After reading Vic Galloway’s rather nice article in today’s Herald on the rise of bands in Scotland influenced by both grunge and lo-fi slacker indie rock.

Recording for our upcoming split 12″ with Manchester bands Waiters and Sex Hands has seen pals recommend I have a good listen to The Meat Puppets too, if that’s the kind of stuff I’m into – particularly if that’s the kind of guitar sound I am enjoying at the moment.

So that’s what this podcast is loosely about.  As I explain, despite growing up at the perfect time to have been into all this stuff the first time around, I ended up being only vaguely aware of it, due to being almost entirely insulated in the bubble of the international expat community in Vienna at the time, and hence only really having MTV to introduce me to new music, beyond what I happened across by accident in the record shops around town.  Which generally wasn’t Dinosaur Jr.

Direct download: Toadcast #210 – The Slackercast

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01. Nirvana – Love Buzz (Shocking Blue cover) (00.26)
02. Feel Right – She’s No Good (08.47)
03. Shudderpulps – Time (10.46)
04. Spectral Park – Colours (16.13)
05. Dinosaur Jr. – Repulsion (24.24)
06. Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way remix) (30.20)
07. The Meat Puppets – Lake of Fire (40.54)
08. Sparklehorse – My Yoke is Heavy (42.57)
09. Narrow Sparrow – Spooky Head (47.40)
10. The Magnetic Fields – Andrew in Drag (52.00)
11. Pavement – Spit on a Stranger (59.40)

Dammit, Edinburgh can be frustrating.  Because we’re coastal, warm weather tends to draw a chilling mist off the sea called the haar, which can fuck up the most promising of warm days.  Yesterday, just as things were getting nice, the fucking haar came down, and it’s still bloody well here.

Anyhow, just a little reminder that next weekend (Saturday 30th April) we will be doing the lifeboats collection here in Stockbridge, and would hugely appreciate any volunteers who fancied helping us shake a tin for an hour or two.  We make it worth your while, in that there will be booze and food, and once we’re finished we’ll settle down to a nice big roast dinner and get shitfaced, and it’s generally a really fun day.

The RNLI is staffed by volunteers, and is actually a charitable organisation, rather than being funded by the government, which is mind-bogglingly nuts.  We inherited the Stockbridge collection from our mental-but-lovely next door neighbour when he moved, and it’s nice to make a little bit of a contribution over and above just handing over some spare change once in a while, so if anyone can make it down to our house next Saturday and help out it would be hugely appreciated – just let us know if you’re coming.

And in the meantime, we should really be celebrating the most important chapter in the Bible – the one about the chocolate bunny rabbits which lay eggs and suchlike.  Ah well, I guess it’s about as plausible as the rest of it.

1. Favourite Easter treat (this applies irrespective of religion – an atheist can still enjoy chocolate bunnies and a couple of days off).
2. Chocolate preference.
3. Who really killed Jesus?
4. Closest you’ve been to a boat-related mishap.
5. Things that will never be said in a church (mosque, synagogue, whatever) sermon but ought to.

The Magnetic Fields – Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits

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Broken Records – And They All Fell Into the Sea (Toad Session)

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Blur – Bank Holiday

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Bob Dylan – Green Eggs and Ham

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The Veils – Jesus for the Jugular

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Do you remember shuttle runs?  They were the single most unpleasant fitness exercise I ever remember being forced to do, and I was quite fit as a young ‘un.

Anyhow, today I am charging back and forth from Carluke, where we are getting some mastering done for the label, to the house, to the printers to collect some promo material, to the house to get them couriered down to London and then back to Carluke once more.  I don’t know if I’ll need a pint or a nap more desperately by the time all this shit is done.

I am also bracing myself for a little bit of trouble with the fearsome Mrs. Toad.  I may have queried Record Store Day a fair bit this week, but that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to it, and I am most certainly going to be out of bed sharpish to trundle into town on Saturday and see what’s what.

Where this may prove to be a controversial decision is that Mrs. Toad has been away in God Bless America for the last week and only gets back on Saturday morning, and I would guess that she might anticipate a little more love and attention than ‘Hello darling, nice to have you back, but I’m off to the shops and I’ll see you in a few hours’.  Ah well, some people are football widows, and Mrs. Toad is a music widow. Them’s the breaks.

Anyhow, in the meantime, I should stop wasting time and get on with wasting time.

1. Your favourite form of exercise.
2. Your least favourite form of exercise.
3. Which hobby always takes up just a little more of your time than any partner might reasonably be expected to understand?
4. We were too disorganised this year, but what should Song, by Toad Records do for Record Store Day in 2012?
5. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Luna – Dear Diary

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Pearl Jam – Bu$hleaguer

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Beck – Guess I’m Doing’ Fine

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Yo La Tengo – Upside Down

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Magnetic Fields – Sad Little Moon

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This podcast is all about our week’s record shopping in Austin, although I promise I am done going on about SXSW, so those of you bored to tears by the whole business are entirely safe, I promise.

