Song, by Toad

Hello You.

This Wednesday 24th December (Christmas Eve, naturellement), at or around abouts 10pm GMT (USA: 2pm PST + 3pm MST + 4pm CST + 5pm EST; Europe: 11pm CET), splashed all over the interwaves via the usual birdshit splatter pattern, for your listening consideration, will be The Waiting Room Christmas Eve 3hr Best Of 2008 Round-Up Show.

On this very (quite, in this case, literally) Eve we, one half of Drunk Country & The Woman of The House, will be dishing out thoughtfully considered Gold Guitar Pick of Excellence ‘Awards’* to the lucky Nominee(s) what is found to be the Best Of in their particular category.

It’s almost like a real end of year music award’s show but with less drinking & no Gallagher brothers.

Below, then, is the list of Categories & Nominees, 34 Artistes + 34 Songs. We have rather cruelly (although this is clearly a cynical attempt at injecting some tension into the proceedings) refrained from listing the Nominees in the last 2 Categories. Those will be revealed on the night. Mwah, I believe, Ha Ha, indeed, Ha.

So, there you go.  This took us AGES to compile from thousands of songs listened to & playlisted over the whole of this past year. *PHEW* just does not cut it. 2008 was simply awash with brilliance, surprises, genius & plain old breathtaking musicalisation. Oh, & singing.

The list, then:

Best “What The Fuck Was That?!”

1) Celebrity Chimp – Celebrity Chimp

2) The Just Joans – Hey Boy… You’re Oh So Sensitive

3) Aidan John Moffat – Cunts

4) Eagleowl – Motherfucker

5) The Theatre Fire – Coyote

6) Joe Rodger & The Velcro Quartet – Suddenly They Realised…

Best Cover Versions

1) Robin Grey – There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis (Kirsty MacColl cover)

2) Erlend Ropstad – 7 (Prince cover)

3) The Miserable Rich – Over & Over (Hot Chip cover)

4) Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns ‘n’ Roses cover)

Best Contenders for a Bond Theme

1) Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Come On Over (Turn Me On)

2) The Last Shadow Puppets – In My Room

3) Get Well Soon – You/Aurora/You/Seaside

4) Hour Of The Shipwreck – Unclouded Eyes

Best Emotional Blackmail

1) Porlolo – Turning On Heels

2) Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers – Beloved, We Have Expired

3) The Dø – Stay (Just A Little Bit More)

4) Meaghan Smith – 5 More Minutes

5) Ane Brun – Don’t Leave

6) Plants & Animals – Bye Bye Bye

Best Pound Down The Back of The Sofa

Nominees 1-8 = a big fat question mark

Best Song of 2008

Nominees 1-6 = a bigger, fatter question mark

The podcast will be available, as we say, sometime tomorrow around 10pm (we have very limited access where we are headed for the holidays, so bear with us).

It remains only for us to wish every one of you all the very best this Christmas holiday & to remind you that our 3hr New Year’s Eve 2008 Jukebox show will be on (just like the title reads) Wednesday 31st December, from 10pm-1am GMT. See the New Year in with us, why don’t you?  (Yah, fucking right…).

Thanks for tuning in & listening. It’s been a heck of a year.

MC & a HNY,

½DC + TWoTH

*when we say ‘Awards’, what we really mean is  we will email a picture of a solid Gold Guitar Pick of Excellence – we’re not that unhinged that we’d actually fork out for 6 solid gold plectrums. Jesus, no.

Somewhat amazingly, this really isn’t very good. It’s not bad, certainly, and I doubt I could find anything explicit to criticise because they are ploughing what would generally be considered as Toad Soil here. Nevertheless, this is a flat, uninspired album that is barely the sum of its parts.

When I reviewed their first record, Ballad of the Broken Seas, I had this to say, and I think it still applies:

I think I’d have preferred one to accompany the other, rather than the collaboration – Lanegan bringing some menace to Campbell’s light and lovely tunes or for her to add a flavour of innocence to his brooding songs of morose dysfunction.

Basically, the point of a collaboration is to generate synergy, to become more than the sum of your parts, to find some je ne sais quoi in the mix. This doesn’t seem to ever ignite into anything that quite seems to embody the respective talents employed here. Mind you Lanegan does have something of a track record of mediocre collaborations: both of his Greg Dulli co-projects the Gutter Twins and the Twilight Singers were disappointing as well.

The problem here is that not only has the collaboration itself failed to produce any notable sparkle, but it also seems to have quashed the generally brilliant individual talents of the two protagonists. On their own, both of these guys are capable of brilliance, so maybe I’m just down on this because I was really looking forward to it. Campbell’s breathless, impish ingenue and Lanegan’s glowering misanthrope have produced some brilliant solo work but for some reason you stick ‘em together and it just doesn’t seem to work.

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Something to Believe
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Seafaring Song

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First things first – I didn’t realise that this album was entirely about sex, but after seeing these two in the flesh, it can’t be about anything else. Not that they were in any way sexual with each other, with us, or with anyone else. In fact they barely betrayed the slightest flicker of emotion between them all night. Except once. After the first song a wee Scottish lass piped up with “Mark Lanegan I love you” at which he gave an amused smirk and cast her a brief glance which can only be described as pitying.

No, the sex was entirely in the two of them as people. Isobel Campbell is an utter fox. Listening to her frail, plaintive voice you’d imagine someone closely approximating a woodland fairy to look at. What you get is a blond cutie in a short, slinky black mini-dress and knee high boots and the sort of look on her face that implies she’d strump you ’til your dentures rattled. With that voice! How?

Lanegan, on the other hand, evinced a sort of glowering, if-you-dare smoulder all night. To quote Beth from Lonesome Music:

“he is a big, surly, scary bugger and make no mistake about it. He refused point blank to talk to the audience and seemed to communicate with Isobel by eyebrow raise alone. The other band members gave him a wide berth. But he sure can sing.”

And that’s what it comes down to: without ever seeming to try he completely dominated the stage whenever he opened his mouth. And, come to think of it, whenever you so much as thought he might. His deep, terrifying growl comes from such a dark, ruined place you get the impression running off with him would be akin to allowing the devil himself to subsume your very soul. Fuck, I’m about as heterosexual as it gets and I bloody fancy him.

As a gig this was no better than good. Basically they ploughed through most of the tracks from Ballad of the Broken Seas, threw in a few from Lanegan’s solo stuff and some from Campbell’s Amorino (not from Milk White Sheets I notice – maybe she’s as lukewarm on that one as I am – or maybe Mark forbade it). The songs were all performed well, but I don’t feel I’ve learned too much more about them in a musical sense for seeing them live. And they used pre-recorded strings on a couple of tracks which gets right on my tits. If you can’t bring a string section, just bloody do without – that’s the whole bloody point of a live performance. It’s not like Isobel didn’t whip out her cello on occasion anyway.

So there were a few minor gripes, but it was a good gig on the whole. Really the whole point of it for me was hearing Mark Lanegan sing. Hearing his voice grip the entire audience by the throat on the closer, Wedding Dress, was worth it and more, all by itself.

Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Saturday’s Gone
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Ballad of the Broken Seas
Mark Lanegan – Wedding Dress