People are going to start laughing at me soon, if I post any more of this kind of stuff.  Guess what kind of sound Taxrat are?  That’s right, ultra-scummy lo-fi guitar pop.  I am pretty sure I would positively review a Keane record at this point, if they slapped all sorts of distortion on their instruments and muffled the fuck out of the vocals.

Anyhow, Taxrat have three songs and absolutely no information on their MySpace page, and their email to me was equally informative:

hey,
here’s a couple recordings we made a few months ago. we’re called Taxrat from southern california.
myspace.com/taxrat
thanks,
jesse

And umm… here they are.  And they’re fucking good.  I do keep telling you this, but it seems like the worse the PR email the better the band – Li’l Daggers, Allister Izenberg, Trips and Falls and now these guys.  All wrote me the most ill-advisedly impenetrable emails when they first got in touch – Allister’s was even in all-caps – and yet every single band turned out to be excellent.

Every single time I hear BBC or glossy magazine gatekeepers say things like: ‘your promo CD needs to have a certain standard of professionalism or we know from experience it is very unlikely to be worth listening to, out of all the submissions we receive’.  They use phrases like ‘of a certain quality’ to describe the more professional submissions, and every single time I hear this I really do feel like they are missing a trick.

For myself, the more professional the email submission, the more nicely formatted and extensive the press materials supplied, the more likely it seems to be that the band will be extremely boring.  It’s not a hard and fast rule, by any means, but I have seen absolutely no sign that shitty, badly written music submissions correlate with bad music; in fact if anything I would tend towards suggesting the opposite is more often the case.

In any case, yes the production values of this stuff might be either completely terrible or irritatingly fashionable, depending on your stance on this kind of aesthetic, but as far as I am concerned they are good pop songs and that’s the end of it.  I like the guitar riffs and I like the bluesy rhythm of it, and I actually like the vocal melodies too, or what little of them you can discern.

Taxrat – Brick Wall

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Taxrat – Burn Down Slow

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P.S. Also, that was one of only two pictures ‘of’ them that I could find, but it was a pretty cool one, so I thought it deserved banner status.

Mrs. Toad and I do NOT approve of Valentine’s Day, and I have to say the fact that she genuinely seems to hate it (rather than just saying so, but secretly still expecting flowers) is a very liberating thing.  It means I can now finally forget about the whole bloody nonsense once and for all, and never ever have to figure out exactly how much I am expected to spend in order to demonstrate my affection for someone.

There is, after all, very little that can be less romantic than obediently making protestations of love for no other reason than that everyone else is doing so and you are expected to conform.  I actually think it’s just plain fucking insulting, frankly.

‘Hello darling, I thought we might go out for a meal tonight.’
‘Yes dear, what a lovely idea, what made you think of that?’

In what possible world can ‘because the shops told me to, everyone else is doing it, and I feel kind of obliged’ be considered a better answer than, say, ‘because we’ve both been really busy recently and I miss spending time with you’.  And assuming that the latter is obviously the more romantic answer, what the fuck does that have to do with the fourteenth of February?

Direct download: Toadcast #161 – The Slappercast

01. Cracker – Mr. Wrong (00.18)
02. The Dead Kennedys – Your Emotions (08.39)
03. Fear of Pop – In Love (13.25)
04. The Veils – Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice (22.02)
05. Bill Callahan – Our Anniversary (24.33)
06. The Wedding Present – Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm (36.00)
07. Tom Waits – Frank’s Wild Years (39.40)
08. The Clash – White Riot (46.15)
09. Taxrat – Burn Down Slow (48.32)
10. Josh T. Pearson – Honeymoon is Great, I Wish You Were Her (55.25)

Yes indeed, I am back on Fresh Air tonight, once again sans Ruth, but she will be back next week apparently, which is good news.

For today, however, you are stuck with me sitting in a room by myself blethering away about nothing at all, which is pretty much par for the course, but I promise that as of next week that blethering will be interspersed with liberal helpings of Ruth telling me that my music taste is fucking shit.  We’re a cute little double act like that.

Live on air from 8pm UK time – listen live here.

As per usual I will be updating the playlist live below as we go along, so feel free to chip in in the comments and let me know how incredible (no really, incredible, no matter what you think) the playlist and chat just happen to be this week.  Anyone mentions the word shit and they’re getting punched.  Through the internet.  Punched through the internet.  Oh dear.

01. Li’l Daggers – King Corpze
02. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide
03. Josh T. Pearson – Sorry for the Song
04. Bob Dylan – Girl From the North Country (Witmark Demos)
05. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – 11 Kinds of Loneliness
06. Ringo Deathstarr – Imagine Hearts
07. Earth Girl Helen Brown – I Wanna Do It
08. Rob St. John – Phantom Limb
09. Warm Ghost – Claws Overhead
10.  The Great Valley – Tall Smoke
11.  Eels on Heels – G
12. Range Rover – Mind
13. Taxrat – Burn Down Slow
14. Tom Waits – All the World is Green