This is called the Fullcast for no better reason than that I tried to fit far too many songs onto the playlist.  I’d have used half the Palmist Records stable if possible, but eventually decided to settle for one single track.  There’s always next week.

I didn’t even make room for a song from the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah record, although to be fair I haven’t really listened to that enough to actually know what I think about it, so maybe that would have been hasty.

If anything this reminded me of the really early podcasts, when I tried to squish two hours of music into a single recording, and the things were just sprawling behemoths of wittering and tuneage.  I can’t say I regret the decision to trim it down to either ten songs or an hour.

Direct download: Toadcast #191 – The Fullcast

01. Beaters – Dark Haunter (00.22)
02. Body Wash – Cool Bike (06.34)
03. High Pop – For Jord (08.23)
04. Django Django – Waveforms (11.35)
05. Steven Malkmus & the Jicks – No One Is (As I Are Be) (17.31)
06. Milkshakes – Track 1 (24.57)
07. Kurt Vile – The Creature (27.37)
08. Ezra Furman & the Harpoons – Don’t Turn Your Back on Love (34.41)
09. Steel Phantoms – Bedouin (41.50)
10. Eagulls – Possessed (47.24)
11. Sands – Fares & Tolls (53.15)
12. U2 – Lemon (60.17)

After enjoying the Vinylcast I recorded a couple of weeks ago, I’m afraid I wasn’t able to resist the temptation to come bacl to my record collection for this week’s podcast as well.  In fact, I think I can safely say that this is now something which is going to become a regular feature of Song, by Toad podcasts because… er, well just because it’s fun I suppose.

This week I went to the Shelter charity shop on our street and bought about half a dozen records: some Bessie Smith, Shirley Bassey, Ella Fitzgerald, Kid Thomas and his Algiers Stompers, and a couple of old Dylan records.

If I end up ever developing a taste for jazz I am pretty sure I will be able to trace it directly to a sense of misplaced nostalgia, and the charity shops of Scotland.  I am a long way from being a jazz fan, but there’s something so fitting about the crackle of vinyl on an old jazz record.  I never used to listen to this stuff as a kid, but for some reason I get a nostalgic feeling from listening to it now.

Direct download: Toadcast #159 – The Vinylcast 2

01. The Meteors – Wrecking Crew (00.22)
02. Kurt Vile – I Wanted Everything (07.16)
03. The Ad Libs – He Ain’t No Angel (15.01)
04. Tom Waits & Crystal Gale – Little Boy Blue (17.39)
05. The Velvet Underground – Stephanie Says (24.07)
06. U2 – Twilight (29.00)
07. Girls Names – Graveyard (33.19)
08. Rene – Destination: Mars (40.00)
09. Ambitious Tugboat – Age Rings (43.07)
10. Manners – My Will (48.27)
11. Otis Redding – Pain in My Heart (56.36)

This is all about my beepy-bloopy tendencies and how I got into the stuff in the first place.

I better point out, right at the beginning, that I don’t see there being any difference between indie and electronica exactly.  Or at least, the dividing line is so blurred and there is so much crossover that the distinction is completely pointless, really.

I think the only reason I really make a distinction myself is because I became a music obsessive by listening to the likes of Dylan and Tom Waits and so on, and then moved onto the like of The Pogues and the Waterboys – not a beep in sight, basically.

Consequently, when I heard bands like Saint Etienne for the first time, although I loved lots of it, I didn’t explore much further because I just wasn’t used to electronic noises.  In actual fact, by the end of the podcast I think I come to the conclusion that it was actually an electronic beat which I really wasn’t used to, mostly, but in any case, I found it quite hard to get into anything vaguely electro for ages.  Given that I could barely make a distinction between the two these days, that seems kind of odd, too.

Toadcast #104 – The Bleepcast

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01. The Pet Shop Boys – Rent (03.46)
02. Stereolab – The Light That Will Cease to Fail (12.09)
03. Dubstar – St. Swithin’s Day (15.25)
04. U2 – Lemon (23.05)
05. Jason Lytle – On a Piece of Wood I Go (30.49)
06. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist (35.57)
07. LCD Soundsystem – North American Scum (40.42)
08. Money Can’t Buy Music – We Are All Asphyxiate (48.59)
09. Magic Arm – Daft Punk is Playing at My House (52.41)
10. Parts & Labour – Fractured Skies (57.49)
11. Jon Hopkins – Circle My Demise (King Creosote) (65.13)

After a week spent debating it, how about a podcast embodying the discussions we’ve been having about production values I thought a podcast which sort of pulls all the disagreements and moans and whingeing and so on into one big mp3 of joy would be a good idea.

