I rather unkindly dismissed this album as boring a little while back, but I have been listening to it a lot since then and I think I need to retreat from that position just a little.

Just to be straight, I am not taking it back entirely.  I think there are quite a few weak songs, and that the sound is just a little too soft and pleasant at times, but there is still some really excellent stuff on All Eternals Deck.

I should first confess that I got into The Mountain Goats, not by the early records which the purist indie-snob might require, but by their Big Pop Hit The Sunset Tree in 2005.  I have also, just to add even more caveats, subsequently discovered that I am probably not all that much of a Mountain Goats fan, all told.  I have explored their back catalogue both forwards and backwards, and rarely found more than bits and pieces which I have liked, although I’ll admit I haven’t heard their very first records, which are supposed to be fantastic.

Which brings us to All Eternals Deck, an album which initially reminded me too strongly of the distinctly soft Heretic Pride, from a year or two ago.  All Eternals Deck is, I think, a better album, and I should not have written it off so quickly.  The Age of Kings is wistful and lovely, and the somewhat bizarre High Hawk Season probably shouldn’t work, with the weird choral backing, but does.

There are other highlights too, such as the rather unpleasant The Autopsy Garland and lovely opener Damn These Vampires, but I still think that I personally would not have included a little under half these songs. Particularly towards the end of the album, for all the songs definitely sound like Mountain Goats songs, that is about all they sound like – their defining characteristic becomes their only one, in a way.

It’s difficult to meaningfully write about an album when you only have a loose relationship with the band’s music, so I don’t want to imply that even I think my opinion on this record is worth all that much.  But for all there is a fair bit which still isn’t really doing that much for me, there are some excellent songs here, and I think I have been a bit unfair in how quickly I dismissed it.

The Mountain Goats – Age of Kings

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The Mountain Goats – High Hawk Season

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I called myself a novelty-whore in a review a little while back, and it’s something which I’ve been a little wary of for a while now: that I am so absorbed in the small-scale DIY end of the music industry that I have somehow lost my taste for famous bands.  Or worse, that I somehow filter out their excellence once they hit album number three or thereabouts, and henceforth hear only the sound of boredom.

I do wonder, sometimes, what my younger self would have made of disappointing recent albums by the likes of Grinderman, Iron & Wine, Bright Eyes and now, it would seem, REM.  I remember reviewing an album by the Rolling Stones many years ago – one heralded as the tedious “blistering return to form” by the proper music press -  and I think I described it as sounding ‘a bit like The Stones covering The Stones’ or something roughly along those lines.  Well the new REM is a bit like that.

I just can’t help but wonder if the me from six or seven years ago who got most of his music from Uncut or Word might have been more impressed with these albums – maybe I’ve just been pulled away by getting my nose too close to the grindstone, but I have genuinely lost almost all interest in bands of this size.

I just read Sean from Drowned in Sound say this on Twitter: “the Ladytron interview is getting serious traffic on DiS at the moment! And people wonder why we don’t DO little bands”.  I have the same issue here, but Sean is trying to run a business, and I am… well I am kind of, but not really.  Big bands mean more traffic, and the fact that I have stopped caring about reviewing albums by the likes of the above, or the new Mountain Goats album (avvvvverage) means that I am doing without the spikes in traffic these high-interest releases bring with them.

I take the opposite approach to DiS though, which is something you can do if you’re a bit smaller: I am absolutely not prepared to second-guess the content on Song, by Toad by the amount of readership it will attract.  Ruth, who does the Fresh Air show with me, pointed out how blogs haven’t called such and such a band (I forget who) out on being shite, and I said that many probably had, just by omission.

I used to write negative reviews on this site, but in all honesty, at the moment I really just can’t be arsed.  I sat down with that Bright Eyes album, and just couldn’t force myself to listen to it all the way through, never mind actually bother thinking of anything meaningful to say about it.  But I’ll take the hit in traffic just to keep the site focussed on things I genuinely give a shit about.

And this year, that means I have reviewed almost no major bands.   REM, Mountain Goats, Bright Eyes, Iron and Wine… just one really booooring record after another after another.  And I wonder if I have just been drawn so far away from mainstream music that I just don’t have the attention left over to properly absorb this stuff anymore.  But deep down I can’t help but suspect that it’s just down to the fact that some very famous bands have released some very, very average music so far this year.

