Well here we go.  The new year is yet to quite take hold or take off, but I promise you that things will kick back into gear this weekend.  There are some fine love shows appearing on the calendar, slowly but surely, and eventually 2009 will get going.  No rush though.

This Toadcast is a bit of a mix.  I’ve got some of this year’s favourites, I look back at some of last year’s favourites, and I also poke away at a couple of the bands I hope will make their mark in 2009.

In that sense, examining last year’s favourites makes a lot of sense.  I’m always curious about how well our fads and fancies bear up to the passage of time.  I’ve not been too fickle in recent years, which is sort of nice, so I don’t mind looking back like this.  There aren’t too many embarrassments to be had, so it’s kind of nice to take the chance to look backwards, look forwards a little and generally just take the opportunity to pause for breath and enjoy the new year.  As should you, toadlings, as should you.  Happy new year, folks.

Toadcast #52 – Let’s Go

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01. Bombadil – Cavaliers’ Har Hum (02.24)
02. Gerry Mitchell & Little Sparta – The Ragged Garden of Your Eye (08.57)
03. Aidan John Moffat – The Boy That You Love (12.19)
04. Mitchell Museum – Extra Lives (18.11)
05. The Savings & Loan – The Virgin’s Lullaby (24.36)
06. The Builders & the Butchers – When it Rains (28.06)
07. Elvis Perkins – It’s Only Me (34.30)
08. Mother & the Addicts – Are Others (38.21)
09. The Pictish Trail – Winter Home Disco (46.27)
10. The Low Lows – Dear Flys, Love Spider (54.49)

1. Meursault – Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues

I know I can’t be objective with regards to this album, but believe me I am being honest when I tell you that it is the best thing I’ve heard all year.  Whether it’s the obvious hits, the peculiar interludes, the perfect blend of pop songs and experimental electronica, or the trajectory and integrity of the album as a whole, I don’t think I’ve heard better than this for years.
Meursault – Salt Pt.1

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2. The Felice Brothers – The Felice Brothers

A warmer, more immediately emotional album I couldn’t really imagine.  The voice and the slow pace are so rich and arresting that you find yourself overcome by sadness almost immediately, and that hold on your emotions is never once loosed for forty minutes.
Felice Brothers – Greatest Show on Earth

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3. Langhorne Slim – Langhorne Slim

Of this top five, all but the Felice Brothers have firmly enhanced their reputations with me with superb live performances.  With Langhorne Slim it wasn’t the emotive power of bands like Meursault, Shearwater or the Low Lows, it was sheer charm.  Sean Scolnick delivered his songs with such easy charisma that you just couldn’t help but warm to him.  Like Barton Carroll, this is an album whose style is far from revolutionary – more a familiar mish-mash of  what I would vaguely describe as Americana.  That familiarity is something which turns out to be a bonus in the end though, as the album worms its way under your skin like few others.
Langhorne Slim – Diamonds & Gold

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4. Shearwater – Rook

Occasionally beautiful, but often thunderous, this album was an immediate success with me, building up to all sorts of crescendos oozing a ferocity you rarely expect.  I still don’t know if it’s the loveliest or the angriest album of the year.
Shearwater – Leviathan, Bound

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5. The Low Lows – Shining Violence

This is another album I didn’t necessarily expect to find this high on the list when I first heard it, but for some reason it’s just grown and grown on me this year, while more highly anticipated records have kind of dropped away.  It broods and snarls, growling it’s tunes at you from behind a wall of reverb.
The Low Lows – This Modern Romance

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Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

Here is the official beginning of Christmas List season, here at Song, by Toad. If you want to get involved and write your own list, then please do. Go here for more details. The more of you that contribute to that the better the results we will get, so don’t be shy.

This is the first quarter of my Festive Fifty for 2008. I will also be preparing a list of my twenty favourite albums, but I might just neglect singles and EPs this time around. If you disagree with anything then do get stuck in, but bear in mind that this is far from a definitive ranking. Ask me on another day and Pictish’s brilliant I Don’t Know Where to Begin could easily be in the top five. Ask me in four months’ time and it would probably be all-change again. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like the Ark as a venue at the best of times, and the fucking shameful treatment dished out to Eagleowl, who played before The Low Lows here tonight, was just fucking embarrassing. People just talked over the performance, and if the band got any louder they they just raised the volume of their conversation to avoid the inconvenience of actually showing the band even a fragment of fucking respect. Fucking pathetic. Unfortunately, Eagleowl don’t play loud enough music to actually be able to drown the wankers out, which meant the rest of us just had to sit through it. Bloody ridiculous. If you don’t like it, fuck off outside and talk. I have been to enough crap gigs recently where I didn’t like the bands enough, found myself talking too much and promptly decided it would be best if myself and my pal left the room until they finished. It’s called a bare minimum of fucking manners, and The Ark audience would have done well to try and bloody well show some.