So we’ve got some Big Production, some demo scratchy stuff and a few bands who have dabbled with both.  I fart on about production values as if I have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, which of course I don’t.

I’m not sure how well it works as a playlist – it might be a bit disjointed – but in general I like it.  I like the debate in general, I like the thought process we’ve all gone through together this week, and in general, by association, I like this podcast.

Toadcast #57 – Production Values

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01. Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA (Original Nebraska Sessions Demo Version) (04.31)
02. Radiohead – Everything in its Right Place (11.13)
03. Enfant Bastard – Vessel (20.19)
04. Half Man Half Biscuit – 1966 and All That (22.37)
05. U2 – Red Hill Mining Town (29.56)
06. Snow Patrol – Last Ever Lone Gunman (37.40)
07. The Divine Comedy – Life on Earth (42.10)
08. Yann Tiersen – Geronimo (Black Session w. Neil Hannon) (46.07 )
09. The Wave Pictures – A Long Way Away From Me (53.34)
10. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band – Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) (Live at Hammersmith Odeon, 1975) (57.35)

I could have sworn that I spoke English pretty well. I mean, I’ve always been confident, able to communicate and rarely had extreme misunderstandings with other people who also seemed to think they were speaking English.

Then I read the quote below and I wondered if I have even the slightest grasp whatsoever of the language we all claim to have in common. I mean, do we have it in common at all or do we just make similar-sounding noises whilst all the while each taking completely different meaning from the conversation.

This man is talking about the rack. The medieval torture device called the rack. This. And what he has to say is the following:

“I am not going to give aid to our enemies by disclosing details of our interrogation techniques. But if we do expose detainees to the Rack it is not torture, because we do not torture.”

Well that’s cleared that up then. The quote was from none other than Deranged-Lunatic-in-Chief George Bush and was perhaps the pick of the bunch which I found on this little post here on Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports. It looks like a pretty reputable source – given it’s part of the Law Professor Blogs network one assumes he’d be pulled up pretty sharpish if he was making it up, never mind the implications for his own career.

Reading some of the bald-faced justifications for torture (yes, torture: think witch trials, The Inquisition, The Middle Ages and other such bastions of enlightenment and civilisation) truly is breathtaking. It pretty much puts the current American government slap bang in that Axis of Evil they invented a few years back. ‘The la-and of the freeee, and the home of thuuuh barbaric medieval torturers’ Quite fucking splendid. This makes an interesting read about the equally insane technique of waterboarding.

The comedy of this whole nonsense is that terrorist acts have killed 3000 people in America in the last six years. This works out at an average of about 500 per year, compared to 40 000 deaths per year due to road accidents. 500 per year, versus 40 000 per year. 500 versus 40 000. When, oh when, will they stop hating freedom and start bombing General Motors.

U2 – Daddy’s Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car
Cracklin’ Moth – Car Wreck
David Bowie – Always Crashing in the Same Car

Ah, Mr. Toad enjoys yet another supercilious snigger at the stupid from his entirely imaginary ivory tower. There’s a survey on Forbes.com about the American Dream and what it means today (scroll to the bottom of this page to read it).

I have two favourite quotes from the few that I idly flicked through, firstly from the truly dismal political posturer Al Sharpton which is probably not too far from the truth:

“I think the American Dream is equal protection under the law and equal opportunity.”

It’s a bit vague, but it’ll do for me, but the true gem was this little wonder from the splendid Hugh Hefner:

“It’s an idea unique to America and shared by other countries as well.”

Unique to America and shared by other countries. How can a man clever enough to be rolling around on a bed of firm young buttocks and silicone boobies at his age be stupid enough to come out with something as prize-winningly vacuous as that, then? There’s also this lovely bit of deluded idiocy from the ever-hilarious Chuck Norris:

“When you’ve got God, you’ve got the gold–and all you need to achieve and experience the American Dream.”

If you’ve got Toad, you’ve got the gold baby. We are all about the gold here on Toad and that is something unique to me, and something that you all have too. Aww yeah, Song, by Toad, bringin’ the gold day after day, one vituperative, vicious rant at a time.

U2 – The Playboy Mansion
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – I Had a Dream, Joe
Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire – The Idiot’s Genius