I am not doing predictions, mostly because I can’t.  I have no idea what is going to be big this year and what isn’t, and even if I think a band is going to release something amazing that probably doesn’t matter, because bands I love rarely ever get all that famous anyway.  But in any case, and in no particular order, here are some things I liked about last year, and some things I didn’t.   Some stuff I’d like to see more of and some things I am looking forward to, and some things I am not.

“Something wicked this way comes”

(And by wicked, I mean good, I hear that’s how the kids are using the term these days)

Tape labels - I know they’re a little contrived, and that tape is in many ways a shit format to release on but… I don’t know, there’s a playful, youthful energy to this stuff which I can’t help but love.

You’re shit, and you know you are - Okay, so we may have swallowed an awful lot of guff this year, but it did make me laugh how most people’s reaction to pompous, self-important garbage like (Viva) Brother was to point and laugh.

The X-Factor - you know how you all complain about that shitey bar full of guys in Ralph Lauren shirts or stupidly tight t-shirts, or girls with ironed hair in tight jeans who seem to forget that Footballers’ Wives was over fucking years ago? Well the X-Factor is a bit like this.  Yes, it’s fucking woeful, but it’s destroying the major labels, clearing the ground for the interesting indies and acting as a very helpful retard-sink for people who might otherwise be bothering us with their opinions about real music.  And for this I salute it.

Recognition for our fucking bands! – King Post Kitsch proved that even if you never play a single gig, and even if you release your album really early in the year you can still get great press and end up on loads of End of Year lists.  Lach got in every glossy music mag in the country – yes, that’s right, all of them.  The Japanese War Effort proved that even if you get almost no press, if people like your stuff enough then social networks can be just as effective, if not more so. And Rob St. John showed rather decisively that even if your PR lady craps out on you mid-campaign, if your shit is good, when it hits the fan it will go absolutely fucking everywhere.

“I’ve only got three bullets and there’s four of Motley Crue”

It’s no secret that a lot of my favourite bands this year have come from Manchester.  And coincidentally enough, four of them seem to have come up with new releases pretty much simultaneously, so given how rarely I mention single releases on this blog I thought that made for pretty much the ideal opportunity to compile some sort of Toad vs Manchester Funtimes Omnibus.

Now, if any of you ungrateful cunts had bothered to come along to the Electric Circus on the last weekend in August you would have seen awesome performances by two of these bands, and you would know why I am so excited by them.  But you didn’t, did you.  Twats. I am almost too embarrassed to invite them back now, but I will try if you promise to turn up this time, because you really should see them.

First, up there at the top of the page, we have Ghost Outfit, whose debut single is now out on Salford’s brilliant Sways Records. The deluxe edition includes all the amazing things in the picture below:

And Tuesday sounds like this:

Ghost Outfit – Tuesday by sways

Also on Sways are the excellent Louche FC.  We also happened to have them booked to come up to play Edinburgh last year, but work commitments prevented that happening unfortunately, which is something I would like to put right this year, if at all possible.

They have their second single out around now, which can be pre-ordered from here. If you want a listen the video is below, as well as a Soundcloud embed of Hands, which they are giving away as a free download.

The Louche FC – Hands by sways

Next up we have the fantastic Brown Brogues, who have a new single out on a Swedish label called Kenrock Records.  For obvious reasons I can’t give you any free downloads here, but the band are streaming the single on their Bandcamp page, and it is available to purchase here. For those unfamiliar with their sound, it’s a bit like Oscar the Grouch singing rock ‘n’ roll songs from inside his dustbin, whilst a wind-up monkey plays drums on the lid. And it’s awesome.

And finally, after all these singles, a whole album at last, and this time from Former Bullies. The band make dreamy, lo-fi pop music, have a penchant for DIY but nevertheless excellent videos. The album is going to be available in relatively limited numbers, and can be purchased either direct from the label or from Soft Power Vinyl, who are a highly-curated online record shop based, I believe, in Livingstone of all places. Their shop is very much worth exploring. They don’t seem to stock much, but what they have is absolutely excellent. And if you want to hear more Former Bullies stuff, their Bandcamp page is here, and has all sorts.

So there you go. So many embeds and pictures and bits and pieces, the whole post is a bit of a mess isn’t it? Sorry about that. Still, there’s enough good stuff there to keep you busy for a few hours.

I touched on some of the questions about which I am going to circuitously ramble today when I wrote about Thee Ludds and the tape label in Sheffield they’re working with called Tye Die Tapes. Specifically, I want to follow up a little on this paragraph, from the end of the post:

I am starting to see a lot of these garage bands gravitating towards labels who do a lot of tape releases, split releases, and stuff like that.  It’s usually small scale and DIY, and quite a few rack up a fair few releases in this manner before going anywhere near an album.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I am not entirely certain where albums even fit in this aesthetic, actually.