We did buy a fair bit of vinyl while we were over there though, whether it be directly from the bands at their shows (usually whilst still pished and giddy from enjoying the gig) or on one of our particular excursions to either End of an Ear or Waterloo Records.

There is such pleasure to be had from poking through rack upon rack of vinyl, and whilst I have no real quibble with digital music, I think the sheer ritual and physical relationship it sacrifices can’t really be matched in the digital realm.

Direct download: Toadcast #167 – The Shoppingcast

01. X-Ray Eyeballs – Crystal (00.22)
02. The Magnetic Fields – All the Umbrellas in London (08.15)
03. Sparklehorse – Homecoming Queen (11.33)
04. The Coathangers – Chicken 30 (17.35)
05. Lost in the Trees – Walk Around the Lake (24.30)
06. Kurt Vile – My Sympathy (32.44)
07. Pavement – Range Life (35.15)
08. Warm Ghost – Open the Wormhole in Your Heart (43.57)
09. The Books – The Future, Wouldn’t That be Nice (50.19)
10. Deerhunter – Earthquake (58.27)

I really should have mentioned this before, but if there are any bands out there who want to play Glastonbury, they have until the 5pm on Monday 17th to apply through the Emerging Talent Competition, which can be entered here.

I’ve had a lot of emails this week since my name went on that list.  They’ve all been really nice emails, not an arse amongst them, but the music has been a very long way indeed from the kind of stuff I listen to, so I do find myself wondering a little at my suitability for this kind of thing.

Anyhow, I am guessing that if you are in a band and reading this then we probably have vaguely similar taste in music, so please apply.

There’s also the Scottish Music Awards coming up as well, and they are open for nominations.  This is something else I will be on the judging panel for (yes, I know, but they asked me, alright, so fuck off).  Again, it would be nice if you would go here and nominate some good stuff, because it would be nice to have as much good stuff in the nominations as possible.  I am looking into the possibility of adopting a mysterious alias, or even pretending to be Simon Cowell for a bit, so I can vote for myself in every category. The voting is open until the end of January, so hop to it.

Anyhewwww… I was browsing 17 Seconds this morning and I happened across a post where Ed mentioned a radio discussion in which decade people would most like to have lived, given the choice.  Most people chose the Fifties because of most people being fucking idiots and thinking it was like it is on rose-tinted, revisionist TV programs.  Read Brighton Rock (okay, not quite the Fifties) if you want to be disabused of such delusions.  Ed himself plumped for the Seventies, citing the amazing musical moments he would have been able to experience first hand.

However, as Ed himself implies with his last sentence, we often don’t realise what the moments of great import are, even as they happen around us.  I wonder how many of those amazing moments Ed would have actually recognised as being significant, even as he hypothetically experienced them for himself.

I was at T in the Park in 1995 or 1996 when Pulp and Radiohead were the headliners (alright, not Glastonbury, fuck you Ed!) but for all I thought both bands were incredible I certainly didn’t think of it as some sort of special moment which would live well beyond that particular year.  I remember being really excited when I first started using Napster, but did I have any idea what a significant movement I was participating in at the time?  No, of course not, it just seemed like a cool widget and I got into a shitload of new bands because of it.

So without further ado let’s get busy wasting what remains of the productive hours of the week by answering five stupid questions and then getting on with talking pish on the internet which is, let’s face it, pretty much what the internet was invented for.

1. Which unsigned band (or tiny label band if you like) would you most like to see win the Glasto competition thingy above?
2. Which current band do you think will be remembered for years?
3. Which current band do you think will be forgotten far faster than you would have thought when they were big?
4. Name something of global importance you are kinda impressed at having been around to witness.
5. Name a fictional world you would most like to inhabit.

The five songs this week celebrate the genius of Stephin Merritt.

The Magnetic Fields – Drive on Driver

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Future Bible Heroes – Death Opened a Boutique

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The Gothic Archies – Smile! No-one Cares How You Feel

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The 6ths – Night Falls Like a Grand Piano

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The Divine Comedy – The Dead Only Quickly

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This really does seem to have snuck out into the public domain almost by accident. The Magnetic Fields are a big deal – or at least, I would have thought so – but I have heard barely a whisper about the release of this new album. For some reason, the places where I tend to discuss music have been awfully, awfully quiet about it and I can’t help but wonder if a couple of relatively uninspiring recent records have dampened the interest in The Magnetic Fields in general, or whether the music world is simply becoming less and less interested in the achievements of the oldies*.

