From about 9pm or so UK time we will have the live stream of the Savings and Loan house gig in the player on this post. I’ve put it below the jump because the player has a habit of slowing the whole page down, so click here to view. And if those fuckers try and advertise Maroon fucking 5 to you then I promise it is NOT my fault – it just comes with the basic UStream service and there’s fuck all I can do about it. Read the rest of this entry »
Before we get onto the tedious ritual of me listing good gigs every week and you ungrateful fuckers not going to any of them, I felt the need to share something quite special with you. I spent my entire weekend going through lists of blogs who might be interested in the music we release and building mailing lists of people who have bought things from the label in the past and so on and so forth, so it’s not been the most exciting weekend of our lives, I have to confess.
Consequently, by bedtime last night, having spent most of the previous forty-eight hours staring at a computer screen all I was really intellectually capable of was a bit of empty-headed cinema and an early night. Mrs. Toad tends to specialise in intellectually dormant movies, but I think it’s fair to say that this time she has pretty much excelled herself. I really don’t know how she can ever top this one: The Saint, starring (so to speak) Val Kilmer and Elizabeth Shue.
Anyone who has read the Simon Templar books, or even seen Roger Moore’s series as that character back before his Bond days, will know that this is light, genuinely entertaining fluff. There’s not much to it, but it has a certain style and is eminently enjoyable. By contrast, the movie was so bad it veered from train wreck to masterpiece and back every thirty seconds or so.
Elizabeth Shue takes, rather predictably, the Christmas Jones role of Nucular Physicist who has, it seems, invented Cold Fusion. She even hosts a presentation at Oxford where an undergrad (in a white coat, so you know she’s sciencey) asks what fusion actually is, presumably not having had to complete GCSE Physics in order to gain a place at university, unless of course she was a vet student or something who happened to be in the wrong lecture. Shue then holds aloft some sort of pickle jar with a glass coil inside it and explains that she just feels Cold Fusion to be possible, and that’s all the justification for this lecture we are given.
Apparently she has ‘a formula’. Because that’s what it takes to create a stable fusion reaction, a pickle jar and a formula, not a gigantic installation of state of the art engineering, apparently. She’s just got two hours of ‘figgerin’ left to do to figure out which order to put the bits of her equations in. Now, I may not know much about Nucular Physics but…
But in all honesty Shue is the least of your worries when watching this – she’ll look back on the script and cringe, but not particularly on her own performance. I suppose that’s the benefit of these one-dimensional, utterly implausible, hot-babe twenty-something lady scientist characters – they’re such ironclad stereotypes that you can’t really do much with them good or bad (assuming, Miss Richards, that you can at least pronounce the name of your allotted discipline correctly).
Anyhow, the real highlight of this two hour festival of toe-curling agony, was Val fucking Kilmer. The man is a legend. His character’s superpower was having no actual identity and being good at disguises, something which was accomplished so cartoonishly badly that every new persona made us cackle with horrified glee. The character in that clip above (don’t watch it all, I really don’t think you could take it) was pretty much the piece de resistance however.
He discovered that Shue’s character loved Byron (or something like that, I can’t remember) so decided that in order to seduce her he would need a character with an artistic soul. I can only imagine the howls of woe from all the charming, well-mannered Oxford scientists who had been trying to slip her the salami for the previous few years, when it turned out that all it took was one of the worst haircuts in cinematic history, a pair of hilarious leather pantaloons and a completely baffling choice of accents to get into the old dear’s knickers.
“Er, sir, the Chateau Latour is four hundred pounds per bottle.”
“Very well, we’ll take two of them.” Zing!
Anyhow, after foiling the plans of the Russian energy magnate who created an energy shortage by stashing Moscow’s entire supply of fuel oil under his fucking house and then decided that the best way to take advantage of this shortage was by providing Cold Fusion power to the people of Russia, thus presumably negating his entire basis of power in an instant, rather than, say, just jacking up the prices of fuel oil and controlling supply to make his fortune and keep a political stranglehold on the country’s government, but I digress… Yes, so after this, Shue decides to give Cold Fusion to the world so she and Val can live happily ever after – once she’s spent the two hours necessary to figure out which way round her formulae go (something presumably not covered in the preceding years of research) in a back room at the American embassy in Moscow, that is.
