Song, by Toad

It’s just vaguely possible that there are some amazing gigs taking place somewhere I know not where in Edinburgh this week, but in all honestly I do not give a tinker’s cuss.  It’s Christmas, you should all either be wrapping presents, buying the bastards, or just cooking something nice and stopping in with friends and family with some nice music.  Far be it from me to lecture people on how to enjoy themselves but… well, you know me well enough by now, I’m going to do it anyway aren’t I.

So honestly, balls to gigs this week, there’s really no point in worrying about them is there, it’s just not what this time of year is for.  I’ve seen a few emails recently saying things like Happy Holidays and people making reference to non-denominational Winter whateverthefucktheywereonabout and all that, and I know they mean well, but fucking hell, I am about as uncompromising an atheist as you’ll meet (ie I find it very hard not to see religious belief as a form of learning disability) but Christmas?  It’s not even a fucking Christian holiday.

I’ve never been offended by being wished happy anything, and I went to a school where that might have been Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Chanukah, Christmas, some solstice or other, or whatever the fuck else.  Who fucking cares?  It’s just a greeting and someone wishing you well, get the hell over it you fucking coward.  As long as no-one asks you to personally give a shit, then someone else having different beliefs to yours and celebrating their own festivals does not fucking oppress you.  So yeah, happy Christmas, whatever.

Personally, apart from the Pagan celebration of light in the darkness of Winter, which has a rather magical quality of its own, just symbolically, I couldn’t care less about the religious implications of Christmas.  It’s not a Christian festival, it was simply adopted by the Christians because they realised that they had far more chance of foisting their religious babble on populations they wished to convert if they respected and adapted to existing rituals, it has nothing to do with anything in the fucking Bible and anyone who tells you that ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’ is basically a fucking idiot.

Apart from those of us in the Northern Hemisphere needing the celebration of light and warmth to combat the cold and the snow and increasing absence of sunlight (welcome to the shortest day of the year, incidentally) there is another big benefit to the Christmas and New Year period which I really appreciate.  It’s the punctuation of the year.  One thing about living in a society which is still fairly homgenous is that the Christmas and New Year breaks are pretty much celebrated by everyone, or at least acknowledged by everyone, and consequently pretty much all of society just stops and pauses for breath.

Life gets pretty fucking hectic, and things develop a sort of helter skelter momentum of their own and you can go on holiday, but the fact that you and everyone around you kind of has to take a break and put their feet up for a week seems to punctuate the natural forwards motion of life for just long enough.  So as long as you can ignore the rapacious commercialism and observe the break on your own terms, something I have very little difficulty in doing, then that week just stopping and doing nothing, looking back on where you were this time last year and musing on where you might be this time next year is just a relaxing, peaceful and nurturing way to recharge the batteries and draw breath before it all goes mental in the New Year again.  Which it always does.

So I’ll appreciate the next couple of weeks and all the silly rituals people, including myself, choose to observe.  It’ll be nice just to do nothing for a while and feel no guilt about it whatsoever.

Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

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Neko Case – Wayfaring Stranger

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You could drink yourself into a coma going to every interesting gig in Edinburgh this week.  I think I might need a few orange juice gigs, if just to vaguely preserve both liver and waistline.  Although it may be too late for both, I have to admit.  I think I am going to start driving to gigs (tonight is by necessity, but we’ll see how it goes) just as a way of forcing myself to stick to fizzy water or some such beverage.

Maybe Skinny Water, perhaps (thank you Cogstar), a drink so monumentally stupid that I have stared at that ridiculous primary school website for hours trying to figure out if the damn thing is a hoax or not.  It’s so ridiculous I keep thinking that it really must be a piss-take, but it really does appear to be water laced with imaginary weight-reducing ingredients.

As their website claimed*, the water “has been enhanced with a unique combination of ingredients to help you lose weight… suppress appetite, block carbohydrates from converting into fat and increase fat burning”.

This website, on the other hand, claims that this is most ludicrous pile of horse manure to hit the public domain in ages.  Although, thinking about it, this product is so transparently idiotic that I find it hard to blame the manufacturers, or the designers of that comedy website.  Honestly, if you are so fucking stupid as to fall for this sort of infantile idiocy then you deserve to be ripped off and, honestly, you deserve the continuing cycle of desperate, futile hope followed by the despair of inevitable failure and decimated self-esteem that this sort of obsessive weight mania will certainly bring you.  Jesus fucking Christ, if you’re too fat (which I am) then either just accept it and enjoy your life, or get some fucking exercise.

Monday 7th September 2009: The Bowery Re-Opening Party with Dan Costello & Wounded Knee.

I have missed the Bowery over the Festival.  Somewhere sane to go would have been appreciated in amongst all the carnage, but Jane and Ruth are back now and celebrate that fact tonight.

