Sweeping the Nation turns six round about, well, now actually.  For a music blog to last that long is highly unusual; most get to about the two year mark and then posting becomes less and less frequent, and eventually the only updates are rather uncomfortable ‘sorry I haven’t posted in ages’ missives spaced an increasing number of months apart until… silence.

For Simon to keep StN going for six years might just be testament to his mentalism, but I prefer to recognise someone with a familiarly psychotic need to constantly tell people what they should be listening to, and can only admire his endurance.

I don’t know what earns respect for music blogs.  Do you end just respecting the ones whose taste you agree with the most, the ones who are firstest and fastest to absolutely everything (twats), the ones who write interesting, in-depth features, or simply the ones who stick it out the longest?  I really have no idea, but I do know that Sweeping the Nation has always had an aura of respect about it, both from bands and other bloggers, and I would like to congratulate Simon on the work he’s done over the last six years.

To mark the event StN are releasing a charity compilation to benefit Macmillan’s Cancer Support.  It can be downloaded from Bandcamp here, for a minimum of £3 and a maximum of whatever you chose to give, and Simon has written a full run-down of the tracks he chose here. There are a couple of Song, by Toad Records band in there as well – it’s nice to be able to support someone who has given our label so much encouragement over the last few years – as well as donations from the excellent Alcopop and Popty Ping labels.  Please give generously.

That old quote which compares writing about music to dancing about architecture always kind of got on my nerves.  I mean, I can sort of see where they’re coming from, in the sense that the value in music is very much in how it makes you feel, which is a very abstract thing and renders the written word kind of redundant.

Then again, people talk about feelings all the fucking time, and it’s an important thing to do, even for insensitive dickheads like me, so the idea that trying to express the feelings which a piece of music stirs in you is stupid is a bit like saying that all attempts to communicate or empathise with each other are also stupid.

The people at Forest Publications probably think I hate them, because I have consistently ignored the projects they tell me about.  I’ve done this for no obvious reason, and it’s hard to put my finger on why, because I actually think the stuff they do is generally excellent.  I think the reason is possibly related to the fact that I have slipped into a certain mindset when it comes to reviewing music, based rather discouragingly around keeping the inbox clear and occasionally interrupting the general flow with a bit of a rant about something which has been bugging me for a while.

It seems oddly difficult to break that, even for such a tiny sideways step as writing about people writing about music.  Anyhow, Ericka sent me an email ages ago about a project she is working on with Forest Publications and I, being a dick, have managed to let it slip my mind again and again so that you now only have a few days to make a contribution.

All the details are here, but the concept is simple, really. Think of a gig or an album or a song or pretty much anything music related which has really moved you, and react to it in whichever medium you feel most comfortable expressing yourself.  In my case that would presumably be words, but they are welcoming submissions in the form of artwork, photography, poetry, fiction and all sorts.  The deadine for submissions is the 30th October, but that is plenty of time in my book.

This reminds me, actually, of a feature which ran a couple of years ago on Sweeping the Nation, although that was executed in writing only, called Songs to Learn and Sing.  I wrote something about the following song, which is called Eggshell Miles, by a band called the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra.

Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Eggshell Miles

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And here, published on STN here, is what I had to say about it:

“Before Kenny Anderson became slightly famous as King Creosote, chief mastermind behind Fife heroes Fence Records, he was in a couple of bands I was really quite into back in my university days, including the Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra.

“Between 1994 and 1997 I went out with a girl who was one of the most remarkable examples I have ever met of someone both highly fragile and extremely strong. She was a slip of a thing, pretty, sharp and highly intelligent and I developed a rather sizeable crush on her when we worked at the same hotel down in Manchester towards the end of my first year.

“I don’t really think it’s fair to go into the details of what had happened to her in the couple of years before we met, but a lot of it was horrific. Really bleak, awful, horrible things. Despite this, she was remarkably whole as a human being – her shell was thick, tough, and her soft centre buried deep down inside where it couldn’t be hurt. The beginnings of the relationship were amazingly tentative because of this. Her wit and humour were confident and merciless, but getting close to her on a more personal level was a minefield. Time and again she would startle like a rabbit in headlights and close up completely. She didn’t want to exactly, it was just a reflex, and one I had to treat with care and patience.

“She was quite into music, and about a year or so into the relationship we picked up The Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra’s album of wonderful, Scottish, folky bluegrass 39 Stephs. The song Eggshell Miles – “To try and get to know this girl/is to try and walk on eggshells/treading very carefully/and breaking every one” – was so perfect a description of the careful beginnings of our relationship that I have never since been able to separate it from my memories of this particular girl and that summer in Manchester. I’ve never heard another song like it really: sensitive and thoughtful, and like all the best poetry, able to put into one line what has now taken me three paragraphs to describe.