The title, Realism, is presumably sarcastic – or at least, it is for the most part. Musically, Stephin Merritt has in the past recorded in a pretty gritty manner, but this is just the opposite. Songs like Hootenanny and Doll’s Tea Party are whimsical to the point of silliness, and neither the music nor the lyrics exhibit any of the harshness you might lead yourself to expect from the title of the Record.

Lyrically it’s not all like that, though, with the opening and closing tracks actually delivering a little of the bleakness I had initially anticipated. In fact, the closing line of the album, about drinking during pregnancy, ends things on a really jarring note, but for the most part the record relies more on wistful regret to deliver its bleaker messages, rather than any kind of unflinching or shocking realism.

This has often been the Magnetic Fields’ way, of course, and despite the lusher orchestrations and less tinny production, this reminds me a fair bit of their ealier stuff, before the grandiosity of 69 Love Songs, the faffing about of I and the growling of Distortion.  I wouldn’t go revering to that cherished old phrase ‘blistering return to form’ or anything, because this album isn’t anything like confrontational enough for that kind of statement, but it does feel like as unified and coherent a record as Merritt has made for ages.  It feels, I suppose, like it isn’t trying too hard, and like it is comfortable with itself.

That impression bleeds through into my relationship with the album as well, in that it is a record I am enjoying in a very unintrusive manner.  It all just kinda works, and it may not rock my world, but I slipped into a very comfortable place with this album surprisingly quickly.

The Magnetic Fields – I Don’t Know What to Say

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The Magnetic Fields – The Doll’s Tea Party

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

*Except for Uncut of course, for whom it is clearly still March 2001 – Jack and Meg, are they really sister and brother? Who noes?

I am not one of those people who goes on and on about the quality of vinyl and the sound it makes and so on and so on, because I am just not an audiophile, really.  I’m not saying that I can’t hear the difference, just that I have no real objection to listening to badly recorded songs on 92Kbps mp3s or on a shitty old tape recorder or anything like that.  It just doesn’t really colour my enjoyment of a song, particularly, is all I’m saying.

This came up on the Fresh Air Radio show yesterday though, and I thought I might write a post about it: one of the things for which I love vinyl, more than the sound, is the way it changes the actual process of listening to music.  I have no CDs anymore, just digital and vinyl.  Because of the Biblical quantities of new music I listen to and the fact that I am jealous little hoarder, I have gigabytes worth of music on my main hard drive (and yes, before you ask, it is scrupulously backed up).  I don’t know the exact number, but I think you could start my digital music collection playing, walk away from the stereo for two months, and it still wouldn’t have to repeat a single song.

That kind of thing, along with Spotify and naughty downloading really does change how I listen to music.  I can find myself deciding I like something, shunting it into my music library, and then not listening to it again for years because I am so caught up with my inbox.  That a bit sad, really, and it is also where vinyl comes in.

Collecting vinyl is an expensive and painstaking process.  Between online purchases from small indie labels across the world (well, the US, Canada and here, let’s be honest), browsing through second-hand shops, the odd new thing purchased in actual record shops (remember them?) and occasionally going mental on eBay whilst plastered, it takes time and effort to accumulate vinyl.  It’s also bulky and expensive, so you just can’t buy that much of it.  I know some people might challenge that, but they are mental people, like Ed from 17 Seconds, who has a whole room of the stuff.  Compared to digital though, it’s just impossible to own that much music on record simply for practical reasons.  This restriction means that your collection tends to stay manageable, and also tends to cluster around the things you really, really love, with a few random second hand purchases thrown in to mix things up.

Secondly, of course, playing the stuff is a very high-maintenance undertaking.  Records need to be sifted, selected, piled up and, most importantly, turned over at least once every forty-five minutes or so.  This makes the act of listening to vinyl so much more deliberate and selective than sticking your stereo on random and letting it play what amounts to a relatively closely selected personal radio station from your collection of digital files.  You have to actively choose what you play, and you tend to listen to it more because you can’t just walk away and let it look after itself.

For myself I find it tends to slow me right down, and take the haste out of listening to music.  A little like the Slow Food Movement, by its very slowness it’s not that it forces me to concentrate exactly, more that it prevents me really concentrating on anything else all that much, so I tend to just absorb the music more.  It stops me treating listening to music like a job, stops me thinking about too many other things, forces me to concentrate on a much narrower selection of music and in doing so allows me to form a better relationship with it.

So never mind the audiophile sound issues, what I think I like most about vinyl is its very inconvenience.  It is a demanding and awkward format, by today’s standards, and this forces you to listen to music in a certain way, a more deliberate and receptive way, and that is what I love the most about the stuff.

