Considering how incredibly brilliant they are at so many things (like becoming epoch-definingly rich, for example) Google is remarkably awful at email spam. Awful to the point that their spam folder is an active nuisance, and the messages they divert into the damn thing seem to be entirely random.
Senders I have marked as spam don’t always go in there, personal emails – even those sent to one recipient only – occasionally do end up in there, and the rest of them seem to be just a random selection of stuff people send me, with no rhyme or reason to the choices whatsoever. They would honestly be more helpful if they just let every damn thing into my inbox and let me sort it out myself.
Anyhewww… if it stays this nice for the rest of the day I may open a beer in the back garden and spark up the barbecue for the first time this year. Mrs. Toad will be out on the piss with her colleagues, so it will be peaceful enough – well, at least until I get a bit too pished that is. And then I think I’ll head up to Neu Reekie at the Scottish Book Trust.
So there, that’s my day planned out, now to find a nice way to waste time until say, oooh, 4pm when I can reasonably commence weekend funtimes. Those who can’t join me in the back garden this afternoon can certainly join me in frittering away the time until then by de-lurking, answering the five silly questions below, and then generally wasting time on the internet until the working week is well and truly over.
1. The oddest things you’ve received spam email about.
2. An old fashioned preserved foodstuff which seems as anachronistic as spam,
3. What does a sunny day most make you feel like doing?
4. Some sunny day music.
5. It’s time for an ice-cream – what would you choose?
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
 I was told off in the comments of a recent podcast for being mean about her, but I honestly couldn’t possibly care any less that Whitney Houston is dead, and when the news was announced I spent no more than a minute or two even thinking about it.
Her music was so fucking awful that I only slowly realised, as the eulogies began to roll in, that she actually sold a lot of records.
Given I love loads of music which is shite in almost every technical sense imaginable, I tend to define ‘good music’ as being a phrase which only means anything if it is entirely conflated with the term ‘popular music’. The music I like being shit or unpopular doesn’t make me like it any the less, and no-one is going to lessen my enjoyment by providing objective, empirical proof that it is rubbish.
Music is good if you derive something out of it which means something to you, personally, so I am left with little use for any broader meaning of the phrase ‘good’ music other than ‘lots of people like it’. By this definition, of course, most of the music I listen to and release is shit. I don’t care though, I can live with that. As I said, this doesn’t make me like it any the less, but does that mean that Whitney Houston was actually quite good? Please no!
Of course there are obvious ways to look at it differently, and one such was very nicely expressed in this particular blog post recently, which made the excellent point that even though the Toyota Corolla is the best-selling car of all time, no-one would make the argument that it was the best. Art and automobiles are evaluated by rather different criteria of course, so the analogy is not quite right, but it’s still a good way to look at it.
However the ‘just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s any good’ point was actually made as part of a wider argument that, irrespective of record sales, Whitney Houston was actually a pretty shite singer. I agree with this, personally, as the constant warbling did my fucking head in, but there are more reasons than aesthetic preference put forward.
The writer makes the distinction between a great singer and a great voice, and points out that irrespective of the notes you can hit or hold, being a great singer has as much to do with creating an emotionally resonant delivery of the actual words you are singing as it does with showing off your facility for vocal gymnastics. In that sense, Whitney Houston reminds me of the slightly sad sight of the busking footballer who can do endless keepy-uppies and ball control tricks, but is nevertheless fuck all use to anyone on a football pitch.
Her ludicrous, pantomime delivery of I Will Always Love You by Dolly Parton has so distorted its meaning that people actually get married to the song, which is just daft when you look at the words.  It’s pretty undeniable that the bombastic Disneyfication of Houston’s version seems entirely consonant with the wedding use, and I thought ‘damn, he’s right, she’s not just interpreted the song, she’s broken its entire meaning’.
The most obvious other example of this would be the American right’s co-opting of Springsteen’s Born in the USA. The song is obviously a protest song, and the lyrics are a harsh social critique which run in more or less diametric opposition to the context in which the song tends to be used, when it is used for clumsy propaganda.
