Well, after a thin couple of weeks there are some rather excellent things happening in Edinburgh over the next few days.  Except I won’t be here because of a wedding.  Drat.  People really shouldn’t get married.  Mrs. Toad and I are married now, that’s all the weddings there need to be.

Alternatively, I suppose, if people weren’t getting married all the time I might well take no holidays at all, so I suppose I should be a little less ungrateful and just take the opportunity to put my feet up.

Anyhow, the Ides of Toad makes a return as well, with our next gig on Wednesday.  Which is tomorrow!  You all better come.  Please.

Wednesday 16th May: Slow Down Molasses & Smackvan play The Ides of Toad at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

As I have mentioned already, Slow Down Molasses (see video above) were fantastic at The Great Escape.  The sound was a right bloody racket when they got all three guitars, keyboards and both drummers going, but they’re still a subtle band, with a light touch.  Smackvan are a somewhat quieter proposition, and their latest album is one of the best things to come out of Scotland this year.

Friday 18th May: The Still Corners, Honeyblood & Magic Eye at Sneaky Pete’s.

This show is in celebration of This is Music turning six, which is probably something like 57 in promoter years.  The lineup is bloody exceptional though, with newcomers the dreamy Magic Eye and the raucous Honeyblood providing local support to Subpop’s excellent Still Corners.

Saturday 19th May: Jonnie Common, Mitchell Museum & Gav from Over the Wall play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

Jonnie Common is a pop genius, pure and simple.  Mitchell Museum are back after officially retiring two years ago, and Gav from Over the Wall has some solo stuff coming out very soon.  So this, as much as there is, is probably Limbo royalty, just about.

Sunday 20th May: Jonquil & Sebastian Dangerfield at the Electric Circus.

Jonquil seem, according to their website anyway, to be tropical pop these days.  I am pretty sure when I saw them they were a sort of orchestral alt-folk band, although I could be wrong about that, because I was embarrassingly drunk at the time.  Anyhow, they’re playing the Electric Circus on Sunday, so you can find out for yourselves I suppose.

Welcome to Toadcast number 215.  This is called the Kingcast because I have been on a bit of run promoting gigs recently, with three in the last eight days or so.  Given almost none of my friends or music associates came to these gigs and that the list of attending guests on the Facebook event pages made for pretty grisly reading, I was grimly expecting the gigs to be absolutely awful – barely attended wastelands of funlessness – but every single one was brilliant.

The people who came were almost all people I didn’t know, with a few welcome exceptions, and the gigs themselves were absolutely immense fun.  There was probably more dancing this weekend that at anything Toad-related in history.

So today I have been looking through the forthcoming gigs and getting my ticket links live and stuff like that, and realising that we have some absolute stonkers coming up.  So with a bit of luck, and rather depending on whereabouts in the world you’re listening from, I might well see you there.

Dancing!  At a Toad gig!  I know!

Direct download: Toadcast #215 – The Kingcast

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01. Withered Hand – Heart Heart (00.26)
02. Willy Mason – Restless Fugitive (07.57)
03. Robert George Saull – One Sugar Day (16.47)
04. Narrow Sparrow – Joe Meeks Dream (22.59)
05. The Dirty Three – Sometimes I Forget You’ve Gone (28.41)
06. Jad Fair, Hifiklub & KPT Michigan (32.20)
07. Jonnie Common – I’ll Be Back (38.17)
08. Shudderpulps – Time (45.10)
09. Honeyblood – No Spare Key (48.33)
10. The Soft Walls – Black Cat (54.06)

I am not doing predictions, mostly because I can’t.  I have no idea what is going to be big this year and what isn’t, and even if I think a band is going to release something amazing that probably doesn’t matter, because bands I love rarely ever get all that famous anyway.  But in any case, and in no particular order, here are some things I liked about last year, and some things I didn’t.   Some stuff I’d like to see more of and some things I am looking forward to, and some things I am not.

“Something wicked this way comes”

(And by wicked, I mean good, I hear that’s how the kids are using the term these days)

Tape labels - I know they’re a little contrived, and that tape is in many ways a shit format to release on but… I don’t know, there’s a playful, youthful energy to this stuff which I can’t help but love.

You’re shit, and you know you are - Okay, so we may have swallowed an awful lot of guff this year, but it did make me laugh how most people’s reaction to pompous, self-important garbage like (Viva) Brother was to point and laugh.

