Cakecast? Yes, the Cakecast, because I turn thirty-six today, and in the absence of a real cake and in honour of the fact that I have a gig tonight at the Wee Red and will hence be working, I decided that at least a picture of some cake was in order. I don’t worry about age particularly, but I have to confess that thirty-six sounds suspiciously more like ‘nearly forty’ than it does like ‘thirty-something’. Curse you time and your unrelentingly linear nature!
Anyhow, as I said, tonight we have Gummy Stumps, Weird Era and Battery Face at the Wee Red Bar for a fiver, so those of you wishing to come along and help me get pished and make a fool of myself will have plenty of opportunity to do so. A can of Red Stripe will do the trick, there’s none of your fancy micro-brew pish at the Wee Red.
01. Clem Snide – Happy Birthday (00.16)
02. The Quiet Americans – Be Alone (07.10)
03. Bottle of Evil – The Boatman (11.52)
04. Tropic of Cancer – Distorted Horizon (15.55)
05. Islet – This Fortune (21.20)
06. Samantha Crain – Traipsing Through the Isles (Daytrotter Session) (29.54)
07. Bos Angeles – Beach Slalom (35.16)
08. Ghost Outfit – I Was Good When I Was Young (38.11)
09. The Sleepy Jackson – Tell the Girls That I’m Not Hanging Out (49.29)
10. The Louche FC – Hands (56.42)
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:
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.
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.
Anyone managed to avoid my relentless plugging of this weekend’s Ides of Toad gig? No, thought not, there’s nowhere to hide when I start riding the spam train down the middle of the information superhighway. Or er… something like that, anyway.
Anyhow, the Ides of Toad gigs are now booked up all the way through to the Summer, at which point they will take a break over the Edinburgh Festival as I get a bit more involved in the Festival this year.
So, given the people reading this blog are probably the people most likely to want to come along, I figured I would give you a handy preview list, so you know what’s in store for you over the next few months – all tickets can be bought either at Avalanche Records on the Grassmarket or online here.
The Bristo Hall is upstairs from the Forest Cafe, and this is part of the Roofraiser series of events being put on to help save the Forest. It will also serve as something of a Homegame wind-down for those of us going, and for those who aren’t it is the chance to see Francois, This is the Kit and Babe, the last of which is Gerard from Findo Gask’s new project.
Jonnie is a pop genius hiding behind excessive modesty, Kill the Captains make a face-melting racket and Enfant Bastard is the only person we could think of to make sense of a bill this diverse!
This has just been arranged as my friend Baz (who is putting on the excellent-looking Imploding Inevitable Festival to which you should all go) was looking for dates and I was really keen, but with all the gigs we have on at this time I was a bit scared to take on anything else. So a house gig seemed like the ideal solution, not least because we haven’t had one for ages.
This could, and hopefully will, get noisy. Edinburgh School for the Deaf make a ferocious racket, and The Louche FC may have distinctly innocent-sounding vocals, but the guitar is nasty as hell. And I know nothing about Spook School bar the song on their Bandcamp page above, but they sound really promising.
I am Ruthless for this week’s show on Fresh Air Radio, so it will just be me prattling on by myself instead. I have a John Darnielle tribute to the assault on organised labour in Wisconsion, I have the original version of that song, and I have some Withered Hand, in honour of his SXSW visa troubles.
Other than that, I am pretty worn out from a night of epic drinking in Stockton (which is not even Middlesbrough) last night after the excellent seminar thingy hosted by The Generator at which I (inevitably) drank and talked far too much. There is a certain inevitability to these things, isn’t there.
As per usual the playlist will appear below as I play things, and feel free to swing by the comments and have your say.
1. Lil Daggers – Give Me the Pill
2. King Post Kitsch – Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone
3. Meursault – And Butter Would Not Melt (from Jonnie Common’s Deskjob)
4. Withered Hand – No Cigarettes
5. Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
6. John Darnielle – There is Power in a Union
7. The Louche FC – Only in a Dream
8. Irk the River – Mind That Child
9. The Son(s) – Radar
10. REM – It Happened Today
11. Billy Bragg – There is Power in a Union
12. Elbow – Jesus is a Rochdale Girl
13. David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got no Sole
14. Clem Snide – Pale Blue Eyes
15. Warm Ghost – Open the Wormhole in Your Heart
16. Dam Mantle – Grey
17. Dolfish – Your Love is Bummin’ Me Out
18. The Honey Pies – Hair of the Dog
I really am running out of stupid names for these fucking things. I’m sure I’m going to end up just numbering them in future, but for now you’re going to have to put up with the bloody silly names I’m afraid.
In my effort to squeeze eleven songs into an hour I actually don’t ramble very much on this one, only to find out that the podcast ends up being much less than the usual hour and a bit, for a change. Do I really talk so fucking much the rest of the time?
Anyhow, this is a fucking ace podcast of new music. I don’t generally pay too much attention to how cool (or otherwise) these things might be, but I reckon any haircut merchants out there might rather enjoy this one. For the rest of you, those without Haircuts with a capital haitch, well, just get on as best you can. Let’s face it, if I love it all, it can’t really be all that cutting edge, can it.
01. FOUND – Machine Age Dancing (00.25)
02. Girls Names – Seánce on a Wet Afternoon (07.00)
03. Sonny & the Sandwitches – A. Grassley – Throw My Ashes From This Pier When I Die (12.19)
04. The Honorable Worm – Wouldn’t Mind Dying (14.46)
05. Li’l Daggers – Ya Tu Sabe (22.54)
06. The Louche FC – Back Bedroom Casualty (29.27)
07. Milk Maid – Such Fun (33.24)
08. Brown Brogues – Treet U Beta (35.56)
09. The Honey Pies – Hair of the Dog (41.07)
10. Zed Penguin – This Town (46.49)
11. Manners – Knives (56.44)
Ruth and I are back on Fresh Air Radio once more this evening, live from 8pm for an hour and a half.
Ruth now has her own blog as well, so for those of you who tire of my wittering and crave a little bit more eclecticism in your world, then go and have a gander at Find Me in the Archives.
This week I have some songs from my Manchester post this week, and will be scarpering immediately afterwards to try and catch what I can of the FOUND album launch at the Voodoo Rooms. Factorycraft is out on Chemikal Underground right about now.
As per usual, the playlist will be updated live below as we go along, and the comments will be open for your heckling and chattering and general talking of pish. So feel free to chip in.
1. Devotchka – All the Sand in All the Sea
2. Golden Ghost – Plain Sight
3. Emit Bloch – Dorothy (a bit of the old version)
4. Emit Bloch – Dorothy (and the whole new versions)
5. Thao & Mirah – Eleven (feat. Tuneyards)
6. Powerdove – Sickly City
7. Moldy Peaches – Anyone Else But You
8. Roger Manning – Pearly Blues
9. Girls – The Oh-so-protective One
10. Brown Brogues – I Just Don’t Know
11. The Louche FC – Back Bedroom Casualty
12. Dum Dum Girls – He Gets Me High
13. Psychedelic Horseshit – Unseen Voids
14. Active Child – When Your Love is Safe
15. The Red River – Apple Valley
16. Husband – Feelings
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:
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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.
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.
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.
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Cakecast? Yes, the Cakecast, because I turn thirty-six today, and in the absence of a real cake and in honour of the fact that I have a gig tonight at the Wee Red and will hence be working, I decided that at least a picture of some cake was in order. I don’t worry about age particularly, but I have to confess that thirty-six sounds suspiciously more like ‘nearly forty’ than it does like ‘thirty-something’. Curse you time and your unrelentingly linear nature!
