Comacast?  Yes, because of the imminent onset of a post-Festival coma.

After trying to juggle two gigs of my own, two gigs I wanted to attend, the Antifolk-off and the visit of a good friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years and the Retreat Festival this weekend I think I am now ready to officially declare August over and collapse into a somnolent stupour.

In short, I need to sleep.  A lot.

Mrs. Toad came back from a ten-day holiday last night as well, and that always restores a sense of equilibrium.  She doesn’t do much except swear at me and tell me to leave her the fuck alone, but for some reason I find that inordinately comforting in times of stress.  I think it might be because I am a fucking idiot.

Direct download: Toadcast #189 – The Comacast

1. PAWS – Booger (00.08)
2. Trwbador – Sun in the Winter (07.09)
3. The Walkmen – On the Water (16.35)
4. Arcade Fire – City With no Children (20.05)
5. Enfant Bastard – Pob is Not Interested (26.33)
6. Michael Kiwanuka – Tell Me a Tale (34.49)
7. Electrelane – I’m on Fire (Bruce Springsteen Cover) (42.22)
8. The Love Gestures – Joanna Newsom 666 (49.55)
9. Ghost Outfit – Those Ghosts (52.54)
10. Lach – Blue Overcoat (60.12)

Blah blah blah talky talky… as festival season starts to slowly warm to its task for the coming year, so too does that other staple: the industry chat-fest.

In many ways it is classic music industry wastage: money raised and spent on people talking about doing things instead of actually doing them; the classic overhead.  A bunch of people only tangentially involved in the making of music are always more able to raise money than those actually making it, not least because they are business people focussed on business, whereas bands are artists who should be focussed on making music.

I’ve been to quite a lot of these, and even begun participating in them recently, and the above paragraph is the cynical voice in the back of my head which will probably never be entirely silenced. I have seen a lot of people be extremely entertaining at these things, but actually useful?  That’s another question.

Then the other voice kicks in and starts to say things like ‘hang on, are you saying they’re a waste of time, then?’  And actually the answer is no.  So far from these chat-a-thons I have managed to ummm… well, find the lawyer who negotiated our distribution deal for us, meet the publishing guy who, as a favour, helped us get a wee chunk of cash for Meursault for having one of their songs in a documentary movie in the States, get me invited down to Manchester to Unconvention, where I found a load of great bands and met people who helped us book two of the dates on Yusuf Azak’s tour, threaten to punch the manager of a bar who was being a dick while one of our bands played (alright, maybe not that one), meet a couple of 6Music presenters who have subsequently played our music, as well as the guy who runs Hype Machine radio… and there will be many more, but those are the ones which pop to mind off the top of my head.

So I cringe at many elements of these events, and I am terrified of being, when invited to speak, one of those people who talks engagingly and entertainingly for an hour, but who only really succeeds in making themselves look witty and charming (yes, I know, not much danger of that, let me say it for you), without being any actual practical help.  But when I look back at what I’ve actually got from them, albeit over many many events, they are actually starting to look like a pretty bloody good use of my time.

I’m still nervous of making a tit of myself at them though!

And we are once again at de-lurking time of the week, so please step out of the shadows and say hello, and give your answer to five stupid questions and then… well, it’s Friday afternoon, this is the internet, you know what to do!

1. How sick are you of people mentioning SXSW by now, as a percentage?
2. Name an entertaining and affable but utterly useless person.
3. When are you most likely to completely clam up.
4. Last most incredibly boring thing you had to sit through.
5. You wrote it off, but it was quite good really.

The Just Joans – Please Don’t Talk to Me

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The Dead Kennedys – Your Emotions

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The Walkmen – Stop Talking

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George Pringle – Extremely Verbal After Midnight (Demo)

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The Pierces – Boring

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Almost a year and a half ago now my friend Craig came round to record a podcast about early blues which we, somewhat unimaginatively, called the Craigcast.