The X-Factor - you know how you all complain about that shitey bar full of guys in Ralph Lauren shirts or stupidly tight t-shirts, or girls with ironed hair in tight jeans who seem to forget that Footballers’ Wives was over fucking years ago? Well the X-Factor is a bit like this.  Yes, it’s fucking woeful, but it’s destroying the major labels, clearing the ground for the interesting indies and acting as a very helpful retard-sink for people who might otherwise be bothering us with their opinions about real music.  And for this I salute it.

Recognition for our fucking bands! – King Post Kitsch proved that even if you never play a single gig, and even if you release your album really early in the year you can still get great press and end up on loads of End of Year lists.  Lach got in every glossy music mag in the country – yes, that’s right, all of them.  The Japanese War Effort proved that even if you get almost no press, if people like your stuff enough then social networks can be just as effective, if not more so. And Rob St. John showed rather decisively that even if your PR lady craps out on you mid-campaign, if your shit is good, when it hits the fan it will go absolutely fucking everywhere.

“I’ve only got three bullets and there’s four of Motley Crue”

01.Easter – Somethin’ American This might be the first time such an unknown song by such an unknown band has ever been given top spot on any of my end of year lists, but they were absolutely brilliant live when they played up here in September, and this song is just fantastic, as are the other two songs on their Soundcloud page.  It’s less lo-fi than a lot of the DIY stuff I’ve listened to this year, and the squalling solos which tease Easter’s songs to an end evoke loads of old school US indie music.  This gives quite tight pop songs a loose, expressive, emotive finale and when they get going live these bits really are amazing.

02.Crystal Swells – Patent Trolls This is another absolute peach of a song which went straight from a PR email to the very front of my brain for the entire year.  I had this on tape in the van for months, and I go back to it again and again.  This one is probably more menacing, compared to the reckless pace of the rest of the album, but that opening riff and the crescendo to which the song builds are just absolutely fucking blinding.

03.Ringo Deathstarr – Do It Every Time Alright, this is the highest-placed pure pop song on this list.  A simple guitar rhythm and a simple tune, delivered with plenty of pace and energy.  This is one to leap around to, pure and simple, and just about the best one of its kind this year.

04.The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 I played this on the podcast last week and struggled to introduce it then, as I probably will now. Firstly, I have hardly heard anyone sing anything about the twin towers attacks without sounding just a little bit forced and uncomfortable when doing so, but this manages it with some aplomb.  And then to have that kind of subject matter twinned with such and incredibly rousing song is an odd and absolutely brilliant juxtaposition.

05.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit This was one of those ‘what the fuck am I even listening to?’ moments, the first time I heard it. It’s old fashioned music, what I can only really describe in my cultural ignorance as soda-stream pop, and it’s not that unusual exactly, there’s just something weird about it.  It’s a bit unsettling, a bit out of focus somehow, and at the same time absolutely brilliant.

06.Josh T Pearson – Thou Art Loosed The solo album may not hark back to Lift to Experience all that much, but this song, the first on the album, seems to have just enough of that shimmering texture to link the two eras of Josh T. Pearson’s music together.  And that repeated “I’m off to save the world” seems to rather sadly presage the tales of personal failure which make this album so uncomfortably compelling.

08.Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon A muffled, growly mess, but it’s got such momentum and drive that I can’t stop listening to it.  It’s rough, muffled, growly shoegazey guitar stuff with a great riff.

07.Jonnie Common – Photosynth Alright, it’s possible I might have included this when it was a Down the Tiny Steps song, so including it again seems like a bit of a cheat.  Doesn’t matter though, this is pop brilliance.  And the video was shot in our back garden too!

09.Timber Timbre – Woman Is that seriously a sax on there?  Why yes, yes indeed it is, and it’s brilliant.  This is one of the biggest songs on the album and one of the most surprising too, given the relatively extravagant instrumentation.

10.Milk Maid – Back Of Your Knees I am absolutely delighted with the band’s Toad Session recordings, not least because I was so apprehensive about the actual recording process.  This might be my album highlight, as much for its more raucous live incarnation as this excellent version.

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11.David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got No Sole The first song we heard from DTB’s fantastic album, and perhaps the poppiest of the lot.  Catchy, unusual and immensely hummable.

