible for me to be just this plain indifferent to a Grinderman album.  I fucking adored the first one, and it never occurred to me, I suppose, that it would be any different with this.

I remember describing a relatively recent Rolling Stones album as being a bit like ‘The Stones covering The Stones’, and there’s an element of that in this as well.  It’s almost as if the concept of Grinderman has been too influential in the genesis of this record, rather than just allowing the ingredients to be given a bloody good shake and accepting whatever comes out.  Put those four guys together and whatever you get should be brilliant, whether it’s ‘Grinderman’ in the strictest sense, or, well, pretty much anything. Whereas this feels like they got together specifically in order to make a Grinderman album instead.

So why doesn’t it work.  Well, this is a music blog, so the perpetual answer to this is pretty simple: I just don’t enjoy the songs, for some reason.  A lot of them, particularly the first couple, sound like little more than re-treads of songs from the first album.  As per usual, there is some great air guitar to be played and some brilliant lyrics, but little that… well, grabs me by the fucking nuts, to be honest.

That may sound facile or glib, but that was the incredible thing about the first Grinderman record: it absolutely, instantaneously, grabbed you hard by the balls and just kept on twisting for an hour or so.  It cleaned an awful lot of cobwebs out of my ears too, and was just plain thrilling to listen to.  This one isn’t bad, but that’s about as much praise as I can manage for it.  It is growing on me all the time, but generally only in bits here and there, and not at the kind of pace where I ever really anticipate much love for the whole album really blossoming.

Grinderman – Heathen Child

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Grinderman – Evil

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Hoarse.  Horse.  Hoarse.  Horse.  Geddit geddit, see what I did there?  Yes, another tedious pun, but I know you know to expect no better from me these days.  Anyway, it’s only called the Hoarsecast because I have a bit of a phlegmy flu which, whilst not fun, is hardly very debilitating so there is no need for me to moan really.  Not that this usually stops me, but anyhewww…

It’s a funny old mix, this playlist.  I rearranged the songs time and again, swapped a few in and out here and there and just couldn’t find a way to make them click together for some reason, so for all I like everything that’s on here it is still a little bitty, as a single coherent mix.

Mind you, with me talking pish between all the songs, there’s fuck all chance of these things really flowing in the first place.

Direct download: Toadcast #142 – The Hoarsecast

01. Wilco – I Can’t Stand It (00.17)
02. Hooray for the Riff-raff – Slow Walk (08.32)
03. Interpol – Evil (15.49)
04. Jose Delhart – Broken Hearted Chant (22.17)
05. Flower Orgy – Boneyard (25.12)
06. Willie Nelson – Good-hearted Woman (31.59)
07. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Notes From the Waiting Room (38.07)
08. Dumbo Gets Mad – Eclectic Prawn (40.33)
09. Sexual Objects – Here Come the Rubber Cops (47.56)
10. Grinderman – Star Charmer (57.53)

I am stumbling towards the Christmas break like a punch drunk boxer dreaming of the bell.  I made up my to-do list for the rest of the year and it’s pretty fucking terrifying.  Still, time spent in France with my Mum fussing like a bloody mother hen and being determined for Christmas to be just so and me ruining it by being rude and too busy to be festive.

There tend to be some musical disagreements in our house around Christmas time.  Mum likes her festive shit, even if it is bordering on being a parody of itself at times.  I like what I consider to be relaxing music – that downbeat, morose stuff which is both warm and comforting.  Stuff like The Willard Grant Conspiracy, Micah P. Hinson, Leonard Cohen, that kind of stuff – The Boatman’s Call by Nick Cave is a favourite, for example.  Not for Mum, though, it seems.

So we both have pretty definite ideas of what kind of music should be played around Christmas time, but it just happens to be in total opposition to the other’s.  The difference being, of course, that I am right and she is not.

Last week we had the top five songs vote, probably just shaded by something by Withered Hand, but I’ll do all the proper counting before the new year and make some grandiose declaration of electoral triumph.  Which leaves this week for us to vote for our favourite album of 2009.  So that’s all the Friday Fives are this week – just list your favourite five albums released this year.  And for anyone wondering, voting for The Low Anthem is just fine, if that’s one of your favourites primarily because I can’t be arsed splitting hairs about self-releases, re-releases and all that other shit.  So please de-lurk and say hello and have a vote – these things are always more fun when more people join in.

