Song, by Toad

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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*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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The key word in that phrase, of course, is if.  There are a massive number of people in the fucking internet age, however, who seem to think that intending to build it is reason enough for people to come and it is really, really getting on my nerves.

Bloggers start blogs, write five posts, and then start making demands about being listed in the Hype Machine or elbo.ws directories immediately, despite it being incredibly fucking clear that it’s going to take at least two months before they’ll even consider you. They are important services and drive a lot of traffic to your site, so I can understand the desire, but please just show some fucking patience.  At least create something of substance before clamouring for people to shower you with praise.

This happens when penis-brained publicists get their hands on a small but promising band as well: the uber-hard sell comes out to play.  “Greatest band ever, set to explode!“  And not infrequently this band has no more than a small handful of songs to their name.

Venture capital-backed start-ups promise to REVOLUTIONISE online music sales/sharing/funding/whatfuckingever and send out these breathless fucking emails full of wind and promises about how you’ve JUST GOT TO BE in from the start.  Do we?  Do we really have to?

People do it to bands all the time.  I can get you on the radio, I can get you this, I can get you that.  And then they just stop paying any fucking attention, it all fails to materialise and the band is left with nothing.

The new mantra for the 21st Century should be more along the lines of: “I don’t care about your fucking plans, your grandiose ideas or your vacant, meaningless promises.  I don’t care what you intend to do, or about your fucking ambitions.  Go away, get your nose to the fucking grindstone and DO something.  Then talk about it.”

Can you tell I haven’t had enough sleep?

Shout Out Louds – Hurry Up, Let’s Go

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The Magnetic Fields – Promises of Eternity

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Micah P. Hinson – Patience

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This may be the limpest of all excuses I’ve ever had for naming a podcast.  You know why it’s called the Jeffcast?  Because I kinda mention Jeffrey Lewis a couple of times.  Oooh, yes, that makes sense.  Still, sorry, I couldn’t think of anything else really, off the top of my head.

I suppose I am off to see Jeffrey Lewis directly after recording this, so I guess it sort of counts.  He is playing a secret gig at Henry’s Cellar Bar after sneaking out of the Beggars Banquet Christmas Party at the Picture House over the road.  It’s one of the things I love about the anti-folk crowd: you genuinely get the impression that they’d rather be playing to an appreciative crowd of their mates, rather than a bigger crowd of anonymous punters who may stand there and demand entertainment.

So there you go, that’s the deal for tonight.  For the rest of the weekend we’re putting together Meursault albums, ready for the official (re)launch of their record next Friday at the Song, by Toad Christmas Party.  So, after folding and screen-printing a thousand of the bastards we’ll all be well ready for Gimme Shelter in the Caves on Saturday and a spot of Candythief action in the Jazz Bar on Sunday.  Enjoy the 48th Toadcast.

Toadcast #48 – The Jeffcast

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01. Yo La Tengo – Double Dare (04.12)
02. Wolf Parade – Call it a Ritual (07.29)
03. Modey Lemon – Loch Ness Monster (11.25)
04. Sly & the Family Stone – Life (17.09)
05. The Velcro Quartet – The Love Song of Little Cosmo Nostradamus (20.03)
06. The Pernice Brothers – The Ballad of Bjorn Borg (25.57)
07. Caramel Jack – The Lincoln Jackson Incident (34.37)
08. The Magnetic Fields – All the Umbrellas in London (38.29)
09. Sparklehorse – Happy Man (Memphis Version) (44.46)
10. The Veils – Birthday Present (49.44)
11. Grandaddy – Miner at the Dial-A-View (54.24)

I always remember the snivelling acolytes of the cool kids at school being so horrified when you showed indifference to the glowing aura of dazzling beauty emanating from the posteriors of their deities that there was only one response: you must be jealous.

Aye, right, spot on you fucking psychological genius.  Christ almighty, are you that heartbroken by someone showing a lack of respect for your personal heroes that you have to whine like a jilted baby?  The answer is yes, of course.  Yesterday someone left a great comment on my post about Scarlett Johansson’s merciless butchering of Tom Waits’ back catalogue which was pretty much in that exact same vein.  It was perfect – a little gem of spurned, wounded madness and I thought I had to share.  No rambling, no idiotic screed, perfectly concise and absolutely brilliant.  No need to mock the old dear any more of course, but I though you might find this funny:

I actually love Tom Waits AND Scarlet’s covers, especially “Falling Down.” There is absolutely no reason for you to bash someone personally because they didn’t cover a beloved song of yours to your liking or because you’re bitter about not being famous.

