Yes, it’s Fresh Air time again, and Ruth is back from the bring of death and ready to chatter away once more. This week we have Russell from Mammoeth playing live in session for us. He has an album out on Mini50 Records some time in the relatively near future, so we may try an weasel a preview out of him if we can.
We’ve also got some interesting new stuff – Eels released a new song from their forthcoming album just the other day, and we’ll be playing the phenomenal new eagleowl single as well. We are recording a Toad Session with them in December, which is also really fucking brilliant news.
This week’s playlist:
1. Modest Mouse – Float On
2. Taken By Trees – Anna
3. Mammoeth – Latin Scribe (Live in Session)
4. Dr. Dog – The World May Never Know
5. Mammoeth – Scramble Eggs (Live in Session)
6. Brian Eno & David Byrne – Strange Overtones
7. Belle & Sebastian – She’s Losing It
8. Arthur Russell – Love is Overtaking Me
9. Mammoeth – Writing on the Walls (Live in Session)
10. Fleetwood Mac – Everywhere
And as always we have last week’s session below the fold – it was with the Pineapple Chunks, and we have downloadable mp3s, and interview podcast and four live videos for you to check out. (All our videos can be found on our Vimeo page.) Read the rest of this entry »
Hello people, more podcastenfun once again. Having done the Deathcast recently, I thought it might be nice to do the polar opposite – the Birthcast. This week’s podcast is all about the birth of Song, by Toad. I’ll tell you about how I started writing about music, how I discovered blogs, how I discovered that what I was writing was in fact a blog and how I ultimately ended up on Wordpress writing what you are now reading. r casually skimming over, depending on your bent.
It has also ended up being something of a 2004 retrospective, because that’s when this all started, however slowly, and that side of it has been nice. I had met Mrs. Toad by this point, and I was all excited, and despite the fact that my job was bollocks, living in London was great fun. I was on a narrowboat at Nine Elms Pier at this point, which was an amazingly brilliant place to live, and I used to cook myself kettle noodles because I couldn’t be arsed firing up the stove. I’d boil some water, throw it over some noodles and some stock and chuck in lots of fresh veg – bloody delicious.
Toadcast #40 – The Birthcast
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01. Modest Mouse – Bury Me With It (01.39)
02. The Fiery Furnaces – Chris Matthews (07.57)
03. The Innocence Mission – I Have Not Seen This Day Before (Live) (17.54)
04. American Music Club – Only Love Can Set You Free (22.57)
05. Brian Wilson – Cabin Essence (28.40)
06. Andrew Bird – Lull (35.30)
07. Jim White – Static on the Radio (42.52)
08. Tom Waits – Trampled Rose (49.09)
09. The Dears – Lost in the Plot (54.36)
10. Giant Sand – Anarchistic Bolshevistic Cowboy Bundle (59.43)
I can see the indie-police descending on me for this one, but here goes anyway: in all honesty, as much as I loved Good News for People Who Love Bad News, I don’t think I really like Modest Mouse very much. After Good News I went and tried to explore their back catalogue a bit and really didn’t get very far. Neither The Moon & Antarctica nor The Lonesome Crowded West did much for me at all and I pretty much gave up.
This latest one is a bit of a return to earlier territory which, for me, means a boom-boom drum rhythm and far too much shouting. One of the joys of Good News was the variety of sound, from the devil’s carnival stomp of Bury Me With it to the wistful dream of Float On, with plenty in between. We Were Dead has far less of that, which makes it all a bit one-paced most of the time. Most of the songs have trademark shouty bits interspersed with trademark melodic bits, with the result that most of the variety in the album is actually within songs rather than between them. The Fiery Furnaces do this a lot as well, and I don’t really like it.
That said, the overall sound is largely decent, if you’re listening for it then Johnny Marr’s contribution on guitars is clearly in evidence, and there are a couple of excellent songs. Dashboard, for example, is so superior to the pre-release leak it acts as a bit of a lesson to those of us with an ill-advised habit of drawing too many conclusion from sketchy pre-release gossip. All in all though, Modest Mouse aren’t my favourite band and this isn’t really my favourite album.
Modest Mouse – Dashboard
Modest Mouse – Missed the Boat
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