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

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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

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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

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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

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Recorded for you from the sunny, blazing hot mountains of Andalucia, this one is a little late being uploaded because we only just got back to Scotland and I decided I might as well wait until we got home before uploading it rather than charge all around Spain trying to find somewhere to upload from and then sitting around for ages waiting for the damn thing to… well, you get the picture.

I actually spent much of the week editing Toad Session videos, which seems just a tiny little bit pathetic, even to me.  Still, editing video whilst sat on the terrace with a beer, overlooking spectacular valley scenery isn’t exactly a hardship, but nevertheless, a holiday should be a bit more holiday-y than that I suppose.

I also think I may have happened to accidentally teach Mrs. Toad’s oldest friend’s kids some truly fucking appalling language too.  Honestly, who lets a retard like me anywhere near kids?

Direct download: Toadcast #135 – The Spaincast

01. The Japanese War Effort – Summer Sun Skateboard (02:20)
02. Benni Hemm Hemm – Shipcracks (06:15)
03. Hobart Smith & Texas Gladden – Down in the Willow Garden (13.39)
04. Blind Willie Johnson – I’m Gonna Run to the City of Refuge (16.24)
05. The Beach Boys – Sloop John B (21.02)
06. Sebastian Dangerfield – The Sycamore Tree (24.49)
07. Animal Magic Tricks – Heavenly Bodies (30.57)
08. Keaton Henson – Oliver Dalston Browning (36.27)
09. Fists – Ace is the Way (40.23)
10. Honeytrap – Little Johnny Winter (45.02)