Video: Vimeo – YouTube
Photos: Flickr
Audio: zip download: right-click, save as

This session was recorded in Glasgow before Josh’s performance at Oran Mor on 22nd November last year.  The first attempt to record a session with him was at Stereo, but recording in a venue really didn’t work out, so this time we decided to take up the kind offer of Phil from PAWS to record it in his bedroom instead.

Again we were a little pressed for time, because Josh had a marathon day, recording a session with the BBC and conducting an interview before doing our session, and then having the gig to play afterwards.  So we only recorded three songs, and for simplicity’s sake we did the interview in one chunk and I have just chopped bits of it into the podcast where appropriate.

Given the incredibly punishing schedule he tends to have I really do appreciate Josh taking the time to re-record this session, as well as the infallibly good humour and cooperative nature showed by both himself and Peter and Tom, his management team.  It may have been tight to get done, but this is a really, really nice session if you ask me.

As usual, the videos can all be found on our Vimeo and YouTube pages and the photos, which were jointly taken by Stephanie Gibson and Dylan Matthews, are collected on our Flickr page.  The session mp3s can be downloaded below, or in a zip file here, the session podcast can be played or downloaded below too, and the tracklisting for the podcast can be found at the bottom of the page.

Direct download: Toadcast #211 – Josh T. Pearson Toad Session

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Josh T. Pearson – Woman When I’ve Raised Hell (Toad Session)

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Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb (Toad Session)

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Josh T. Pearson – Covers Medley (Toad Session)

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01. Josh T. Pearson – Woman When I’ve Raised Hell (Toad Session) (02.54)
02. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (12.30)
03. Perfume Genius – All Waters (19.06)
04. Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb (Toad Session) (25.26)
05. The Dirty Three – Some Summers They Drop Like Flys (31.43)
06. Papa M – The Lass of Roch Royal (38.17)
07. Judy Collins – Wild Mountain Thyme (53.03)
08. Howe Gelb – Can’t Help Falling in Love (55.37)
09. Josh T. Pearson – Covers Medley (Toad Session) (61.54)

Reviewing this album is going to be a little tricky (yes, I know, I always say that).  Because Matt from Stay Loose, who are doing the UK PR for the album, knew I would like this he got a copy to me really quickly, so I first heard it before any of the swathes upon swathes of messianically-toned reviews were published.  This is a bloody good thing, because after all the fawning press, I think I might have found it hard not to be deliberately contrarian, had I not already known it was a stunning album.

It is not by any means, in my opinion at least, for everyone.  The critical world may be awash with love for Last of the Country Gentlemen, but I can imagine it turning a lot of people off.  I have a couple of reasons for that, and they are as follows:

Firstly, the album is intimidatingly intense from an emotional perspective.  It is so naked, so confessional, so tortured, that just being able to absorb the force of it takes some doing.  If you are not able or inclined to do so, then I can easily imagine it becoming a bit wearing, and you might just glaze over entirely.

Secondly, the actual arrangements are pretty minimal, and in songs which depend heavily on repeated, rolling refrains, and quarter of a hour’s worth of intense, confessional narrative, I can easily see people who are not captivated by this record finding it to be over-wrought and, ultimately, boring.  When you write an album this personal, though, I think this is the kind of risk you must know you are taking, as an artist.

For the rest of us, well I have to agree with what seems like ninety-nine percent of the British music press: this is fucking stunning.  Essentially it is a document of a particularly rough period of Pearson’s life – as he says, “I write what’s in front of me” – and is unflinchingly* uncensored to the point where you almost have to engage with it, or else you simply can’t share the same space.  The quietness of the music has a similar effect: you either hush up and listen intently to every vanishing syllable and every finger barely brushing a guitar string, or there is simply no point bothering.

Live, this effect is particularly noticeable.  I have never in my life heard such blanket silence at gigs as when I have seen Pearson play, first at the Muzzle of Bees Backyard Barbecue in Austin and then last week at Stereo in Glasgow.  It’s simply impossible to give this album anything other than your full attention.  The sparse beauty of the music demands it to begin with, but to treat such unguarded confessions with anything less would seem like the height of crassness.

There are few vestiges of Pearson’s previous band, the ten-years-dead Lift to Experience, here.  Surprisingly short opener, the three-and-a-bit minute I am Loosed, is possibly the closest you’ll get.  There is also a certain grandiosity in the idea of a fifteen minute acoustic lament, and these make up the bulk of this record, and in doing so perhaps hint at a similar underlying aesthetic to The Texas-Jersusalem Crossroads.  “Commerce versus art, commerce versus art”, as he might put it.

