Song, by Toad

The key word in that phrase, of course, is if.  There are a massive number of people in the fucking internet age, however, who seem to think that intending to build it is reason enough for people to come and it is really, really getting on my nerves.

Bloggers start blogs, write five posts, and then start making demands about being listed in the Hype Machine or elbo.ws directories immediately, despite it being incredibly fucking clear that it’s going to take at least two months before they’ll even consider you. They are important services and drive a lot of traffic to your site, so I can understand the desire, but please just show some fucking patience.  At least create something of substance before clamouring for people to shower you with praise.

This happens when penis-brained publicists get their hands on a small but promising band as well: the uber-hard sell comes out to play.  “Greatest band ever, set to explode!“  And not infrequently this band has no more than a small handful of songs to their name.

Venture capital-backed start-ups promise to REVOLUTIONISE online music sales/sharing/funding/whatfuckingever and send out these breathless fucking emails full of wind and promises about how you’ve JUST GOT TO BE in from the start.  Do we?  Do we really have to?

People do it to bands all the time.  I can get you on the radio, I can get you this, I can get you that.  And then they just stop paying any fucking attention, it all fails to materialise and the band is left with nothing.

The new mantra for the 21st Century should be more along the lines of: “I don’t care about your fucking plans, your grandiose ideas or your vacant, meaningless promises.  I don’t care what you intend to do, or about your fucking ambitions.  Go away, get your nose to the fucking grindstone and DO something.  Then talk about it.”

Can you tell I haven’t had enough sleep?

Shout Out Louds – Hurry Up, Let’s Go

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.

The Magnetic Fields – Promises of Eternity

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.

Micah P. Hinson – Patience

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 am away, so this is a phantom post which I VERY KINDLY wrote before leaving, just to make sure you all remain up to date during my absence.  Wouldn’t want you needlessly wasting your money on shit gigs now, would we.

I may not be there in person, but fucked if I’m having you degenerate lot misbehave in my absence.  There are good gigs out there and if I catch any of you wasting your money on aural effluvium like Newton Faulkner then there will be serious repercussions.  Or Kate fucking Nash.  Unspeakable.

Here is what you are permitted to spend your musical sheckles on.

Monday 4th August 2008: Rob St.John & Emily Scott play The Retreat Festival at the Scottish Scullery.
I swear if anyone has asthma they might just drown out the music at this particular gig, both Rob and Emily are so hushed.  It will be beautiful music though, so I really recommend this.  Rob is warming up to a new release shortly, which really is excellent news.
Rob St. John – Tipping In

Wednesday 6th August 2008: The Pictish Trail & HMS Ginafore play The Retreat Festival at the Scottish Scullery.
Jenny Ginafore is one of the intentionally undiscovered gems of the Fence Collective.  From what I know (not much, I just confess) she’s just not up for pushing her music any farther than it intends to trickle along of its own accord.  Her music is beautiful on its own, Johnny Pictish’s recent album is brilliant, and this should be a great gig.
HMS Ginafore – You Built a City Inside of Me

Thursday 7th August 2008: Shout Out Louds at Cabaret Voltaire.
As Swedish eighties indie revivalists go, this lot are easily as good as it gets.  Their Cure/Smiths infused indie pop is pure joy and I am gutted that I’ll be away for this one.  If you can go, GO!
Shout Out Louds – Tonight I Have to Leave It

Friday 8th August 2008: Randan Discotheque & The Wee Rogue play The Retreat Festival at the Scottish Scullery.
Craig, who is Randan Disotheque, writes classically Scottish songs: slightly wry, slightly morose and witty enough to be enjoyable.  The Wee Rogue, whom I have only ever seen once, on his Edinburgh debut, writes the most remarkably fragile songs you’ll hear in a while.
Randan Discotheque – The Prince Must Go to Iraq