It’s been this way in the States for a while but, within the bounds of the kind of music I’m into at least, it certainly seems that at the moment a lot of young folk in garage bands are not focussing on finding someone to release their albums, nor just slapping stuff up on the post-MySpace digital ventures and hurling it blindly out into the void, as I have heard so many journalists and bloggers complain in the past.

It seems like increasingly they are forming loose-knit communities based around tapes, maybe the odd 7″ and, oddly enough, zines and releasing their music on free EPs, tapes and splits, be they vinyl or cassette.  In terms of resurrecting obsolete technology I find this kind of fascinating.  But I like it.

It seems like an odd combination of digital and analogue sensibilities, too, which I also like.  A lot of these labels are making rough DIY videos and using those and Bandcamp pages to get their music out to as wide an audience as possible.

They’re also recording a lot, which is an advantage of the digital era which I think is underappreciated. Recording is cheap and easy now – your songs can go from your living room to a fan in Kazakhstan in a couple of hours, and there is no real reason you need to have one, polished, definitive version of your songs anymore, an idea I think was unnecessarily reinforced when recording was expensive.

This was driven home to me during the PAWS Toad Session we recorded recently.  The band talked a lot about allowing their fans to actually be able to watch the evolution of a song, from rough demo, to lo-fi band version to something recorded in a professional studio.  In fact, they wondered why anyone would really care about a song without having some idea of where it had come from.

In fact, I think this is one of the reasons the passion for tapes has kicked off so much recently: they reacquaint people with the actual craft of making music.  The initial explosion of MySpace and digital music in general was amazing, but it swiftly resulted in there being this infinite miasma of music out there, which got so thick it started to make our heads spin.

The rise in vinyl purchases seemed to reinforce the idea that digital music simply didn’t do enough for a lot of committed music fans.  It was too plentiful, too nebulous, and too throwaway. They wanted something to ritualise their passion, and something which in some way symbolically represented it in the way an iTunes library never can.

Looking at these tapes and zine labels, I kind of get the impression that the same thing happened to a lot of musicians. Sure, they can record and release anything they want to now, but being in a band is a creative thing – it’s a craft – and that fact seemed to become increasingly lost in all the talk of viral marketing and Garage Band software. Besides, if you never actually do get signed, as most don’t, then having a website and some mp3s to show for all your blood, sweat and tears seems like a pretty poor return.

Looking at these tape labels, particularly those which include things like zines and, not infrequently self-designed t-shirts and dodgy homemade YouTube clips, they seem to be trying to reconnect with the actual craft of music.  The recording and re-recording of songs seems designed to emphasise just how much work making a really good song can be – it’s not just about a mic, a MacBook and a MySpace page.

Vinyl is too expensive for some, but what’s the point in firing another anonymous mp3 out there into the void?  If you’ve worked that hard on something, you need to show your work some respect, find some way of embodying what it means to you before you can really expect other people to allow it to mean something to them.

So these DIY musicians are sitting there dubbing their own tapes, one at a time, they are using photocopiers, glue and scissors to do their own design work and they are creating objects of care and of craft.

So you could say that they are simply rejecting the digital world in order to reacquaint themselves with a past (which is often wildly romanticised and in some cases they are too young to remember anyway) when music is supposed to have meant something more, and that’s fine, but I think it’s a little simplistic.  This music is going on Bandcamp, the videos are being shared on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, so they are still embracing many elements of the digital world. It’s not a Luddite movement.

In fact it seems to embrace the best of what the right combination of forward facing and backward facing technology can do for you these days.

And, if you want to explore some of these labels, here are a few I have been getting into recently:
Sways Records (Salford)
Comfortable on a Tightrope (Manchester)
Tye Die Tapes (Sheffield)
Gnar Tapes (Portland)
Night People (Iowa City)
Gerry Loves Records (Edinburgh)
Cath Records (Glasgow, but very new and yet to have any actual releases, I think)

And a couple recommended to me on Twitter:
Auris Apothecary
Scotch Tapes
Secret Furry Hole
Analog Edition
The Tapeworm
Loud and Quiet Cassettes
Tired Tapes

I may sound like I work for the BBC, but if anyone asks me, I do tend to tell them that I am not really all that English.  My mum was born and raised in Moss Side though, which is one of the scummier parts of Manchester, and I lived in the city myself for a year apiece at the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, so if I am actually from anywhere in England in any meaningful sense, then it is probably Manchester.

I’ve always harboured a sort of simmering resentment for the place though, in that unfair way you do when your life is shit for all sorts of reasons and it ends up rather unreasonable reflecting on where you are living at the time.  I’ve been through this all before on the Manchester Podcast, but I’ll rehash it here quickly, just to explain myself a little.

