Song, by Toad

It’s teh next Great Depreshun oh noes!  Or maybe we’re just moaning like a bunch of fucking girls.  After the doom and gloom in the papers it seems time to actually compare the current financial tantrum to the Great Depression and tell anyone who makes that comparison to fuck right off and stop being so self-indulgent.

It’s even ridiculous when compared to the rough times in the fucking eighties when Margaret Thatcher eviscerated everywhere in England outside the M25.  She destroyed the country.  Annihilating nationalised industries which were no longer economic makes sense, but completely destroying the industries that keep a town alive at the same time as you destroy the support networks provided by the state and also refusing to do anything to encourage industries to grow that might replace the thousands of jobs you have just made vanish is just slash and burn social policy.

There may be a little too much opinionated political opinion and general drunken rambling between myself and my darling girl Mrs. Toad, but erm, well, fuck it you’re own your own.  Listen if you think you can face it.  But you must understand, we were vewy bewwwy drnk.

Toadcast #44 – The Whingecast

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01. Woody Guthrie – Do Re Mi (04.20)
02. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (12.52)
03. The Specials – Ghost Town (15.31)
04. The Clash – Career Opportunities (25.33)
05. Billy Bragg – To Have and to Have Not (36.04)
06. Jane’s Addiction – Been Caught Stealing (36.03)
07. 4 or 5 Magicians – Forever on the Edge (39.25)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Ghosts of Cable Street (52.29)
09. The Willard Grant Conspiracy – Evening Mass (62.44)
10. Phil Ochs – No Christmas in Kentucky (68.29)

Final score: Bottles of wine: 5.  Bottles of beer: 3.  Night night bitches.

6. Richmond Fontaine – Thirteen Cities

Willy Vlautin is one of the most gifted storytellers in modern music. I have never known anyone so effortlessly evocative. This is a desert western classic, all beauty and rambling stories about drifters and losers, the normal and the ordinary.

Richmond Fontaine – The Kid From Belmont Street

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7. Monkey Swallows the Universe – The Casket Letters

Sometimes God is a bastard. These characters have gone on potentially permanent ‘hiatus’ just as I started to get all excited about them. The Casket Letters is one of the loveliest albums of gentle folk-pop you’re likely to hear, and then they go and pack in it. Swine!

Monkey Swallows the Universe – Down

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8. The Sequins – The Death of Style

Genuinely innovative style, boisterous and the very definition of infectious. Who’d have thought Coventry was so much bloody fun!

The Sequins – When the Flames Went Out

review | website | buy

9. Ray’s Vast Basement – Starvation Under Orange Trees

Beautiful, wistful and very old fashioned. This is an album of dust-bowl Americana with a sprinkling of loveliness, all based on the work of John Steinbeck which, on listening to the album, is no surprise at all.

Ray’s Vast Basement – California’s Gone

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10. The 63 Crayons – Spoils For Survivors

Electronic and relentless, always travelling forwards. The band Kasabian wish they could have been.

The 63 Crayons – The Squeeze

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The wench is away and I am here by myself, managing the last few days of our house project. You can imagine what fun that must be, I’m sure.  Still, we move back in this weekend, so it may be a crap couple of days but it’ll all be over soon and then you’ll be relieved of me constantly whinging about it, which will be nice for you.

Given we’re living in a basement flat on a short term let for a month I got quite into the basementy idea with this playlist. I digressed into The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, but mostly it’s music from ‘95/6 when I was living in a damp, grotty basement flat in Glasgow with a mate and the girl I was seeing at the time.

I bought stacks of CD singles back then and lost them all when someone broke into the flat.  Thanks to the joys of the internet I’ve been able to track most of them down recently, so you get a few of those, as well as some of the stuff I was listening to at the time.

It’s interesting as a historical document, to me anyway, but I am not sure how well the playlist itself works.  There’s something about this podcast that I’m not sure I like as much as the others, even though I like all the songs on it.  I don’t know, let me know what you think.  Perhaps Tears of Rage, Oasis and the Cranberries aren’t good enough songs to have all on the same podcast.

Toadcast #17 – The Cellarcast

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01. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End (03.33)
02. Oasis – Rocking Chair (10.54)
03. Bob Dylan & the Band – Tears of Rage (17.59)
04. Bob Dylan – Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Live) (25.54)
05. The Band – Rockin’ Chair (29.17)
06. Lloyd Cole – Unhappy Song (37.59)
07. Hootie & the Blowfish – Sad Caper (48.40)
08. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Shallow Grave (54.03)
09. Tom Waits – November (55.55)
10. Barenaked Ladies – The Old Apartment (63.26)
11. Ray’s Vast Basement – Black Cotton (68.33)
12. The Bluetones – Colorado Beetle (71.08)
13. The Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There (79.35)
14. The Cranberries – Joe (87.07)
15. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Ballad of Robert Moore & Betty Coltrane (96.13)

Out in early July, this is an album you really, really should buy. Starvation Under Orange Trees is a lush, beautiful record that drifts disarmingly between scratchy desert Americana and slightly melancholy West Coast pop. This gives it a wonderful foundation of wistful sadness, upon which shimmering mirages of optimism and relaxed contentment flit about enigmatically.

I rather lazily assumed this was a debut, which turns out to be utter bollocks. A quick Amazon search finds a couple more albums, about which I confess to knowing nothing at all. But it does make sense. There is a definite control and confidence about this album – jaunty when it needs to be, sparing when it doesn’t – that you rarely ever see in a debut.

They can often sound a lot like the laments of dust-bowl drifters that inhabit many a Richmond Fontaine album, but playful piano, surprising duets and a frequent but subtle loosening up into a low-key Summer strum lift this away from Willy Vlautin’s often desolate outlook into something a little harder to pin down. Another comparison would perhaps be Leonard Cohen as well, although only in elements, rather than whole songs.

Based around the books of John Steinbeck, this music embraces the misery he can create, but fundamentally leaves you with the more optimistic outlook that occasionally ran hand in hand with much of the bleakness in his writing. Imagine going through the worst time in your life, making the decision, making the break, and starting out a-fresh. Nothing has improved yet, but things have changed. You’re sitting there in the late afternoon with a cold beer and your feet up watching the sun set and the light change and despite everything you feel that moment of courage and confidence that occasionally comes at these times. You feel like it can be done.

And that is the atmosphere of Starvation Under Orange Trees.

Ray’s Vast Basement – The Story of Lee
Ray’s Vast Basement – How Through Sacrifice Danny’s Friends Gave a Party This duet reminds me so much of the McGarrigle Sisters it’s unreal.

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