I had an awesome week of live music last week, from the Dylan Uncovered on Thursday (from which there is some recorded audio of Esperi and Yusuf Azak’s sets here), to Ringo Deathstarr on Friday and finally Conquering Animal Sound on Saturday.

This week promises to be a little more spread out, but nevertheless just as good.  As well as the return of the Ides of Toad gigs on Saturday (with an ear-carressingly excellent lineup, I might add) we will be recording a Toad Session with Armellodie Records‘ Thirty Pounds of Bone.  The Rob St. John one will be published this Saturday as well, and Rob himself will be here all week recording his debut album, so I am going to be like a giddy little puppy until the inevitable crash on Sunday, I would imagine.

In other news, I assume you’ve heard about Radiohead’s new album?  Presumably inspired by Edinburgh’s Gerry Loves Records, they are releasing the world’s second ever record packaged in newsprint.  Ah well, we all need to draw inspiration from somewhere, and apparently the Hollies don’t have any more good songs to rip off*.

I have to confess that I don’t think Radiohead have released anything which has been much cop since Amnesiac, but I really do salute their excellent adjustment to selling music in the Twenty-First Century.  I know this is all much easier when you are already as famous as they are, but absolutely no-one has adjusted as well, as quickly or as consistently innovatively as they have.  The special edition isn’t even all that pricey – just thirty quid – and I bet it’s fucking gorgeous.

Anyhow, where were we?  Oh yes, gigs:

Tuesday 15th February 2011: Ryan Francesconi, Rob St.John & The Wee Rogue at Old St. Paul’s Church on Jeffrey Street.

Ryan Francesconi is a composer who does a lot of arranging for Joanna Newsom (who has described him as a genius on more than one occasion).  He has recorded several albums of his own, including some amazing solo guitar stuff, which he will be performing on Tuesday, along with some of his Balkan stuff.  Support will come from the excellent Wee Rogue and from Rob St. John – and for those who worry about duplicating their entertainment, Rob will be playing a totally different set to Saturday’s Ides of Toad gig, so I strongly recommend going to both.

Wednesday 16th February 2011: The Last Battle, Letters & Oso Street Outreach at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

This is an interesting one.  I was contacted by Letters’ US PR guys before the band had ever played in Edinburgh, which is actually their hometown.  They were described recently by The Pop Cop as ‘Scotland’s hottest new band’, which seems a little odd for a band who has never played a gig yet, and you can preview a couple of their songs here if you like, and read their interview with Kowalskiy here.

Thursday 17th February 2011: Kill it Kid & Scoundrels at the Electric Circus.

I wasn’t as smitten with the Kill it Kid album as I had expected to be, but by all accounts they are a irresistible force live, and I reckon this could well be worth a punt.  The vocals alone are powerful as hell, and when their bluesy rock ‘n’ roll really gets going I reckon it could be pretty bloody impressive.

Kill it Kid – Send Me and Angel Down

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Saturday 19th February 2011: Rob St.John, Ziggy Campbell & Thirty Pounds of Bone at the Wee Red Bar.

This is going to be a bonanza of goodness.  As well as the awesomeness promised in the official lineup, we also have a special guest added to the bill who we are, for carbonated beverage-related reasons, having to pretend is a secret (the only American band on the label, named after a certain Scottish lake, you get the picture).  Also, Thirty Pounds of Bone will be travelling up from the very bottom left hand corner of the island to play a rare gig up here, and people have told me that the last time they saw him, he was so good that they travelled halfway across Scotland to seem him play the next day again.  Oh, and Rob has promised to play Fucking Loud, by all accounts, so I am expecting heckles of ‘Judas!’ from you.  And if your musical knickers weren’t damp enough already, we also have that Ziggy fella from FOUND, whose own album is released in a few weeks too.  100% pure unadulterated lineup gold!

Loch Lomond – Elephants & Little Girls (Toad Session)

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Saturday 19th February 2011: French Wives EP Launch at Sneaky Pete’s.

Sneaky’s have some really good stuff programmed in for the next month or two, so it’s worth just generally checking out their listings, but this is the one which stood out for me this week.

French Wives – Me vs. Me

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*Dear Radiohead fanatics, that was a joke.  Please do not form an angry mob and try and burn the house down because you hate me for poking gentle fun at your favourite band.