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

The thing I hate the most about Satnavs is that although they do find wherever it is you’re going, but you tend to have absolutely no idea how you got there.  So you are no less lost, in a sense, you just happen to be in the right place.

Well, I am getting a bit like that with my calendar.  I write so much in my calendar that I tend to assume I put everything in it, which I don’t.  The only problem with this is that I make no effort to memorise appointments or events anymore, assuming them to be in my calendar.

Previously, I used to just remember stuff.  That wasn’t entirely failsafe, but I was generally pretty good at keeping things in my head.  Now, once I write things down (or even when I don’t, but assume I have) they just vanish from my head altogether, leaving me entirely at the mercy of the computer.

And frankly, it’s unsettling.  When I do forget something now I feel a bit like you do in those dreams where you’re entirely naked in a public place, or when you’re suddenly on stage, expected to give a grand performance on a musical instrument you never learned to play.  Other people get those dreams, right?  It’s not just me.

Umm, so it’s time for our traditional Friday de-lurking amnesty, time for you shirkers to step out of the shadows, and talk utter pish on the internet.  Friday, after all, is not really for doing work, is it.

1. Are you early, late or completely punctual for appointments?
2. What is your most embarrassing memory failure?
3. What piece of technology would be like a helpless child without (‘your phone’ will be accepted, but please bear in mind it’s a pretty poor answer – not that this is supposed to be all that challenging of course, but a better answer will win you so much more respect, and let’s face it, that’s what it’s all about, eh)?
4. Which dream is the most disconcerting – the falling one, the public nudity one, the crumbling teeth one, or the on stage with no idea what to do one?  Or even a different one, if you like.
5. What was the last question again?

The Mountain Goats – You, or Your Memory

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Bob Dylan – I Forgot More Than You Will Ever Know

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The Last Battle – Photographic Memory

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Micah P. Hinson – I Still Remember

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – A Night to Remember

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The Let’s Get Lyrical campaign was born of a desire to combine Edinburgh’s status as an official City of Literature, with Glasgow’s as a City of Music.  There are events being held throughout February and it will come as no surprise to discover that they are a bit of a step up from the dreary indie pish I usually feature on these pages.

As you can imagine, there are an awful lot of scholarly things that can be written about this topic and, as you can probably also imagine, you aren’t going to read them here.  Nothing about all the value of oral traditions, the role of lyrics in folk music, or even the emotional impact of the details of the lyrics versus the more abstract emotions generated by the music – I have stuff to say about all of these things, but I am down visiting my folks in London at the moment, so settling in to write an essay would be considered somewhat uncouth, I suspect.

Instead, I have picked six fairly random songs by six of my favourite lyricists, and will write just a little bit about why they resonate with me so much.  I find it amazing how important I can find lyrics – to the extent that I would suggest that music can make you love a song, but only lyrics can make it a part of your soul – and yet there are vast swathes of my music collection where I am neither aware of, nor particularly interested in the lyrics.  A lot of the time they’re just plain indecipherable, and in the absence of liner notes in the digital age, tracking them down seems like an awful lot of work and I rarely do it; I doubt I am alone.

What it tends to take is a particular hook.  I hear a phrase which snags me, and then I am pulled in.  But for a lot of music I am happy enough for that not to happen, and just to enjoy the tunes.  When you really do connect with the lyrics, though, the impact of a song changes totally.

Eef Barzelay – The Ballad of Bitter Honey (Amazon)

Eef Barzelay, whether with Clem Snide or solo, has written some of the best, cleverest, wryest, most cutting lyrics I have ever heard.  This is the man responsible for the phrase ‘the root canal music of a prom night disaster’, but this song might just be his greatest.  Written from the point of view of a dancer whose ‘ass you saw bouncing next to Ludacris’ it manages to create the portrait of a sweet natured, shallow girl trying her very, very best to wring some sense of self-worth out of life, and failing.  Horribly.  It manages a particularly remarkable trick of being at once utterly excoriating in its description of the mores of the modern world, and yet tenderly sympathetic of the person who both embodies them and bears their burden.  So much sympathy and so much rage.  But that’s Eef Barzelay for you.