Anyhow, those are some of the edited highlights, but really this film has to be seen to be believed. You have to be tough though, because I really don’t think many people could take it. Particularly the bit where Val’s hiding in the river in Moscow and the baddies looking for him conveniently fuck off for ten minutes so he can stumble to the shelter of the nearest block of flats, only to return (again, for no fathomable reason beyond evil ESP) five minutes later to resume the excitement of their narrow escape.
Anyhow, I’ll stop now. Please, please watch this for yourself, it really is the worst film I think I have ever seen, and considering the woman I married that really is saying something. Absolutely all of it is bad. All of it. Every line, every plot device, every character, every single premise, absolutely everything. Cold Fusion! In a pickle jar with a glass coil! It looked more like she’d brought her cuppa soup in the fucking thing, honestly.
Oh hang on, I was supposed to be talking about something else, wasn’t I…
A couple of splendid Glasgow bands are coming through to play at the newly re-opened Liquid Rooms. The re-decorating may be complete, but the sticky floor and smell of stale beer have apparently been lovingly preserved. Still, it was always a good venue to see bands, because the stage is high enough that you can always see, and the PA is really fucking loud. Look for the Twilight Sad to give it a good workout!
This’ll be a gorgeously Americana-flecked night of acoustic pop. Dan Mangan’s new album Nice, Nice, Very Nice is really, erm, very nice indeed (sorry, had to be done).
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Honeytrap are wild fun, and this will be my first chance to see Sebastian Dangerfield, but I’ve talked enough about this gig already, so you know what to expect by now – or at least you should. Tickets here.
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This is the first glimpse of The Savings and Loan in about five years, and probably the first proper one just about ever. Their debut album is out on Song, by Toad Records in early December, and they will be supported by The Last Battle, fielding a rather minimal lineup (it is our living room after all). We’ve sold about half the tickets already, and whilst you are likely to be able to get in on the night, it might be safer to buy tickets in advance from here. It would help us out if you did, anyway.
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Ohhh what jolly fun it’s been this week. Â Now I know why bands find it so hard to find booking agents: because it’s a shit job and no-one in their right mind would want to do it.
Then, just as I was hating promoters for all I was worth, I started into the organisation for all my own gigs that I had to book and suddenly developed a new-found sympathy for them too. Â So WHO IS TO BLAME FOR MY SHIT WEEK, THEN? Â I can’t think of anyone, it’s most frustrating.
Anyhow, I think I am now just about sorted for everything, so here are some announcements for you, so you can add all sorts of Toady nonsense to your calendars. Once again, I am putting all the label announcements into a Sunday Supplement so that the blog itself isn’t totally over-run with self-pimping during the week, which I am assuming would bore the shit out of everyone, myself included.
Inspector Tapehead Hooops Session was recorded by the lovely gentlemen from OLO Worms as part of their kind hospitality to our Tapeheady friends on their recent tour – thanks lads.
Cloud Sounds Song, by Toad Records Special seems, according to Ted, to have been purchased for the price of a pint when we were down in Manchester last weekend. Â It’s one of my favourite podcasts, and if you want to be even nicer, you could buy the first and thus far only (I think) Cloud Sounds Split 7″ – the song by Onions is worth it all by itself.
Peenko’s Scottish DIY Labels series features Song, by Toad this week. Â I am always impressed with quite how good I am at making myself sound like a total dickhead in so few words when it comes to these mini interview thingies. Â Ah well, we all need a talent of some sort I suppose, I was just hoping mine might be martial arts or a snappy dress sense or something like that instead.
Honeytrap launch their new album Petrushka (Toad review here, listen in full and buy here), this Saturday at Medina. Â Jesus H. Foxx & Sebastian Dangerfield are also on the bill, and tickets can be purchased here. I was skeptical about Medina as a venue at first, but I was at an Acoustic Edinburgh show there during the Festival and really liked it – the atmosphere was ace, and I think this is going to be an excellent night. Â Doors will be kinda early though, because there’s a club night on after us, so don’t be too late.