Meursault – Salt Pt.2 2008

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Grinderman – No Pussy Blues 2007

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The Veils – Not Yet 2006

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The Decemberists – We Both Go Down Together 2005

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Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Cannibal’s Hymn 2004

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In preparation for applying for a slot on Edinburgh’s student radio station Fresh Air, I thought I would challenge myself to get through an entire podcast without actually swearing because, on public access radio, you can’t use naughty words. A Toad without swearing, you say, what the fuck has the world come to?

Well to make sure I don’t disappoint you in your noble quest for dissolute anti-culture I thought I’d compensate by playing a collection of the filthiest and most sweary songs I could lay my hands on. Thinking about it, I’ve managed to forget Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s truly foul ‘Je T’aime, Moi Non Plus’, but there you go. I could have improved just about every playlist I’ve ever done in retrospect, I think, so at some point I have to draw the line.

So, I use bad words when I quote other people and when I give you the names of the songs but I don’t think I let a single naughty word slip during my own chat on this one, but let me know if you catch me out.

Toadcast #23 – The Filthcast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Cunt (01.09)
02. The Pogues – Boys From the County Hell (05.24)
03. Adam Balbo -Let’s Make a Porno (10.03)
04. Celebrity Chimp – Pornstar (13.06)
05. The Tacticians – Hardcore Porn (15.37)
06. Billy Bragg – St. Swithin’s Day (21.05)
07. Grinderman – No Pussy Blues (26.05)
08. The Libertines – I Get Along (33.10)
09. Carbon/Silicon – What the Fuck (35.47)
10. Frank Turner – Heartless Bastard Motherfucker (42.03)
11. Les Enfant Bastard – U R My Fucking Sunshine U Cunt (44.52)
12. Plans & Apologies – Tony Blair Fucknut (49.50)
13. The Libertines – What a Waster (57.00)
14. Lambchop – Your Fucking Sunny Day (60.49)
15. The Ex-Men – Suck Her (67.35)
16. Micah P. Hinson – Patience (73.04)
17. Eels – It’s a Motherfucker (76.59)
18. Doug Anthony Allstars – I Fuck Dogs (80.07)

1. Grinderman – Grinderman

Oh yes indeed! While other artists fall away in their old age and run out of ideas, Nick Cave just gets worse, which generally means better. This is a snarling, strutting, menacing, virile beast of an album and perhaps the only hotly anticipated major record all year to deliver the goods like a sack of spanners. Guitarist Martyn Casey describes it thus: “It wasn’t consciously two fingers to maturity but I remember thinking, all the way through, “This isn’t bad for a bunch of old farts.”" No, Martin, it isn’t bad at all.

Grinderman – No Pussy Blues

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2. The Builders & the Butchers – The Builders & the Butchers

Ragged, ramshackle, raucous and fucking brilliant. Imagine shaking every last skeleton out of your closet and them all coming to life, burning down your house and dancing round the inferno, guzzling bourbon. I want to move to Portland.

The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake

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3. The Twilight Sad – Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters

Imagine every stereotype of indie miserablism you can muster and this album is it: brooding, ambitious and intense. There’s no hedging their bets with face-saving archness either, just a collection of brutally emotional songs delivered with the kind of relentless wall of guitar noise that threatens to shake your house to pieces as you get drunker and drunker and turn it up louder and louder.

The Twilight Sad – Walking For Two Hours

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4. Mother & the Addicts – Science Fiction Illustrated

An amazing, hugely infectious record that manages to stuff funk, disco, new romanticism and a bit of glam into a brilliantly fuzzy indie album. A professional reviewer (I can’t remember who, sorry, or I’d give credit) said that this album could have been released in 1986, 1992 or 2003 and it wouldn’t have sounded out of place. This sums it up far better than I can. A total joy.