Eef Barzelay – The Ballad of Bitter Honey

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Barton Carroll – Shadowman (Amazon)

I don’t know how closely this song draws from real life, but this is a portrait of an over-shadowed, jealous and weak younger brother so well constructed and harrowing as to make me feel a little bit sick every time I hear it. As I have written many times before when describing this song, the absence of any shred of redemption is just plain merciless.  Very few people in pop music seem to have the sensitivity to construct such a believable relationship and such a real protagonist as this, and yet also the courage to eschew the mandatory happy ending.  It really is a brutally nasty, mean song.

Barton Carroll – Shadowman

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Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost (Amazon)

Songdog are a different kettle of fish.  Their lyrics are cryptic, clever and acerbic.  I remember listening to the start of this song, tum-te-tumming along, and suddenly doing a double-take.  ’What the fuck did they just say?’  I rewound the song and yes, they really did sing: “I’m nobody special, but I give pretty good head.” Songdog do this all the time.  They are dark, horribly (by which, of course, I mean awesomely) cynical and you always get the impression that you are a step or two behind what they are trying to tell you.  There’s such resignation to the music that this never seems pretentious or condescending however, just the work of a band who are woefully underappreciated and seem to have stopped expecting you to get it.

Songdog – Gene Autry’s Ghost

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Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy (Amazon)

I must be one of thousands of young men who heard this song and thought ‘Fucking hell, that was me!  I am the Saturday Boy!’ Billy Bragg does this all the time, particularly in his early work, and this is far from alone in its ability to absolutely and utterly nail what it feels like to be male and lacking in both sexual confidence and skills.  Almost every man I know has in his past a girl on whom they had the most unspeakable crush and who, for all she may have enjoyed our company as much as the attention, had about as much intention of going out with us as she did of flying to the moon.  The closing line sums it up so well: “While she was giving herself for free/ At a party to which I was never invited”.  People think of Bragg as a bit of a caricature of himself these days, but that’s massively unfair.  Political songs aside, his love songs show a writer more gifted than anyone I know at taking all sorts of complex emotions, and entanglements and distilling them into a single line, full of warmth, a bit of humour and, most of all, the knowledge that he absolutely, undoubtedly Got It.

Billy Bragg – The Saturday Boy

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The Mountain Goats – Dance Music (Amazon)

I am not a particularly committed fan of Darnielle’s wider canon, but The Sunset Tree is a stone cold classic.  There are a lot of tender, heartwarming  and heartbreaking moments on the record, but one of those stop-dead-in-your-tracks moments occurs early in this short, perfect song.  Coming from a stable family background as I do, I would never be so stupid as to suggest that I can really grasp the kind of domestic horror described here: “I’m in the living room watching the Watergate hearings/ while my step father yells at my mother./ launches a glass across the room, straight at her head/ and I dash upstairs to take cover./ lean in close to my little record player on the floor./ so this is what the volume knob’s for.” It is short, direct, unflinching and does what all great writing should: finds not just details, but the one crucial detail.  I remember that one short verse bringing me so much clarity: the violence, the fear, the intense relationship with music.  I am sure I still don’t entirely grasp what this kind of life is really like, but this song has done more for my understanding than any advertising campaign or newspaper article I have ever come across.

The Mountain Goats – Dance Music

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Tom Waits – Fish and Bird (Amazon)

In this particular case, it is not so much just about the lyrics themselves, as the personal context.  I bought Alice just as Mrs. Toad and I were getting together and listened to it constantly.  She lived in Edinburgh, I in London, and we went back and forth every couple of weeks – it was a rather improbable romance in many ways, but a complete whirlwind nevertheless.  It was pretty obvious to both of us, I think, that this was something special, but as the months wore on it slowly became clearer and clearer that resolving our geographical problem was going to be a very, very significant challenge.  Mrs. Toad was a touch more spooked by this than I was and the relationship suddenly became very, very shaky indeed – you know when you can hear the tension in someone’s voice and you know that something is up, even if you can’t dig the details out of them. Anyway, after Christmas of the first year of our relationship she decided she couldn’t face it and packed it all in, putting an end to over a month of looming unease which had taken the shine off eight months of thrilled, giddy romance.  Fortunately for me (and her I suppose) she saw the error of her ways two or three months later and came crawling (hey, this is my story, so that’s how I’m telling it okay – so what if it wasn’t exactly crawling per se, but I digress…) back.  However, in those months before she saw sense I was trying to come to terms with the fact that it seemed I had lost the girl I was absolutely certain I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.  And I drank gin and listened to this song.  A lot.