Tuesday 8th September 2009: The Pineapple Chunks & X Lion Tamer at Electric Circus.

How these two rather mental bands are going to complement one another on a bill is anyone’s guess, but I really like both and am definitely looking forward to this – unhinged guitar indie and dancey electro stuff.  And incidentally, X Lion Tamer has a new EP out, called Neon Hearts, which is available in Avalanche Records on Cockburn Street as of right about now.

The Pineapple Chunks – Art Storage

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Wednesday 9th September 2009: Willard Grant Conspiracy & Doghouse Roses at Sneaky Pete’s.

The Willard Grant Conspiracy are one of my favourite bands ever.  Robert Fisher’s voice is deep and rich, and his songs go from the desperate ballad to lovely alt-country to grinding tension, often in the same album.  There is no chance I am missing this gig.

Willard Grant Conspiracy – Evening Mass

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Thursday 10th September 2009: Meursault vs Dead Boy Robotics vs Foundling Wheel at the Voodoo Rooms.

Versus gigs are a bit risky in some senses – how to keep the pace up without garbling things, how to get enough interplay between the bands to stop it simply being a standard gig with a shuffled playlist, all sorts of things – but I love the idea in general.  The styles on show this evening are pretty varied too, which I think is a good thing.

Friday 11th September 2009: Neko Case at the Voodoo Rooms.

Neko Case has, simply, one of the most gorgeous voices around.  I’ve seen her live before and she is lovely – charismatic, charming and a superb performer.  There’s a lot on this Friday, so I don’t know if I’m likely to be able to make it, but I really want to go to this.

Neko Case – Tightly

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Friday 11th September 2009: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Come On Gang & Dupec play This is Music at Sneaky Pete’s.

Totally Enormous what? Fucking hell, you really should go for the name alone.  This is Music nights are brilliant fun, and this is just that kind of carefree, enjoyable lineup which makes them good.

Saturday 12th September 2009: The Jesus H. Foxx EP Launch at the Bowery, with Some Young Pedro & Golden Ghost.

YES, the offical Song, by Toad Records release of Matter, by Jesus H. Foxx!  I don’t know why I ever even wanted to be a record label, but one of the reasons was to be involved with, and make a contribution to, music which I bloody love.  I am absolutely thrilled to have this EP on the label and really looking forward to the launch night.  I’ve never seen either Some Young Pedro or Golden Ghost before either, so even more room to be excited.

Jesus H. Foxx – Trying to Be Good

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*Until people pointed out that it was total bollocks and they decided to change it.

Well, I really was feeling wary about this, because the pre-release promo track People Got a Lotta Nerve really didn’t do it for me.  It was sort of stodgy, by the numbers alt-country and I ended up feeling rather apprehensive about the rest of the album.  I am a bit of a neophyte as far as Neko Case is concerned, with Fox Confessor being the first album of hers which I bought, and my knowledge of her previous releases still being more than a little sketchy.

Fox Confessor, for me, was a bit of a masterpiece and do I think this is quite as good?  Well, no, but I doubt I was ever going to.  When you first properly discover an artist by virtue of their writing one of your favourite albums in years then not much they can do is likely to live up to that.  What it does not do, however, is disappoint.

Neko Case’s music, if it has a fault, can occasionally flirt with the alt-country version of power pop.  On this album it does threaten to happen from time to time, but she always seems to shift just before things go a little too far.  The vocals have a similar sort of tendency.  She has tremendous vocal power and a voice that is clean as a whistle.  In terms of sheer vocal ability she seems to me (although I wouldn’t know) to have one of the strongest voices in indie music at the moment.

Because of these factors, it is the restraint that I find remarkable in her music.  It would be so easy for her to overdo it, but she never seems to.  You get the impression of someone totally in control of her music.

The final word as far as Neko Case is concerned is, I think, warmth.  Despite combative and occasionally confrontational lyrics, she mixes in some wonderfully lovelorn ones and delivers it all with a kind of welcoming, friendly intimacy which is perhaps, in the absence of much quirkiness, where the rich charisma of her music comes from.  So I may never love this as much as Fox Confessor, but it’s a bloody lovely record.  Again.  She’s good.

Neko Case – This Tornado Loves You

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Neko Case – Don’t Forget Me

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As an aside, one thing the warmth of her voice falls slightly short in achieving is the ragged pain of this Harry Nilsson song.  The Walkmen recorded an absolutely stunning version a few years back, and the bewildered, raw hurt of Hamilton Leithauser’s voice suits this particular track much better, I think.  Or maybe I’m just saying that because theirs is the first version I heard.

