Hello You.

This Wednesday 24th December (Christmas Eve, naturellement), at or around abouts 10pm GMT (USA: 2pm PST + 3pm MST + 4pm CST + 5pm EST; Europe: 11pm CET), splashed all over the interwaves via the usual birdshit splatter pattern, for your listening consideration, will be The Waiting Room Christmas Eve 3hr Best Of 2008 Round-Up Show.

On this very (quite, in this case, literally) Eve we, one half of Drunk Country & The Woman of The House, will be dishing out thoughtfully considered Gold Guitar Pick of Excellence ‘Awards’* to the lucky Nominee(s) what is found to be the Best Of in their particular category.

It’s almost like a real end of year music award’s show but with less drinking & no Gallagher brothers.

Below, then, is the list of Categories & Nominees, 34 Artistes + 34 Songs. We have rather cruelly (although this is clearly a cynical attempt at injecting some tension into the proceedings) refrained from listing the Nominees in the last 2 Categories. Those will be revealed on the night. Mwah, I believe, Ha Ha, indeed, Ha.

So, there you go.  This took us AGES to compile from thousands of songs listened to & playlisted over the whole of this past year. *PHEW* just does not cut it. 2008 was simply awash with brilliance, surprises, genius & plain old breathtaking musicalisation. Oh, & singing.

The list, then:

Best “What The Fuck Was That?!”

1) Celebrity Chimp – Celebrity Chimp

2) The Just Joans – Hey Boy… You’re Oh So Sensitive

3) Aidan John Moffat – Cunts

4) Eagleowl – Motherfucker

5) The Theatre Fire – Coyote

6) Joe Rodger & The Velcro Quartet – Suddenly They Realised…

Best Cover Versions

1) Robin Grey – There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis (Kirsty MacColl cover)

2) Erlend Ropstad – 7 (Prince cover)

3) The Miserable Rich – Over & Over (Hot Chip cover)

4) Taken By Trees – Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns ‘n’ Roses cover)

Best Contenders for a Bond Theme

1) Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan – Come On Over (Turn Me On)

2) The Last Shadow Puppets – In My Room

3) Get Well Soon – You/Aurora/You/Seaside

4) Hour Of The Shipwreck – Unclouded Eyes

Best Emotional Blackmail

1) Porlolo – Turning On Heels

2) Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers – Beloved, We Have Expired

3) The Dø – Stay (Just A Little Bit More)

4) Meaghan Smith – 5 More Minutes

5) Ane Brun – Don’t Leave

6) Plants & Animals – Bye Bye Bye

Best Pound Down The Back of The Sofa

Nominees 1-8 = a big fat question mark

Best Song of 2008

Nominees 1-6 = a bigger, fatter question mark

The podcast will be available, as we say, sometime tomorrow around 10pm (we have very limited access where we are headed for the holidays, so bear with us).

It remains only for us to wish every one of you all the very best this Christmas holiday & to remind you that our 3hr New Year’s Eve 2008 Jukebox show will be on (just like the title reads) Wednesday 31st December, from 10pm-1am GMT. See the New Year in with us, why don’t you?  (Yah, fucking right…).

Thanks for tuning in & listening. It’s been a heck of a year.

MC & a HNY,

½DC + TWoTH

*when we say ‘Awards’, what we really mean is  we will email a picture of a solid Gold Guitar Pick of Excellence – we’re not that unhinged that we’d actually fork out for 6 solid gold plectrums. Jesus, no.

Part 1: 1-10
Part 2: 11-23
Part 3: 24-36
Part 4: 37-50

Here is the official beginning of Christmas List season, here at Song, by Toad. If you want to get involved and write your own list, then please do. Go here for more details. The more of you that contribute to that the better the results we will get, so don’t be shy.

This is the first quarter of my Festive Fifty for 2008. I will also be preparing a list of my twenty favourite albums, but I might just neglect singles and EPs this time around. If you disagree with anything then do get stuck in, but bear in mind that this is far from a definitive ranking. Ask me on another day and Pictish’s brilliant I Don’t Know Where to Begin could easily be in the top five. Ask me in four months’ time and it would probably be all-change again. Read the rest of this entry »

This may be the limpest of all excuses I’ve ever had for naming a podcast.  You know why it’s called the Jeffcast?  Because I kinda mention Jeffrey Lewis a couple of times.  Oooh, yes, that makes sense.  Still, sorry, I couldn’t think of anything else really, off the top of my head.