There is little else to say here, really.  This record is utterly brutal, and yet utterly beautiful.  The music itself is no more than quiet acoustic guitar, building from the barest touch to a brief swells of strumming as the song rises an falls.  Warren Ellis’s fiddle makes an appearance here and there, but it too is beautifully understated.  It is what it is, and a lot of people will simply find the barriers too great to really enjoy a record this burning with unhappiness, self-recrimination and heartbreak.

For everyone else, though, Last of the Country Gentlemen is one of the most special, affecting, horrible, beautiful albums you will hear for fucking years.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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Josh T. Pearson – Woman, When I’ve Raised Hell

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from recordstore.co.uk

* I wonder how often the term ‘unflinching’ has been used in reviews of this record!

Yes indeed, I am back on Fresh Air tonight, once again sans Ruth, but she will be back next week apparently, which is good news.

For today, however, you are stuck with me sitting in a room by myself blethering away about nothing at all, which is pretty much par for the course, but I promise that as of next week that blethering will be interspersed with liberal helpings of Ruth telling me that my music taste is fucking shit.  We’re a cute little double act like that.

Live on air from 8pm UK time – listen live here.

As per usual I will be updating the playlist live below as we go along, so feel free to chip in in the comments and let me know how incredible (no really, incredible, no matter what you think) the playlist and chat just happen to be this week.  Anyone mentions the word shit and they’re getting punched.  Through the internet.  Punched through the internet.  Oh dear.

01. Li’l Daggers – King Corpze
02. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide
03. Josh T. Pearson – Sorry for the Song
04. Bob Dylan – Girl From the North Country (Witmark Demos)
05. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – 11 Kinds of Loneliness
06. Ringo Deathstarr – Imagine Hearts
07. Earth Girl Helen Brown – I Wanna Do It
08. Rob St. John – Phantom Limb
09. Warm Ghost – Claws Overhead
10.  The Great Valley – Tall Smoke
11.  Eels on Heels – G
12. Range Rover – Mind
13. Taxrat – Burn Down Slow
14. Tom Waits – All the World is Green

I think I have figured out why Fence Records hate the internet.  Or at least, I feel like I am starting to get some insight into what is an intensely troubled relationship.  The two of them just don’t get along at all, and the mutual antipathy has boiled over into outright hostility this afternoon, with the rush to buy Homegame tickets from the Fence website actually breaking the whole internet.

So while I wait for normal service to be resumed, and with it the opportunity to buy tickets for Homegame this year, I thought I might record a podcast.  Or at least, so I thought.  But it turned out the Facebook chat about the interminable (three hour) wait was too entertaining, and the paralysing fear of the site suddenly coming back online and me missing out on tickets was too much.

So I faffed about, went out and got pissed, and ended up recording this after our gig tonight, sorry.

Direct download: Toadcast #158 – The Refreshcast

01. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Love is Terminal (00.17)
02. Black Tambourine – Throw Aggi off the Bridge (07.34)
03. The Great Valley – Tall Smoke (11.53)
04. Hezekiah Jones – I Love My Family (Album Version) (20.47)
05. Lift to Experience – These are the Days (29.14)
06. Titus Andronicus – Fear & Loathing in Mahwah, NJ (33.09)
07. Byrds of Paradise – Touch Tunnel (42.54)
08. Eels on Heels – G (48.59)
09. Balkans – Edita V (52.40)
10. The Caulfield Sisters – I See Your Face (59.37)

Before you break out into a cold sweat about having to sit through another list of the best albums of the decade, don’t worry, this is not one of those.  Although most of these songs would be there or thereabouts if I were actually compiling a favourite songs of the decade list, that’s not why they’re here.

Basically, rather than try and rank anything against anything else, all this is is a meander through the last ten years and me chattering about how my relationship with music has changed and what sort of stuff I was into at what times of my life.

Basically, this is the soundtrack to a perfectly normal, albeit enthusiastic, music fan’s descent into full-on deranged internet mania.

Toadcast #99 – The Decade

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01. Eels – A Daisy Through Concrete (04.09)
02. Goldfrapp – Pilots (10.04)
03. Grandaddy – The Crystal Lake (14.17)
04. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (23.13)
05. Interpol – NYC (30.46)
06. Tom Waits – Kommienezuspadt (34.57)
07. The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle (40.41)
08. The Walkmen – The Rat (44.06)
09. The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid (51.20)
10. Broken Records – Lies (Demo Version) (57.07)
11. The Savings and Loan – Christmastime in the Mountains (64.11)

Hmmm.  I am not a big fan of Christmas, really.  Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy it, because I do, more that there are a million things about the season which fucking irritate the living shit out of me.  A simple example would be the appearance of Christmas decorations in shops in October; that annoys everyone, I know, I am not claiming to be unique here.  High Street Christmas is an ungodly shitfest of an invention, and the less I have to do with it the happier I am, generally.