Born in the USA, however, was initially recorded for the Nebraska Sessions, and sounded radically different. The version of Nebraska we know and love is not actually what Springsteen had in mind, apparently, but rather a series of demos which were intended to be re-recorded with the full E-Street Band. Those re-recordings never quite sounded right, so in the end the demos were released instead, although a radically different Born in the USA did make a famous re-appearance on his eighties album of the same name.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Listen to the above version, and it’s pretty obvious what the tone is, and many people have expressed total bafflement and contemptuous derision that those on the right could possibly think the song expressed anything which chimed with their politics at all. I understand that bafflement of course, but in some ways you can say that the fault also lies with Springsteen himself.
Listen to the album version below. You can’t really blame chest-beating jingoists for co-opting a song whose most obvious musical characteristic, in this version anyway, is a kind of giddy, air-punching euphoria. There are many songs whose deliveries are at odds with their message, and I can understand the argument that the bitter message of the lyrics and the anthemic bombast of the music are intentionally cast in satirical juxtaposition. But the misinterpretation of the meaning of this song in particular, a little like Houston’s mangling of I Will Always Love You, does seem to be actively encouraged by the musical interpretation offered by the artist themselves.Â
And just as I was about to close the book on that one, write Houston off as someone with plenty of vocal dexterity but no artistic sensitivity whatsoever (and to rather more quietly chide Mr. Springsteen for being a grandiose muppet), I was reminded of another occasion where people completely bypass the meaning of a song and treat it as something completely different from what the artist intended. And in this case it’s really a lot less clear that the musical delivery is anything like as complicit in the confusion.
The song in question is The One I Love, by REM. This, like I Will Always Love You, is another song chosen frequently to be payed at weddings, and this one is equally baffling when you listen to the lyrics. It’s basically a song about treating a relationship as light entertainment and then discarding it when convenient – the very antithesis of marriage.
As I said, though, in this case I really am not so sure where the misinterpretation comes from. Stipe’s delivery is far from saccharine. It’s not even all that passive – the song is howled acrimoniously at the listener. With familiarity, the guitars sound less awkward and unpalatable these days than when the song was released, of course, but it still seems a long way from the kind of warm, fuzzy stuff you’d want soundtracking your nuptials. Mind you, what the fuck do I know, I had Better Off Without a Wife by Tom Waits playing at my wedding.
So maybe it’s not Houston’s fault after all. Maybe people are just fucking idiots.
I don’t know where I was going with this, but there are some points to be made, I guess. Just because she sold a lot of records doesn’t mean she was any good. Just because she could hit a lot of notes doesn’t mean she was a good singer. Bruce Springsteen can be too damn over the top for his own good at times. Document by REM is a fucking incredible album. I should DJ more weddings. And no-one at any point in human history will look back fondly on the Toyota Corolla.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
 I’ll confess, the fact that Sparrow and the Workshop have twice insisted to me that John Knox Sex Club are the best live band in Scotland played a significant part in me asking them to play at Henry’s on Saturday. Then I heard their version of Katie Cruel on the Sways Records Mixtape, and thought it was incredible. And then I heard their new album Raise Ravens, and that was that. So I am really looking forward to tomorrow, I don’t know about you.
As for today, it really is unseasonably warm at the moment – almost creepily so. I half expect Jeff Goldblum to come rushing in the door brandishing unfairly discredited research and demanding I help him get in touch with the president to explain how aliens are invading, or the dinosaurs are coming back, or a comet is about to collide with the planet or something like that. It’s usually Jeff Goldblum who delivers that kind of news isn’t it?
I other news, the Eastern Promise even is taking place in Glasgow (well, Easterhouse actually, but that’s almost Glasgow) this weekend. You can get the bus from Mono if you like, and tonight will see the appearance of the amazing Animal Magic Tricks, who was fucking great in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, and tomorrow the return of the Scottish Independent Record Fair, where you can purchase assorted tat from the independent record labels of Scotland, amongst which we number our good selves. You’ll be able to tell our stall, because it will be the one with all the best stuff on it. Bwah-ha!
Actually, I’ll be there to set up, but will have to get back through to Edinburgh pretty sharpish for obvious enough reasons. In my absence, the stall will be manned by Wee Matthew, who has helped us out with all sorts of things, from filming to PR to screen-printing of album covers, over the last few years.