Saturday 9th August 2008: Nouvelle Vague at the Liquid Room.
As much as arch cover versions are really starting to get on my tits, Nouvelle Vague don’t make a bad fist of this particular sub-genre.  Their loungey versions of indie classics are rather enjoyable, and why not spaff fifteen quid on an evening’s entertainment.  They’re playing the previous night too, supported by Rachel Unthank & the Winterset.
Nouvelle Vague – Human Fly

I was in the pub this lunchtime, stuffing myself with fish and beer, as we traditionally do at Proper Job, every Friday, as a matter of ritual. Whilst there I vaguely recall seeing a reference to some sort of fish from Normandy and instead my more common thought (mmm.. fish!) I found myself thinking that I liked the sound of Normandy. Just the word. I know that it’s just a pretty dreary, flat and largely unremarkable region of Northern France, but the name appeals to me somehow. A bit like Picardy, its neighbour.

There are a few places I’d like to visit just because of the name, actually. Corsica is another one – it just sounds nice as you pronounce it. Andalucia is another, although only when I pronounce it without the ‘th’. So it sounds really nice, but only if I say it wrong. Damascus has a lovely sound to it as well.

I remember a Mark Knopfler song (yes yes, I know, just fuck off) where a soldier in Napoleon’s armies dreams of returning home to his sweetheart, the “Flower of the Aquitaine”. Places in the Ukraine like Odessa have always sounded impossibly romantic for similar reasons. There’s something so evocative about that part of the world, irrespective of what the reality happens to be like. Or how about Dakar – how could you not want to go there? Or Madagascar? Alexandria always sounded so enticing as well, as do Casablanca and Marrakesh. Or Budapest. Or Mali.

In fact, I think it is possibly to arrange a lifetime of holidays on phonetics alone. Although maybe, looking at that list above, I just like the sound of the hard ‘c’.

/randombollocks

Shout Out Louds – Normandie
Yo La Tengo – Andalucia
The Divine Comedy – Motorway to Damascus

Well, perhaps Europop isn’t quite the right term. Eurindie perhaps. This podcast is stuffed full of splendid tracks from the rest of the European continent which we, as marvellously parochial and narrow-minded Brits, seem to forget exists half the time.

I have no real idea how much this music actually intersects with any of the local scenes to which it might belong, but it is certainly nicely in tune with the British scene as I know it at the moment. Scandinavia is inevitably rather over-represented, but I have managed to track down a Belgian, a little Dutch and something (tangentially) Italian to throw into the mix as well. And a special secret bonus surprise for right at the end, but wait for it patiently and don’t ruin it for yourselves by peeking.

The big thing I can’t get over is just how much I had to leave out of this podcast actually. I’d lazily assumed that it might be a little tricky to fill an entire playlist, but I could just as easily have filled two. So don’t whinge about what’s not on there, because I know, I know!

Toadcast #27 – Europop

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.

01. The Divine Comedy – Europop (00.06)
02. Mikrofisch – The Kids Are All Shite (05.52)
03. A Classic Education – Stay, Son (10.40)
04. Wolfkin – These Are Illusions (14.14)
05. Tafra – Cheesy Epic View (19.47)
06. Kottarashky – Chetiri (21.32)
07. Teitur – Catherine the Waitress (29.40)
08. Jens Lekman – No Time For Breaking Up (35.44)
09. Shout Out Louds – Parents’ Living Room (40.01)
10. The Tellers – Hugo (45.34)
11. Cats on Fire – Born Again Christian (49.47)
12. Yann Tiersen – Ginette (57.21)
13. Air – Alpha Beta Gaga (61.44)
14. The Raveonettes – That Great Love Sound (70.33)
15. Die Ärzte – Quark (73.41)
16. Bettie Serveert – I’ll Keep it With Mine (77.19)
17. Snake & Jet’s Amazing Bullit Band – Doom City (82.46)
18. Röyksopp – Remind Me (87.36)
19. Sigur Rós – Untitled (Álafoss) (90.50)
20. Snapline – S2 (102.59)

