So, I may be jetlagged to all fuck, but why not get on Fresh Air Radio and pass my incoherence onto you.  Hell, what could possibly be more entertaining than listening to me almost fall asleep whilst introducing songs?

Actually, it will probably work in everyone’s favour actually, as rather than the usual bollocks talking, I will probably end up playing more songs and chattering far less in between, which will presumably be much more entertaining for those of you actually listening.

I will also be joined by Olaf Furniss of Born to be Wide, who will be introducing us to lineup for Wide Days, which takes place on the 7th April 2011 at Teviot House.

Live from 8pm UK time: click here to listen.

As per usual, feel free to chip in in the comments below, and I will be adding the playlist as we go along.

1. Pavement – Spit on a Stranger
2. Preston School of Industry – Straits of Magellan
3. Sparkelhorse – Happy Pig (Live)
4. The National – Think You Can Wait (with Sharon Van Etten)
5. Lady Lazarus – Fighting Words and Fists
6. New Animal – All I Want is Gone
7. My Teenage Stride – The Genie of New Jersey
8. Dolfish – Digitised Love Letters
9. Dolfish – I’m Proud of You Joanna
10. The Zincs – Rich Libertines
11.

Fresh Air, after giving its hard-working students an entirely deserved and not at all excessive four months off over the Summer, is back on the interweb airwaves this week.  And you know what that means, don’t you?  Yes, Ruth calling me names for an hour and a half while we play songs!  Hooray!  Kind of.

We’ve been off the air for ages, and I actually haven’t seen Ruth all that much in the intervening time, so it will be nice to have a chat and catch up, although I promise to try and do most of that whilst the songs are playing so as not to bore you too much.

Live from 8pm (UK time) – listen here.

The player on the page linked to above can be a little flaky, so just pause and un-pause it and that should sort it out.  Alternatively I am pretty certain you can find us on iTunes quite easily.  We’ll be updating the playlist live below as we go along, so feel free to chip in with comments during the show and we’ll… well, probably just tell you to piss off, really.

1. Meursault – Crank Resolutions
2. Jackson C. Frank – Blues Run the Game
3. Sweet Baboo – I’m a Dancer
4. Onions – I Want to be a Dancer
5. The Decemberists – Down by the Water
6. The National – Terrible Love (New Version)
7. The Driftwood Singers – Coco Ellis
8. Oz St. Fossils – The Jeweller’s Daughter
9. Trips and Falls – I Learned Sunday Morning, on a Wednesday
10. REM – I Believe
11. Ray’s Vast Basement – The Story of Lee
12. Pet Shop Boys – What Have I Done to Deserve This?
13. Sparta Philharmonic – Devotion
14. Nick Drake – Blues Run the Game

Having spent the week driving Loch Lomond around the country I figured that some sort of driving-themed nonsense would be in order for this week’s podcast.

Driving music (NOT in the Top Gear sense) tends to stick in your head, probably because when listening to it there is nothing else to do but sit and absorb the whole album.  I know most musicians would probably blanche somewhat at the idea of having their work enjoyed over the thrum of wind noise, tyre noise and a grumbling engine, but a long drive is still probably one of the best places to listen to music.

Oh, and the ‘character’is supplied by all the fuckers outside having fun while I DO FUCKING WORK FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT OF YOU UNGRATEFUL INTERNET BASTARDS.  Erm, sorry.  I’m tired.

Toadcast #123 – The Drivecast

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01. The Twilight Sad – The Wrong Car (01.53)
02. Bear Driver – A Thousand Samurais (09.12)
03. The National – Terrible Love (14.37)
04. Band of Horses – Infinite Arms (19.11)
05. The Wedding Present – Drive (25.07)
06. The French Wives – Me vs Me (28.54)
07. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band – Davy’s on the Road Again (Live) (35.01)
08. Foon Yap – Gabriel Moody (41.49)
09. The Goodnight Loving Supper Club – The Pan (50.14)
10. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – A Map of Morocco (54.27)

I am not going to review this album exactly, I don’t think.  My feelings are a bit ambivalent, and I’m not really sure where I stand on it, so I thought that instead of actually writing a review I might recount three conversations I’ve had about it recently.  These are badly remembered versions of the conversations, not word for word transcriptions, but hopefully they get the point across.