Savings and Loan House Gig will be pretty much everyone’s first chance to see Song, by Toad Records’ latest ‘signing’ (if you can really call it that, which you can’t, honestly) before their album Today I Need Light comes out on 6th December. As it’s at our house and tickets are going steadily I would ask you to buy one in advance just so we have a reasonable idea of numbers in advance. Â You can get tickets here, and I have just confirmed a (very) stripped down set by The Last Battle will also be on the cards for the evening.
The Yusuf Azak Album Release Tour is being booked up slowly but surely. Â Turn on the Long Wire is every bit as good as I would have expected from Yusuf, and is out on the 15th November. Â There are album launch nights booked as part of a joint tour with Ethan Ash on the following nights:
Thursday November 25th, Cellar 35 in Aberdeen.
Friday November 26th, Gambetta in Glasgow, with Jonnie Common.
Saturday November 27th, The Roxy in Edinburgh, awaiting confirmation.
The first single from his album, Eastern Sun, will be out as a free download in a week’s time or so.
AND FINALLY, the Song, by Toad Records Christmas Party has been confirmed for Thursday 16th December at the Queen Charlotte Rooms in Leith. Â We’re going to have an electric stage downstairs headlined by the Savings and Loan, for whom this will also be their album launch, and an acoustic stage upstairs. Â I am working on the full lineup at the moment, so there will be more announcements to come about this soon enough.
Welcome to the latest in an ongoing series where I try and review albums by my friends without either pissing them off or sounding like I’m slathering them with praise because we have on more than one or two occasions been spotted in the same pub together.
The Last Battle remind me, if not in sound, at least somewhat in politics of some other friends of mine, Broken Records. Both bands seemed to suffer something of a backlash before they’d really had much of a, er.. well, much of a frontlash. I’ve heard a surprising number of people spit feathers about these guys, given that they’ve hardly gone stamping about the place talking themselves up as far as I have noticed. They were greeted with rather hyperbolic levels of enthusiasm on their appearance a year or so ago, with a lot of people seemingly too hasty to find the Next Amazing Band from Edinburgh ZOMG! etc etc, and I can see how that might draw reactions, but it is hardly the fault of the band themselves.
Anyhow, in amongst all that hysteria proclaiming them to be alternately the best and worst band in the city depending on what day of the week it was, they simply got on with signing to my pal Ed’s label, 17 Seconds, and recording a debut album. Thinking for yourself can be tricky when there’s a lot of shouting going on, so with all the shrill reactions I’ve actually found it quite hard to gauge my own relationship with this record.
Edinburgh is more than well stocked with bands who tend to draw the term folk into descriptions of their music at the moment, but when you look at the likes of Withered Hand, Broken Records, eagleowl and Meursault, the Last Battle are probably closer to traditional folk than any of them. In fact, they remind less of their immediate peers and more of the folk-influenced stuff I was listening to when I first moved to Scotland in about 1994 or so.
Having not heard the full album before their launch night a couple of weeks ago I think I cemented my relationship with it when I found myself thinking ‘ooh good, this one’ within seconds of pretty much every song they played. Most bands can come up with a ‘sound’ if they’re pushed, but given the stuff that lands in my inbox I am constantly disappointed with how few can actually write songs which exist as good songs, independent of whatever signature sound the band may have developed. This elusive skill it appears the Last Battle most certainly have, giving each song its own distinct character,.
Possibly my favourite Last Battle song is absent from this though – the excellent Ward 119. That song bursts with such genuine tenderness I find myself wishing this was perhaps a more personal affair than the concept album it is, because for all even concept-based stories have to some extent be based on personal experiences somewhere I have, I think, always preferred more forcefully emotional songs like that one – they make a much stronger connection, for me.
Nevertheless, this is a really nicely uncomplicated album, and a consistent foot-tapper. Scott has a very normal-blokey voice, and it’s complemented really well by Arwen’s rather more gorgeous tones. The songs are held together by the consistent strum of the guitar or mandolin, like the constant rhythm of the yellow lines on an overnight drive, and given real pathos by the cello. As I said, it’s all done quite simply, but really well nevertheless.
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Having missed most of the first week of the Festival by being in Spain, I am now going to miss large parts of this week by pootling about in Anstruther at Haarfest (tickets can be found in the right hand column of this page).
Mrs. Toad will presumably hate me for this of course, as she has to stay behind in Edinburgh and do a proper job, whereas I can fuck off to Fife, get lashed, and call it work. Mwaaah hah haaa…!