A great deal of that conversation centred around Fat Possum Records (Wikipedia), and how Matthew Johnson struggled for years to keep it trundling along, despite being near bankruptcy for most of the time.  It wasn’t until soul legend Solomon Burke decided to release his comeback record with them that they finally got out of the financial woods with some finality.

Craig’s interest in the label is based around an obsession with old blues music, but from a modern indie kid’s perspective Fat Possum are still one of the best record labels in the world – The Walkmen, AA Bondy, Andrew Bird, Sonny and the Sunsets, Band of Horses, The Black Keys, Dinosaur Jr., The Felice Brothers, Wavves and Yuck all release with them.  So this is absolutely all about Fat Possum and their bands.  Sort of a tribute, and sort of a public demonstration of me being absolutely green with envy.

Direct download: Toadcast #163 – The Fat Possumcast

01. R.L. Burnside – Snake Drive (00.15)
02. Dinosaur Jr. – Almost Ready (14.11)
03. Junior Kimbrough – Meet Me in the City (21.34)
04. Andrew Bird – Plasticities (Live) (28.46)
05. Johnny Farmer – Ocean Blues (38.37)
06. Solomon Burke – Fast Train (46.26)
07. Sonny & the Sunsets & Death Cream (59.02)
08. The Walkmen – Donde Esta la Playa (61.45)
09. Cedell Davies – Keep on Snatchin’ it Back (68.03)
10. T-Model Ford – Take a Ride With Me (76.47)

And now, drum roll please for the final installment of Song, by Toad’s Festive Fifty for 2010.  Woo hoo!  I am sure Liars, The National and Micah P. Hinson will be breaking out the champagne at the excellent news.  Ah well, at least The Japanese War Effort and Li’l Daggers might give a shit.

01. Liars – Scissor When this song breaks it is absolutely fucking fearsome, and it is absolutely all I can do to stop myself leaping around the room and breaking stuff, no matter when or where I am or what time of day it is.  And this is about all I need to say about the matter.

02. Micah P. Hinson – My God, My God Just utterly, utterly beautiful, with a carefree little string coda rendered completely heartbreaking by the content of the song.  Three albums of sheer genius and one that was pretty damn good – why is this man not infinitely more famous?

03. The National – England It’s not as obvious, but the piano opening of this track is every bit as emotionally gripping as Fake Empire, once it properly sinks in.  And the build is so, so slow that by the time the brass kicks in you feel like you’ve been waiting for an age.  It reminds me of Elbow’s glorious Station Approach in that sense: some of the most euphoric depressing music ever made!

04. The Japanese War Effort – Summer Sun Skateboard First the guitar is really good, then the harmony vocals are fucking lovely, then the massively scratchy lead vocal is fucking great, then the glockenspiel is fucking superb, and then half way through it peaks, and takes the rest of the song to slowly drift into a blissed out coma.

05. Micah P. Hinson – Seven Horses Seen It’s easy to explain this one: just listen to the lyrics.  Hinson can be unflinchingly fucking brutal in his writing, and this is just another example of it.  That it goes, again, hand in hand with some truly beautiful music makes it all the more poignant.

06. Jason Lytle – D.U.I. BBQ Checkpoint Officer number two is talking to the driver of the car who just pulled into the D.U.I. barbecue checkpoint. “Good evening sir, have you been drinking tonight?” “Hell yeah officer!  I cracked my first beer this morning at nine and I’m wasted right now.  Any of you fucking pigs wanna fight?’

07. Songdog – 3.30am (Small Talk) I could fill an entire review with Songdog lyrics which make me do a double-take, but let that not detract from the wry, laid back music, performed as if with one eyebrow raised and here rendered even more lovely by the conversational duet.

08. Liars – Scarecrows on a Killer Slant Erm, this is Liars again, and unlike Scissor, which makes you beg for it, this is just loud and feral.  I don’t really need to justify this choice any more than that, do I?

09. The Walkmen – Blue as Your Blood The rhythm which underpins this has you ready for the song to break, ages before they finally let it happen about two thirds of the way through.  Hamilton Leithauser has one of the most yearning voices I’ve heard, and this is my highlight from yet another great album by one of the more under-appreciated bands around.