12.Kurt Vile – Baby’s Arms Another album from which it is tricky to extricate just one song as a highlight, but for some reason I’m giving this the nod above Jesus Fever or Puppet to the Man. I think it’s the most late night and glass of red winey song on the album, but it’s close.

13.The Sandwitches – Lightfoot Are you still allowed to describe songs as joyous romps these days?  Because that’s what this feels like, an idiosyncratic, gleeful romp of a song.

14.Josh T Pearson – Country Dumb It’s hard to pick out just one song from this record, but this one seems to stand out for some reason.  Maybe it’s related to the number of times I’ve heard it and the circumstances, but there’s an unsettling fatalism to this which lifts it above the autobiographical confessional of the rest of the album.

15.John Knox Sex Club – Above Us the Waves This kind of sincere, epic grandiosity is really difficult to pull off without coming across as a bit po-faced or joyless, but this is just spell-binding.

16.Jonnie Common – Summer Is For Going Places There are so many incredible songs on this Jonnie Common album I could easily have picked four or five for the Festive Fifty, but I didn’t want the whole thing to be dominated by one or two artists.  Summer is For Going Places is as laid back and infectious as the rest of Master of None.

17.Crystal Swells – Mellow Californian Another masterpiece of feral, overloaded lo-fi brilliance.  And no matter how messy they make this stuff, Crystal Swells always make sure the pop song isn’t lost, so it may not sound like it, but I reckon they know exactly what they’re doing.

18.Yoofs – John Actor is Monkfish I love the chorus on this, the vocal refrain, how well-controlled the momentum of the song is – and once again we have an unknown DIY band with two songs in my Festive Fifty.  Keep an eye on Art is Hard Records in the new year.

19.Hookworms – Teen Dreams For unheard of DIY bands to produce stuff with this much oomph is unusual.  This is from a self-titled 12″ now out on Faux Discx, and it’s, well, epic, I suppose is the best way to describe it.

20.Easter – Damp Patch For a band with three songs on a Soundcloud page and nothing else, I am a bit wary of over-stating my own enthusiasm for this band.  They have a sort of slow-burn to them, but then that spills over into raucous endings, a bit proggy, a bit krauty and all messy.  This track isn’t their most aggressive, but it’s bloody great.

21.Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Of Scottish Blood And Sympathies Epic, post-rocky, shoegazey awesomeness from a band who threw their biggest beast of a track down right at the very beginning of their debut album.

22.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams The weird sense of otherworldly fuzz on this record made it absolutely compelling from the first listen.  It’s like listening to a lost gem from the sixties with a brain so addled you can barely make out the stereo.

23.Jarad Miles – Miles Away Rocketship is a lovely record, and there are some gorgeous, touching songs on it, but perhaps the quietest, most low-key one of the lot caught my attention the most – touching and full of pathos.

24.Pillars and Tongues – Thank you Oaky Grandiose and beautiful, rich and enveloping – if one song sums up why you should own and love this album then I reckon it might be this one.

25.The Sandwitches – Heaviest Head In The West As much as the jaunty, carefree pop songs on this album caught my attention, one of the best songs on the album is this one, which is both far darker and contains one of the most arresting, enigmatic squeals in pop history.

26.Elbow – Lippy Kids I am not all that into the new Elbow album, but this track is an absolute blinder.  It’s gorgeous, and contains some of Guy Garvey’s most poignant lyrics.

27.Crystal Stilts – Shake The Shackles It wasn’t all that consistent an album, but there are some cracking songs – sort of like the Ringo Deathstarr album in that sense – and this is the best of them.  The crooned delivery almost has a New Romantic edge to it, but the rest of the song is shoegazey, garagey goodness.

28.FOUND – Machine Age Dancing The wonky breakdown in this had me sending text messages to the band the first time I heard it.  Songs like Vincent Gallo and Anti-Climb Paint may have been well familiar to FOUND fans by the time Factorycraft came out, but they kept plenty of gems to themselves, and this is one of them.

29.Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce This is far from a vintage album, but the deranged crashing about of this song is probably as close as Bad as Me gets to vintage Tom Waits.

30.Palms – Wolf Despite the really, really rough recording (those cymbal crescendoes actually quite hurt my ears) this is still clearly a brilliant song.  It’s a more brooding approach to garage rock (and I use that term, as with all genre terms, extremely loosely) than some of the more frantic stuff I’ve heard this year, and is a song I played something like ten times consecutively the first time I heard it.