Mother & the Addicts – So Tough

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5. Elvis Perkins – Ash Wednesday

For someone who loves downbeat emotional music as much as me I can’t believe this is the highest placed album of acoustic loveliness on the list. Perkins manages to wield wistful, heartbroken melancholy in that wonderfully intimate way that makes even the most depressing of tales sound bravely hopeful. It’s possibly the least depressing album of unhappy music I’ve heard in a long time. Catch him live too, if you can, he’s superb.

Elvis Perkins – It’s Only Me

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It’s been an utterly dismal year for highly anticipated records by the big groups in 2007, but fortunately the slack has been taken up by loads of smaller acts bringing new things to the table. Except for one thing.

A really big, angry pair of rock ‘n’ roll bollocks.

I got accused, when talking about gratingly affected furry-minged feminist hippy intellectuals as part of my St. Vincent review, of being part of the ‘testosterone-fuelled indie rock blogosphere’. The cheek! But Wendy was right – I have been reviewing sensitive, introspective, subtle and slightly eccentric albums for a depressingly long time now. Not that I don’t like the music, but what my inner Neanderthal is crying out for at the moment is some raging, furious, guitar-battering indie howl. Take the shackles off lads, get your balls out and beat the shit out of your guitars. I mean, seriously, what the fuck am I supposed to listen to when I’m three-quarters of the way through a bottle of gin, it’s three in the morning and I want to play something fucking loud?

So far this year, although there has been the odd really good ‘turn it up fucking loud’ song, it’s always in total isolation, and very few and far between to begin with. Nothing with the snarl of the Von Bondies’ first album, for example. Or the Libs’ first. Or half of The Wedding Present’s early material. Or Yo La Tengo at their most incoherent. Or early Nick Cave when he went all apocalyptic on us. Even Grandaddy have a couple. Grandaddy!

It doesn’t have to be completely mental and just making a lot of noise isn’t enough. ‘Rawk’ is dreadful and need not apply. It has to have an insistent beat, be drenched in pain, and have some real fucking menace to it. Then, at some point it has to get properly fucking loud, with guitars that drive you into spasms of lurching, drunken air guitar, face clenched like a Baptist’s buttocks at Pet Shop Boys concert.

This year’s best examples:

Parts & Labour – Fractured Skies That frenetic beat, when it gets going, is enough by itself, but when the guitar kicks in..
The Twilight Sad – And She Would Darken the Memory It may take its time to get going, but it’s well worth the fucking wait.
Kings of Leon – Charmer Not especially loud, this one, but that insistent beat and the pained screech still do it for me.
The Arcade Fire – Intervention This is a big, angry song – brilliant!
Grinderman – No Pussy Blues If you nee d this exp laining to you, then you will never understand anyway.

Some classics from yesteryear:

The Von Bondies – No Regrets
The Strokes – Juicebox Just listen to that beat – fucking marvellous – and there’s a distinctly prog-tastic guitar solo in the middle as well. Fucking great
The Wedding Present – Blonde The definitive song of wounded indie rage?

The blogosphere is cheering me up a little at the moment folks – people are writing political rants. With venom. And swears. Actually, not too many swears, but plenty of vim and vigour and I think this is fucking brilliant.

If anything has been symbolic of the problems of modern democracy it has been the recent disregard for its very mechanisms – by the leaders the whole bloody system served to elect in the first place. First there was the public theft of an election by George Bush – one of the most spectacular and flagrant cases of utter disregard for the democratic process I have ever come across. What an amphibiously dishonest, grasping, over-privileged, mentally deficient grotesque parody of a human being that man is. On the outside he’s just a gurning cretin, but on the inside he is a Mr. Creosote of acquisitive greed with a heart like a little black ball-bearing of condensed evil.

Then there was the war in Iraq. At least Americans were broadly in favour of the war beforehand, albeit only because they were force-fed a never-ending avalanche of bare-faced lies and treated like retarded children by their own repellent government. Generally, however, I think a referendum at the time would have favoured the war although I’m entirely open to correction on this point. But on our side you get Tony Blair, purporting to lead a country who almost entirely rejected the spurious and at times virulently dishonest and utterly pathetic cajoling we were subjected to in order to justify prosecuting a war of abject immorality, craven avarice and genocidal, racist contempt for the lives of people whose crime was simply being a bit brown and rather foreign. Blair pushed through his personal, evangelical agenda directly against the will of the people in a spectacular exhibition of psychotic, single-minded vanity.