10. Li’l Daggers – King Korpze I’ve been loving my scuzzy, garagey guitar pop this year and this four song EP is as good as I’ve heard. Picking this ahead of Ya Tu Sabe or Hungry may be a bit arbitrary, but something from here was always going on.

Click here to download all these songs in one zip file.

1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

The results of the only real award that matters this Winter season (apart from the oracular annunciations of my own opinion, of course) can now finally be announced!  AWESOME! I hear you cry in unison.  Maybe.

Last year we had these votes as well, but I rather neglectfully failed to actually add up the final scores.  In all honesty, it’s the making of the lists which is often the best bit, so picking a winner at the very end is probably not entirely necessary for fun to take place, but given you all did me the honour of voting it seems a little rude not to fulfil my side of the bargain.

So yes, my enormous and profoundly complex algorithm (also known as a tally chart) has finally processed all the entries, and we can announce the winner of the Song, by Toad Readers’ Top Five Songs of the Year.  On Friday we will vote for our top five albums, so you might want to start thinking about that one in advance.

Anyone who actually followed the votes will know two things about this particular vote: firstly, that the winner was completely obvious from the very start; and secondly, that there are dozens and dozens of songs with no more than a single vote each, which is kind of inevitable in this kind of thing, but at least suggests that for all Song, by Toad probably represents something of a musical monoculture, there is at least a fair bit of diversity within that narrow vista.  So congratulations to the likes of CTel for coming on here and posting five entirely different songs from a notably different genre to the norm around these parts, and balls to the indie kids who don’t like it!

So, in reverse order, we had many songs tied for sixth place.  They’re not really part of a top five, of course, but I thought you would be interested to see them:
Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
Arcade Fire – We Used to Wait
Meursault – One Day This’ll All Be Fields
Meursault – Weather
The National – England
The Scottish Enlightenment – Little Sleep
The Walkmen – Angela Surf City

Getting into the top five, we ended up with a three-way tie for third place (in alphabetical order):

=3. Broken Records – You Know You’re Not Dead (Buy here)

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=3. Foals – Spanish Sahara (Buy here)

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=3. Meursault – What You Don’t Have (Buy here)

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There was a really close-run race for second throughout the voting, with Meursault, Foals and Broken Records all in there at various times, but in the end a little burst of enthusiasm carried the following tranche of epic gorgeousness over the line ahead of the others:

2. eagleowl – No Conjunction (Buy here)

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Which leaves the winner, obvious from the very start of the voting, and a song which, from the moment it was first released, generated so much excitement for the album from which it comes that High Violet was almost guaranteed to do well weeks before anyone heard more than a single song.  Bloodbuzz Ohio may not even be my personal favourite from that record (that would be England) but it does embody the rich, luxuriant sombreness of the album beautifully.

1. The National – Bloodbuzz Ohio (Buy here)

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And so there we go, your favourite five songs from 2010, a year which I thought was brilliant for new albums, far better than the extremely disappointing 2009.  A few things stood out to me from the voting, which are sort of worth mentioning, just by way of follow up.

1. No Sparrow & the Workshop?  Come on, people. I know the Sparrows have been quiet for a while, working on their new album, but I reckon they deserved a little more love than they ended up getting in this particular vote.

2. Ha ha ha, no Joanna fucking Newsom or Laura Marling. Well done.  They’re fucking shit.  I am proud of you.

3. Meursault and The National got a lot of votes. The National scored marginally more total votes than Meursault, but they were mostly for Bloodbuzz Ohio.  Meursault had about five or six songs, all of which could easily have been nudged into the top five by a couple of stray votes here or there.  In the end, I think it’s fair to say (with some pride) that the consistent excellence of their album, and their general schizophrenia as a band, cannibalised their own vote.  No matter though, because these two bands both scored almost double as many total votes as anyone else on the whole list, which is accolade enough in itself.

