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

I really am running out of stupid names for these fucking things.  I’m sure I’m going to end up just numbering them in future, but for now you’re going to have to put up with the bloody silly names I’m afraid.

In my effort to squeeze eleven songs into an hour I actually don’t ramble very much on this one, only to find out that the podcast ends up being much less than the usual hour and a bit, for a change.  Do I really talk so fucking much the rest of the time?

Anyhow, this is a fucking ace podcast of new music.  I don’t generally pay too much attention to how cool (or otherwise) these things might be, but I reckon any haircut merchants out there might rather enjoy this one.  For the rest of you, those without Haircuts with a capital haitch, well, just get on as best you can.  Let’s face it, if I love it all, it can’t really be all that cutting edge, can it.

Direct download: Toadcast #164 – The Roadcast

01. FOUND – Machine Age Dancing (00.25)
02. Girls Names – Seánce on a Wet Afternoon (07.00)
03. Sonny & the Sandwitches – A. Grassley – Throw My Ashes From This Pier When I Die (12.19)
04. The Honorable Worm – Wouldn’t Mind Dying (14.46)
05. Li’l Daggers – Ya Tu Sabe (22.54)
06. The Louche FC – Back Bedroom Casualty (29.27)
07. Milk Maid – Such Fun (33.24)
08. Brown Brogues – Treet U Beta (35.56)
09. The Honey Pies – Hair of the Dog (41.07)
10. Zed Penguin – This Town (46.49)
11. Manners – Knives (56.44)

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

And now, drum roll please for the final installment of Song, by Toad’s Festive Fifty for 2010.  Woo hoo!  I am sure Liars, The National and Micah P. Hinson will be breaking out the champagne at the excellent news.  Ah well, at least The Japanese War Effort and Li’l Daggers might give a shit.

01. Liars – Scissor When this song breaks it is absolutely fucking fearsome, and it is absolutely all I can do to stop myself leaping around the room and breaking stuff, no matter when or where I am or what time of day it is.  And this is about all I need to say about the matter.

02. Micah P. Hinson – My God, My God Just utterly, utterly beautiful, with a carefree little string coda rendered completely heartbreaking by the content of the song.  Three albums of sheer genius and one that was pretty damn good – why is this man not infinitely more famous?

03. The National – England It’s not as obvious, but the piano opening of this track is every bit as emotionally gripping as Fake Empire, once it properly sinks in.  And the build is so, so slow that by the time the brass kicks in you feel like you’ve been waiting for an age.  It reminds me of Elbow’s glorious Station Approach in that sense: some of the most euphoric depressing music ever made!

04. The Japanese War Effort – Summer Sun Skateboard First the guitar is really good, then the harmony vocals are fucking lovely, then the massively scratchy lead vocal is fucking great, then the glockenspiel is fucking superb, and then half way through it peaks, and takes the rest of the song to slowly drift into a blissed out coma.

05. Micah P. Hinson – Seven Horses Seen It’s easy to explain this one: just listen to the lyrics.  Hinson can be unflinchingly fucking brutal in his writing, and this is just another example of it.  That it goes, again, hand in hand with some truly beautiful music makes it all the more poignant.

06. Jason Lytle – D.U.I. BBQ Checkpoint Officer number two is talking to the driver of the car who just pulled into the D.U.I. barbecue checkpoint. “Good evening sir, have you been drinking tonight?” “Hell yeah officer!  I cracked my first beer this morning at nine and I’m wasted right now.  Any of you fucking pigs wanna fight?’

07. Songdog – 3.30am (Small Talk) I could fill an entire review with Songdog lyrics which make me do a double-take, but let that not detract from the wry, laid back music, performed as if with one eyebrow raised and here rendered even more lovely by the conversational duet.

08. Liars – Scarecrows on a Killer Slant Erm, this is Liars again, and unlike Scissor, which makes you beg for it, this is just loud and feral.  I don’t really need to justify this choice any more than that, do I?

09. The Walkmen – Blue as Your Blood The rhythm which underpins this has you ready for the song to break, ages before they finally let it happen about two thirds of the way through.  Hamilton Leithauser has one of the most yearning voices I’ve heard, and this is my highlight from yet another great album by one of the more under-appreciated bands around.