Tom Waits – Fish and Bird

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It’s Christmas Day, we have had our breakfast of smoked salmon and poached eggs, and I decided I might as well settle down with a bottle of fizz and talk shite on the internet.  Given we opened all our presents and had a big meal when my parents were visiting last week, I figured I was obliged to do no more than get pissed and slowly waste away the day today, stopping only to gorge myself on roast lamb at some indeterminate point in the evening – whenever Mrs. Toad gets over last night’s hangover I suppose.

I am lining up my stupid movies for tonight, as well, because that is all I intend doing this evening: watching intellectually vacant films whilst lolling about on the couch like a beached whale.  This, as far as I am concerned, is the True Meaning of Christmas (TM).

Direct download: Toadcast #154 – The Couchcast

01. Stephen Malkmus – Baby C’mon (00.16)
02. Sylvain Chomet – L’Illusioniste (05.02)
03. Bloody Cassette Boy – Nigella’s XXXmas (12.03)
04. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Cold White Christmas (13.50)
05. Kung Nai vs. Cambodian Space Project – Women (22.16)
06. King Koyote – La La La (27.33)
07. LY and SO – One Day This’ll All be Fields (33.55)
08. Tommy Perman – Drive My Car (36.19)
09. Stoney & Meat Loaf – Jessica White (42.30)
10. The Wind-up Birds – In a Yorkshire Call Centre I Knelt Down and Wept (49.19)
11. The Mountain Goats – Tyler Lambert’s Grave (54.35)

On the drive back from Glasgow yesterday, after the second of Yusuf Azak’s three album launch gigs, the snow started absolutely horsing it down, to the extent that all the traffic slowed to a sensible single file at about thirty miles an hour, and all you could see was little red tail-lights in the white.

It was, if I am being entirely honest, pretty cool. Although of course that’s easy to say when you’re no more than twenty miles from home and in no actual danger.

Anyway, this morning it’s all turned icy outside and Mrs. Toad is complaining about the heating not being up to the job, so I think we can safely say that the rituals of Winter have begun! Hence, the Coldcast.

Direct download: Toadcast #150 – The Coldcast

01. The Mountain Goats – You or Your Memory (00.28)
02. The 63 Crayons – Devils (07.02)
03. The Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant (15.50)
04. Brown Brogues – I Just Don’t Know (19.07)
05. The Beatles – Dear Prudence (25.16)
06. Girl Problems – Sancho (31.49)
07. Thirty Pounds of Bone – A Lesson in Talking (41.21)
08. Willy Mason – Carry On (44.33)
09. Y Niwl – Dau (52.42)
10. Songdog – A Life Eroding (So Much Sorrow) (61.26)

Before you break out into a cold sweat about having to sit through another list of the best albums of the decade, don’t worry, this is not one of those.  Although most of these songs would be there or thereabouts if I were actually compiling a favourite songs of the decade list, that’s not why they’re here.

Basically, rather than try and rank anything against anything else, all this is is a meander through the last ten years and me chattering about how my relationship with music has changed and what sort of stuff I was into at what times of my life.

Basically, this is the soundtrack to a perfectly normal, albeit enthusiastic, music fan’s descent into full-on deranged internet mania.