Given the fact that during the Festival the centre of Edinburgh becomes roughly as welcoming as the picture above I think I’ll appreciate a swift relocation for a few days, ready to come back to the last week of the Festival, go to a couple of shows and pretend I always knew it was going to be fun all along.
Anyhow, for those of you not Fifing themselves all to pieces this week I have some very fine recommendations indeed:
I was at the first night, which was great, and apparently this week has been great fun, according to the man himself and according to Dylan’s drunken Facebook pictures of himself, Bart and Jamie and Rory from Broken Records who played there on Saturday.
Dan from Withered Hand is currently working on his second album, although I am not sure how far he’s actually got just yet. Either way, I’m probably as excited to hear new stuff from Withered Hand as I am to hear new stuff from any band on Song, by Toad Records. Dan’s way with words is as good as anyone I know, and his knack of wrapping them up in simple but effective melodies makes his music both as pleasurable and as rewarding as anything else happening in Edinburgh at the moment.
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John Grant used to be in a band called The Czars who had some truly brilliant moments. I saw him at SXSW, and he stepped up to a piano in a checked shirt and sporting a very alt-country sort of beard and then instead of playing the sort of Bella Union alt country I expected (fairly obvious assumptions based on costume and venue) he played a series of sweet, melodic piano ballads, with just the faintest scent of theatricality about them. I haven’t heard the album yet, but that was an intriguing show and I’d recommend checking his stuff out.
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I haven’t seen the Besnard Lakes live, but their sound is really nicely complex and layered, and when their songs are good they are really really good. If that translates to the live setting as well as I suspect it might then this could be an almighty wall of sound and completely brilliant. That’s just a guess though, but I would like to think it’s true. Let me know if you go and find out.
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This is something of a stripped back gig for the Scottish Enlightenment, due to the absence of a guitarist, but nevertheless their slow, deliberate sound is a treat I would recommend to anyone. There is an album due out shortly, which I am heartily looking forward to.
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I’ll be honest with you, I know no more about this than the fact that I had a listen to their MySpace page and thought it sounded interesting. Interesting it did sound however, so I reckon it might well be worth a chance if you’re looking for something to do on Thursday.
For those of you not so keen on the cut and thrust of the bleeding edge of alt-folk, there is the opportunity to do something to satisfy a couple of the other senses this week. Â On Thursday 5th August there is a bit of a foodie event taking place at the Drill Hall on Dalmeny Street, called World Kitchen. Also, on Thursday, after having your ears assaulted by my dubious DJing skills, you may wish to pop down to the Wee Red Bar for the inaugural Chops club night.
Myself and Mrs. Toad are taking a bit of holiday too, bravely leaving our house and retarded cat in the hand of Mrs. Toad’s brother. It works quite well actually. He crashes with us for a bit, we get the house and cat looked after, and he gets to make a bit of money renting out his house during the Festival. And then I’ll be back just in time to bugger off to Haarfest in Anstruther for a week and erm… well, there is a Festival in Edinburgh in August isn’t there? It looks like I might actually miss most of it, although by an odd coincidence I will be around every Sunday.
And that is a convenient happenstance, because for the month of August Ruth and my good self will be returning to Fresh Air Radio for our Toad and Ruth’s Toad and Ruth Show with Toad and Ruth, with shows from seven to half eight in the evening on Sundays the 15th, 22nd and 29th August, and a kick-off preview show which will be broadcast (Ruthlessly, unfortunately) this Wednesday 4th August from half eight. As usual we’ll be looking to get guests and live music on the show, starting with legendary New York anti-folker Lach on the 15th, who will hopefully play a few songs and chat about Lach’s Anti-hoot, his Festival show in which he will be trying to recreate the spirit of New York anti-folk in Edinburgh. Kinda like the Bowery, then.
Pilrig St. Paul’s is on the corner of Leith Walk and Pilrig Street, and is just the latest in a long list of gorgeous venues sniffed out by Jillian and Emily from Tracer Trails. It will also be the venue for this year’s christonafuckingbikeimohsoveryexcited Retreat Festival (free sampler of some of the bands involved to be found here), so this will be a chance to sneak preview the place before committing to a weekend of unspeakable joy and drunken liver-punches later in the month. I know little about this particular lineup, I have to confess, apart from the fact that Calvin Johnson shares a label with the utterly unspeakable and profoundly punchable Jeremy Jay. But I assume Mr. Johnson himself is a hell of a lot nicer or the Tracer Trails team would never be dealing with him in the first place.