“Anyhow, some eight or nine years passed, we had long-since split up, and I was listening to a freebie sampler which included My Favourite Girl by this guy called King Creosote. A couple of the music magazines had mentioned him, and I was quite interested to hear his stuff. I really enjoyed the song and it only slowly dawned on me that the voice sounded vaguely familiar. Eventually I twigged – that bloke from the Skuobhies! – so I went and fished out my old copy of 39 Stephs and put it on. And lo and behold it was him. And then when I got to Eggshell Miles I was utterly floored by old memories, so utterly bound up in the music that I hadn’t listened to for nearly ten years, only to be unlocked again and come flooding back because I vaguely recognised a voice on a sampler CD by a new band I knew next to nothing about.”

There’s a shitload of news today, but let’s start with that naughty bit of the headline, shall we?

The National have announced that an expanded version of High Violet is to be released on November 22nd.  If, like many of us, you own the album already I urge you to download the new material illegally, or email 4AD and demand they send you the tracks for free.  Having initially been lukewarm on this record, I have since come to think of it as one of my favourite of the year, but for fuck’s sake, the fucking thing’s only been out for, what, six months?  Is my version already obsolete, and am I really going to have to buy the whole fucking thing again?  This is grasping huckstersim of the worst kind, and exactly the reason people started to hate the big labels (and George Lucas – in fact, especially George Lucas) in the first place, because cajoling people into buying the same thing again and again is technically referred to as ‘ripping the the right royal fucking piss out of your fanbase’.

Born to Be Wide is at the Electric Circus again on Thursday.  There will be another round of the excellent Charity Shop Disco (where DJs pick records from the Oxfam music shop and you can buy what you hear), as well as round-table chatty stuff based around A&R.  Guests will be Hannah Overton from XL Records, Stewart Henderson from Chemikal, Kenny McGoff from Columbia and Yvonne McLellan from Island.

The Scottish Music Awards are now accepting nominations and submissions and so on for 2011.  Canada has the Junos, darf sarf has the Mercurys, America… well, doesn’t really have anything, and now it seems we will be making a square go of kicking off our own up here. So if you want to submit your stuff or make a suggestion, there are forms at the bottom of the front page of the site.

My Sweeping the Nation interview has just been published, as has one with new blog Five Minutes With… so for those of you who haven’t had quite enough of my incoherent and self-contradictory burbling over here, pop over there to have a quick scan of even more of it.

The Music Alliance Pact was started by Jason from the Pop Cop and recently reached its one-year anniversary.  The Pact itself is a coalition of bloggers, each from a different country, who regularly compile a collective post containing one song each from their respective countries of origin.  Apart from reminding us that decent independent music isn’t all anglophone, it also serves to magnify the reach of Jason’s personal choices several-fold.  Being on a single blog post is one thing, but being featured in the MAP puts you in something like three dozen.  To celebrate, Jason has made a compilation available at the above link, including songs by every band he has featured in the MAP since its formation, many of which are exclusives recorded specifically for the occasion.  Happy birthday!

So there you go.  Honestly, what are the fucking National thinking?  I am tempted to guess that in this case it wasn’t really their choice, more the record label, but of course I really don’t know.  I mean, this is a total piss-take isn’t it?  Can anyone think of a decent excuse for this sort of balls?

Hmm, one of the key points of the blogosphere is not that any one particular blog may or may not be good, or that individually one site might wield a lot of influence, it is that collectively blogs wield a lot of influence.  This is at its most effective when bloggers cooperate and interact, and I’ve been doing a fair bit of that recently, but committing the cardinal sin of collaborative blogging: failing to cross-link.

Apart from being really rather bad manners, it renders the whole scheme a little pointless if I go to all the effort of writing these posts and stuff like that and then fail to nudge you muppets in their general direction.  So here’s a general breakdown of the bits and pieces people kindly invited me to make a contribution to at the tail end of last year.

Slowcoustic Review of 2009 – Basically this is a review of the year where I get a little bit sidetracked and end up ranting about the irrelevance of the major labels and the rise of the DIY movement.

Sweeping the Nation UK Music Bloggers Poll – Simon has been a constant support not just for this blog for for the record label as well, and compiles  an annual UK bloggers’ best of the year list, and here is this year’s.

Saam from Faded Glamour has conducted a UK blogger’s album of the decade poll, and has posted the main countdown here, and then the individual top three lists by the participating bloggers are assembled here.

Finally, the Contrast Podcast’s Festive Fifty reaches its finale here, and Neil from Meursault and myself introduce William Henry Miller Pt.1.  Sadly, two songs from that Decemberists toss-fest made it on there, as well as one from The Allen Creature, but that’s the problem with democracy: none of us is as stupid as all of us.  Still – Withered Hand in the top three means there must be something fundamentally right with the list, so it must be forgiven its aberrations.

Simon over at Sweeping the Nation has hosted a wee guest post by a certain Toadly gentleman, as part of an excellent series called Songs to Learn & Sing.  I suggest you pop over and have a read.  It’s a really good series, and you’ll find one or two of your favourite bloggers contributing as well as a few genuine surprises.

I couldn’t think of much to post about sweeping, but there’s never a bad time to hear Tom Waits.

Tom Waits – I Can’t Wait to Get off Work (And See My Baby)