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1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

 Here we are at the penultimate podcast of the year, and the one immediately preceding Christmas.  I really don’t like 99% of Christmas music so there’s pretty close to none of it at all on here, although I have made a couple of exceptions as a lazy sort of nod to the season.  Let’s face it, if the druids can be arsed dancing about like idiots around Stonehenge and people can fall out over half-defrosted turkeys then I can probably make the effort to shove a couple of token musical nods onto a single podcast, can’t I.

I actually take a lot of this podcast from my recently-published albums of the year list, and from my as-yet-unpublished Festive Fifty, so it’s a bit of a yearly roundup as well.

And in fact, seeing as Christmas is a Sunday, I won’t actually be posting until Boxing Day now, so this will be the last post before Christmas so umm, in the off-chance I don’t bump into you on Facebook, Twitter or down the pub, I better wish you Happy Christmas now, hadn’t I.

Direct download: Toadcast #206 – The Scroogecast

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01. Tom Lehrer – A Christmas Carol (00.23)
02. The Black Tambourines – Bad Days (05.09)
03. The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 (10.42)
04. Timber Timbre – Woman (13.31)
05. Sons of Joy – Pig (20.25)
06. The Japanese War Effort – Our Land Could be Your Life (24.51)
07. Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand (31.37)
08. Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams (35.39)
09. Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon (41.37)
10. The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name (47.46)
11. Sons of Joy – In the Bleak Midwinter (58.07)
12. Sons of Joy – Coventry Carol (60.00)

 So, ta-daaah, here we go, what all right-thinking people have been enjoying most this year.  And if you haven’t been enjoying these most this year, then dammit, what do you do when I tell you what opinions to have about music, ignore me?  Surely such a thing is inconceivable.

As those of you who listened to last week’s podcast, where I played two songs from the more forgotten albums on my first ever Albums of the Year list (2004), I am actually more fascinated by these lists in retrospect than at the time.

Looking back at this list in five or ten years, the interesting albums won’t be the ones I am still listening to, but the ones I am not.  I am sure practical details, like whether I have them on vinyl or tape or just digitally, will play a role, as will drifting fads and fashions.  But sometimes it really does just seem to be random – albums just drift out of favour for no really obvious reason.  Or, as has been the case with Kurt Vile this year, some albums seem to remain favourites for ages, despite not necessarily being the ones which grabbed you the first time.

So enjoy, this is what I have been mostly enjoying this year.  And a fine list it is too, I hope you will agree.

 10: The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient This is a very late entrant to this list, because for some reason I didn’t really listen to this album at all until the last month or two, but it’s bloody brilliant, managing to drift from ambient dreamers to Springsteen-like rockers to melancholy acoustica perfectly seamlessly. And the other joy of it is: another back catalogue to explore, too!

The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name

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 9: Pillars & Tongues – The Pass and Crossings This is a stunning album from what I think must be my favourite record label of the year: Empty Cellar.  They have released three albums in my top twenty this year, and worked with the artist who released another, and that’s before we get into the singles.  This album is grandiose, beautiful and all those words like sweeping and elegiac which journalists love to use so much.  Except in this case it actually is.

Pillars & Tongues – Palms to Tell

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 8: Milk Maid – Yucca This record is actually a collection of lo-fi home recordings, but somehow the end result has got real style. Not charmingly rough and ready style, although it has that too, but a real sense of swagger.  It’s not as frantic and noisy as a lot of its lo-fi brethren this year, either.  Recording Milk Maid’s Toad Session was probably one of my favourite things this year.

Milk Maid – Can’t You See

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 7: The Sandwitches – Mrs. Jones’ Cookies A little like Sonny & the Sunsets, this album doesn’t entirely click on every single song, but it does on most.  And beyond the pop tunes, there’s a wild, wailing quality to this which had me scrunching up my face in incomprehension for the first few listens.  ‘What the f…  did they just… are they…serious?‘ It didn’t take too long for it to click though, and I have since been foisting this record on visitors to our house all year.

The Sandwitches – Summer of Love

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 6: David Thomas Broughton – Outbreeding This is a disciplined and polished pop record from a man more commonly known for spending most of his gigs figuring out just how much he can antagonise his audience before they give up altogether.  A favourite of mine since I first saw him at the End of the Road Festival in something like 2008 or 2009, I couldn’t have been much more surprised by this album, but it’s fucking brilliant nevertheless.