And here are a couple of songs which didn’t quite make the cut:
Teitur – We Still Drink the Same Water
The Teenagers – French Kiss
The Raveonettes – Here Comes Mary
Blood Music – Eagles in the Water
Hello Saferide – If I Don’t Write This Song Someone I Love Will Die
Tafra – I’m Sorry Brakne-Hoby

You all know I’ve been doing a regular slot on DC’s radio show, The Waiting Room, of late, don’t you? Well this week’s slot saw me picking a track by Sky Larkin, as well as three wonderful songs from the splendid Happy Realease Records from darn sarf*. I may have been a little rude about their sound actually, but it was inadvertent. I was trying to head off the criticism from indie snobs – What? Who? None of those round here, surely? – about the fact that they are just plain enjoyable indie-pop for the most part, and ended up implying that I thought they were lightweight. The Genius of Tact strikes again. I should teach courses in this shit.

Anyway, swing by The Waiting Room to download this and past episodes, and Error FM to see what sort of crazy fools agree to put this sort of rubbish on the airwaves. The, er, internet airwaves. Interwav… oh never mind, you know what I mean.

The Waiting Room, Wednesday 12th March 2008

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.

* Darn sarf, for my non-British readers, is the phonetic spelling for how a cockney might pronounce the words ‘down South’. Which is where they are from. Yes, I know, hilarious wasn’t it.

And here’s a sneaky little bonus podcast from myself:
Toadcast #23½ – The Freshcast

A week or so ago, I recorded a demo show for Fresh Air FM, the local student radio station, with a view to applying for a slot during next term, only the computer ate the bastard thing. Fucking technology. Anyhow, Sunday was Mrs. Toad’s birthday, and for some reason she was keen to get plastered and do a podcast with me, so we re-did it together. It wasn’t played quite as straight as I’d hoped, and by the time I’d had time to reflect on submitting it I was pretty certain Fresh Air would chase me out of the building with sticks. Fortunately for me, however, they didn’t hate it, didn’t seem to think I was a smart-arsed twat and didn’t dispatch me from the building with a boot print in my arse.

As this show is just a pre-record and will be going out randomly over the night when they stop broadcasting, I thought I’d pop it up here for you to have a listen. I won’t be doing this with any more Fresh Air things because, well, you need to go over there and listen for yourselves really, don’t you. But for this once I thought you might like it seeing as you shower of treacherous fuckers all seem to love Mrs. Toad so very bloody much. Be warned though, because it was made for a different audience, so there may be a bit of duplication from previous podcasts, and it’s rather long, as apparently there is a lot of time to fill overnight when there are no presenters in the building.

The Fresh Air plugs themselves were enough to see us kicked out.

Toadcast #23½ – The Freshcast

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.

01. Shout Out Louds – Tonight I Have to Leave It (03.09)
02. The Shaky Hands – Whales Sing (06.41)
03. The Cave Singers – Thinking of Heaven (13.05)
04. Preston School of Industry – Straits of Magellan (17.23)
05. Adam Balbo – Talkin’ Bush (27.11)
06. Donnan Linkz feat. Baje One of Junk Science – The N Word (29.18)
07. Riff-Raff – Romford Girls (36.44)
08. The Pogues – Dirty Old Town (38.58)
09. Nicole Atkins – Neptune City (46.44)
10. Edith Piaf – Elle Frequentait la Rue Pigalle (50.11)
11. Dusty Springfield – You Don’t Own Me (53.34)
12. AA Bondy – Vice Rag (59.12)
13. Relatively Clean Rivers – Hello Sunshine (68.09)
14. The Eighteenth Day of May – Lady Margaret (71.05)
15. Celebrity Chimp – Pornstar (81.27)
16. Nightjar – Poor Man’s Son (84.01)
17. Ravens & Chimes – General Lafayette, You Are Not Alone! (93.03)
18. Eels – Love of the Loveless (95.59)
19. Glasvegas – It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry (106.49)
20. Flashguns – St. George (111.01)
21. Elle S’Appelle – Little Flame (123.09)
22. Elk City – Cherries in the Snow (125.58)
23. The Low Miffs – Also Sprach Shareholder (130.41)

