Song, by Toad

Well you know how I said I wasn’t so convinced by Toadcast #17?  Well it proved somewhat prophetic, although that prophesy may have been somewhat self-fulfilling of course.  It’s one of my least downloaded podcasts for ages, but this one should sort that out.  There’s some genuinely excellent music on here, although most of it is pretty obscure.  There’s no Arcade Fire or anything to pull in the punters, bar a bit of The Magnetic Fields, but a really good selection of new and emerging music nevertheless.

And why the Homecast?  Well that’s obvious of course: we’re back in our house at long last and I recorded this from my massive old lab bench that doubles as a desk and music centre all at once.  It’s fucking brilliant – I really should take a picture and post it for you so you can see.  The bench is 2.75m long, so I have computer and stuff at one end, stereo equipment at the other and a couple of good sized speakers either side. A music anorak’s paradise!

Toadcast #18 – The Homecast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Eureka Springs (Edit) (00.00)
02. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (02.30)
03. Flashguns – St. George (07.53)
04. George Pringle – Carte Postale (13.52)
05. Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Own Me (16.59)
06. Destroyer – Foam Hands (21.55)
07. Howlies – Aluminum Baseball Bat (28.44)
08. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir – Aspidestra (38.36)
09. Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Leftovers (40.48)
10. Ruth Theodore – Overexpanding (49.22)
11. Akron/Family – Ed is a Portal (55.28)
12. Victor Borge – Phonetic Puncutation (63.22)
13. Josiah Wordsworth – Drive-by Media (70.23)
14. King of Prussia – Spain in the Summertime (74.44)
15. The Magnetic Fields – Threeway (83.07)
16. The Forms – Knowledge in Hand (87.44)
17. Howlies – Smoke (90.14)
18. The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom (95.38)
19. Found – When You Fall (102.09)

This music drifts from the distorted acoustic songwriting of Lou Barlow on one side and a slightly fuzzy take on West Coast pop on the other. At one minute you hear the Beatles and the other Pavement.

It’s one of those albums I suppose I’ll never be falling all over myself to push on people, but it’s solid and it all works really well. There’s nothing ostentatious going on, just good solid songwriting about the sort of topics that lift a record above the average ‘baby I luv u’ nonsense you hear all day on the radio. It’s a grower too, for sure, but not in a difficult way. More in the manner that it goes quite quickly from ‘oh that’s decent’ to ‘oh that’s really very good indeed’ over the course of a good handful of listens.

The wistful pianos of Physics Never Stood a Chance beautifully compliments the toe-tappingly insistent rhythm and slightly mucky guitar riffs of Beatlesy opener Spain in the Summertime. It’s small, this, but perfectly formed. Not a rush out to the shops right away job, but truly worth investing in should you have a spare eight dollars. It may sound straightforward enough, but there’s enough pain in the voice, enough fuzz in the guitars and enough motion in the rhythm to make this a really good record.

King of Prussia – Misadventures of the Campaign Kids
King of Prussia – Terrarium

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Cripes, people turn, don’t they?  And they turn fast, too.  Is all the environmental this and green that and sustainable the other getting on your tits too?  Christ it’s pissing me off.  All of it, from the preaching of the converts, to the hollow me-tooism from major multinationals trying desperately to persuade us that they care, they really do care.

It’s called Green Fatigue, apparently, and reminds me of when hotels say that they want to avoid unnecessarily washing towels because they want to pwotect the pweshus wickle enviwunment.  Utter bullshit.  If it was more expensive than just washing the lot all the time, they’d never consider it for a second.

The silly thing is that I come from dyed-in-the-wool hippy stock, and despite my shallow, materialistic veneer I would describe myself as something of a hippy manqué as well.  The friend with whom I was discussing this is also rather of the oatmeal variety himself, and he sparked the whole discussion by expressing frustration at the giddy myopia of the small army of global warming neophytes, all converted in the last six months from a state of skeptical indifference to a tedious kind of giddy sanctimony about everything and anything environmental.

The thing is, from a purely mathematical point of view, of course there’s no absolute certainty about global warming.  It’s a massive system and the interactions are too complex to be certain about any of it.  But it’s interesting how the same tiny sliver of mathematical uncertainty has gone from being a major doubt to totally insignificant in the space of a few months, simply as the tide of public opinion has gathered critical mass.

In Proper Job I design products, mostly medical ones, but products nonetheless.  Objects made of plastic, metal and often some electronics, ranging in size from about as big as a pen to the size of a large television.  As a couple of silly old hippies, my friend and I had to remind ourselves that we’ve been bashing on about the environmental impact to clients for years and invariably the result was utterly blank incomprehension, a moment or two of squirming, and then the resumption of the conversation from before the offending sentence was uttered.  Two years ago we’d have been grateful for anyone, anyone, to listen to us for more than a moment about sustainable product design, and let’s not forget that the enormous amount of plastic we use in various products these days makes up a significant part of our total dependence on oil.  Plastic is a hydrocarbon, and hydrocarbons basically come from oil so, simplifying slightly, without oil there is pretty much no plastic.

It’s amazing how quickly the sudden snowball put our backs up, especially given that we are basically on the same side.  Are we really that misanthropic that the fact that everyone else is suddenly doing it too is enough to send a couple of silly old hippy idealists out to the shops to buy a Humvee?  Well, no of course it isn’t, but it’s amazing how quickly we turn.

King of Prussia – Shades of Hippiedom
The Tragically Hip -  Save the Planet