4. How do I know nothing at all about Foals? I assume that you all read this site because you more or less agree with my taste in music.  Otherwise, I can’t entirely see the point.  So how come, given we all listen to broadly the same kind of music, do you all love Foals so much while I have never once made the time to sit down and listen to their stuff.  Shame on me.  Homework for Christmas!

5. We got a lot of votes. This fact gives the results a sheen of respectability which I could never hope to generate on my own. Thank you.

This album takes a little while – well, two songs really – to get going, but once it does I am quickly back in that happy Walkmen land I love so much.

They have such a distinctive sound, the Walkmen, from Hamilton Leithauser’s wailed vocals, to that grumbly organ which underpins so many songs, to the rough rattle of the guitar, that I find myself in pretty happy territory from the first note, but then I am a big Walkmen fan.  In terms of songwriting though, I have to confess, I have taken a little while to settle into this record.

Juveniles and Angela Surf City just don’t really do it for me for whatever reason, so it is the lurching, off-kilter guitar rhythm of Follow the Leader which first made me really sit up and take notice.  It sounds for a second like the drummer and the guitarist are playing different songs, with the two elements only really unified by the vocals, when they finally arrive.

It’s a short song though, and once this awkward little pleasure stumbles off stage, the real substance of the album finally makes itself known.  The superbly simple, insistent rhythm of Blue as Your Blood tells you from the very start that the song has another gear to reach, but it is over halfway through the song when that release finally happens.

I was challenged recently by Rory from Broken Records on my enduring love for the Walkmen’s bursts of feral ferocity, most obvious on the stunning Bows + Arrows.  He reckons that it’s with You & Me that they really became one of the best bands around at the moment.  Whilst I agree that You & Me is indeed a fucking great record, there is still a little bit of me which secretly pines for them to go absolutely fucking mental once or twice in an album (Thinking of a Dream I Had – pleeeeeease!).

They seem to have forsaken that territory forever these days, however, but this is no great shame.  In place of that kind of full-frontal assault are songs whose euphoria builds slowly, from In the New Year on You & Me, to Blue as Your Blood and Stranded on Lisbon; the latter with horns so warm they’re almost Christmassy. Even the sudden choral vocals two-thirds of the way through All My Great Designs have a touch of Christmas about them actually, which is nice as the cold returns to the air at this time of year.

For all there is still a roughness around how their instruments are recorded, the actual feel of the songs is a lot mellower these days, and that easy atmosphere makes this feel like quite an easy album to come to terms with, but actually I am not sure that it is.  I took it so easy it kind of washed over me the first few times I heard it, and actually despite being less confrontational than I am used to, I still think it’s a record you have to take your time with. Woe is Me and Angela Surf City still seem to me a little like songs which haven’t quite located their own meanings yet – there’s just a little sparkle missing from them in my opinion – but in general this album is yet another corker from a truly excellent band.

The Walkmen – Stranded

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The Walkmen – While I Shovel the Snow

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Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

Despite the title (and the first song) there is very little ranting about the fucking Pope on this podcast, I promise.  He may be a vicious, decaying old scorpion in charge of one of the most corrupt and evil institutions on Earth, but after a little bit of gentle joshing at the beginning I promise I do let it drop and carry on with the music.

We have a fair bit of new stuff this week, such as Belle & Sebastian, Broken Records, Li’l Daggers and various other bits, and then a brief detour into Mrs. Toad and my drunken late night vinyl escapades last night.

Enjoy!

Direct Download: Toadcast #140 – The Romecast

01. Tom Lehrer – The Vatican Rag (00.17)
02. Li’l Daggers – King Corpse (06.26)
03. Bastardgeist – Flee to the Hills (11.26)
04. Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love (20.23)
05. Broken Records – Ailene (23.10)
06. The Walkmen – Blue as Your Blood (31.31)
07. Common Grackle – At the Grindcore Show (36.07)
08. The Meteors – Out of Time (40.42)
09. The Housemartins – Five Get Over Excited (43.46)
10. The Delfields – Claire (50.03)

This wasn’t particularly supposed to be all fuzzy and noisy, and in actual fact is probably isn’t, except for in bits. I have been listening to the Male Bonding album a lot this week, and then the split single from Thee Ludds and The No-Brainers dropped into my inbox, and then I became fascinated by the splendid mess that is I’llfinishyrfinish and suddenly I realised I had a podcast which was pretty much all over the place.