Toadcast #99 – The Decade

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01. Eels – A Daisy Through Concrete (04.09)
02. Goldfrapp – Pilots (10.04)
03. Grandaddy – The Crystal Lake (14.17)
04. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (23.13)
05. Interpol – NYC (30.46)
06. Tom Waits – Kommienezuspadt (34.57)
07. The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle (40.41)
08. The Walkmen – The Rat (44.06)
09. The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid (51.20)
10. Broken Records – Lies (Demo Version) (57.07)
11. The Savings and Loan – Christmastime in the Mountains (64.11)

Well the Funkcast was probably about as gentle a ‘tell me about this genre’ podcast as you’re likely to get.  This, on the other hand, is not gentle.  I suppose it was never likely to be – there’s only so gentle an introduction you can give to this kind of music.

Basically, I was becoming increasingly curious about the number of alt-folkies I know who come from heavy metal backgrounds.  Loads of my friends here who I know because we all listen to indie rock or alternative folk or all sorts of things inbetween seem to have been really into metal when they were young.  This doesn’t entirely make sense to me because I see very little connection between the two kinds of music, and for so many people to have made that transition it must be a strong connection.

Then, of course, it turns out that loads of people whose music I listen to – alt-folk, once again – also grew up listening to metal.  The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and, more locally, Dan from Withered Hand and Neil from Meursault.  So, having been round at the house doing artwork for their single releases I asked the Neil and Chris from Meursault and Matthew who helps out with the label to put together a metal podcast.  It might not be quite as pleasant to cook your bacon sandwiches to on Sunday afternoon, but erm, well I never made any promises with these bloody podcasts anyway – just deal with it, we’ll probably be back to the alt-folk next week.

Toadcast #91 – The Metalcast

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01. Half Man Half Biscuit – Vatican Broadside (0.00)
02. Withered Hand – Takeaway Food (05.03)
03. AC/DC – Whole Lotta Rosie (13.17)
04. Slayer – Jesus Saves (17.25)
05. Mount Eerie – Wind’s Dark Poem (24.21)
06. Nirvana – School (35.13)
07. Dinosaur Jr. – On the Way (37.50)
08. Lightning Bolt – Ride the Sky (42.59)
09. Richard Cheese – Rape Me (47.47)
10. Children of Bodom – The Trooper (53.50)
11. Meshuggah – Autonomy Lost (57.05)
12. The Mountain Goats – No Children (62.01)
13. Anal Cunt – You’re Old (Fuck You) (73.27)

Hmm, given my slightly patchy relationship with the Mountain Goats (I love some albums, like some, am not that fussed by others, but I don’t really know their music all that well) and given the general mumbles of ambivalence from the faithful which I have heard accompanying this release, I was prepared to like this record an awful lot less than I do.

Heretic Pride and I only partially connected, and I had sort of expected that to be that with this band.  They were very much established by now, they weren’t particularly young anymore and they had scored a couple of borderline mainstream hits recently.  Time, in other words, for squishy, over-produced re-treads of old territory for the next three albums and then a comfortable enough retirement.

Concept albums also give me a bit of a twitch.  They can occasionally be brilliant, but more often are just a little contrived – a point stretched just slightly too far to fit the original idea.  The title of this album and the titles of the songs themselves should tell you all you need to know about the concept underpinning this piece of work.

It doesn’t start particularly brilliantly either.  Samuel 15:23 is a little plodding, with thudding drums which give the song a rather heavy step and seem to hold it back a little.  Psalms 40:2 is good, but then Genesis 3:23 is the sort of annoying Mountain Goats pop-lite sound which publicity people tend to send out to bloggers because they think it’s the obvious pop song.  Which it is, but it’s no way to market a band like this.

No, The Mountain Goats are at their best, in my opinion, when Darnielle’s voice rises to a nasal snarl of anguish.  Even though Sunset Tree was heavily arranged and very produced, that snarl was still in strong evidence on that album, and you can certainly hear it here on a few occasions, which I am really happy with, because it’s been missing for a while.

Then at times he slows to a glacial pace; each exhalation accompanied by the barest touch of piano.  Genesis 30:3 accomplishes this with the most success, I think, although in general this is a pretty slow-paced record, so it’s a prominent technique of the course of the whole forty-five minutes.

I think there are probably just a few too many soft impressions of the Mountain Goats on this record for me to really get too giddy about it, but for the most part it’s pretty good actually, and a lot better than I was expecting.

The Mountain Goats – Psalms 40:2

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The Mountain Goats – Matthew 25:21

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