The first time around was my first year of university.  Compared to everyone around me in Vienna and Singapore, where I was raised, I was really quite English.  I liked English and American music, I supported Manchester United and I visited England quite regularly to see my family in Manchester.  When I actually moved to England for the first time, however, I found it didn’t really work like that, that I wasn’t very English at all, and promptly endured a year of pretty severe culture shock.

The second time around I had been distracted for a year after graduation by accidentally becoming a restaurant manager, had been offered a design internship in Milan, only for that to fall through and for me to find myself stranded in Manchester again, flat broke, working in a pub and having a very hard time of getting the job for which my degree had allegedly prepared me.  This led to a few too many conversation which went roughly like this:

“What do you do for a job then?”
[I look around myself in a confused manner, as if the fact that I am standing behind a bar, pouring drinks and then demanding money in exchange for those drinks should make the answer to that question somewhat obvious.]
“I’m a barman.”
“No, I mean as a real job.”
“I am a bar man.”
“But surely you’re far too well-spoken and intelligent to be just a barman!”
“Well, you’d think.”

It was shit, but I did listen to some fine music while I was there.  Here are a couple of songs, one from the first spell and one from the second:

James – One of the Three (buy here)

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Yo La Tengo – Last Days of Disco (buy here)

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Anyhow, after my shite experiences living there have tainted my memories of Manchester for the last seventeen years, things have slowly started to change.  A few years ago I discovered Red Deer Club and Humble Soul, two of my favourite independent record labels in the UK.  Why, I am not sure, but for the last year or two I have just been bumping into one cool Manchester music enterprise after another, and suddenly I find my negative associations with the place starting to evaporate.

Firstly, I came across Cloud Sounds, now my favourite podcast, and the blogs Folly of Youth, A New Band a Day and Pigeon Post.  As well as being good in their own right, all of these lovely people have been incredibly supportive of what we’re up to here as well.

Secondly, Ruth from Fat Northerner kindly invited me to take part in two Unconvention events, one in Macclesfield, where my dear friend Tom Smith is from, and one in Salford, where United and stabbings are from.  Around the same time I went to last year’s In the City as well, so I ended up spending a fair bit of time in Manchester last year and honestly, I had a blast.

So with my good relationship with the city almost entirely restored, I now also seem to be finding all sorts of interesting music stuff happening there too, and have ordered a pile of vinyl from small labels in Manchester recently.

The above picture is the vinyl starter pack from Sways Records, which just dropped through my letterbox this morning, and I can’t wait to get stuck into it tonight.  I bought this for the debut single by The Louche FC, which can be heard below.  I first heard these guys on a Cloud Sounds podcast, and am trying to get them up to Edinburgh for a live show sometime soon.

The Louche F.C – Motorcycle Au Pair Boy by sways

I’ve also just received Suffering Jukebox singles from Milk Maid and Manchester’s current A&R darlings Brown Brogues, and have been playing them loads recently.  Brown Brogues are playing SXSW this year, and because they make a right old racket I might actually be able to persuade Mrs. Toad to go and see them.

I Just Don’t Know by brown brogues

Also, Static Caravan sent me through a whole pile of awesome 7″ aural pleasure recently as well – help yourself here.  I found them by searching out the debut single by The Maladies of Bellafontaine, and ended up with a pile of other records as well.

And finally, Debt Records is the home to the likes of Red Tides (whose lead singer – I think – is absolutely lovely – I accidentally bumped into her upstairs at Fuel Cafe in Withington, while she was doing some embroidery or something, if I remember – this whole thing has been bit random) and Louis Barabbas & the Bedlam Six who are, of course, playing this week’s Ides of Toad gig at Henry’s.  Debt Records’ ethos is to embrace live performance, focussing on good gigs in interesting places, as a way of reacting to an environment where in order to become popular recorded music is becoming more and more boring.

So apart from all these interesting projects which I have happened across in the last year or so, what I’ve found really interesting has been the self-image of Manchester’s music scene.  A certain friend of mind has dismissed it as being ‘full of fucking sneering hipsters’, and given the city itself reminds me heavily of Glasgow, I think I always thought of Manchester as fashionable hipster haven.

But when I told one of my friends there that Edinburgh is good to work in because all the ambitious fashion whores tend to fuck off to Glasgow sharpish, which makes it hard to make progress here, but at least tends to mean that the people who remain are interesting and stubborn and not focussed on celebrity or stardom, their response was ‘Oh right, a bit like Manchester is with London then?’

And I suppose I’d never thought of it that way before. I’d always thought of Manchester as somewhere cool, somewhere to kind of envy, as a lot of other Edinburgh people think of Glasgow I suppose.  I do forget that no matter how much you achieve, especially in something as status-orientated as the music industry, there is always someone more successful to cast envious glances towards.  So next time we Edinburghers whinge about Glasgow, maybe we should just stop whining and be grateful we aren’t as isolated as Aberdeen.