This night is a preview night for Retreat, the Forest Fringe and Acoustic Edinburgh and a general statement that, Festival and imported musical exotica aside, there is plenty of awfy good stuff to be found here the rest of the year too. There will be mini acoustic sets by a selection of bands on the hour, interspersed with equally mini DJ sets of local music toilers such as myself playing five-song sets of our favourite Edinburgh records. Enfant Bastard, Meursault, Emily Scott and the brilliantly named Haftor Medboe stand out for me on the list of artists booked to play.
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Villagers were very nearly reviewed on Song, by Toad when they released their debut album a month or so ago. I found it all just a tad too nice, to be honest, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be genuinely interested to hear them live. A live performance is often a little more raw than a recorded song, which often leads to me quite considerably preferring a live setting for some of the current rash of polished folk-pop.
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This acoustic mini-festival starts this weekend and runs through to the end of the following one. On Friday we have Iona Marshall and the Last Battle, Saturday is The One Ensemble and Yusuf Azak and Sunday Meursault (solo) and Esperi. As well as Electric Circus, Ed from the Roxy seems to be one of the few committed to supporting local music during the tidal wave of imported bumph which swamps the place in August.
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FOUND’s rather fantastic (Machine Age Dancing! MACHINE AGE DANCING!!!) new album is out soon. How soon I don’t quite know I have to confess, but I can tell you this about it: it’s more of an abrasive indie-rock album that I ever expected from these lads which, frankly, is just showing off. Get back in your pigeonhole you alt-folk glitch-hopsters!
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Ah the cooling touch of sweet, clean porcelain. And it may well be hot in our house, but dammit I have never experienced such an unpleasant sleeping experience as being baked alive inside a tent when the sun comes up as fiercely as it did this weekend at Glastonbury. Dear God almighty that was a nasty way to wake up, especially with a vindictive little bastard of a hangover kicking away at the inside of your head.
We didn’t do too badly for facilities actually – it’s the single greatest advantage of going to festivals with a band – but I am reminded of a daft little toilet story from my old job (no, STOP IT, it’s nothing like that, honestly) which I have intended to mention for a while and always forgotten.
Scotland is a very long way north, a very, very long way north in fact, and this means that during the Winter you arrive and leave work in the dark. It can be lighter in the mornings, but by the time four in the afternoon rolls around, it is generally pitch fucking black outside. Add to that the fact that we used to do most of our work on computers, even when the sun was shining the blinds were generally pulled right down so that people could see their monitors.
So yes, it was quite a dark place to work, with one glorious exception: you guessed it, the men’s toilet. I’m not kidding. That side of the building was south-facing so, you could be sitting in a dingy office with the blinds drawn all day, arrive and depart in the dark, but every once in a while, on one of those beautifully clear sunny days that Scotland has, you would walk into the loo and be confronted by this blaze of sunshine. It was great. It just lifted your spirits.
Now I’ve managed to tell you that little story in total sincerity and with a (largely) straight face, do you think I can trust you to be grown ups about it in the comments? No, probably not.  Honestly, you people…
The Last Battle’s new album is due out on 17 Seconds Records, and this is the first single from that record. They play quite traditional folk, with cello and lovely male/female vocals but this song is a bit rockier in that ‘Christ alive, is that an electric guitar?’ sense, and a good, beefy introduction to the band. I have a feeling the Meursault might be solo acoustic, but I am not entirely sure.
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To be brutally frank, my little experience in the music industry has taught me that the following is as close to a cast iron rule as there exists: labels and PR, cannot make you famous, only you can make you famous. You can only do that if you play as often and as well as possible, and in doing so build up enough momentum and buzz around your band that everyone else, be it press, radio, fans, whatever, absolutely has to take notice, or they simply wouldn’t be doing their jobs. There are exceptions of course, there always are, but that is pretty close to a hard and fast rule. Booking tours and getting gigs is far from easy however, I’ve done it myself and it was shit and I was shit at it, so I strongly recommend you come along to this and pick the brains of some professional booking agents.
