Jesus ear-fucking Christ this fucking hurts to listen to.

The Willow Garden is a song I first came across as a b-side to Where the Wild Roses Grow by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  I didn’t know it was a traditional song at that point, but I didn’t care where it came from.  I didn’t even know who Warren Ellis was, but the fiddle playing on the song was some of the best I had (and still have) ever heard.

It’s amazing – managing to sound mournful, morbid and creepy all together.  Like a lot of Warren Ellis’ stuff it is really quite horrible and utterly beautiful at the same time

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Willow Garden

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Anyhow, at some point I twigged that it was actually a traditional tune, probably when I was browsing through eMusic’s amazing collection of stuff from Smithsonian Folkways.  This kind of horribly macabre tune suits that style perfectly.  Nothing quite seems to deliver the gleeful brutality of old folk and fairy tales quite like the screech of those pre-war folk voices, and the harsh, sawed violin which tends to accompany them. It fits well with Ellis’s approach to the violin as well actually, and to The Bad Seeds’ approach to folk songs and murder ballads: they revel in the discord, the casual malice, the horror, the almost cartoonish evil of it all.

Hobart Smith & Texas Gladden – Down in the Willow Garden

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One thing a lot of this old music doesn’t fit too well with, however, is soft pop.  Sam Amidon, for example, is hardly hard on the ears, but his voice has character, and where Cave and the like bring cheerful brutality, Amidon brings a lovely sense of empathetic sadness.  The intensity of the emotion is still there of course, and it is always a rather grim emotion to embrace.

I have heard these songs sung with a degree of beauty however, and sometimes it works.  Kind of.  Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes snuck a couple of covers onto MySpace a few years back under the name White Antelope.  They were simple recordings, and although they were pretty unembellished I really quite liked them.  I find his songwriting rather boring, I have to say, but he has a lovely voice and I really enjoyed hearing his versions of songs like Silver Dagger, Wild Mountain Thyme and things like that.

White Antelope – Wild Mountain Thyme

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And then this fucking happened.  Jesus donkey-fucking Christ, what an awful, awful thing to have heard.  I should have known better, frankly.  It was fucking stupid of me to click on the link anyway, to be honest, but like a Presbyterian surfing child porn on the internet all day, I knew just what I was going to get and a large part of me was just dying feel the outrage.

Bon Iver’s first album For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t too bad.  It had a couple of nice tunes, and the minimal arrangements suited his vocal delivery, making it seem ghostly rather than just weak.  The new album was a fucking awful soft-pop horrorshow though.  The lush, utterly objectionable arrangements were abysmal enough in themselves, but they made his voice turn from lip-wobbling emotion to a sort of pathetic, needy bleat.  And now he’s taken to giving The Willow Garden the mother of all public shamings with this dreadful, wan, weak, lifeless version.

Is it fair to call the Chieftans the Elton fucking John of folk music, given the sheer number of people they’ve collaborated with?  I know that collaboration and cover versions are a central part of the folk tradition, but honest to God I wish there was some way I could unhear this fucking song.  And to make matters worse, I keep playing it again and again, just to remind myself that I am not exaggerating the scale of the horror.  And if you’ve got the Bad Seeds’ version, and that gorgeous old version by Hobart Smith and Texas Gladden in your head already, it sounds even more utterly abominable by comparison.  Sing with some fucking spirit man.  Sing as if something, anything, depended on it for the love of fucking God!

Justin fucking Vernon & the Chieftans – The Willow Garden

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Whee, back on the radio.  And for some reason tonight’s playlist is going to consist of lots of pretty well-established artists.  There is no reason for this at all, it just worked out that way when I was selecting the playlist.

Nevertheless, I find myself focussing so much on new music that the old stuff kinda gets neglected these days.  I have actually stopped listening to my digital music collection for pleasure, and now only listen to vinyl when I am actually listening for the pure enjoyment of it.  This isn’t an ideological stance against digital music, more a logistical one.  The drive with all my music on is now upstairs, and I haven’t been arsed to set up a link to the stereo yet.

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

As per usual I will update the playlist live below as I go along, so feel free to chip in with any suggestions and comments and assorted smart-arsed remarks you might have.

1. Sleepy Horses – Lubbock Love Song
2. Paul Simon – Graceland
3. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Optimist vs the Silent Alarm
4. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – Graceland
5. Paul Simon – Adios Hermanos
6. The Scottish Enlightenment – Necromancer
7. Jesus H. Foxx – Elegy for the Good Times
8. Droney Mitchell – An Empty House (Droney may actually be Rob St. John.  Just perhaps.)
9. The Savings and Loan – Pale Water
10. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow
11. White Antelope – Silver Dagger
12. Saint Etienne – Like a Motorway
13. The Maladies of Bellfontaine – Black Biro

I know I promised the Notcraigcast last week, but it didn’t happen I’m afraid.  After last week’s amazing Craigcast Neil and I were intending to introduce Craig to all sorts of modern music which we thought continued some of the traditions of the blues music he was describing to us, but circumstances have rather conspired against us unfortunately.  Neil is off on tour with Meursault playing his songs, and Craig is off on tour with his liver, taking it around the watering holes of Edinburgh and giving it a good, hard kicking in each one.