And so, before I even begin to try and get my head around another busy weekend, let’s just kick back and relax a bit, and spend the afternoon fannying about on the internet. My Fresh Air Show, incidentally, is likely to be on a Friday afternoon this year. Along with yon Brian from Trapped Mice/Loch Awe/Last Battle/etc etc etc… and possibly one other victim. So erm, yes, even more wastage to Friday afternoons than usual!
1. Name a band who sound nothing like their name.
2. Era you romanticise the most.
3. Of all the people saving the world in disaster movies, who would you most want on the case if you had the choice.
4. Has there actually been a good ‘ZOMG it’s the end of teh wurld!!1!’ film that you can think of?
5. Kids’ movie you actually like.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Please note that this is called the Remmcast, rather than the Ariyemcast, for little better reason than that it sounds better.
R.E.M. split up this week, which is sort of like the death of an elderly relative: you know it’s sad, and you mourn the loss, but they hadn’t been themselves for a while, everyone knew it was probably coming, and maybe it’s for the best after all.
Due to not really wanting to pontificate too much, I haven’t really produced what could be in any way described as a ‘career retrospective’ or anything, nor have I really gone into much about their contemporaries or influences nor indeed the enduring influence they themselves have had. Nope, I have simply recorded a podcast as per usual, but with three R.E.M. songs in it because they were fucking brilliant.
01. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Hard Time in a Terrible Land (00.26)
02. Burning Yellows – False Horizons (04.33)
03. R.E.M. – Perfect Circle (11.44)
04. The Twilight Sad – Kill it in the Morning (17.52)
05. Niwel Tsumbu – It’s All Vibrations (23.35)
06. R.E.M. – Star Me Kitten (33.03)
07. The Fair Ohs – I’m a Woman, I’m Your Wife (38:15)
08. Zoey Van Goey – You Told the Drunks I Knew Karate (GRNR Remix) (39.10)
09. The Whines – Electric Current (45.02)
10. Youthfall – Secular Child (49.01)
11. R.E.M. – Parakeet (59.47)
We nearly missed our anniversary again this year, but fortunately caught the fucker just in time. We were heading off to Leith to get some scran and I was sitting at the bus stop thinking about how it was nearly August and then asked one of those stupid questions you ask when something is really obvious, but actually so obvious you become unsure of it:
“It’s July, right?”
“Yes, of course it is.”
“That means it must be nearly…” (hastily fishes in pocket for phone) “Fuck! It’s our anniversary. Today!”
When your wife forgets the thing entirely as well I guess it makes no difference, so instead of going to see something daft at the pictures, we went to a fishy place, had a seafood platter and bottle of champagne, before going for (a couple too many) cocktails at The Raconteur round the corner from our house.
Five years married. Oh how happy we looked. That didn’t last*.
01. Mazes – Summer Hits (00.22)
02. Frightened Rabbit – Fuck This Place (feat. Tracyanne Campbell) (05.49)
03. CD/EX – Tell the Girl (12.13)
04. Lab Coast – Astronaut Like Me (18.11)
05. Sauna Youth – Backgrounds (20.31)
06. Hookworms – Teen Dreams (26.52)
07. R.E.M. – Swan Swan H (Athens Demo) (41.33)
08. Admiral Radley – All Fucked on Beer (44.24)
09. Dolfinz – Coral Reefer (51.17)
10. Tom Waits – All the World is Green (59.01)
*Of course it fucking did, don’t be silly. We’re the happiest fucking couple I know, despite spending 90% of our time together swearing at one another!
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.
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 Stallcast you ask? Yes indeed the Stallcast, because my brain is still stuck in neutral after the Christmas break and seems annoyingly resistant to being asked to function properly at the moment. I’ve had half a week back ‘at work’, if I can really call it that, and I still feel like the the old grey custard is still spluttering a bit, rather than firing on all cylinders.
The playlist reflects this in many way too, because it’s a bit all over the place. Good tunes though, although I suspect those amongst you with Haircuts might not be as impressed as others.
Anyhow, the mission for this week is to get fucking moving, clean out the foostiness in the brain and properly embark upon 2011. A jump start may be needed, however.