David Thomas Broughton – Nature

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  5: Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for my Halo I am getting into ‘every damn list on the internet has this album on it’ territory here, but balls to it, I still love this record.  I actually struggle to explain why though, because it’s not gripping, weird, striking or anything.  It is, in fact, an entirely straightforward collection of songs crooned over fairly minimal guitar, bass and drums, at a relatively middle of the road pace.  But for some reason I find the whole album one I have gone back to again and again and again all year.

Kurt Vile – Puppet to the Man

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 4: Crystal Swells – Goethe Head Soup This is one of the mostly ferociously-recorded things I’ve heard all year, with barely the slightest quarter given to the listener’s more delicate aural sensibilities.  But underneath all the buzzing, distorted racket, and despite the headache-inducing nine-minute kick in the ears that is the title track, this mini-album holds a half dozen of the finest pop songs I’ve heard all year.

Crystal Swells – Waco, Wasilla, Waikiki

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  3: Jonnie Common – Master of None Pure genius, this one.  This album has charm to spare, but it’s not as straightforward as it seems.  The actual sounds Jonnie uses in assembling his songs are really quite unusual, but the results are pure, joyous pop.  He seems to have pulled off the trick of being an experimental musician, but keeping that fact completely undercover, and making us all think he’s created the pop record of the year.  Which of course he has.

Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand

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2: Timber Timbre – Creep on Creepin’ On I don’t know what it is about the ghostly voodoo stuff these guys do which I love so much.  Certainly with the increasingly deep arrangements there is a certain theatricality to this record, but then instrumentals like Obelisk and Swamp Magic could as easily be found in one of Tom Waits’ more flamboyant nightmares as they could on the stage, or indeed a contemporary pop record. Creep On Creepin’ On is never pompous or overblown though, and displays a remarkable deftness of touch, particularly with the more

Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On

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  1: Josh T. Pearson – Last of the Country Gentlemen I hesitated a long time before putting Last of the Country Gentlemen at the top of this list. Apart from the fact that at times the word enjoyable isn’t exactly the right one to apply, the whole album seems to belong in a slightly different category to everything else.  It’s just different to all the other albums, and it feels difficult to actually compare the emotional response to this to the emotional response I’ve had to everything else.  But in the end, between SXSW, Homegame, an aborted and a successful Toad Session, the number of times I’ve heard these songs and the effect they’ve had on me, there is little doubt that this, even if it isn’t my favourite album of the year per se, is still the album which dominated 2011 and is almost certainly the album by which I will remember it.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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11-20

 Having been sick all week it is a bloody miracle there’s been anything written on this blog at all, never mind the fountain of insightful commentary we have seen since Monday.  Pulitzers, here we come!

“And the Nobel Prize for Gin and Swearing goes to…”

Anyhow, I am having one of those ‘what the fuck kind of a world do we fucking live in?’ weeks, which I generally dismiss as the indulgence of old people who forget how shit things actually were in their youth.

But this week we have seen the forcible suppression of peaceful protesters in the States, the criminalisation of the equally peaceful Fortnum & Mason’s protesters in the UK, the classification of pizza as ‘a portion of vegetables’ in the guidelines for providing balanced meals in US schools, Sepp Blatter suggesting that racist abuse can be laughed off with a handshake (to howls of outrage from the English press, whose own national football captain was caught on film recently calling someone a ‘fucking black cunt’) and our government subsidising the private sector by sending them slave labour in the form of the jobless, whose benefits will be withheld if they don’t obey.

My taxes may well be spent on some dubious projects, but damned if they should be spent paying the wages of fucking Tesco employees, thank you very fucking much.

So, swearing over with.  As I will be on the radio later I needed to get that out of my system now, lest I sully the ears of Edinburgh’s sensitive student population with naughty words.  I will be joined, of course, by El Parks and Brian Pokora on Fresh Air radio at 3:30pm, and for those of you who are out and about on Saturdays when our pals from Live From the Latin Quarter are broadcasting, then you can always listen to them again on Mixcloud here.

On air from 3:30pm UK time – listen live here.

And in the meantime, here are five silly questions for those of you with an afternoon to waste.  Friday is of course de-lurking amnesty on Song, by Toad, so if you’ve been reading for a while but never quite been arsed to chip in and say hello, why not do it today.  Let’s face it, nothing you say can possibly be as inane as what the rest of us will be coming out with for most of the afternoon.