Then, on the other hand, there’s actual Christmas.  There’s the dark and the cold, both of which I love, funnily enough.  Then there’s the quiet evenings with family and all the food and watching the Back to the Future Trilogy one after another and all that sort of stuff.  Hell, I even kinda like the decorations.  I really like that Christmas.

The thing is, the first, shitty kind of Christmas starts really early so it’s basically the only kind of Christmas there is available for the best part of two months.  Then, at some undefinable point, Proper Christmas quietly takes over and the whole thing becomes very pleasant indeed.  My Mum’s already been in touch to ask what kind of things we’d like her to cook when we get to France on Christmas Eve.  Christmas trees are available everywhere, and for some reason I really like Christmas trees.  So it’s starting: actual good, decent proper Christmas is starting to rear its head, but it’s not there yet.

For some reason I am still waiting to actually feel at all Christmassy.  I suppose the contradiction of despising the high street at this time of year is that if you boycott it entirely, which we have, and if you make no actual Christmas effort yourself, which we haven’t, then you end up just a little short of the cues to trigger that Christmas feeling, which their relentlessly avaricious Yulery tends to do whether you like it or not.

So I think that at some point, probably towards the end of next week when everyone in the office stops even pretending and I start to feel a genuine panic at not having bought my bloody mother anything, I will start to feel that warm, restful, bosom-of-the-family kind of Christmas feeling, but it hasn’t happened yet.  I can see Christmas starting to happen all around me, but for some reason I am still waiting to actually feel like it’s Christmas time.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Right Now I’m A-Roaming

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Lift to Experience – Waiting to Hit

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Jesus fucking Christ.  I think I may actually have a badger living in my mouth.  Or a muskrat.  Or one of those little yappy dog bastard things which always make me want to feed them to our bloody cat.  Gin is raping my brain.  Fucking bastard.

To make matters worse, that insufferable weasel Mrs. Toad is malingering at home, lolling around in bed, watching movies on iTunes and generally just doing bugger all.  I WANT TO GET SICK!  I never get fucking sick.  If I ever have time off work it’s either because my back is crippling me, which doesn’t feeling like being sick at all because it doesn’t give you proper sick voice, or I am skiving.  Now, however, I feel a nap in the disabled loos coming on again.

Actually, writing the word loo in the plural form there makes me think, not all that surprisingly of… Rebecca Loos!  The disabled Loos!  I think her pig-wanking episode was the pinnacle of reality TV – the ultimate in self-parody by a medium already happily digesting its own sphincter.
For those who missed it, there was a reality TV programme over here a good few years back called On the Farm or something like that, where the same old cast of desperate E-Listers moved into a farm for a bit and spent their days doing ordinary, everyday farm jobs.  No-one, however, seemed to think through the implications of showing one particular everyday farm job live on television: that of inseminating livestock.

So a woman, who was effectively famous for no other reason than the wielding of her vagina, ended up masturbating a pig live on television, and with that particular act removed from the utilitarian farm environment and brought into the realm of entertainment (particularly the realm of ‘salacious entertainment for the means of getting ahead despite being devoid of any observable skills besides the possession of an enormous pair of breasts’, which is Miss Loos’ specialist genre) it turned from tedious chore into bestiality.  Which was brilliant.

Why was it brilliant?  Well apart from the ‘Christ has anyone thought about what she’s actually doing?‘ factor, which was pretty good in itself, it was such an amazingly clear illustration of what is actually going on in reality TV.  These people, basically, are humiliating themselves in order to become famous.  They are sufficiently desperate for fame – and fame in and of itself as opposed to fame as a by-product of having a particular talent – that they consider having the entire nation point and laugh at them on live television to be a suitable price to pay for that fame.  How much humiliation will they collectively be prepared to tolerate?  How desperate are they to be in the public eye?  Well Rebecca gave us our answer – desperate enough to wank off pigs on the telly.

1. Most dignity-free celebrity moment on reality TV.
2. Invent a new reality TV programme.
3. Most pointless celebrity.
4. Favourite trashy celebrity (being even slightly worthy disqualifies anyone from this, so choose carefully please).
5. Biggest surprise celebrity attention-whore who turned up on reality TV despite you previously thinking they had some dignity.

This week’s five songs are taken from a compilation I made about seven years ago, comprised of stuff I ended up selling on because I had no room left on my CD shelves.  Looking back at what’s on it though, I do wonder what the fuck I was thinking.