Why give this long-dead horse another poke? Well because the 90s seemed to nurture a demoralising apathy to all things political. The consensus view seemed to lapse into a defeated shrug of the shoulders and a general impression that politicians were so utterly morally bankrupt and entirely self-interested that there was no point even attempting to engage the tawdry little weasels because they’d just do whatever the fuck they pleased anyway. Now, this point of view is pretty accurate, but the apathy it engendered has basically led politicians and business leaders (who are all unelected politicians these days, given the enormous power of large corporations) to feel, as they are no longer being scrutinised with any semblance of genuine interest, that they can abandon even the pantomime of giving a fuck what the populus thinks and just do whatever the flaming bollocks they want.

Tony Blair is perhaps the living embodiment of where the politics of apathy leads. So it is with great pleasure that I read people like Crash Calloway getting pissed off at the woo merchants and peddlers of pseudo-science, and Another Form of Relief getting stuck into the lamentable legacy of Tony Blair. It may be fucking futile, people, but if we don’t at least shout as loud we can then it gives these vicious cunts the license to do exactly what the fuck they please with utter impunity, and you can bet the anal virginity of your first born son that the dirty little cock-smokers will do nothing, absolutely nothing, that is even remotely in our interests unless they are pinned down and bloody well forced to. If we don’t say anything then they get away with it all for absolutely nothing.

Go get stuck in, lads, kick the dirty little fuckers as hard as you bloody well can.

Grinderman – Get it On
I am not the world’s biggest Pearl Jam fan, but this is a great song and I have yet to hear a better description of George Bush than ‘Born on third, thinks he got a triple.’ I hope all you non-Americans understand that reference! Pearl Jam – Bu$hleaguer
Plans & Apologies – Tony Blair, Fucknut
This is a brilliant song, and very apposite. One thing we must not do is let Blair manipulate his own legacy to read as anything other than his being the evangelical psychopath who led this country into an illegal, genocidal war against its will and on the domestic front managed to achieve a greater disparity between rich and poor than any other Prime Minister in history. That is your legacy, Tony. Good fucking riddance, you are a twat. MJ Hibbett & the Validators – The Fight For History
And is any political rant complete without this song? Billy Bragg – Ideology

I may be very much in love with Mrs. Toad, but if the opportunity to get a quick divorce were to present itself I may consider it, if just so I could run away in the dead of night with this album. The problem is, it’s so primal it would probably make me its bitch and I would be condemned to a life of gimp masks, beatings and sexual subservience. Mind you, one listen to Go Tell the Women and actually that doesn’t sound too ba… no, no, I’ll stop there.

It’s like that though, this album. Sexually charged, brutal, visceral; it reminds me of those vicious old folk tales of rape and torture and pillage. And it’s all delivered in a festering, menacing piledriver of scabrous blues-rock that quite frankly makes me want to subject myself to its nefarious will for ever more.

Really, given how generally poor the major releases have been so far this year, and the absolute dearth of people continuing to produce excellent music into their dotage (well, musically speaking anyway) this is an absolute rocket delivered squarely up the arse of the rest of the industry. Why the fuck aren’t any of the rest of you this good?

It’s not all the explosion of angry guitars that I was expecting though, although it is a hugely guitar-dominated record. Actually, there’s more simmering menace than there are mental wig-outs. Songs like the smouldering Grinderman, Electric Alice and Go Tell the Women are tense, brooding and threatening. But when they do cut loose and go for it you really get your money’s worth, with tracks like the brilliant single No Pussy Blues – probably Nick Cave’s best raging stalker anthem since the towering Loverman (for ’tis his band, don’t you know – explanation here).

Honestly, I’d post half this album if I thought I could get away with it. If you want feral music with huge fucking balls that you are pretty sure would slam you over the desk and shag you hard up the arse if you turned your back on it for a second, then this is your baby.

Grinderman – Go Tell the Women
Grinderman – Honey Bee (Let’s Fly to Mars)

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