I am Ruthless for this week’s show on Fresh Air Radio, so it will just be me prattling on by myself instead.  I have a John Darnielle tribute to the assault on organised labour in Wisconsion, I have the original version of that song, and I have some Withered Hand, in honour of his SXSW visa troubles.

Other than that, I am pretty worn out from a night of epic drinking in Stockton (which is not even Middlesbrough) last night after the excellent seminar thingy hosted by The Generator at which I (inevitably) drank and talked far too much.  There is a certain inevitability to these things, isn’t there.

Live from 8pm UK time – click here to listen.

As per usual the playlist will appear below as I play things, and feel free to swing by the comments and have your say.

1. Lil Daggers – Give Me the Pill
2. King Post Kitsch – Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone
3. Meursault – And Butter Would Not Melt (from Jonnie Common’s Deskjob)
4. Withered Hand – No Cigarettes
5. Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
6. John Darnielle – There is Power in a Union
7. The Louche FC – Only in a Dream
8. Irk the River – Mind That Child
9. The Son(s) – Radar
10. REM – It Happened Today
11. Billy Bragg – There is Power in a Union
12. Elbow – Jesus is a Rochdale Girl
13. David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got no Sole
14. Clem Snide – Pale Blue Eyes
15. Warm Ghost – Open the Wormhole in Your Heart
16. Dam Mantle – Grey
17. Dolfish – Your Love is Bummin’ Me Out
18. The Honey Pies – Hair of the Dog

This is my annual World of Song, by Toad Records podcast, where I prattle on a bit about the stuff we have coming up in the new year.  I play a couple of things we released towards the tail end of the year, and some stuff by some of the new bands we’re going to be working with for the first time in 2011.

I also prattle on at immensely tedious length about the ins and outs of running a record label, which may or may not actually interest you at all, but it’s there whether you like it or not.

We’ve got plans for some changes for the new year as well, with a new imprint for the label being launched, and a partnership with the Brothers Grimm for the creation of new lines of merch to go with every release.  It’s going to be a bit exhausting, I think, but immense fun nevertheless.

Direct download: Toadcast #155 – Song, by Toad Records 2011

01. King Post Kitsch – Eggshells (00.21)
02. Animal Magic Tricks – Heavenly Bodies (06.31)
03. The Savings and Loan – The Virgin’s Lullaby (18.45)
04. Inspector Tapehead – Sugar on Your Sheets (22.00)
05. Rob St. John & the Braindead Collective – The Whites of Our Eyes (28.11)
06. Loch Lomond – Elephants and Little Girls (41.36)
07. Trips and Falls – This is All Going to End Badly (52.37)
08. Jesus H. Foxx – Plans (Alt. Version Demo) (54.59)
09. Meursault – Another (61.34)
10. Lach – I Want to Be With You (65.56)
11. Yusuf Azak – Lay Me Down (Demo) (76.49)

The Fishcast?  Yes, because the fishmonger opposite our house is today auctioning off for charity the largest lobster ever to be fished out of the Firth of Forth, and the fucking thing is ma-hooo-sive!  Honestly, if that little bastard ever got its claws on you I don’t think you’d stand a fucking chance.

Anyhow, yes, I do know that a lobster isn’t a fish, don’t worry, but the Fishcast just had a better ring to it than the Fuckinggreatbiglobstercast, and the word Crustacean didn’t seem to have an obvious way of crunching down into the Somethingcast.  So Fishcast it is, deal with it.

Direct download: Toadcast #144 – The Fishcast

01. The Generationals – Trust (00.17)
02. The Divine Comedy – The Seafood Song (09.51)
03. The Driftwood Singers – Coco Ellis (17.33)
04.  The Tragically Hip – Chagrin Falls (25.59)
05. Toby Richardson – King of All the Moves (30.06)
06. Utidur – Grasping for Thoughts (39.35)
07. Slow Talk – Fashion Sense (42.43)
08. King Post Kitsch – I’d Sooner Laugh (Demo) (53.34)
09. Bear Driver – Golden Touch (Demo) (55.31)
10. Saharan Gazelle Boy -Halfhair Girl (61.24)

Tonight at 20:30 will see the return of my radio show to the airwaves of the student radio station in these parts; Fresh Air.  The station will be broadcasting through the Festival, and I myself have slots this evening, to kick things off, as well as Sunday 15th, 22nd and 29th (at the earlier time of 19:00-20:30) when Ruth will presumably be back.  The full schedule is (sort of) here.

We’re hoping to have live guests and stuff like that, and have Lach pencilled in for the 15th, to help publicise his Antihoot show, and have yet to line up anyone proper for the other two weekends yet.  We’ll hopefully get there though.

Anyhow, tonight Dylan will stand in for Ruth, and we will be previewing the Festival and talking pish about what music things are happening here throughout the month of August.

Listen Here – Live from 20:30BST

As ever, the tracklist will be updated live below and if you have any trouble with the feed you should be able to get rid of it by pausing and un-pausing the player.  Alternatively, you can find the station on iTunes as well, listed somewhere under college radio stations, I think.

1. Honeytrap – Little Johnny Winter
2. Mark Lanegan – Methamphetamine Blues
3. FOUND – Let Fidelity Break
4. Eels – Souljacker
5. Roky Erickson and Okkervil River – Goodbye Sweet Dreams
6. The Japanese War Effort – Summer Sun Skateboard
7. Arcade Fire – City With No Children
8. Inspector Tapehead – Yarvil
9. Yusuf Azak – Turn on the Long Wire
10. King Post Kitsch – Walking on Eggshells
11. Milk – Wilma, There’s Been a Fire!
12. Benni Hemm Hemm – Retaliate
13. Lach – I Want To Be With You

Night night!