01. R.E.M. – It Happened Today (00.23)
02. Sin Fang – The Only Living Boy in New York (09.24)
03. Jamie Cameron – When You’re Almost Done, Run (15.14)
04. Johnny Hawaii – The Lonely Smurfer (20.10)
05. Speak & the Spells – She’s Dead (26.51)
06. Beth Gibbons & Rustin’ Man – Tom the Model (35.34)
07. Future Bible Heroes – A Thousand Lovers in a Day (39.09)
08. Kurt Vile – Jesus Fever (43.15)
09. Charles Latham – Hard On (48.25)
10. FOUND – Machine Age Dancing (55.39)
Fresh Air, after giving its hard-working students an entirely deserved and not at all excessive four months off over the Summer, is back on the interweb airwaves this week. And you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, Ruth calling me names for an hour and a half while we play songs! Hooray! Kind of.
We’ve been off the air for ages, and I actually haven’t seen Ruth all that much in the intervening time, so it will be nice to have a chat and catch up, although I promise to try and do most of that whilst the songs are playing so as not to bore you too much.
The player on the page linked to above can be a little flaky, so just pause and un-pause it and that should sort it out. Alternatively I am pretty certain you can find us on iTunes quite easily. We’ll be updating the playlist live below as we go along, so feel free to chip in with comments during the show and we’ll… well, probably just tell you to piss off, really.
1. Meursault – Crank Resolutions
2. Jackson C. Frank – Blues Run the Game
3. Sweet Baboo – I’m a Dancer
4. Onions – I Want to be a Dancer
5. The Decemberists – Down by the Water
6. The National – Terrible Love (New Version)
7. The Driftwood Singers – Coco Ellis
8. Oz St. Fossils – The Jeweller’s Daughter
9. Trips and Falls – I Learned Sunday Morning, on a Wednesday
10. REM – I Believe
11. Ray’s Vast Basement – The Story of Lee
12. Pet Shop Boys – What Have I Done to Deserve This?
13. Sparta Philharmonic – Devotion
14. Nick Drake – Blues Run the Game
Ha! Any excuse to shoe-horn a bit of vintage REM into the equation! Although I’ve probably desecrated five millennia of Chinese mythology by misappropriating it like that. Sorry!
So… Mr. and Mrs. Toad have invaded China to spread the good word of the amphibian god, Toad-Ra, and left Toad Enterprises Inc.â„¢ to its own devices, which leaves me in charge of copying-and-pasting stuff up onto the blog.
If you’d like to see your name up in lights on here over the next couple of weeks, like Martin did yesterday with his excellent gig review, just drop me a line -Â probably best to use the sunday(at)songbytoad(dot)com email address. Basically I’m trying to avoid writing too much and would prefer it if you lot did it all instead!
That photo of the little Feng Shui toad reminds me of a guy I used to work for in Cardiff. He ran a small but fairly successful chain of bars and restaurants, but then got all mystical on us and got into Feng Shui and all that self-help shit. He decided that what Cardiff really needed was a shop half-filled with distressingly hippy-dippy life-enhancement tat like healing crytals and dozens of little toads like that one in the picture, while the other half of the shop was filled with heaps of American self-help Anthony Robbins bollocks retailing at around £150 for a pack of six audio cassettes. The fella was forced to close the shop within a year. Fucking idiot.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be Friday without a five, would it? So here we go. Remember to delurkify yourself and get stuck into the bizarre, unpredicatable and frankly suggestive banter that usually occurs on a Friday. Hey, beats working.
1. If you were to visit China, what in particular would you make sure you experienced while you were there? (If you’ve already been - you can tell us what you enjoyed most.)
2. What dish do you always order from the Chinese take-away?
3. And the oddest Chinese thing you’ve ever eaten.
4. Do you practise any Feng Shui at home?
5. Happy-clappy shiny-shiny hippy-dippy Anthony Robbins self help plans. A genuine method to improve your life or a pile of hoary old arse?
I cognize that doing of emergent essays or narrations is ponderous and valueless process wholly. I don’t require routing uncommon literature, to tackle varied quotes and definitions, guiding to these operates. It is edit for me chiefly to trace essay writing service underground. The fascinating ordered projects are educated. I am precisely amazed and principally I have prepared marks.
 Considering how incredibly brilliant they are at so many things (like becoming epoch-definingly rich, for example) Google is remarkably awful at email spam. Awful to the point that their spam folder is an active nuisance, and the messages they divert into the damn thing seem to be entirely random.