1. What would you set the jobless to do, if you had them at your disposal?
2. Most spurious ‘portion of fruit or veg’ claim you can imagine.
3. Most hateful athlete.
4. Worst old people moan.
5. Worst old people moan you find yourself letting slip occasionally.

And the playlist for the radio show will appear live below from half three.

1. Yo La Tengo – Tom Courtenay
2. Adam Stafford – Shot Down You Summer Wannabes
3. P.S. I Love You – Facelove
4. The Twilight Sad – That Summer at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy
5. Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand
6. Phoenix – Fences (Friendly Fires Remix)
7. Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon
8. The Pixies – Where is My Mind (Bass Nectar Remix)
9. Wounded Knee – Hares on the Mountain
10. Sugar Baby – Dock Boggs
11. Clarence Ashley – Cuckoo Bird
12. The Black Keys – The Only One

Sorry about the delay getting this post up, but today has been the day of bureaucracy.  Magnificent, steaming bureaucracy.

Anyhow, apart from the momentous occasion of my birthday, there’s actually quite a bit going on in Edinburgh this week. If you’re really quick, and really keen you can nip down to the Liquid Room tonight and catch Wild Beasts.  Their latest album may be a little tepid, despite the frantic fluffing from Drowned in Sound, but Two Dancers was incredible and they are a cracking live band.

Also, Yuck are playing Cabaret Voltaire on Saturday, but I think that might be sold out as I can’t seem to find tickets.  Besides, you should be at the Wee Red Bar instead anyway.

In the meantime, a flu has come down pretty hard over the course of the day, so I feel like shit.  I will now proceed to spit out these gig blurbs as fast as I possibly can and scarper for the bed toot sweet.

Thursday 17th November 2011: Vic Galloway presents… Remember Remember, Jonnie Common & Adam Stafford at the Electric Circus.

The second in the ongoing series of ‘Vic Galloway Presents’ gigs at the Electric Circus, with the awesome Jonnie Common, the Christ-I-can’t-believe-I’ve-yet-to-see-him-live Adam Stafford, mastermind behind Wiseblood Industries, and the I-don’t-really-know-much-about-them-at-all-sorry Remember Remember.

Friday 18th November 2011: An Evening with Wounded Knee – “House Music” album launch show with Kittens & The Wee Rogue at the IsoLounge.

Gerry Loves Records are launching their next tape release, Wounded Knee’s House Music, with a night at the cosy Iso Lounge, former home of the much-missed Leith Tape Club.  Drew will be joined by the whispers of The Wee Rogue, and a band called Kittens, who are apparently one part of 7VWWVW and a chap from The Divine Comedy, which sounds as odd as it does fascinating.

Friday 18th November 2011: Liz Green, Emily Scott & Caro Bridges at the Electric Circus.

This, I think it goes without saying, will be stylish and lovely.  Emily Scott was excellent at her recent album launch at the Third Door, and Liz Green is always bloody marvellous.

Liz Green – French Singer

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Saturday 19th November 2011: Gummy Stumps, Weird Era & Battery Face play the Ides of Toad at the Wee Red Bar.

Without doubt *cough cough* the gig of the week will be at Wee Red Bar on Saturday, on the day I just coincidentally happen to turn thirty-six and intend to celebrate with copious amounts of bevvy.  This will be loud and dirty, and honestly I could have happily put any of the three bands as headliners.  Come along, clap the bands, point and laugh at the Toad!

Weird Era – Summer Heights

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Battery Face – Lurch

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Gummy Stumps by winningspermparty

Saturday 19th November 2011: An evening with Richard Youngs at the Canon’s Gait.

I know next to nothing about Richard Youngs, I must confess, but anything with the joint seal of approval of Braw Gigs and Tracer Trails will be at worst interesting and at best absolutely fucking amazing.  As I said, I feel like shit, so forgive the laziness of pasting a wee bit of the press release below:

“With hundreds of solo and collaborative releases on countless labels (including his own “No Fans” label) Richard’s music has been heaped with accolades since the 1990’s. Whether through his collaborations with the likes of Simon Wickham-Smith, Jandek, Neil Campbell or Makoto Kawabata, or in his solo work encompassing the starkest minimalism, lush acapella and acoustic balladry, Richard adds a touch of humanity to any project he’s involved with – a rare thing in the sterile surroundings of the experimental scene.”