The Magnetic Fields – Time Enough For Rocking When We’re Old

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The Wedding Present – Spangle

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Right, given we’ve come down to Manchester for the Meursault gig, I thought I might make a podcast based around the two years I spent living here.  As I mentioned on this week’s Friday Five, however, those were really not very happy times so basically this podcast is just a great big hour-long whinge about how shit my life was a couple of times a few years ago.

Nah, not really.  I mean, I do describe why life was tough then but it really isn’t just a great big moan, I promise.  For some reason the music in my life at those times seems to have really stuck in my head and become incredibly strongly associated with the period in question.  Partly, I suppose, because the emotional succour you get from music when things are a bit rough is something you’re grateful enough for for it to really form an important connection.

The other aspect is that on both those occasions I had so little music with me that the stuff I did have got played over and over again, so a really small amount of stuff really dominated my listening habits at that point, and became incredibly strongly intertwined with all of my memories of the time.  So, er, yes.  Here you go: The Manchester Podcast.

Toadcast #88 – The Manchester Podcast

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01. Pearl Jam – Dissident (03.16)
02. The Newcranes – Box of Shadows (08.53)
03. James – Say Something (17.17)
04. The Lemonheads – Into Your Arms (20.30)
05. Blur – Clover Over Dover (27.00)
06. Yo La Tengo – On Our Way to Fall (39.47)
07. Moby – Southside (41.31)
08. Calexico – Removed (48.10)
09. Jolene – Constantinople (51.46)
10. The Magnetic Fields – Yeah! Oh, Yeah! (57.57)

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)

You know, for once I think the religious right in America have actually put their finger on something which I find difficult to argue with.  Robert Peters, President of Morality in Media, of whom Song, by Toad is a staunch supporter, has written this insightful little piece for Christian News Wire called “Connecting the Dots: The Link Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murder”.  In it he points out the obvious fact that a decline in Judeo-Christian morality (actually, I think he means Judeo-Christian-Islamo morality because the three religions are all basically offshoots of the same sapling) has led to the permissiveness in society which leads us to tolerate both the marrying of ‘people’ of the same sex and the mass murder of innocent children.

I think it goes with out saying that knowing that our brief time on Earth is all you have, rather than having a nice safe spot in heaven to look forward to when it’s over, would lead you to be cavalier about human life.  Basically, the secular Darwinian values of modern society encourage you to go and kill people, whereas no-one with a safe knowledge in a neverending afterlife of bliss would be at all tempted to be even remotely careless with the seventy or eighty odd years they might have to spend on Earth in advance of it.

The clear, rational crux of his argument is expressed beautifully in the following paragraph:

“This secular value system is also reflected in the ‘sexual revolution,’ which is the driving force behind the push for ‘gay marriage;’ and the Iowa Supreme Court decision is another indication that despite all the damage this revolution has caused to children, adults, family life and society (think abortion, divorce, pornography, rape, sexual abuse of children, sexually transmitted diseases, trafficking in women and children, unwed teen mothers and more), it continues to advance relentlessly.”

I don’t think anyone would argue that gay marriage and the sexual revolution are clearly responsible for abortions, divorce, rape and abuse of children, and the trafficking in slaves.  Gay marriage has been on the agenda for the last twenty years, at most, and is only legal in a tiny number of states in the US and other countries around the world.  Yet even in this short period, rape, the slave trade, abortion and the sexual abuse of children have all clearly skyrocketed out of control.

Only a staunch Darwinian, like Hitler, could try and argue that the world is undoubtedly a safer place now than it has ever been.  Because don’t let the Nazi definition of a woman’s role in society: “Kinder, Kirche, Kueche” (Children, Church, Kitchen) fool you, they were self-evidently atheist liberal elitists.  Allowing rationality into the law and into society in place of obedience to the dogma of the Judeo-Christian(-Islamo) values system on which the United States was founded will inevitably result in a terrifying slide into anarchy, plagues, and the rebirth of Sodom and Gomorrah in the 21st Century.

The United States is the most religious of all the first world nations, and has the highest levels of violent crime, which proves conclusively the need for more religious guidance in the law-making and social policy of developed nations.  The fact that there is absolutely no correlation between the contents of the two doesn’t mean that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights weren’t clearly founded on the Bible and the Ten Commandments, as David Limbaugh recently made clear.

And if anyone needs any more proof of the direct link between gay marriage and mass murder, I offer you this little personal anecdote.  I have now attended a couple of gay weddings, and since then, every single time I hear this kind of babbling, incoherent rhetoric I am overwhelmed with the desire to hunt and kill absolutely any of the retards who take this sort of shit even vaguely seriously.  So there you go.  Maybe Peters had a point after all.

The Magnetic Fields – When My Boy Walks Down the Street

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The Ballet – The Face of Everything

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Billy Bragg – Sexuality (Live)

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