I suppose I am off to see Jeffrey Lewis directly after recording this, so I guess it sort of counts.  He is playing a secret gig at Henry’s Cellar Bar after sneaking out of the Beggars Banquet Christmas Party at the Picture House over the road.  It’s one of the things I love about the anti-folk crowd: you genuinely get the impression that they’d rather be playing to an appreciative crowd of their mates, rather than a bigger crowd of anonymous punters who may stand there and demand entertainment.

So there you go, that’s the deal for tonight.  For the rest of the weekend we’re putting together Meursault albums, ready for the official (re)launch of their record next Friday at the Song, by Toad Christmas Party.  So, after folding and screen-printing a thousand of the bastards we’ll all be well ready for Gimme Shelter in the Caves on Saturday and a spot of Candythief action in the Jazz Bar on Sunday.  Enjoy the 48th Toadcast.

Toadcast #48 – The Jeffcast

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01. Yo La Tengo – Double Dare (04.12)
02. Wolf Parade – Call it a Ritual (07.29)
03. Modey Lemon – Loch Ness Monster (11.25)
04. Sly & the Family Stone – Life (17.09)
05. The Velcro Quartet – The Love Song of Little Cosmo Nostradamus (20.03)
06. The Pernice Brothers – The Ballad of Bjorn Borg (25.57)
07. Caramel Jack – The Lincoln Jackson Incident (34.37)
08. The Magnetic Fields – All the Umbrellas in London (38.29)
09. Sparklehorse – Happy Man (Memphis Version) (44.46)
10. The Veils – Birthday Present (49.44)
11. Grandaddy – Miner at the Dial-A-View (54.24)

Hello, more Toadcastery. I’ve, erm, focussed on Dadrock for this one. Not too much of it on the playlist, fortunately, although there’s a couple of well-known names on there. In my defence though, I couldn’t bring myself to feature Coldplay, so I was forced into the compromise of playing an almighty butchering of one of their songs by the splendid Richard Cheese.

Basically I spend most of this podcast trying to justify the presence of so much bland music in the charts and how the hell that came to pass. There’s plenty of chatter about how music is used as a sort of social glue as well, in which case the quality of the stuff becomes almost secondary. There are some really good new bands on this as well – The Velcro Quartet are particularly brilliant, as are the songs by Mumford & Son, Yoshimi! and Honeytrap. Enjoy responsibly.

Toadcast #32 – The Tribecast

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01. Hercules & Love Affair – Hercules Theme (01.32)
02. The Velcro Quartet – Dead Dog’s Hill Replaced with Johnny Cashback, at the band’s request. (07.53)
03. Seabear – Teenage Kicks (11.17)
04. Athlete – Shake Those Windows (21.02)
05. Richard Cheese – Yellow (30.31)
06. ESL – Czarne Oczy (31.59)
07. Emiliana Torrini – Me & Armeni (39.50)
08. Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal (43.24)
09. Snow Patrol – Last Ever Lone Gunman (48.11)
10. The Killers – All These Things That I’ve Done (58.17)
11. The Pictish Trail – All I Own (66.52)
12. Mumford & Sons – White Blank Page (73.01)
13. Honeytrap – Song For Nona (82.17)
14. The Velcro Quartet – How to Kill Your Wife (87.04)
15. Yoshimi! – Song For Suzy (Demo) (94.34)
16. Frank Turner – The Outdoor Type (100.34)

Erm, given the splendidly Mojo-friendly, wonderfully grown up music I have been posting recently you may have been lulled into a false sense of slippers and Gardener’s World. This may (should) somewhat dispel these gathering clouds of maturity because, frankly, this lot have lost their fucking marbles.

Electro-glam? Surreal circus pop? Moody-electro? Yup, the lot, all in one splendidly confusing package. I am not sure any of the songs I have heard thus far really fit with one another at all, but they pretty much all tickle my fancy.

Actually, no, they’re better than that. It’s so bamboozlingly, bizarrely brilliant I want to jump around with a fucking great grin on my face and play it far too loud in the office just for the looks of totally confused horror on my colleagues’ faces. Songs about murdering your wife, the religious horror at the march of the scientific method, and a doomed lovesong rendered entirely in the banal everyday language of software.

It’s camp, it’s ferocious, it misses occasionally, and I have no idea if I’m just dazzled or genuinely impressed, but this really puts the fun right back into writing about music, really it does. They themselves describe it on their MySpace page as sounding like: “a velociraptor doing the Charleston” and a less informative but more appropriate description I cannot imagine. It’s fucking inspired, whatever it is.

The Velcro Quartet – Monsters Are Coming to Get Me
The Velcro Quartet – Suddenly They Realised They Were Compatible
The Velcro Quartet – The Love Song of Little Cosmo Nostradamus