October? Jesus, you must be kidding, that means Autumn and everything. You can feel it in the air actually, and in fact it’s been there for a couple of weeks now. Blech. Booring. Still, dark evenings in with a glass of wine and a record player is a fine way to spend an evening.

I am still absolutely buzzed off my tits after the weekend. Neil from Meursault and Frances Magic Tricks and Pete Leg were recording in the house this weekend and fucking hell it sounds like it’s going to be gorgeous. They’ve put together a nine-song album which, assuming everything gets negotiated cleanly, we will be releasing on 12″ vinyl probably early next year or late this, and it is going to be fucking amazing. I can’t sit still at Proper Job at all – I just want to get home and get the mixing process started.

On the subject of albums, Yusuf Azak is in town this week and has apparently been recording for his debut album for the last while. That also sounds incredibly promising, and I can’t wait to hear stuff from that one either. EXCITING, people! The last six months of the noughties (oh how I hate that phrase) is shaping up to be a really rather excellent one in terms of local music.

After an apparently excellent Versus night last month (which I missed, apologies) the Black Spring gentlemen return Limbo to the Edinburgh gig diary after a two or three month break. They’ve invited Toad favourites Inspector Tapehead through from Glasgow to play, the night after another Toad Records band, Jesus H. Foxx, play at Sneaky’s.

Tuesday 6th October 2009: Casiokids & Stanley Odd at Electric Circus.

Alright, this may not be exactly my bag, but listening to something hip-hoppy with an obvious Scottish accent is downright weird. And besides, if I were to be bored with indie-folk-pop etc etc then this looks like a pretty interesting lineup.

Wednesday 7th October 2009: Kill It Kid, Sparrow & the Workshop & Yusuf Azak at Cabaret Voltaire.

I am curious to see Kill It Kid. I’m not all that convinced by their recorded music, but they are supposed to be phenomenal live, and I can well believe it. It’s been bloody ages since I saw Sparrow & the Workshop too, and Yusuf Azak

Kill It Kid – Send Me an Angel Down

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Thursday 8th October 2009: FOUND & Road to Tokyo at the Bowery.

I have been reliably informed that FOUND will be taking this opportunity to give some material from their new album a first airing, so I wouldn’t miss this if I were you.  And given that Come in Tokyo have recently split, this the Road Thereto is going to be the only chance you get to see Allan Pebble wielding an electric guitar with purpose for the foreseeable future.

Friday 9th October 2009: Jesus H. Foxx & the Boycotts play This is Music at Sneaky Pete’s.

I believe it is Jamie from This Is Music’s birthday on Friday, so this one should be raucous.  I don’t know the Boycotts that well, but the Foxx are getting tighter and tighter live, and a sweaty, drinky night like this should be great fun.

Friday 9th October 2009: X Lion Tamer & Devil Disco at the Bongo Club.

You know, it’s been ages since I went to a gig at the Bongo Club.  I like their stage – everyone gets a good view because it’s high and almost in the round – despite the fact that the club itself is more than a little scruffy, so it’s a surprisingly good place to hold a gig.

Saturday 10th October 2009: Inspector Tapehead, Mickey 9s & X in the O play Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms.

Partly it’s good to see Limbo back on the Edinburgh gig calendar, and partly it’s extremely good to see the rhythmic weirdness of Inspector Tapehead back over here.  I don’t know the other two bands, but the Limbo lads are extremely reliable in putting together a good lineup.

Inspector Tapehead – Humdinger

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Saturday 10th October 2009: Micachu & the Shapes at Sneaky Pete’s.

It may be a surprise to see me recommending a band like Micachu, but I saw them at Limbo last year and actually thought they were really good.  There’s a bag of energy in their performance, and they are just melodic enough that I found myself really enjoying them despite it not being a style of music I normally warm to.

Helloooo people.  This morning the Toadcast comes to you from Leith.  There were beers and there was a fuckload of incoherent rambling, and it ran way over time but, erm, who really cares?

This week I went to visit my crippled friend Steven (v? ph?) Kearney in Leith and we recorded a podcast in his house prattling on about all the usual nonsense.  He got all jumpy about sound quality, omitting to notice the fact that the Toadcasts are the most incredibly badly recorded show on the interwaves.  Honestly, why would this week be the one single week it suddenly didn’t sound like shit?

