6. Barton Carroll – The Lost One

I know nothing about Barton Carroll, I wasn’t looking forward to this album at all, and then when it landed in my lap I still refused to quite get it for ages; maybe it’s because it’s stylistically quite unadventurous. The big difference, though, is that absolutely every single song on this album, despite flirting with cliche rather frequently, is compelling. They all have you perking up when they come on in their turn, thinking ‘oh good, this song’.
Barton Carroll – Those Days are Gone, and My Heart is Breaking

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7. Donny Hue & the Colors – Tell Tall Tales

This is another album which rather arrived out of nowhere. I wasn’t even aware it was in the pipeline when the promo copy was emailed through in November or so, when the album turned out to be quite so brilliant it was like an early Christmas present. It’s wry and witty, sad and playful and a simple pleasure from start to finish.
Donny Hue & the Colors – Good Time Happening

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8. Bombadil – A Buzz, A Buzz

I liked this album enough all on its own, but when I saw these guys play live at Pickathon in August I was just floored. I haven’t enjoyed a live performance so much in years – it was just overflowing with fun and zest and exuberance, and only the clinically dead could have failed to be swept away.
Bombadil – Cavaliers’ Har Hum

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9. Pale Young Gentlemen – Black Forest (Tra La La)

This is just a fantastically rewarding album to listen to. It’s delicate at times, wistful at others, and thumping at others. It’s also more instrumentally accomplished than pretty much anything else you’ll listen to for a long time.
Pale Young Gentlemen – Coal/Ivory

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10. The Pictish Trail – Secret Soundz Vol. 1

For someone who I’ve seen on stage so many times, and seen play for other people’s bands so many times, this record still still wasn’t anything like what I expected. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this ever-surprising dance from sad to playful to downright bizarre wasn’t it. It’s a cracking record though, almost because it seems so surprising.
The Pictish Trail – Winter Home Disco

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Oh thank fuck it’s Christmas. Or, any holiday really. I am so fucking incredibly tired I could pitch face first on the tarmac and sleep for six months without so much as coming up for air.

I have been reading, with some amusement, the bickering over the religious nature of Christmas which seems to take place in the American press with monotonous regularity. Apparently the Christians are adamant that we remember the religious nature of a pagan festival, which seems a little odd considering that the Christianisation of Christmas itself was basically the Christian colonists’ acceptance that they could never defeat local pagan religions. So basically they adopted Yuletide and tried to wedge their amusing Biblical myths into a story that their conquered people would never give up, and then waited a few years for it to degrade into some sort of carnival of aquisitiveness which they could have a tantrum about.

So it’s a pagan festival which has turned into an unbridled celebration of Western consumerist greed… erm, which part of this came up in the Bible again?

Personally, as an atheist, I love Christmas. It’s got nothing to do with that Jeebus character, it’s closer akin to the the pagan celebration of light and life in the middle of the darkest part of the year. As a family we have always come together and spent peaceful time together at this time of year. We play music, we read books, we cook together, but above all we rest. We get together and enjoy one another’s company. Mrs. Toad and I will, this year, be doing nothing more than snuggling up on the couch and wasting time. And that time wasting together is oddly one of the most important things you can do to forge a strong relationship. Just taking time to be together and enjoy one another’s company is, after the year we’ve had, going to be a rare treat, and one which I intend to enjoy immensely.

Toadcast #51 – The Yulecast

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01. Yo La Tengo – On Our Way to Fall (03.12)
02. Tom Waits – Soldier’s Things (07.21)
03. Pale Young Gentlemen – We Will Meet (15.23)
04. The Felice Brothers – Greatest Show on Earth (19.15)
05. Eels – Beautiful Freak (27.27)
06. Clem Snide – The Dairy Queen (35.25)
07. Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue (43.13)
08. A.A. Bondy – Black Rain, Black Rain (48.45)
09. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Brompton Oratory (54.19)
10. Sufjan Stevens – Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother (60.06)

Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

The next installment of late year list-o-rama brings us up to date with the first half of the Toad Festive Fifty. Slightly more, in fact, because I’m gearing up for a top ten, so I’ve cheated slightly on numbers here are there. For those of you who want to make your own lists, see this post for the rules, and get stuck in. The more who take part the better.

One of the things that struck me with this part of the list is the inclusion of a song from the Broken Records Toad Session. Basically, Broken Records would be all over this list, apart from the fact that they were all over last year’s list, as submitted to the Contrast Podcast, and all the songs they released this year are songs I knew from last year. So instead of where they belong, on this year’s list, they are on last year’s list. Later on there are also songs by bands which were released last year, I’m pretty sure, it’s just that I only discovered them this year.

So as well as not being in rigid Order of Toadly Merit they aren’t even in accurate chronological order either. Ah well. You’ll live. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

Here is the official beginning of Christmas List season, here at Song, by Toad. If you want to get involved and write your own list, then please do. Go here for more details. The more of you that contribute to that the better the results we will get, so don’t be shy.

This is the first quarter of my Festive Fifty for 2008. I will also be preparing a list of my twenty favourite albums, but I might just neglect singles and EPs this time around. If you disagree with anything then do get stuck in, but bear in mind that this is far from a definitive ranking. Ask me on another day and Pictish’s brilliant I Don’t Know Where to Begin could easily be in the top five. Ask me in four months’ time and it would probably be all-change again. Read the rest of this entry »

What ho!

Mr. Toad, possibly in a far more gin-sodden fug than usual, has rather superbly extended his amphibious hand to The Waiting Room & granted me a bit of Song, by Toad space to post TWR podcasts whilst we swim about in the unemployment bins. Whether this sees a sharp downturn in his traffic we’ll have to wait & see.

