Song, by Toad

1.Timber Timbre – Timber Timbre
This record is ghostly and weird.  I hate to keep going back to the Bon Iver thing, but reading the Bon Iver press, including the superlatives, lead me to expect an album as good as this, only to be massively disappointed.

Then, months later, I took a chance on this record, which turned out to be the album which matched the breathless accolades – to my mind anyway.  The ghostliness, the creepy sense of the macabre, it just all works so incredibly well – almost like the tales of some lost animalistic religion from an isolated community out in the wilderness somewhere.

It is also perfectly judged in terms of when to stay quiet and bare, and when to drag the sound up from the grave to dance around the odd figures the song has conjured up out of the dark.  Brilliant.

Timber Timbre – Lay Down in the Tall Grass

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2.Navigator – Bad Children
For an album this high on my list to have been released as a free download from a micro-label based in Bone Valley, Utah.  Even more surprising, then, that other people in and around Edinburgh had already heard of him.

This record is astoundingly good though, a ferocious mess of overloaded channels and twisted distortion, delivering pain and anger and the occasional, fleeting glimpse of something a little more tender.  And somehow, underneath all this tangled mess, there are pop songs.  Braden McKenna actually writes amazing tunes – he may batter the living shit out of them afterwards, but he really does write cracking pop songs first and foremost, and that combination is what makes this such a great album.

Navigator – Work is Done

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3. Withered Hand – Good News
It’s hard for me to judge this album, given I knew pretty much all of the songs beforehand either from his superb Religious Songs EP or from live performances.  Somehow that just didn’t seem to matter, because Dan’s delivery, the superb performances of his band and the brilliant job Pete and Neil did of recording this have managed to capture one of the unlikeliest heroes of Scottish underground music you could imagine.  In a really odd way, Dan just oozes a kind of reticent charisma, and the album is a lovable as it is devastating.

A brilliant piece of work by a fellow not one person in the music press would ever have tipped to write one of the great Scottish albums of the last five years, and yet that’s exactly how I would describe Good News.

Withered Hand – Cornflake

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4. Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Songs in the Night
Instead of being the alt-folk record her Confiscation EP seemed to be preparing us for, Songs in the Night came out as more of a folked up rock ‘n’ roll album.  Instead of ruining the delicacy, this gave Sam Crain a really strong platform for her stunning voice, and the resulting record has energy, guts and pathos absolutely all over it.

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Long Division

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5.Trembling Bells – Carbeth
Carbeth, amazingly, has almost entirely retained its ‘What the fuck is this?’ impact ever since the first time Ruth from the Bowery passed me a CD-R of it way back in March.  It’s wild, preposterous and… well in all honesty it’s a completely mental psych-folk anachronism.  But it’s still utterly engrossing and giddily brilliant, and despite still being a bit baffled by it, I love this album.

Trembling Bells – I Took to You (Like Christ to Wood)

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Well I hope you’ve all had your thinking caps on for the last few days, because today is the first of two list days here on Song, by Toad.  This week the Friday Five is going to be your chance to list your five favourite songs of the year.  On the off-chance that enough people do actually vote for the same songs I will then add them up at the end and award some sort of Toadly Prize of Music Achievement to the winners.

And if you all vote for completely different things then I just won’t bother.

The five I’ve listed below are actually five songs which are not in my Festive Fifty, and looking at them I find myself with the inescapable feeling that this might be because in some important way my Festive Fifty is wrong, somehow, because they are all brilliant songs.

Anyhow, as times to de-lurk go, this should be ideal.  No wit or humour required, just chip in with the five songs released this year which have moved you the most.  And encourage your friends to vote as well – the more people chip in the more meaningful the results become.

Next week we’ll be doing the same with albums, so get head-scratching for that one as well, and then I’ll stop being so demanding and go back to my usual job of trying my very best to keep you entertained of an afternoon with minimal participation required.  I hope you actually find these things some fun, and don’t think it’s a bit like that terrible moment when a comedian looks around the auditorium and asks for a volunteer.

And so, without further ado, your five favourite songs of 2009 are…

The Builders & the Butchers – Barcelona

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Samantha Crain – Long Division

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Bombadil – Sad Birthday

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Jason Lytle – Flying Thru Canyons

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The Low Anthem – Charlie Darwin

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I actually know very little about Samantha Crain.  Campfires & Battlefields, one of my regular readers and frequently a kind babysitter of the site when I am absent, emailed me a couple of her mp3s a while back and that was the first time I’d even heard of her.  C&B’s excitement was was obvious, and I have to confess my own pretty much matched his the second I heard her gorgeous, soulful voice break out across the bluesy foundation of the wonderfully sad songs which she writes.