Lift to Experience – Waiting to Hit

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – St. John Street

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Dan Bern – New American Language

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Solomon Burke – Diamond in Your Mind

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Pete Yorn – Strange Condition

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Uncut Magazine and I had a pretty amazing relationship between the turn of the millennium and about 2004 or 2005.  Basically, I would buy it every month and turn straight to the reviews section and the cover mount CD of what they considered to be the best of new music released that month, and devour both simultaneously, taking notes about what I wanted to spend that month’s meagre wages on.

Those cover mount CDs were amazing, at the time, and almost invariably related to that month’s new releases, but in the last few years they have become way, way more concepty, and I have started to enjoy them less and less.  For some reason, Uncut’s relationship with contemporary music seems to have come adrift even faster than my own, even as I approach my mid-thirties.

Even if I am exaggerating that particular claim – maybe blogging is keeping my tastes young(ish), you never know – it seems a shame that I have drifted away from what was one of my major sources of new music for years, so this podcast is something of a retrospective  and also a salute to all the stuff I picked up from Uncut and in particular their amazing cover mount CDs over the years.

Toadcast #78 – The Uncast

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01. The Magnetic Fields – I Don’t Want to Get Over You (03.36)
02. Ismael Lo & Marianne Faithful – Without Blame (10.01)
03. Gemma Hayes – Over & Over (14.19)
04. Elliot Smith – Memory Lane (19.01)
05. The Woodentops – Well Well Well (26.59)
06. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (31.07)
07. Heather Nova – I’m On Fire (39.55)
08. Roddy Frame – I Can’t Start Now (46.36)
09. The Flatlanders – Going Away (50.10)
10. The Acorn – Crooked Legs (59.37)

…or Poshfest, as I like to call it.  Honestly, it was the most middle-class, civillised event I can possibly imagine.  Even the toilets remained usable all the way through the weekend.

That may sound like I am mocking it, and in a way I am, but myself along with it because you see, I loved this festival.  It was absolutely, absolutely inch perfect for me and from the looks of it a good few others too.  I don’t know if it’s a sign of age, but I truly don’t think I have ever liked the grotty side of festivals – the shit-splattered toilets, swimming in a sea of someone else’s piss; the denuded field covered in used cans and broken plastic glasses, the seas of polystyrene shit and leftover food strewn about the place, the ninety minute queue at the bar for warm beer that is invariably the flavourless and piss-weak rubbish that is Tennents and a whole myriad of other whining-old-bastard-in-his-slippers complaints.

End of the Road, on the other hand was superb, primarily I think because it was pretty small.  The fields generally retained their grass, people were spread pretty nice and thinly throughout the gardens, the toilets were kept clean and even had bog roll in them pretty much all the time, the food was good, the bar queues were genuinely pretty minimal and the beer was really quite nice.  A pint of Leffe for £3 is pretty comparable to a high street bar, unlike the usual almighty fleecing you tend to get at these things, and the fact that Leffe was available at all is in itself a good sign.

You know the only complaint I have about End of the Road: the lineup was actually just too good.  It was a brilliant combination of the up-and-coming, the alternative staple and the indie legend.  I had to miss about half a dozen things I really wanted to see just because there was so much good stuff on, and that’s even with Dan Sartain and Micah P. Hinson dropping out.  I didn’t get to sample the excellent film and comedy selections for example, which I would have loved to do, but I am delighted they are there as it means I am almost certain to be able to persuade the musically indifferent Mrs. Toad to come along with me next year.

The other problem with the strength of the lineup was that, apart from missing several things I wanted to see – Malcolm Middleton, Herman Dune, James Yorkston, Jens Lekman, Josh T. Pearson, Giant Sand, just the list of people I missed would make an impressive festival lineup by itself – but also it never gave me time to just wander in on something random and discover new things.  It’s nice at festivals to idly meander from one small venue to the next and take a chance on things you’ve never heard, and I couldn’t do that this time because there was just so much stuff on that I really wanted to see.

So Simon, my only complaint about your festival is that it was just a bit too bloody good!  Oh, and a few more showers would have been handy.  But all in all, I could have gone to the exact same festival the following weekend and still not been bored – superb it was!

So here are some tracks from the groups I missed.  I’ll be writing up the bands from the individual days pretty soon, but for now, here’s what I could have won…

Malcolm Middleton – Fuck It, I Love You
Herman Dune – 123 Apple Tree
James Yorkston & the Athletes – A Man With My Skills
Jens Lekman – No Time For Breaking Up
Lift to Experience – These Are the Days
Giant Sand – Cracklin’ Water