11. Shout Out Louds – Our Ill Wills

The first time I heard this album I thought it was mediocre.  Mediocre!  The next time I thought it was decent.  Now I think it’s an 80s indie pop masterpiece.  One of the most enjoyable records I’ve heard for ages. If you’re having a party with even slightly discerning guests put this on, loud!

Shout Out Louds – Tonight I Have to Leave It

review | website | buy

12. White Rabbits – Fort Nightly

Piano driven rock ‘n’ roll brilliance. You know how if you really love something you sit there drumming on the table with your fingers and bobbing your head like a muppet?  Well this is that album for me.  Great, great stuff.

White Rabbits – Kid on My Shoulders

review | website | buy

13. Frightened Rabbit – The Greys

This album has the dubious honour of being the first ever freebie I was ever sent to review.  I felt so important and so happy.  And what a fine album it is too: discordant indie with howling, tuneless vocals and scrappy, jumpy guitar.  Scottish indie is alive and well, and it’s because of groups like these lads.

Frightened Rabbit – Music Now

review | website | buy

14. Loch Lomond – Paper the Walls

Breathtakingly beautiful chamber folk from that cauldron of indie brilliance: Portland, Oregon.  Sufjan Stevens meets the Decemberists and, this year, outdoes them both.

Loch Lomond – Song in ¾

review | website | buy

15. Alela Diane – The Pirate’s Gospel

Truly a work of hushed folk wonder.  I only found out about her because she’s on the same label as the Shaky Hands.  What fine noses those people at Holocene Music have.  Honestly, you could not find a finer album of bluesly, folky, old-time gorgeousness.

Alela Diane – Pieces of String

review | website | buy

The 2008 Plug Awards have been announced, so go along and vote. They are pretty much the best awards going if you ask me, but I am not particularly excited by the nominees this year. That album list, for all it contains an awful lot of very good albums, is pretty lacking in imagination. There are no nominations there that didn’t make me think ‘ah yes, them’ when I read them. The list of best blogs is largely the same. It’s like someone Googled music blogs and wrote down the top five results. That’s not what happens, but you get my drift. Half of them are on the Wikipedia mp3 blog page, which pretty much sums it up. Not much from the old Song, by Toad blogroll, sadly.

Be careful where you say this, though. I stirred up a right old episode of handbags on the bloggers’ message board over at elbo.ws for saying that I thought it was a crap list. I must confess I didn’t express myself very well when I first said it – accusing the nominees of by and large lacking a personal voice, when what I really meant might have been better said thus: they tend not to have that personal journal aspect that I like about my favourite blogs, which makes them as much about the person doing the writing as it does about the music.

Either way, the ensuing kerfuffle would have done a bunch of twelve year old girls proud: the next time I logged in I was ‘the worst poster on these boards’ and ‘retarded’ and found myself fending off the rather pompous, and not a little bit comical, outrage of half a dozen premium bloggers. So I got stuck right back in myself, as I’m sure you can imagine, and the whole thing descended from there. In any case, if the hierarchy of bloggers counted for anything, which it fortunately doesn’t, I would be entirely finished in the blogging world as of this morning.

It was a bit silly really, as there was a perfectly useful discussion to be had in there somewhere, but the ensuing nonsense was classic internet message board: absolutely everyone over-expressing themselves and calling each other ‘tards and so on and so forth. I called someone a cock smoker at one point myself, which I think is one to be particularly proud of. The Aussies really do bring a panache to the world of the casually vulgar insult that the rest of us can only aspire to. I told another gentleman what his writing tended to substitute sincerity for writerly knob-cheese, which perhaps mightn’t have been the most diplomatically adept way to get the discussion back on course. And, almost inevitably, I think I called them all a bunch of whores at one point as well.