She’s quite right.  I am unforgivably bitter about not being famous.  Because I’ve done, erm… nothing worthy of fame really.  But then, that doesn’t seem to discourage many people. And it couldn’t possibly be because I think Scarlett Johansson can’t fucking sing and that our pathetic toadying to celebrity means no-one had the balls to tell her, could it?  No no, that would be entirely implausible.  Can anyone sense that I’m in a bit of a mood today?

And what better song:

The Magnetic Fields – Famous

I am perhaps not the best person to be reviewing this, given I am basically a casual fan of a cult band – a slightly self-contradictory combination. Stephin Merrit has done mountains of work under numerous guises, and a lot of it has been truly brilliant. A lot of it, however, has not. After the peak of 69 Love Songs came the trough of the truly disappointing I, so full of the overbearingly twee and the excruciatingly arch that it barely warrants a listen. As he himself says: “The previous Magnetic Fields record had been self-consciously soft rock”. The self-consciousness is always on the verge of smothering The Magnetic Fields, but the soft rock bit was a step too far for me, I’m afraid.

Fortunately, this is a bit of a return to earlier territory for Merritt. Distortion fits the bill indeed as a title, with those Jesus & Mary Chain guitars of old being in evidence throughout – in fact he explicitly set out to reimagine their landmark album Psychocandy. For the most part this is extremely welcome, bringing songs full of tension and growl. The songs themselves I would only describe as partially successful however with a few, as ever, just failing to capture that underlying melody that brings hummability to distortion-laden noise-pop.

Merritt has always been like this. Every album has a few misses to go with its hits, so there are plenty of tracks on this that I really like. As ever, unfortunately, there are several that I really don’t which means, as I mentioned above, that I am only ever going to be a casual fan of The Magnetic Fields. An attitude, as well as a review, quite possibly, that may just slightly irk the purists.

The Magnetic Fields – Xavier Says
The Magnetic Fields – Drive On, Driver

website | hype | amazon

Well you know how I said I wasn’t so convinced by Toadcast #17?  Well it proved somewhat prophetic, although that prophesy may have been somewhat self-fulfilling of course.  It’s one of my least downloaded podcasts for ages, but this one should sort that out.  There’s some genuinely excellent music on here, although most of it is pretty obscure.  There’s no Arcade Fire or anything to pull in the punters, bar a bit of The Magnetic Fields, but a really good selection of new and emerging music nevertheless.

And why the Homecast?  Well that’s obvious of course: we’re back in our house at long last and I recorded this from my massive old lab bench that doubles as a desk and music centre all at once.  It’s fucking brilliant – I really should take a picture and post it for you so you can see.  The bench is 2.75m long, so I have computer and stuff at one end, stereo equipment at the other and a couple of good sized speakers either side. A music anorak’s paradise!

Toadcast #18 – The Homecast

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01. Aidan John Moffat – Eureka Springs (Edit) (00.00)
02. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (02.30)
03. Flashguns – St. George (07.53)
04. George Pringle – Carte Postale (13.52)
05. Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Own Me (16.59)
06. Destroyer – Foam Hands (21.55)
07. Howlies – Aluminum Baseball Bat (28.44)
08. The Scotland Yard Gospel Choir – Aspidestra (38.36)
09. Johnny Flynn & the Sussex Wit – Leftovers (40.48)
10. Ruth Theodore – Overexpanding (49.22)
11. Akron/Family – Ed is a Portal (55.28)
12. Victor Borge – Phonetic Puncutation (63.22)
13. Josiah Wordsworth – Drive-by Media (70.23)
14. King of Prussia – Spain in the Summertime (74.44)
15. The Magnetic Fields – Threeway (83.07)
16. The Forms – Knowledge in Hand (87.44)
17. Howlies – Smoke (90.14)
18. The Beat – Mirror in the Bathroom (95.38)
19. Found – When You Fall (102.09)