The Walkmen – Don’t Forget Me

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

This is a Muppet News Flash.  It isn’t, but there is certainly news afoot at the moment.  The larger labels appear to have woken from their brandy-induced Christmas comas and managed to poke their spotty interns into action once more.  And the result: we have inboxes with Important News once again.  In order, not of how famous the band is and therefore how how highly the news scores on the Official Indie-Kid Excitement Scale, but in order of just how excited I personally am about the release of each track I bring you:

Elvis Perkins in Dearland:

Elvis Perkins’ last album was blindingly brilliant.  Aching, sad, uplifting, and literate enough to be beautifully crafted, but never arch.  To say that I am looking forward to this release is an understatement.  Shampoo is brilliant, with enough stomping funeral blues and ghostly choirs of the underworld to give it massive presence, and fucking hell his voice is in g0od form.  I love this, and I can’t wait.  A couple more tracks can be streamed from his shiny new website.
Elvis Perkins in Dearland – Shampoo

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Neko Case:

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was so beautiful that I hurriedly scampered through her back catalogue, only to be slightly disappointed.  It was a bit too Lady-country-lite in places, and I find myself slightly fearing that Fox Confessor was an aberration of brilliance, surrounded by a sea of above-average music.  Listening to this song doesn’t reassure me all that much, I have to confess, but I still have hope.
Neko Case – Maneater

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The Decemberists:

Their last album was hardly a classic, despite several great moments.  Something, somehow, didn’t quite click with it, and there were a couple of really duff songs; Summersong and The Perfect Crime were gratingly bad.  The Rake’s Song isn’t all that great, I have to say, and it sounds like it has been prematurely terminated to serve as a preview.  The song doesn’t feel over when it fades out.  But again, I have hope, albeit just a little less in this case.
The Decemberists – The Rake Song

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Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs:

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect smart lyrics in this release, although what we can expect musically might be less predictable.  After last year’s filthsterpiece he seems to have returned to a more textbook songwriting format, and the instrumentation of this seems pretty straightforward as well.  Not sure what to expect – this is a pretty good song, and I would be very surprised if this wasn’t a really good, enjoyable album with plenty of wry internal laughs to be had.
Aidan Moffat & the Best Ofs – Big Blonde

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Christ that whinge of depression about our electoral system was a bit of a damp squib thrown onto our weekend plans wasn’t it.  Fuck that for a game of soldiers, this is a bloody great weekend and I am bloody looking forward to it and there is going to be plenty of fun to be had, so enough sulking and time to be cheerful.

Tonight there’s cutting and pasting and putting together the samplers for the launch party tomrrow.  I also get the first samples of the Nightjar album, getting us within a week or so of our first official release. Tomorrow is seeing a couple of old mates for the first time in ages, and trawling charity shops for some first class silliness for the launch night itself.  Then Sunday is calming down, sleeping off a monumental hangover and generally relaxing.

The sun is out, things are fun, and in general the only worry is that I fight off the temptation to go out and drink too much beer and never get my samplers put together for tomorrow.  Sunshine, booze, music.  It’s a simple recipe but nevertheless and completely infallible one and today it promises a fine weekend of inebriation, joy and Toadery.

Neko Case – Star Witness
Elk City – Los Cruzados
Ravens & Chimes – General Lafayette!  You are Not Alone!
R.E.M. – Fall on Me

And not particularly ashamed either, so fuck off. No, not the poor people with coloured skin, nor the ‘alternatively abled’ spast… whoops, sorry, or even the gays, lesbians, trannies, hermaphrodites and other Belgians.  No, it’s the beautiful people.  Really, they just make me suspicious.

I got a CD in the post this morning from a promotional company and on the front was the picture of a pretty blonde girl.  Hmm, thought I.  Dubious.  I opened the CD to find a half-dozen more pictures of this same fetching blonde lass looking alternately sultry, or ‘natural’, or god knows what else.  In her ‘normal’ shots she was wearing jeans (very normal) with stilettos (still sexy, oh yesh).  To be fair to her, she looked very appealing, but this is a music CD and anytime I see cover art that makes much play of the firm breasts or, alternatively, rugged jawline of the musician in question my marketing department radar goes right off.

Tarting up your musician implies that their music won’t do the trick by itself – or at least that you think it won’t.  It shows a lack of confidence.  One look at this album cover and all my prejudices kicked in and I was certain it was going to be shit.  Hollywood Strings three-quarters of the way through the song?  Check.  Gratingly soulful X-Factor vocals?  Check.   ‘Real’ singer-songwriter marketing?  Check again.  And was it dreadful?  Yes it fucking was.  Of course it was.

Fuck.  Right.  Off.

Suede – Beautiful Ones
Neko Case – Pretty Girls
Elvis Costello & the Attractions – All This Useless Beauty