10. Li’l Daggers – King Korpze I’ve been loving my scuzzy, garagey guitar pop this year and this four song EP is as good as I’ve heard. Picking this ahead of Ya Tu Sabe or Hungry may be a bit arbitrary, but something from here was always going on.

Click here to download all these songs in one zip file.

1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

Dreams?  Sixteen hellish nightmares more like (although I suspect that rather facile joke has been made in just about every damn review of this album so far – it’s just too easy too avoid).  But yeah, this is rough as fucking balls this is, and fucking awesome with it.

Sixteen songs, under twenty minutes long, this is an album which doesn’t fuck about it just gets on with making a stinking racket, slapping you around the face a bit and then buggering off.

Songs like Barf City might seem a little much in isolation, but oddly enough, in the context of the album itself, surrounded by its slightly less full-frontal neighbours, it actually seems to make sense.  Certainly the acoustic strum of Moldy Spectre which follows it seems like a blessedly soothing balm when it arrives.

In some senses this is just a massively lo-fi version of swampy blues rock, with a few stylistic nods to metal thrown in here and there.  But it’s just so fucking rough and loud and furious that I find myself really enjoying it, almost as if every time I think they’ve gone as far as they’re going to go down this particular road they nudge it just a little bit further.

The songs are short as hell, and so is the album, and by the end of it I have to confess my head is rattling just a little bit.  But it’s fucking ace, this, and if you’re looking for something to blow the alt-folk cobwebs out of your ears for some time to come then this will do the trick with bells on.  It’s ludicrous, over the top, and great.

All their albums are released as free downloads, which can be had from their website here.

Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands – Tropical Lover

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Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands – Two Dead Rats

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Lo-fi garage rock with a bit of surf and a bit of rockabilly, this really is good stuff.  It’s sloppy, rough, loud and cocky and I am really fucking enjoying it.

Mrs. Toad always knows when I am going to get into something.  She walked into the room when this was first playing and asked what it was.  I said it had just arrived in my inbox, and she told me that I was going to like it.  Eh?  I said.  ‘Well, it’s rough and a bit atonal and the singer sounds like he’s not really arsed – basically it’s right up your street’.  And she’s right, it really is.

They’ve buried the vocals deep as hell on this, and they are barely enunciated to begin with, giving the impression of someone singing through a drunken stupour, carried along by the constantly crashing drums, which get a fucking good beating on this record, and the guitar which, while it sounds as off-balance as the singer, still fair snarls its way through the songs with some vigour.

They use some sort of keyboard thing (my knowledge of keyboards, as you can probably tell, is next to nil) to provide a constant wail through most of the songs and, a little like early Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, it seems to hold it all together quite well.  It’s almost like a crying child they give a good kick at the start of a song, and who doesn’t stop bawling until the end of it.

I am perhaps a little less convinced by Devil You Know, the last song on this EP, but the rest are bloody great.  It’s four songs on a 7″ which is short, sharp and punchy as fuck.  Money very, very well spent if you ask me.

Li’l Daggers – King Corpse

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MySpace | Buy from Livid Records

Despite the title (and the first song) there is very little ranting about the fucking Pope on this podcast, I promise.  He may be a vicious, decaying old scorpion in charge of one of the most corrupt and evil institutions on Earth, but after a little bit of gentle joshing at the beginning I promise I do let it drop and carry on with the music.

We have a fair bit of new stuff this week, such as Belle & Sebastian, Broken Records, Li’l Daggers and various other bits, and then a brief detour into Mrs. Toad and my drunken late night vinyl escapades last night.

Enjoy!

Direct Download: Toadcast #140 – The Romecast

01. Tom Lehrer – The Vatican Rag (00.17)
02. Li’l Daggers – King Corpse (06.26)
03. Bastardgeist – Flee to the Hills (11.26)
04. Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love (20.23)
05. Broken Records – Ailene (23.10)
06. The Walkmen – Blue as Your Blood (31.31)
07. Common Grackle – At the Grindcore Show (36.07)
08. The Meteors – Out of Time (40.42)
09. The Housemartins – Five Get Over Excited (43.46)
10. The Delfields – Claire (50.03)