The above photo is of the Palm House in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens, and was taken and passed on to me by Dylan, of Blueback Hotrod legend.  And given that the weather outside is all kinds of shit I thought there would be a sort of bitter irony in using it today.  See – that’s how nice Edinburgh can be, so what the fuck is this pissing rain all about?

Anyhow, traditional British whingeing aside, it’s going to be a pretty bloody mental week this week. Thursday is going to be a particular swine, what with the awesome David Dondero going up against the Fruit Tree Foundation night in Leith, as well as the Travelling Band/Jonnie Common show at the Electric Circus.  Then it’s Oxjam takeover time on Friday.  Then Rob St. John’s album launch on Saturday.  Fucking hell, I’m going to have a liver like a cricket ball  by Sunday.

Wednesday 19th October 2011: This is Music presents Denis Jones & Adam Stafford at Sneaky Pete’s.

My pal Howard, who runs Humble Soul Records down in Manchester, absolutely raves about Denis Jones, as does Jonnie Common, and I can’t imagine two people whose recommendations I would take more seriously.  Apparently Mr. Jones does a lot of looped vocal stuff, but everyone who has told me about it has qualified that with ‘yeah, but it’s nothing like you’d expect’.  Intriguing.

Denis Jones – Elvis

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Thursday 20th October 2011: David Dondero at the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

David Dondero is kind of under the radar, I suppose, but from the relatively little I know about him, he can be fucking spectacular.  Rothko Chapel was one of my songs of the year a couple of years ago, and his sparse, acoustic Americana is really gorgeous.

David Dondero – Rothko Chapel

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Thursday 20th October 2011: The Fruit Tree Foundation presents James Yorkston, Rod Jones & Withered Hand at Nobles, Leith.

The Fruit Tree Foundation was set up by former Idlewild gentleman Rod Jones and former Delgado Emma Pollock to raise awareness for the Mental Health Foundation. My personal knowledge is a little sketchy, but I think musicians have volunteered to act as mentors for young songwriters, and together to create new music, and I think it is this which will be performed in Nobles on Thursday. Given the calibre of the musicians involved, it should be really good.

Thursday 20th October 2011: The Travelling Band & Jonnie Common at the Electric Circus.

Jonnie Common actually worked on a track by Adam Gorman of the Travelling Band for his recent Deskjob project, so this pairing makes plenty of sense from that perspective.  As to how the rousing Americana of the band and Jonnie’s idiosyncratic electropop will go together musically, erm… well, remains to be seen.

Adam P. Gorman – Hitchhiker (from Jonnie Common’s Deskjob)

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Friday 21st October 2011: Oxjam Edinburgh Takeover (Facebook link).

This is a beast of an event, with gigs happening at the Electric Circus, Cabaret Voltaire, Sneaky Pete’s, The Banshee Labyrinth and the (recently resurrected) Left Banke.  The full list of bands thus far confirmed as playing is as follows: As In Bear, Black International, Broken Records (solo), Citizens, Dead Boy Robotics, Endor, Esperi, FOUND, French Wives, i build collapsible mountains, The Last Battle, Letters, Loch Awe, The Machine Room, Meursault, PAWS, Sebastian Dangerfield, The Spook School, Trapped in Kansas, Trapped Mice, Vasquez and Verse Metrics.  It’s going to be a beast of a night, I suspect, but you’re own your own with this one, I am not digging out links for all those bands, nor attempting to describe them.  Just go.

Saturday 22nd October 2011: Rob St. John album launch with Meursault, eagleowl & Viking Moses at Pilrig St. Paul’s.

Personally, I think this is damned close to being the lineup of the year.  I’d like to see anyone else top it, in any case.  This is also, the header implies, the launch show for Rob St. John’s gorgeous debut album Weald, out on 12″ gatefold vinyl at the end of November. We have partnered with John Truckasaurus to add Viking Moses to a bill already bursting with goodness. Tickets are available at Avalanche Records and online, here.

Rob St. John – Your Phantom Limb by Song, by Toad

Saturday 22nd October 2011: Patrick Wolf at the Liquid Room.

Alright, alright, a few of you might well raise an eyebrow at this one, but I remember when Patrick Wolf first broke through.  His brand of flamboyant, baroque pop was a bit over the top perhaps, but it certainly had a certain element of fascination.  So I may of course be personally endorsing Rob St. John’s album launch, but this one still kinda caught my eye.