Consequently I’ve sort of cobbled together a podcast from fragments of the Pantscast and the stuff I’d intended to play for Craig.  It’s largely folky, but that wasn’t wholly by design, more to do with the fact that listening to the really early blues stuff Craig played for us sent me back to listening to old Smithsonian Folkways stuff and so there are a couple of songs from there, as well as a couple of modern things which those recordings brought to mind.

Smithsonian Folkways, incidentally, is a non-profit record label run by the Smithsonian Institute to preserve and support a truly epic amount of our musical heritage.  Just go and have a browse through their archives – it’s amazing how much incredible stuff these guys are looking after on everyone else’s behalf.

Toadcast #94 – The Not-Notcraigcast

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1. Micah P. Hinson – She Don’t Own Me (02.57)
2. Hem – The Cuckoo (11.13)
3. Saint Etienne – Like a Motorway (16.52)
4. White Antelope – Silver Dagger (22.15)
5. The Boggs – Plant Me a Rose (28.00)
6. Willard Grant Conspiracy – River in the Pines (31.47)
7. Berzilla Wallin – Conversation With Death (Oh Death) (39.22)
8. Samamidon – O Death (44.26.)
9. Dock Boggs – Sugar Baby (49.21)
10. Alela Diane – White as Diamonds (Daytrotter Session) (54.09)
11. Sandy Denny – By the Time it Gets Dark (59.07)

This is the last Song, by Toad show on Fresh Air for this term – so the last one until about October time, basically.  As the band are long time Toad friends, and as their long (loooong)-awaited debut album is being released on Monday, it seemed only fitting that Broken Records pop into the studio and have a chat about things, talk through the album itself (read: TOAD EXCLUSIVE!!!1!1 or something like that), and generally shoot the breeze.

To tune in, go to the Fresh Air homepage and click on the big Listen Now button on the left hand side, from about 6.30pm-8pm, UK time.  As per usual, I’ll fill in the playlist below, and you can take the opportunity to leave compliments, questions and abuse in the comments section as you see fit.

01. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band – Hard to be a Saint in the City (Live at Hammersmith Odeon 1975)
02. White Antelope – Wild Mountain Thyme
03. Broken Records – Wolves (Toad Session)
04. Linfinity – Holy Rain
05. Ambulances – Come With Us
06. Broken Records – Lies
07. Sparrow & the Workshop – Last Chance (Toad Session)
08. The Lovely Eggs – Have You Ever Heard a Digital Accordion
09. The Low Miffs – Dear Josephine
10. Broken Records – Nearly Home
11. Bruce Springsteen – Dancing in the Dark

Whee – pub!

Robin Pecknold is more widely known for his Fleet Foxes stuff, but he appears to have a solo project as well, covering folk songs.  To call it a solo project may be exaggerating things slightly, because there’s little evidence of this being much more than a name given to a MySpace page so he can post a couple of solo versions of stuff he just fancied recording.  Maybe not, of course, there could be more to it than that.

I’m no great Fleet Foxes fan, I have to confess.  I think they have a few utterly gorgeous tracks and a lot of pretty unremarkable ones, as far as I personally am concerned, but this stuff I really do like.  Pecknold certainly has an utterly beguiling voice, and when singing these classic old songs he imbues them with a loveliness all his own.

False Knight on the Road was originally a Fleet Foxes b-side, I believe, and I’ve included that here, along with Silver Dagger, and a couple of other versions of that song.  I’d be mildly but pleasantly surprised if there were any plans to take this any further, but it’s the kind of project which doesn’t need to be any more than this kind of small, low key exercise.  Lovely, lovely stuff.   There are a couple more to be enjoyed on their MySpace page, if these tickle your fancy.

White Antelope – False Knight on the Road

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White Antelope – Silver Dagger

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The Men They Couldn’t Hang – Silver Dagger

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Bob Dylan & Joan Baez – Silver Dagger (Live 1964)

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It’s that time of the week once again.  At 6.30pm, British Summer Time, myself and Dylan from Blueback Hotrod will be live on Fresh Air, Edinburgh’s student radio station.  There will be no theme, no coherence and no real attempt to do anything more dynamic than just chatter about music, so please do tune in and listen to us blether.

Rather than emailing or (grrr) tweeting, I thought I might just leave this as an open thread for those who want to contribute, and I’ll add the playlist live as we go along.

Click the big ‘Listen Live’ button on this page to tune in, between 6.30pm and 8pm tonight.

01. The Bluetones – Glad to See You Back Again
02. James – Sound
03. Emily Scott – Pageant Queen
04. Frightened Rabbit – Old Old Fashioned (Live)
05. Kid Canaveral – Teenage Fanclub Song
06. Popup – Lucy, What are You Trying to Say?
07. Blur w. Francoise Hardy – To the End
08. Gene – Dolce & Gabanna or Nowt
09. Meursault – Hard On (Charles Latham Cover)
10. Charles Latham – Nite Man
11. Withered Hand – Religious Songs
12. Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There
13. White Antelope – Silver Dagger
14. Cancel the Astronauts – I am the President of Your Fanclub and Last Night I Followed You Home

Cheers, see you next week at the same time.