Still, Steven has recently started his own podcast, leading on from his Fresh Air show Dylan and the Mule.  It’s only one episode down, but it sounds very promising indeed, so with a bit of luck there could be very good things coming from that part of the world this year.  Me, I just desperately need a sleep.  Night night Toadlings.

I will probably be gawping at the wonderful Cybraphon by the time you read this.  With a hangover.

Toadcast #81 – The Mulecast

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01. Withered Hand – No Cigarettes (06.56)
02. Buster Fantastic – Mess of Me (17.57)
03. Mountain Goats – Genesis 3-23 (19.47)
04. Kill It Kid – Send Me an Angel Down (29.07)
05. Joe Cocker – Dear Landlord (33.51)
06. Loch Lomond – Blood Bank (44.52)
07. Micah P. Hinson – Don’t You Forget (Parts 1 & 2) (59.24)
08. The Palace Flophouse – Until My Lungs Hurt (64.52)
09. Tom Waits – A Little Rain (78.17)

This week I welcome you to the absolutely 100% guaranteed non-controversial podcast.  Nothing to see here. Move along.  Although, it might be slightly controversial, just possibly, around two thirds of the way through if you are excessively religious or perhaps if you have some objection to pointing and laughing as Jade Goody dies of cancer or Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse slowly expire in the full and relentless gaze of the public eye.

Has anyone seen the film Deathwatch?  It’s set in Glasgow in the 1980s and almost entirely obscure, despite an amazing cast: Romy Schneider, Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow.  What it amounts to is that a woman discovers that she is going to die, and then a TV company ask to buy the rights to film her last weeks.  It’s a bit over the top at times, but a pretty visionary movie nevertheless.  It’s always disconcerting where something like that makes a prediction which proves to be so uncannily true.  I think the scariest thing about 1984 is how utterly determined the species seems to be to make sure that it comes true.

If you can find a copy, I’d recommend that you watch it.  It’s pretty hard to track down though – we had to get ours from Amazon France for some bizarre reason, so good luck to you.

Toadcast #60 – The Blandcast

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1. Belle & Sebastian – Women’s Realm (04.41)
2. Clem Snide – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience (09.00)
3. Pree – Light Falls (17.05)
4. Frivolous Laura – A Lullaby (20.22)
5. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Statues (27.27)
6. The Low Anthem – Oh My God Charlie Darwin (37.18)
7. Kill It Kid – Burst its Banks (41.31)
8. Pete Doherty – The Last of the English Roses (49.03)
9. R.E.M. – Perfect Circle (59.41)

Friends and family of this band are going to want to slap me for this review.  Mind you, Kill It Kid are signed to one of the best indie labels in the UK – One Little Indian – and the label got in touch asking for a review, so here goes.  They can take it!

This music is furious, revivalist, bluesy Americana.  It’s got loads of potential, so I’ll get the criticisms out of the way first because there’s no need to end this review on a bum note.  Occasionally they are too close, to my ears, to mimicking a style rather than necessarily interpreting it.  Also, I find myself loving lead singer Chris Turpin’s voice on the quieter numbers and finding it a little bit too much from time to time on the louder ones – caricatured, almost.

Every review they’ve had so far has mentioned his voice, and fair enough, because it has character and will divide opinion.  I would always prefer to listen to a voice with a life of its own, however, rather than another identikit music school warbler.  If you have a distinctive voice like this you just have to accept that some people will never like it, but that doesn’t matter, because they will never be your audience anyway.  Better to think about how much the other people are going to love it.

The music is phenomenal enough, and this is one of the most energetic studio recordings I’ve heard.  Either these guys virtually play a live gig in their recording studio, or their engineer is a very talented individual, because there’s no evident artifice to this at all.  I does actually sound like they are there in front of you playing, and I would be absolutely amazed if they don’t prove to be a complete fucking tornado of a live band.

So I may have some reservations about this, and I would like to see them develop their genre a little more, but there’s bags of potential here and I would love to see them on stage.  Basically, I am thoroughly enjoying this, bring on some more please.

Kill It Kid – Private Idaho (Had to change the song, sorry, because apparently Send Me an Angel Down is going to be a single, so it would have been a bit cheeky to leave that up here for free.)

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MySpace | Buy the EP from Norman Records