Dylan:

D: Heard the new National album yet?
T: Yeah, but to be honest I’m not really that into it.
D: No, I know what you mean, but it is growing on me.
T: They’re like that as a band actually – I’ve always taken ages to get into their stuff.
D: In some ways Boxer is still growing on me.  But with the new one I keep listening to it and finding lyrics and little bits which are amazing.
T: Yes, and then once you find that bit you suddenly find that it gets you into the whole song.  I know, I’m not going to stop listening to it, it’s just that I haven’t really clicked with most of it yet.

Ruth:

R: Have you heard the new National album yet?
T: Yeah, I’m not really…
R: No, no, me neither, I really don’t like it.
T: Finally, I feel I can say it out loud.  Everyone seems to love the bloody thing.
R: It’s just not that good.  It’s repetitive, the lyrics are great, but the tunes just aren’t there.
T: No, none of the actual melodies have really stuck in my head yet particularly.  I’m just find it quite boring, and I loved Boxer, although that took a while to grow on me as well.
R: Well I’ve listened to the new one at least ten times and I can’t understand why everyone’s so excited.  It’s like they’re finally getting the praise for this one that they were due for Boxer, like Grizzly Bear.  The one everyone loved was nothing like as good as the previous ones.

Elbow were a bit like that, I think. The Seldom Seen Kid is nothing like their best album, but they’d been bubbling under as an excellent band for so long I think people finally decided they were due some recognition and heaped it on a record which may not, in itself, have actually merited the acclaim it received.  A bit like Ryan Giggs’ Player of the Year award last year.

Neil:

N: So, have you got the new album by The National?
T: Yep.  Not really that convinced, to be honest.
N: You’re a fucking idiot.  It’s incredible.
T: I don’t know, I’m not really getting it.  I keep feeling I’m missing something, with all the praise it’s been getting.
N: Praise?  It’s had really bad reviews.
T: Has it?  I’ve not really read any of the reviews, but everyone on Facebook and Twitter and so on can’t stop talking about how it’s the best album of all time and so on and so forth.
N: Maybe, but the actual critics have been really lukewarm.  Most of them are saying that the tunes just aren’t there.
T: I’d tend to agree.
N. But it’s not that kind of album – that’s not what it’s about.
T: Well the fans themselves seem to love it.  Maybe they’re just listening to it longer and with more attention and less expectation, rather than rushing through it trying to find a handle for a review.

So there we go.  I still don’t get it entirely, although there are some great moments, and National albums do tend to take a long while to sink in with me, so maybe that will change over time.  Then again, I was never all that keen on Alligator, so maybe I am at heart just not much of a National fan, which is possible. Anyhow, a record being a hit with the fans rather than the critics is no bad thing.

The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio
The National – Sorrow

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The Toadcasts stumble from one clusterfuck to the next, each one more incoherent than the last.  This, I think it’s fair to say, makes the Homegame one look good by comparison.  Not that the songs aren’t good, just that the instances of people talking over one another and two conversations going on at once and so on and so forth are notably worse on this.

However, the music is excellent, and surprisingly up to the minute by my standards.  We even managed to sneak the new National song in there, which they only released on Thursday – how’s that for happening and newsworthy and so on and so forth.

We have some new Sam Amidon as well, a track by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti which dropped through my letterbox while I was away in Austin, and some splendid stuff by Harlem and Clogs.  If only it wasn’t for the pish chat, this would be a great podcast, actually.

Toadcast #115 – The Messcast

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1. Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – Ruth Drink My Whisky (05.12)
2. The National – Blood Buzz Ohio (13.40)
3. Loch Lomond – Spine (MMIX) (25.50)
4. Sam Amidon – Way Go Lily (29.43)
5. Harlem – Friendly Ghost (34.49)
6. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Round and Round (44.02)
7. Ghostkeeper – By Morning (49.10)
8. Love is All – Bigger Bolder (53.57)
9. Grand Champeen – Broken Records (62.16)
10. Clogs – Last Song (68.24)

There has been an unprecedented amount of disruption to this site over the last couple of weeks, caused by a hectic release schedule at Song, by Toad Records which prevented me preparing in the slightest for going away to the Fence Collective’s Homegame Festival, rattling through two sessions in the day and a half I was back in Edinburgh, and then buggering off to Austin for SXSW. I can only apologise, and thank you for your patience and Dylan for his assistance, otherwise the whole universe might well have imploded.

