Song, by Toad

People fall in love for lots of reasons, some good and some bad. I don’t know why I fell in love with my midget companion, but I did and now I’m stuck with her.

What is the reason for this post then? I’m not entirely sure, but it’s late and I am pished and I am feeling a rush of elated giddiness about my sheer good fortune in ending up with this lass. Happiness is an elusive thing too, so I think you have to note the occasions when life is good to you, if just out of gratitude. A doff of the cap to the fates, if you will, because bad luck is always ready to make things shit the minute you take anything for granted.

People who are miserable fuckers, I am always tempted to conclude, don’t recognise the happy times when they have them. I never want to be someone who doesn’t acknowledge his enormous and entirely undeserved slices of luck when they materialise. I hate people who don’t know how lucky they are.

Anyhow, the point, yes of course. Well we have just come back from a friend’s house having had a delicious meal (grey sole and queen scallops on a bed of spaghetti with lemon, parsley and purple sprouting broccoli – what a cunt I’ve turned into!) and watched an amazing film. It was Death Watch with Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider and Harry Dean Stanton and is shot in Glasgow in 1980. Try finding it anywhere – I bet you can’t. French Amazon is where we eventually tracked it down.

Anyhow, after all this grown-up middle class bollocks what does my darling girl want to do when we get home? Turn the stereo up fucking loud and plough through the vinyl. Play music, play it fucking loud, get mashed and act like idiots. Like I needed any encouragement. So the gins are poured, the amp is bursting at the seams and the neighbours are praying for the SAS. God I love this girl!

The Builders & the Butchers – Black Dresses Play this really, really fucking loud. Really fucking loud. Break something, you played it that loud.
The Sequins – Patients
Billy Bragg & Wilco – Hesitating Beauty This is just a love song. I make no apologies. I am besotted. Fuck you too.
White Rabbits – Kid on My Shoulders
The Shaky Hands – Whales Sing

Honestly, the reason I am the sort of obsessive arse who writes a music blog is this. It’s Saturday night. I am in the house. I am plastered – really giddily plastered. And what, apart from more cleaning fluid with which to refill my glass, do I reach for?

The fucking volume control, that’s what. I am rifling through my CDs, turning everything up indecently loud, dancing around the living room like a retard and playing music as loud as my 70s Technics amp can possibly manage. It’s already blown one of our shiny new and utterly useless modern speakers. And I intend to blow the other one.

Music makes me REALLY FUCKING HAPPY! When I am miserable I head for the stereo, when I am happy I head for the stereo, when nothing is happening I head for the stereo. My life is expressed entirely through fucking music. All those people I want to beat to a bloody pulp for their desperate dishonesty – it all comes out on the stereo. When I am buzzing, when I am miserable, when I am agitated, the volume just rises and rises until the neighbours are complaining and the clouds are falling.

Sorry everyone, but drunkenness and the Toad have reached that perfect storm where the drink goes down and the alcohol gets guzzled and life swirls and sways to the tune of angry indie rockers who throw out their best effort into the churning sea of indifference that the modern media represents.

We support them, I hope. There’s a community of us out here, a community I hope I have reached, who care about and love the direct emotive power that music has. A group of people that gets irresponsibly drunk when we should be paying our broadband bills. A group that sways like the Leaning Tower of Pisa with a particularly bad hangover as the songs just get louder and louder and the neighbours grow more and more impatient and eventually we stumble to bed, plastered and happy as the songs we have played echo around the petrol stations and supermarkets that mark out our territory.

It’s a new year but nothing has changed. I am still drunk as a nun and scrabbling through my CD collection for newer and louder things with which to terrify everyone I know. How the fuck have you been? and how’s your mother? Still got a nice arse? Yes, thought so…

White Rabbits – The Plot
Nick Cave – Do You Love Me?
Broken Records – One Good Reason Are these lads the best unsigned band in Britain at the moment? I think they might be.

11. Shout Out Louds – Our Ill Wills

The first time I heard this album I thought it was mediocre.  Mediocre!  The next time I thought it was decent.  Now I think it’s an 80s indie pop masterpiece.  One of the most enjoyable records I’ve heard for ages. If you’re having a party with even slightly discerning guests put this on, loud!

Shout Out Louds – Tonight I Have to Leave It

review | website | buy

12. White Rabbits – Fort Nightly

Piano driven rock ‘n’ roll brilliance. You know how if you really love something you sit there drumming on the table with your fingers and bobbing your head like a muppet?  Well this is that album for me.  Great, great stuff.

White Rabbits – Kid on My Shoulders

review | website | buy

13. Frightened Rabbit – The Greys

This album has the dubious honour of being the first ever freebie I was ever sent to review.  I felt so important and so happy.  And what a fine album it is too: discordant indie with howling, tuneless vocals and scrappy, jumpy guitar.  Scottish indie is alive and well, and it’s because of groups like these lads.