This may be a little more related to the likes of blues and traditional folk than most of you are used to, but I think there’s a lot of good stuff going on in Stringjammer’s music. Long Road Home, on their MySpace page, is a case in point, and there is more there like that. There’s a lot of experimental and strange stuff in there, but they obviously started from quite traditional base material before they went and made it all weird, so I think this one should appeal to readers of Toad.
Tickets for this can be bought from the band here, and I recommend you do so. Kid Canaveral are not exactly a fashionable band – they’re not even close to being arch enough for that – but they have an amazingly consistent talent for writing infectious indie-pop melodies. Â Also, The Scottish Enlightenment – I might finally get a chance to see the bastards play!
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I remember when I first started writing Song, by Toad, people when they first latched onto the site would occasionally refer to the not all that infrequents bursts of rage and frustration with the music industry as ‘a breath of fresh air’ and stuff like that, for the simple reason that if I thought something was fucking shit, then I would say so.
I had noticed that sort of post becoming less frequent myself over the last couple of years, and even Mrs. Toad remarked the other day that random outbursts of rage were becoming really quite rare.
I thought about this, and I think that the reason no-one in the music industry has any balls when it comes to the simple task of telling it like it is – on the face of it, quite a simple thing to do – is the same as the reason that I tend to be quite tame these days myself: you get to know everyone, you become friends with them, and it becomes almost impossible.
If I turn around and say ‘all the venues in Edinburgh are shit’, what does that say to my friend Nick, who works his arse off to make Sneaky Pete’s one of the best. And what if I say ‘the NME is fucking rubbish’ and someone thinks, ‘oh, I might review this nice album by Inspector Tapehead, but I wonder what this Song, by Toad thing is…’ You get my point.
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01. Arcade Fire – Month of May (01.37)
02. Takeda – A Million Years (10.58)
03. Adelaide’s Cape – Anchored Down (15.55)
04. Yo La Tengo – Outsmartener (26.44)
05. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Eggshell Miles (33.49)
06. The Last Battle – Ruins (36.44)
07. The Mountains and the Trees – More and More and More (47.11)
08. Liars – The Overachievers (50.45)
09. The Recovery Club – Rest and Be Thankful (53.54)
10. Meursault – Hey Joe (Daniel Johnston Cover) (62.49)
For those of you interested at all in even more of my inane prattling, I have recently done an interview with a certain Mr. Timothy London for his blog, which can be read here. The interview itself was about a less cynical music industry, and I am not entirely sure I really made a great case in its favour, with some really very cynical remarks indeed. Still, I tried to answer the questions themselves as honestly and intelligently as I could, so hopefully that counts for something!
This weekend I was down in Macclesfield for Unconvention, a day of seminars, workshops and general chats about the future of music and ways in which we can best try and generate awareness and success on a minimal budget using the myriad weird and wonderful tools the modern world has given us. It was a really good day, and I heard some very interesting things, and also managed to make a tit of myself at the Managers Are The New Labels panel I was on.
The Scottish habit for constant and furious self-deprecation got a little lost in translation with all the English attendees, so everyone in the workshop got the rather unfortunate impression that I was really down on myself about what we’ve achieved with Song, by Toad and how qualified I may or may not be to be in the music industry and what I do or do not bring to the bands we work with. After a particular rush of sympathy (“Noooo, it sounds like you’re doing an incredible job”) I did get close to pointing out to them that self-confidence really wasn’t an issue here, it’s just the way you learn to express yourself in Scotland and don’t worry I am well aware of how much we’ve achieved in the last couple of years just that you always have to be aware of how much there still is to achieve and honestly it just doesn’t do to sound even slightly boasty in Scotland but honestly I’m fine don’t worry. But that might have made matters worse, so I just dropped it.
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Monsieur Slim is not only great live, Sean Scolnick is a fucking lovely bloke as well. I know Monday is a shite night to go out, but honestly this will be worth it. He swings the pace from the mournful ballad to stomping Americana in the drop of a hat, and there are few better voices out there at the moment, in my opinion.