Fortunately The Low Lows do indeed make a racket, and any chatter was instantly swallowed in a buzz of noise and feedback. Their recent album, Shining Violence, is fuzzy enough, but there’s something much more primal about the live show.  The music has an angrier, looser vibe on stage.  It feels much less controlled, as if it were somehow likely to break loose and launch itself at you.

It wasn’t the swirl of experimental feedback that I was somehow expecting, don’t ask me why, but what it was was a more feral, confrontational version of its recorded self.  Between the nasal bark of the delivery and the amazing levels of reverb on his mic channel, PL Noon’s voice was pretty much indecipherable, but that didn’t matter so much.  The feeling in his voice drove home the added force of the music beautifully.

There was much more synth in the live show that I had noticed on the record as well, which was interesting.  Synths have been a staple of the classic indie-pop combo for some time now, from the angular haircut bands to the more arch dancier bands, but with the Sargasso Trio using them so successfully in what is essentially a folk-pop band and now this, it appears that the instrument is enjoying its spell in the limelight.  In this scenario, set against the buzz of guitars, it did sterling work, bringing an dystopian surreality to songs that for the most part were already slipping sideways in a barely controlled manner.

You know when you go to a gig with not all that much knowledge of a group and come out thinking ‘Nope, these guys really are the business’?  Well this was one of those gigs.

The Low Lows – Modern Romance
The Low Lows – Sparrow

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No, I’m not dead, just insanely busy. We recorded the Alela Diane & Mariee Sioux Toad Session today, and it’s been a pretty bloody hectic weekend, so I am bloody exhausted.

Also, when I requested my slot on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station, I looked at a couple of months of my diary and what do you know, hectic as hell but for some reason Tuesday was empty absolutely every week for about two months. Perfect, I thought, I shall request Tuesdays as it will never clash with anything and life will be beer and skittles.

Since they were nice enough to give me a slot on Tuesdays what has happened? Well this week I was offered a ticket for Manchester United’s home tie with Barcelona in the European Cup and there are two bloody gigs I want to go to in Edinburgh that night as well. Fucking typical.

Tuesday 29th April: The Low Lows & Eagleowl at Henry’s Cellar Bar.
I am so pissed off about missing this gig I could cure cancer on Tuesday afternoon and just not fucking tell anyone out of spite. Eagleowl’s morose folk and The Low Lows building, feedbacky Americana would have been the best lineup for bloody ages. Arse arse fucking arse.
The Low Lows – Raining in Eva

Tuesday 29th April: Isosceles & Eastern Conference Champions at Cabaret Voltaire.
I have no idea quite what the word angular means when applied to music, but perhaps abrupt, spasmodic indie pop with plenty of synth and style might cover it. That’s Isosceles anyway, and they’re excellent. Eastern Conference Champions are another very, erm, yoof-friendly sounding beat combo and despite this I really like them.
Isosceles – Isosceles

Thursday 1st May: Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms with Come On Gang & The Chap.
I’m not sure if there’s been a Limbo night yet that hasn’t been worth going to, but you know what, I’ve never once made it. This is unlikely to change this week unfortunately, but Come On Gang are supposed to be brilliant and The Chap sound decent as well.

There’s a couple of others, like Colin McIntyre (of Mull Historical Society) at Cabaret Voltaire and Zoey Van Goey and Crash My Model Car at Henry’s, but my interest in both of those gigs is kind of slim, so I go if you want but I won’t be making it. Maybe if they’d put them on a Tuesday instead…

I’m not listing any gigs as part of the 32 Music Live festival at the Three Sisters in Edinburgh because, for some incredible reason which I really hope goes deeper than my own simple stupidity, I can’t seem to find the fucking listings anywhere on the internet. The closest I could find was this on Bebo, with the only interesting bits of information being that it starts this weekend and is free. Go information superhighway!