Frightened Rabbit – Music Now

review | website | buy

14. Loch Lomond – Paper the Walls

Breathtakingly beautiful chamber folk from that cauldron of indie brilliance: Portland, Oregon.  Sufjan Stevens meets the Decemberists and, this year, outdoes them both.

Loch Lomond – Song in ¾

review | website | buy

15. Alela Diane – The Pirate’s Gospel

Truly a work of hushed folk wonder.  I only found out about her because she’s on the same label as the Shaky Hands.  What fine noses those people at Holocene Music have.  Honestly, you could not find a finer album of bluesly, folky, old-time gorgeousness.

Alela Diane – Pieces of String

review | website | buy

There’s no real theme to this week’s podcast, but there’s plenty of splendid new music. Basically I felt so guilty about the crazy rant that the Pink Podcast descended into that I have tried to say as little as possible in this one.

I’m off to the End of the Road Festival this weekend, which is why I recorded an advance post, so you’ll be enjoying this while I’m away getting rained on. The lineup is just phenomenal actually, so it should be really quite a splendid weekend. Tim from the Daily Growl will be there, as will Jamie from the Runout Groove and I believe possibly Sweeping the Nation as well, so it may turn into quite a blog-in. Tragically, however, I will be without my Midget Companion. Mrs. Toad is away in Australia (jammy bitch) with work and doesn’t get back in time to come along, so I will be taking a book and enjoying the pleasure of my own company as best I can.

There was at least one inevitable balls-up though – when describing the Catherine Howe song I said ‘I can’t believe this is current – it sounds so old-fashioned!’ and I have since discovered that in fact it is a 2007 re-release of a 1971 record which may just explain that. In the process I also discovered that I am something of a fucking idiot.

So, End of the Road, and in the meantime, enjoy the podcast – Toad on his very best behaviour!

Toadcast #11 – Not Sure What This One’s About[audio http://media.libsyn.com/media/songbytoad/ToadcastNo11.mp3]

01. A.A. Bondy – Vice Rag (00.52)
02. White Rabbits – The Plot (03.39)
03. The Courteeners – Cavorting (08.19)
04. Alaska in Winter – Close Your Eyes/We Are Blind (11.46)
05. Beirut – Fork & Knife (La Fete) (18.32)
06. Band of Horses – Is There a Ghost (21.57)
07. Nathan Lawr & the Minotaurs – We Go Down (26.52)
08. David Dondero – Rothko Chapel (30.34)
09. Jackson C. Frank – Blues Run the Game (38.15)
10. Calexico – All the Pretty Horses (41.45)
11. Catherine Howe – In the Hot Summer (48.53)
12. Little Name – How to Swim & Live (53.31)
13. Emma Pollock – Adrenaline (56.36)
14. George Pringle – Fellini For Prime Minister (63.52)
15. Octoberman – By the Wayside (67.27)
16. The 1900s – When I Say Go (74.54)
17. (The Real) Tuesday Weld – Kix (79.44)

I am hugely late picking this up, but there are no claims to slick professionalism here at Song, by Toad.  Fort Nightly by The White Rabbits has been pottering about the blogs for a bit, but I have to admit that it was only recently that the blinding song While We Go Dancing finally hit me.  And right between the eyes it was too, once it finally got round to it.

Well needless to say, I rushed straight out and bought the album and have been digging the absolute melons out of it ever since.  Ten more When We Go Dancings it is not though, which took me a little while to adjust to, but once I did the beaty, direct drive of this album really got to me.  I think the sound is best described as confident and direct, with plenty of grit and growl whilst never forgetting the rhythm and roll that make a great indie album.

Stylistically it’s almost what I’d call an indie rock ‘n’ roll album, liberally laced with all sorts of elements of honkey-tonk, even bits of ska at times, and many other joyous things.  There is a bit of grit in there too somewhere, almost a spooky barroom echo in a way, and it brings a welcome shadow of darkness to the atmosphere.

If there’s one stand-out aspect of this album it is the piano, which rattles in an unhinged, macabre way through much of the record.  This has the effect of making it sound at once old-fashioned, upbeat and danceable and yet also slightly ghostly.  It’s too hard to describe, this, but take my word for it, it’s definitely worth buying.

White Rabbits – While We Go Dancing
White Rabbits – March of the Camels

website | hype | amazon

Their CD has gorgeous cover art and I was tipped off about them ages ago, so why the fuck has it taken me this bloody long to listen to the two tracks by White Rabbits that I downloaded? And how has as great a song as While We Go Dancing managed to be in my music collection for so long without me noticing? Well I have just bought the CD so expect a review very, very shortly.

What piano! What a song! What a dick I am!

White Rabbits – While We Go Dancing