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My personal pick of the Tigerfest gigs this week would be twofold:
There Will Be Fireworks managed to sell over a thousand of their debut album pretty much on their own and without much press, which I can promise you is no mean achievement. Their Twilight-Frabbitry will be complemented by the emergence, blinking, into the light of Jesus H. Foxx who have been hiding away in some secret Foxxcave somewhere working on their debut album.
17 Seconds Records’ newest signings The Last Battle join a couple of their more established acts downstairs at the Roxy. Their debut album should be upon us very soon, so keep an eye out for that.
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You wouldn’t necessarily think that quiet acoustic stuff would work all that well at a clubby sort of place like Sneaky’s but it actually does – I’ve seen some really good acoustic stuff there in the past. This is the latest in a series of gigs marking the fourth birthday
Stuffs
It’s an odd lineup, this one, although in a funny sense I can actually see it working quite well. Adam Stafford will presumably be playing an acoustic set, and Dead Boy Robotics have just launched an EP of thumping, dirty disco(ish) tunes. Add that to the strange, shy, loopy experimentalism of Conquering Animal Sound and you certainly have an eclectic lineup, but one which I think will actually work quite well.
Fatcat Records, innovative composer, plays lots of piano. Those are about all the facts I have about this one, but I have to get this published before my lunchtime internet window here at Proper Job slams shut, so I am afraid I don’t have the time to find out anything more helpful for you. There’s always the links above though, and you’re not children, so I’m sure you’ll be fine.
It’s Tigerfest and The Kays Lavelle album launch this week, as well as being May, which says to me that our first barbecue of the season can’t be much further away, surely. Ach, who knows though, this Spring’s been all over the bloody shop so Christ knows.
Still, we’re firmly into the first stirrings of Festival Season now which is… erm, well certainly not a bad thing I guess. There are some fucking shitty festivals (blogs, bands, etc…) out there, and I am becoming distinctly picky in my taste for festivals, and really quite middle-aged. I do not have the patience for shitty camping and massive green-field sites with fucking dreadful beer, a swampy bog of misdirected urine surrounding the toilets and a two-hour queue for a drink. Not happening, not any more, not for Toad. Fuck off.
So, erm yes, the rise of the boutique festival in recent years has been very welcome for me indeed. The food and drink are infinitely better, the facilities are better, the lineups are a little more focussed and because the budgets are smaller you can be absolutely confident of never, ever, ever accidentally hearing Kasabian play.
And, let’s be entirely honest, there are simply fewer people and I really do not like people all that much.
So, if anyone can tell me what that little rant had to do with anything then there’s probably some sort of prize – amnesty from me hugging you when I’m drunk sounds like a suitable bonus. So, erm, live in Edinburgh this week then.
Apart from admin and spare cash, PR is pretty much the single most important function of a record label these days. It’s also, apart from actually making the music itself, the most important thing for any unsigned band to master.
I don’t know Miss Kitchen, but The Wee Rogue is really excellent, and the Last Battle have just signed up with 17 Seconds records and have a debut album on the way, so should be full of the joys of life at the moment. Their music leans a little more towards the traditional, in terms of song structures, in comparison to the general landscape of alternative folk around these parts, whereas The Wee Rogue leans a bit closer to total silence, his music can be that still. It’s compelling nevertheless, so this gig is highly recommended.
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On what is proving to be a rather busy Thursday this gig is Dead Boy Robotics’ EP launch, supported by Vasquez who I don’t know at all, and The Foundling Wheel. Expect thumping noise, which is likely to veer from the boisterously danceable into the ear-splittingly unhinged.
I know precisely nothing at all about this lineup, sorry. But it’s a combined promotional effort between Braw Gigs and Tracer Trails (I think – it’s called Braw Trails Presents, so I guess that’s probably right) and those two rarely ever put a foot wrong (new as the former might be) so I definitely think this will be worth checking out.
This is the Kays’ album launch party for their upcoming debut album Be Still This Gentle Morning, and I am going to be in bloody Manchester for Unconvention, which is hugely frustrating.
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This is curated by 17 Seconds the blog for Tigerfest and is not to be confused with the 17 Seconds Records showcase next week, which is different, apparently. Although X-Lion Tamer and The Wildhouse are actually on 17 Seconds Records. But then, without the approval of 17 Seconds the blog, they probably wouldn’t be signed to 17 Seconds the label, would they? Keep up!
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