Oh and Vampire Weekend are at the Liquid Room, but don’t bother – they’ve sold out.

I am now going to sleep the sleep of the recently deceased.

I was right to be excited about this – it’s bloody marvellous. All dusty guitar noise and distant, distressed vocal, this reminds me in parts of the likes of Band of Horses and Grandaddy, but also of more feedback-heavy, de-tuned stuff along the lines of Sparklehorse.

There’s a foreboding air to the album, almost like a distant storm brewing in the dusty Arizona desert. Yep, dusty again, sorry. It’s not a million miles away from the atmosphere conjured by Willy Vlautin’s wonderful Richmond Fontaine, although further from Calexico and perhaps a little closer to the Jesus & Mary Chain.

The constant fuzz of the background keeps things simmering away, but it’s not as one-paced as you might think for something with such a ubiquitous undercurrent. Five Ways I Didn’t Die might not be quite Top of the Pops fodder, but it’s a bloody enjoyable pop song in its own de-tuned way, and Raining in Eva is the sort of nostaligic, rueful oboe-licked meander that could easily have issued from the pen of the likes of Tom Waits, had he been dust-bowl hobo rather than an LA boho.

Those of you looking for something pleasant for dinner parties should steer clear, but if you like the sound of a record that treads the line between tense and angry, and wistful and redemptive then have a go at this. It’s a lovely, lovely album.

The Low Lows – Five Ways I Didn’t Die
The Low Lows – Modern Romance

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There’s only time for a real quickie this week as I am working my hairy little buttocks off on the Broken Records stuff at the moment.  Still, in your insatiable thirst for pointless, self-indulgent rambling I was sure you’d want to listen to something splendid in the meantime.

There’s no underlying theme to anything either I’m afraid, just me rattling on about some current and very interesting music, as well as a couple of confessions so shocking you may never come back here again.  Looking at the playlist, I’m sure you can guess which ones they are.

So good luck with this, and I am already looking forward to the next one.

Toadcast #25 – The Quickcast[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/songbytoad/ToadcastNo25.mp3]

01.  The Futureheads – Broke Up the Time (02.02)
02. Tapes ‘n’ Tapes – Hang Them All (05.05)
03. Meursault – Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues(13.21)
04. The Byrons – Azerbaijan (19.13)
05. The Fire Engines – Candyskin (26.04)
06. The Close Lobsters – Firestation Towers (28.53)
07. Mighty Mighty – Law (34.21)
08. Kim Carnes – When I’m Away From You (41.14)
09. Meat Loaf – Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (44.32)
10. Dirty Summer – War is Bad, Bono is Great (50.02)
11. The Low Lows – Dear Flies Love Spider (53.40)
12. Sargasso Trio – It’s Hot in Hell (58.32)
13. The Extraordinaires – High Five the Cactus (63.11)
14. Modernaire – Distraction (69.40)
15. The Indelicates – Point Me to the West (75.47)
16. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Night of the Lotus Eaters(83.47)

Yes, you did read that correctly.  Meat Loaf.  Fuck off.

Another slightly random discovery here, I happened across these fellows from Austin, Texas when poking around bands who were going to be playing at South by Southwest this year.

They do actually have plenty of releases to their name, which I may have to start exploring because their sound is bloody excellent. It’s a kind of low-fi, simmering drone rock combined with the some of the bare bones of Southern American rock. Imagine Band of Horses crossed with the excellent Ravens & Chimes and you might be just about there. They sound just a little like Yo La Tengo at times too, although maybe that’s just me.

The fuzz and the feedback combine beautifully with the more traditional aspects of their stuff – it’s haunting and emotive, almost plaintive somehow, but that may be down to Parker Noon’s voice. Apparently they are amazing live, descending into spirals of feedback, distortion and impassioned noise and amazingly, I am going to get the chance to find out for myself because they’re actually coming to Edinburgh to play Henry’s in April – bloody marvellous.

Either way, I am loving the sound of this lot and am really rather looking forward to investigating further. If it’s all as good as the songs I’ve heard so far it should be a real buzz to dig through their back catalogue. Shining Violence is their new album and is pegged for release in early March, so I’ll definitely be snapping that one up.

The Low Lows – Dear Flies, Love Spider
The Low Lows – Sparrows

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