One of the best things about this site, in my opinion, has always been the sheer consistency.  Any arsehole can write a music blog, and frequently any arsehole does, but it takes a special kind of mental illness to keep it up this constantly for this long with so little disruption.  I haven’t actually been diagnosed with obssessive-compulsive disorder, but it can’t be far away.

Anyhow, after last week’s disgraceful levels of disorder, things will be back to being ship-shape and Bristol fashion around here in no time, starting with today’s Friday Fives.  This is, as per usual, your opportunity to de-lurk, write something trivial and silly and generally say hello to the Toad community.  A tiny proportion of the people who read this site actually comment, and although I am extremely grateful to those who do because it gives me a somewhat illusory air of authority, it would be nice to meet some of the silent majority once in a while.

First some news though.  Ryan Adams and The National have new songs out and about for downloading (horrible and wonderful respectively).  I really wonder about Ryan Adams.  He has a large number of absolutely incredible albums to his name, and yet some utterly unspeakable shite as well.  Mind you, his best work seems to be done during bursts of crazy and largely unfiltered creativity so maybe, if that’s how he works, occasionally he’ll end up down the odd cul-de-sac and we should pretty much just accept it as part of the process which makes him great.

Also, WOXY has closed, giving a great big enormous lie to that BBC weasel who claimed that they were closing BBC 6Music to give the commercial sector some room to breathe.  The commercial sector cannot compete in that space and has little interest in doing so, so stop pretending we’re as stupid as you seem to think and give us our fucking station back you craven old lickspittle.  I heard rumours that WOXY was back on the block when I was out in Austin, but I didn’t quite expect it to be shut down within a week of my getting back.

Anyway, pills taken, here are your five questions for this week, answers don’t need to be inspired or brilliant, it’s just nice when you take part:

1. Favourite artist who is also really erratic (doesn’t have to be just music).
2. Favourite radio DJ or podcaster.
3. When do you listen to radio or podcasts?
4. If you had one free play on prime-time radio (say, in the middle of that fat cunt Chris Moyles’ show, for example) then what would you play?
5. Suggest some background music to the Queen’s speech.

And here are some songs I was enjoying during my first few months of moving my music writing from a static site to a proper blog page, back in 2006:

The Titans of Filth – Morbid Widow’s Portrait Gallery

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Destroyer – European Oils

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The Skygreen Leopards – Disciples

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Genaro – Garp 52

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Abernethy – Everyone Who Knows You

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Yes, we’re back on the air with a somewhat hastily arranged programme.  I somehow managed to only realise on Monday that this show would be going out today, so we haven’t been all that big on preparation this week, I’m afraid.

There’s a slightly new format to the show this year, in that I will be joined on every broadcast by Ruth from the Bowery, and that there will be a live session performance from a band of our choice every week as well, with the video of this performance going up in the post for the following week’s show.

On air 7pm-8.30pm GMT – listen here.

This week we will be joined by Edinburgh newcomer Thomas Western, who has only just moved up here and is just starting to introduce himself to the local music scene.  He’ll be playing a few songs – maybe three or so, depending on time – picking some tunes and talking pish with Ruth and myself.

The tracklisting will appear below and be updated live during the show, so feel free to add abuse and nonsense in the comments.  Like you ever need asking…

1. The Walkmen – The New Year
2. Thomas Western – Live session track so new it’s not been named yet!
3. Jesus H. Foxx – Elegy For the Good Times
4. The Builders & the Butchers – Down to the River
5. Bonnie Prince Billy – The World’s Greatest
6. Thomas Western – The Worm Forgives the Plough (Live in Session)
7. Diamond Rings – All Yr Songs
8. The National – Fake Empire
9. The Douglas Firs – Grow Old and Go Home
10. Daniel Johnston – Walking the Cow
11. Thomas Western – Don’t Talk (Put Your Hand On My Shoulder) (Live in Session)
12. The Oldham Brothers – Wouldn’t It Be Nice (Beach Boys Cover)
13. Thomas Western – Your Front Door (Live in Session)
14. Meursault – William Henry Miller Pt. 2 (Vinyl Version)