You, then, being readers of this worldwiderife infamous blog, are probably aware of my occasional filth & jibber jabber in the comments portal thereunder &, by association, may possibly know what to expect from the ear mollestation what is The Waiting Room — perhaps having tuned in, tuned out & turned off as quickly as it took you to read that.

This week, then, on the show, The Woman of The House (TWoTH to the passengers of Deep Space Nine) & I mouthfart our merry way between such loveliness as Anna & The Family Tree, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Thomas Tantrum, The Republic Tigers, Parenthetical Girls, The Theatre Fire, Kría Brekkan (ex múm), Pale Young Gentlemen, Pete & The Pirates + the ever embedded many, oh so very, more. We also jump on the bandwagon du jour & spin a tune off of the new recording by popular beat combo Mirkinassault.

Added to all that giddiness, we have a rather dodgily realised competition, open to bands/artists/& the like, to write a new theme tune for the show. Christ knows how that one’s going to run, but if you have any musical talent & fancy a stab then aim your blunt instruments this way.

The Waiting Room: 3rd December 2008

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Ta very & huge cheers plus a doff’d fedora to Toad for the assist.

This week’s Toadcast has no theme at all because, erm… well, frankly they’re difficult to come up with and therefore seem just a tiny little bit like hard work.  So given I’m podcasting once a week now, I am not going to be arsed coming up with some immaculately scripted (ah ha haaa!) arrangement once every seven days, so this week it’s really just a brief tour of inbox fodder.

This weekend there are loads of good things happening, not least a performance by Mumford & Sons at the Voodoo Rooms, and a first look for me at what could potentially become an excellent new venue in Edinburgh.  That’s a secret though, so no more details than that.

So, for now enjoy the Soulcast, so named for no better reason than that the first couple of songs have the word soul in the title.  Piss-poor excuse really, isn’t it.

Toadcast #41 – The Soulcast

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01. Nat Johnson – Dirty Rotten Soul (02.39)
02. Maxwell Panther – Lost Soul on a Roll (06.21)
03. Deerhoof – Chandelier Searchlight (11.40)
04. Aberfeldy – Claire (15.01)
05. Hot Lava – Blue Dragon (21.11)
06. Deathbot – The Cold Wind Revival (23.20)
07. Lambchop – Sharing a Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr. (28.41)
08. Wilco – Company in My Back (35.45)
09. Woodenbox – Twisted Mile (39.17)
10. Pale Young Gentlemen – There is a Place (46.33)
11. Japanese Motors – Spendin’ Days (54.52)

Well this is rather good. Not uniformly brilliant perhaps, but not an awfully long way off. It starts a little slowly, not because the songs themselves aren’t good, more because they are all of a similar, slightly dreamy sort of pace. I’d have been tempted to stick something a little more uptempo or dramatic in there somewhere.  By the time Crook of My Good Arm turns up I find myself somewhat grateful for the increase in urgency.

For the most part, although Crook of My Good Arm is brilliant, it is the exception rather than the rule on this album.  It’s raucous and a little clattersome and really not quite what the rest of the album is about.  For the most part Black Forest seems to owe something of a debt to Elvis Costello & the Brodsky Quartet’s Juliet Letters, albeit without the pretentious bombast.

Combine that sort of aesthetic with a gorgeous, gentle pop sensibility and just a little wistful sadness and you have the ingredients for Black Forest.  Add just a tiny little bit of drama, that always treads the right side of ambitious to remain down to earth, and you have twelve songs of unmitigated loveliness.  I wasn’t expecting this album, it appeared from nowhere in something of a musical barren patch, and I love it.

In fact, just to reiterate that last point, I’ve rarely known a band manage to weave so many slightly preposterous, theatrical elements into their music without sounding just a little bit arch and pretentious.  That this is absolutely not the case here is one of the reasons, above and beyond a love of the music, that this album feels genuinely special.

Pale Young Gentlemen – Kettle Drum (I Left a Note)
Pale Young Gentlemen – We Will Meet

Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

The internet is so brimming with bands and suggestions, I am forever letting things slip past by mistake. I remember hearing the name Pale Young Gentlemen a year or more ago when they released their self-titled debut album. I never followed up on it, not because of lack of interest, more because my musical time has become so crowded and when the brain gets a bit full it tends to act like a sieve, leaking various random pieces of information, never to be remembered.

Well, not quite. I happened across them reading Another Form of Relief the other day and listening to Clap Your Hands, it does echo somewhere back in the depths of my memory, so it’s not quite gone yet. Anyway, they have a new album coming out in early October, and as soon as I am able to offer a sensible opinion I will be reviewing it*.

It’s odd though, just as I have started saying that I am getting a little bored by the incredible ubiquity of whimsical indie folk, awash with orchestration and instruments and drawing heavily from a combination of old folk and cabaret, here comes something in exactly that vein which is just brilliant. What’s the difference? Well I think that irrespective of your relationship to the genre or style, and no matter how jaded you might become, good stuff is still good stuff.

The other thing is that I don’t think these guys are too pushy. They do incorporate a lot of the aforementioned influences into their work, but there’s a laid back, gentle pop sound to a lot of their other stuff which ends up being more important. It’s more about the overall feeling than the arrangements, I think.

I await their album with real interest, and will be buying their previous one as soon as I get paid.

Pale Young Gentlemen – Clap Your Hands
Pale Young Gentlemen – Crook of My Good Arm

MySpace | More mp3s | Website (with webshop)

* Yes, yes, ‘we could be waiting a long time, then’.  Ha ha you fucking comedians.