So I decided to embrace it, go for it and just appreciate the noise. There is some acoustic fuzz too, and a song by Grandaddy who can be fuzzy but often aren’t, but in general if you like your music to be played on a tape recorder down the back of the sofa in the next room, you should like this.

Oh, and we have the new Walkmen track and the new Cotton Jones one and all sorts. Aren’t we clever. Actually, who the fuck am I calling ‘we’, anyway?

Toadcast #132 – The Fuzzcast

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01. The Walkmen – Stranded (02.20)
02. Grandaddy – Fuck the Valley Fudge (09.02)
03. Male Bonding – Your Contact (16.19)
04. Navigator – Headless Horseman (The Microphones cover) (19.44)
05. Grizzly Prospector – Oh! Grizzly Me (Slow) (Live) (21.06)
06. Cotton Jones – Glorylight and Christie (24.09)
07. The Sound of the Ladies – The 40s Never Died (27.35)
08. Thee Ludds – I’m a Moron (34.42)
09. The Walkmen – Thinking of a Dream I Had (42.06)
10. Ace Bushy Striptease – I’llfinishyrfinish (I’ll Finish You) (49.32)

Erm, really sorry that this is so very, very late, but life rather caught up with me this week.  So I never quite managed to find time to get my shit together until this evening, unfortunately.

It’s surprising how much of my time these weekly podcasts seem to take up – it can be quite hard to find an evening every single week to record these things.  What I find amazing is that I don’t run out of blather.  I don’t recall ever saying anything profound or all that intelligent either, so this little collection must represent hours and hours of inconsequential rambling.

On Friday a nice young lady in the pub asked me “Has anyone ever told you that you talk loads and loads.”  I suppose, looking back at a hundred and some podcasts the miracle is that actually the answer to that question is ‘no, not really, not that I can remember’.

Oh, and yes, that is Tina Turner and Kim Carnes you see there.  Suck it up, hipsters.

Toadcast #107 – The Tardicast

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01. The Walkmen – This Job is Killing Me (03.30)
02. Grandaddy – Hey Cowboy, the Phone’s For You (09.57)
03. Comaneci – Satisfied Girl (15.51)
04. Tina Turner – Private Dancer (17.50)
05. Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou – England (27.33)
06. Ruth Theodore – False Alarm (34.09)
07. The Waterboys – Sweet Thing (40.54)
08. Kim Carnes – Bette Davis Eyes (48.04)
09. R.E.M. – Half a World Away (53.55)
10. Radiohead – Creep (Acoustic) (59.59)

Before you break out into a cold sweat about having to sit through another list of the best albums of the decade, don’t worry, this is not one of those.  Although most of these songs would be there or thereabouts if I were actually compiling a favourite songs of the decade list, that’s not why they’re here.

Basically, rather than try and rank anything against anything else, all this is is a meander through the last ten years and me chattering about how my relationship with music has changed and what sort of stuff I was into at what times of my life.

Basically, this is the soundtrack to a perfectly normal, albeit enthusiastic, music fan’s descent into full-on deranged internet mania.

Toadcast #99 – The Decade

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01. Eels – A Daisy Through Concrete (04.09)
02. Goldfrapp – Pilots (10.04)
03. Grandaddy – The Crystal Lake (14.17)
04. Lift to Experience – To Guard and to Guide You (23.13)
05. Interpol – NYC (30.46)
06. Tom Waits – Kommienezuspadt (34.57)
07. The Decemberists – Red Right Ankle (40.41)
08. The Walkmen – The Rat (44.06)
09. The Mountain Goats – Dilaudid (51.20)
10. Broken Records – Lies (Demo Version) (57.07)
11. The Savings and Loan – Christmastime in the Mountains (64.11)