Either way, without going into the rights and wrongs of the actual argument, it’s amazing how easily this sort of thing seems to happen on the internet. People just don’t seem to have quite evolved the means for preventing this sort of cycle escalating far, far faster than it would in the real world. Sometimes I think people get a bit carried away coming up with a neatly phrased put-down and rather forget the discussion they’re in. I know I went a bit over the top at the time, but then again, I did do some excellent work, especially towards the end when I got a little irritated.

I suppose what it really comes down to is the fact that it is incredibly difficult to be sensitive on the internet. I knew that half those bloggers, whose work I was about to publically declare not all that interesting, use those boards. In a direct personal conversation you can convey a lack of desire to be confrontational and directly hurtful with body language, but it is pretty bloody tricky to do so when writing something down, especially when the content itself is really quite touchy.

The Wedding Present – Getting Nowhere Fast (Live)
Shout Out Louds – Ill Wills
Art Pedro – I’m the Greatest

Sometimes the search for the catchy single can have slightly adverse effects on the perception of a record.  Tonight I Have to Leave It, the superbly infectious Cure-a-like opener to this album was the only song I knew when I first put the whole thing on the record player.

Consequently, I completely missed the whole album the first time through.  I don’t even know how I ended up listening to it again really, because I dismissed it as bland and soft and not really good enough.  This was completely wrong.  I think I was expecting more guitars, more angst, maybe even more rock.  In fact, instead of Tonight I Have to Leave It being a typical song, it is actually at the far end of the spectrum inhabited by this album.  The rest slides from 80s retro-indie through polished and bouncy indie-pop to wistfully twee lament but the key word, instead of being indie, is pop.

This is actually a splendid pop album, not the angsty indie one I had anticipated, which I suppose is the reason it took me so long to adjust.  Sure, the sound is still massively informed by 80s British indie, but it is given a shimmering pop sheen by the lush duets and the bouncy production.  So, over the course of about ten listens, this went from a disappointment which was entirely my own fault, to one of my favourite recent purchases.  Poor bloody musicians really don’t deserve to be at the mercy of such fickle blinkering on the part of their audience they really don’t.  It’s a brilliant album people, buy it!

The Shout Out Louds – South America
The Shout Out Louds – Blue Headlights

website | hype | amazon

Oh you utter bunch of disloyal bastards.

Honestly, I toil away hour after hour for you fuckers, I risk my job, my sanity, by bank balance, my sleep and my marriage to bring you absolutely anything and everything musical I can possibly think of – anything to enrich your drab and pointless little lives with the illuminating joy of a beautiful tune.

I read about it, I listen to it, I accumulate it, I think about it, I track it down, I hoard it, I share it and I love it. And with a gossamer wrapping of that deepest of loves and drop of purest ambrosia (no, not the custard) I pass it on to you, my treacherous band of musical turncoats.

By necessity and due to homelessness there is no internettery in the current Toad residence, and had there been I can promise I would have put a stop to this weekend’s skulduggery post haste. What do I find on returning to work this morning and happily signing in to check the comments and visits of the little brood of musical internet chicks I have so lovingly nurtured through the highs and lows these last years? I find that you have cruelly and wantonly abandoned me for another more fair and who suits your tastes better, that’s what. And who is this harlot for whom you have forsaken your steadfast and devoted Toad? None other than my own erstwhile sweetheart (and now bitter rival) the scurrilous and deceitful Mrs. Toad!

That’s the last bloody time I let her near this blog, it really is. Bastards.

British Sea Power – Remember Me
Shout Out Louds – Oh, Sweetheart
Wilco – I’m the Man Who Loves You
Mark Mulcahy – The Way She Really Is
Buffalo Tom – Does This Mean You’re Not My Friend?

(Not a bad wee podcast, that one, I thought Told you all she was a fox)