That voice is so rich, knowing and, well, experienced I suppose, that her youth seems almost inconceivable.  21 is still pretty young, and the solidity and presence of the band belie the fact that as a group they are still only just settling on their sound – only just establishing their identity, it seems.  In fact, Samantha herself is only just starting to explore the kind of songs that she herself can write.

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I’ve been waiting for this for a while, and it is bloody lovely.  Campfires & Battlefields, perhaps one of my oldest readers (in both senses), introduced me to Samantha Crain a few months ago, and I’ve been waiting for this to make an appearance ever since.

It’s quite an old album actually.  Samantha recorded it herself and made it available as a self-release a couple of years ago, but since she is now signed to Ramseur Records they thought a formal re-release would be a good thing.  Since then the band has stabilised a little and there are plenty of new songs raring to go, so hopefully it won’t be long before we are hearing even more from this particular neck of the Oaklahoma woods.

The record itself is an absolute beauty.  The music is basically a kind of gentle, bluesy rock ‘n’ roll, with a little bit of folk folded in there for good measure, but Samantha’s voice has a wonderfully graceful soul quality to it which is the absolute clincher for me.  I honestly could listen to her sing all day long.  She’s still finding her feet a little as a songwriter and evolving her sound as she does, but this sounds very mature.  Maybe it’s the voice, or maybe the slow, confident pace, but it does not sound like the first work of a fledgling musician.

I can’t wait for the new stuff, but until then this is five songs of true beauty, and there is plenty to keep us engaged while we wait.

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Beloved, We Have Expired

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This is the podcast to accompany all the Portland and Pickathon things I’ve been slowly but surely writing up over the course of the last couple of weeks.  With all the video to edit it may take a while to get it all sorted, but just follow this Pickathon search and you’ll find it all.  My full review of the festival is here.

This is a musical journey through our trip, from the Shaky Hands and The Builders & the Butchers who got us out there, to Eef Barzelay who we saw in Portland, several bands from the Pickathon Festival and even a song from Ray Rude’s Gameboy pop outfit Operation Mission.

It’s rather shorter than usual, but that is part of a new strategy: shorter podcasts more often.  I am going to try and go for once a week, and make them a maximum of an hour long.  I can’t promise anything, but I am going to try, and I think this might be a better approach for all of us, frankly.

Toad’s Pickathon pictures | Toad Vimeo page | Other Pickathon Features

Toadcast #34 – The Portland Podcast

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01. The Shaky Hands – A New Parade (2.20)
02. The Builders & the Butchers – When It Rains (08.47)
03. Eef Barzelay – Numerology (12.21)
04. Operation Mission – Aqueous (19.30)
05. Lackthereof – Choir Practise (23.22)
06. Langhorne Slim – Restless (31.20)
07. Bombadil – Cavalier’s Har Hum (40.47)
08. Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Beloved, We Have Expired (43.26)
09. Oz St. Fossils – Jeweller’s Daughter (53.54)
10. Loch Lomond – Tic (59.49)
11. The Cave Singers – Cold Eye (66.34)

DC is giving away all sorts of goodies on The Waiting Room this week. In fact, he’s giving away all sorts of things that I would rather like to win myself, bar a couple of things which I have already. I was supposed to write this last week, but given it appears I have some sort of Black Belt in Fuckwittery, I managed to miss it by a week. Idiot.

Anyhow, all you have to do is listen to last week’s episode and email DC with the weight, pounds or kilos, of his suitcase when he flew back from the States the other week. The podcast itself is mostly about that trip and the bands he encountered there, so there should be bags of good things to listen to. I’m just downloading it myself, so I’ll be listening in a wee while.

Last week’s Waiting Room – the one with the competition.

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Anyway, the goodies to give away are as follows:

The Builders & Butchers / Loch Lomond split 12″ – signed by The Builders & The Butchers
The Builders & Butchers Debut CD Album – signed by The Builders & The Butchers
Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers T-Shirt – size Adult Medium (US)
Anni Rossi CD Albums Scandia + Insects Kissing
Parethetical Girls 7″ Picture Disc + CD Album Safe As Houses
The Jones Street Boys CD Album Overcome
Or, The Whale CD Album Light Poles & Pines

I can promise you, that Builders & the Butchers album is still the best thing I’ve heard since I tiptoed in to the blogosphere a couple of years ago, and Loch Lomond are brilliant. Samantha Crain is bloody marvellous too, and I’m really looking forward to seeing her at Pickathon in a couple of weeks, and to hearing her new album. When Mrs. Toad and I get drunk, The Builders & the Butchers is pretty much the first thing we reach for in the evening. The only row is whether to play Black Dresses or Spanish Death Song first.

The Builders & the Butchers – Bottom of the Lake
Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers – Bananafish
Loch Lomond – Nothern Knees, Trees, and Lights