The only time I have met him, enigmatic, reclusive Scot Charlie from King Post Kitsch… no, wait sorry.  Actually Charlie did introduce himself at the Meursault album launch down at the Old Queen’s Head a couple of months ago, and enigmatic and reclusive he most certainly was not.

Apparently that’s turned up in a couple of reviews recently though, and in his everso gentle reminder to me that I had yet to actually review this EP despite popping a track on the podcast recently, Charlie sounded a bit nonplussed at the description, so I thought I might as well mention it here.  He is not enigmatic.  Or reclusive.  Okay? He just happens to live in London.

Maybe there is something to the enigma chat after all though, because this is an oddly constructed EP and no mistake.  Having hit you with a cracking pop song first off – the lo-fi, slightly old-fashioned, slightly Beatlesy Walking on Eggshells – it drifts into a sort of dream state with the stuttering, uncomfortable Portland Street, before drifting off into the odd reverie of the title track.  This last song sounds a little like a cross between Luna and Au Revoir Simone.

Anyhow, that sequence gives the EP an odd emotional trajectory.  It’s a bit like those sequences of junkies in Trainspotting, where you get the intensity of the hit, before everything drifts into some sort of out of focus trance-like state.  If I remember our conversation correctly I think Charlie has recorded a whole album’s worth of material, and in many ways this sounds more like a chunk out of an album than something which was originally supposed to be an EP, although maybe I just hear that because I know about the album to begin with.

Either way, there are really good songs on this EP, and it represents another step forward for someone I think has real promise.

King Post Kitsch – Walking on Eggshells

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Website | King Post Kitsch on Bandcamp (download EP here for free)

My brother heads off today, so I figured we’d take one last chance to do a podcast while we can.  This is mostly new stuff and inbox though, so I am not sure how he’ll react.

Actually, he was in the room last week while I went through my inbox, played stuff, replied to emails, deleted things, and so on and so forth.  I think his response was that he simply wouldn’t be able to handle the avalanche of shit I have to get through, and that it would simply turn him off music completely.

I don’t mind that, I have to confess, because although some people do send me wildly inappropriate things, after two hours of listening to one ‘psychedelic rock band who are blazing a trail across the LA scene right now’ after another I then open an email from Allister Izenberg, which was possibly the most terse, abrupt and non-sugar-coated promo email I have ever read, even including Trips and Falls.  It was such a bad email actually that even before listening I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to really like the music, and boy oh boy was I right.  It makes all the ‘rock, hip-hop, funk fusion’s next big thing’ emails easily worthwhile.

Toadcast #131 – The Brocast

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01. Hot Lava – Pink Lemonade (02.52)
02. Burnt Island – Hiding Out (07.42)
03. King Post Kitsch – Monomaniac (11.26)
04. Glass Animals – Leaflings (19.17)
05. Allister Izenberg – Little Swan (24.24)
06. Television Keeps us Apart – Voices (33.22)
07. Ola Belle Reed – High on a Mountain (41.01)
08. Clarence Ashley – Cuckoo Bird (51.54)
09. Willard Grant Conspiracy & Telefunk – The Cuckoo (54.23)
10. Soft Cat – Blackbird (62.41)

Well well well, this is extremely good indeed.  King Post Kitsch is an exiled Weegie currently residing in London, and was recommended to me by Lloyd from Peenko.  I’ve been a little slow on that count, I suppose, because everyone and their blogger seems to have been chattering about this EP for a while now actually, but er… well, you know how it goes around these parts.

It’s hard to really describe this music for some reason, even though what you hear isn’t exactly going to confuse or shock you.  There only seem to be three songs to be found anywhere, all from an EP which is free to download from their Bandcamp page, and whilst they all hold together as a group, they really are all quite different as well.

Alaska starts out as a rolling ramble, pinned down with brief interruptions of guitar, and slapped around by a scuzzy synth headache which could as easily be My Bloody Valentine as it could Grizzly Bear.  Move on and Modern Times is stumbling, stop-start drunkard, all thumped piano keys and discordant guitar.  Then, after all this, Fante’s Last Stand is peculiar falsetto dream, with its plucked refrain and splashes of (presumably digital) glockenspiel bordering on both the twee and the macabre.

It’s short, and there’s not much to go on here, but this is a really fucking excellent little EP and I am really looking forward to where this may go – very, very promising.

King Post Kitsch – Alaska

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Bandcamp | Website

I don’t know what the damn hell it is about dressing formally which makes me feel so uncomfortable, but it does.  Presumably just because I’m such a scruffy fucker for the entire rest of my life, those few hours every year I spend in a (vaguely) ironed shirt and pair of proper shoes just seem so completely out of character as to be really quite discomfiting.

Still, at our age everyone we know seems to be either getting married or breeding (and not infrequently both) so the old whistle is going to have to get used to seeing a little bit more action over the next few years, it seems.  The ludicrous thing is that I actually have a couple of really nice suits, but I never get round to wearing the fuckers because it just all seems too much like hard work.

This weekend, people.  In a suit.  Me!  Would you believe it.  I really should thank all these marrying bastards for saving my investment in suits from being complete waste of money it would be if I actually was left to my own devices.

Toadcast #109 – The Suitcast

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01. Joker’s Daughter – The Bouncing Liquorice (02.22)
02. Lloyd Cole – Undressed (05.52)
03. The Besnard Lakes – Like the Ocean, Like the Innocent Pt.1: The Innocent (11.53)
04. Shearwater – God Made Me (18.52)
05. King Post Kitsch – Alaska (24.52)
06. Cold Lake Flight School – Driftwood (30.16)
07. Dan Sartain – Ruby Carol (32.52)
08. The Japanese War Effort – Lanark (38.01)
09. Oreaganomics – Self-assembled Martyr (45.35)
10. The Stands – Some Weekend Night (53.45)