And not just any cats, those two fuckwits in the picture up there. Yep, Mrs. Toad managed to keep her despair at the loss of Floyd under control for just about six months before she decided that not just one cat, but TWO fucking cats was the answer.

I think the idea is that because I work from home they will keep themselves entertained and not pester me the whole fucking time, but I honestly think this is ambitious. I think they are going to be climbing all over the keyboard all the time and making a right fucking nuisance of themselves to be honest.  And the second I complain people will call be a bad person because wook and the wickle darlings, they’re SO KYOOOOOOOT!

So while you are sitting uncomfortably in your offices today, Mrs. Toad and I will be driving up to Aviemore to meet the lady who’s selling them to us and then driving back with a van full of mewling kittens.  Splendid.

Anyhow, if those two little fuckers don’t tempt you to de-lurk and say hello, then nothing will.  This is the internet, right?  Pictures of kittens is just what people do here.

1. Name the girl (on the left, she’s a menace, apparently).
2. Name the boy (the gormless one on the right).
3. Which of the various internet memes since the cute pictures of cats obsession have you enjoyed the most?
4. What would be a better way of delaying your mid-twenties-onwards parenting instincts which people seem to salve with pets these days?
5. Pick a weird pet for someone you might not expect to have one.

PAWS – Kitten

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Squirrel Nut Zippers – Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter

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The Cure – The Love Cats

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Cat Nap in the Boom Boom Room

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Grandaddy – What Happened…

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Soft Cat – Silver Babies Sun

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Hooray, it’s my fucking birthday.  Whoop-de-fucking-doo.  The thing is, I genuinely don’t care about birthdays, either in a positive or a negative sense, but Facebook and birthdays are an ungodly fucking combination, really they are.

“Yo, happy birthday dude.”  “Hey man, have a good one.”  Fuck off!  If you really, truly care then at least buy me something expensive, and if you don’t care enough to do that, which you shouldn’t, then let’s just drop all the shallow platitudes shall we. I don’t care about my birthday, so there’s no need for you to pretend to.

Can you tell I’m tired?

Last night was brilliant.  The Scottish Enlightenment were fucking awesome and the New Music Innovation thingy in Glasgow was surprisingly interesting.  The thing is, it was the third night out on the lash in a row for me, so by the time I stumbled back from Haymarket to our house I was pretty clapped out.  My legs ache this morning.  How does a hangover and a lack of sleep make your legs ache?

So, I am considering a late afternoon nap before I go and play fives and then head out to the Wark to kick my liver while it’s well and truly down.  Bit of a run around, nice tea, lots of beer.  Consider the weekend launched!

1. Most obscure member of your family who consistently remembers your birthday.
2. Coolest childhood birthday party moment you can remember.
3. Biggest birthday trouble you’ve been in.
4. At which gig have you felt either much, much too young or much, much too old?
5. Do you prefer birthdays or Christmas (or Thanksgiving, Easter or Whitsun if you want).

The five songs are from Uncut’s Best of 2003 covermount compilation.

Hamell on Trial – Oughta Go Round

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Paul Westerberg – Crackle & Drag

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Soft Hand

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The Handsome Family – Far From any Road

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The Fiery Furnaces – Two Fat Feet

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Hoarse.  Horse.  Hoarse.  Horse.  Geddit geddit, see what I did there?  Yes, another tedious pun, but I know you know to expect no better from me these days.  Anyway, it’s only called the Hoarsecast because I have a bit of a phlegmy flu which, whilst not fun, is hardly very debilitating so there is no need for me to moan really.  Not that this usually stops me, but anyhewww…

It’s a funny old mix, this playlist.  I rearranged the songs time and again, swapped a few in and out here and there and just couldn’t find a way to make them click together for some reason, so for all I like everything that’s on here it is still a little bitty, as a single coherent mix.

Mind you, with me talking pish between all the songs, there’s fuck all chance of these things really flowing in the first place.

Direct download: Toadcast #142 – The Hoarsecast

01. Wilco – I Can’t Stand It (00.17)
02. Hooray for the Riff-raff – Slow Walk (08.32)
03. Interpol – Evil (15.49)
04. Jose Delhart – Broken Hearted Chant (22.17)
05. Flower Orgy – Boneyard (25.12)
06. Willie Nelson – Good-hearted Woman (31.59)
07. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Notes From the Waiting Room (38.07)
08. Dumbo Gets Mad – Eclectic Prawn (40.33)
09. Sexual Objects – Here Come the Rubber Cops (47.56)
10. Grinderman – Star Charmer (57.53)

My brother heads off today, so I figured we’d take one last chance to do a podcast while we can.  This is mostly new stuff and inbox though, so I am not sure how he’ll react.

Actually, he was in the room last week while I went through my inbox, played stuff, replied to emails, deleted things, and so on and so forth.  I think his response was that he simply wouldn’t be able to handle the avalanche of shit I have to get through, and that it would simply turn him off music completely.

I don’t mind that, I have to confess, because although some people do send me wildly inappropriate things, after two hours of listening to one ‘psychedelic rock band who are blazing a trail across the LA scene right now’ after another I then open an email from Allister Izenberg, which was possibly the most terse, abrupt and non-sugar-coated promo email I have ever read, even including Trips and Falls.  It was such a bad email actually that even before listening I had a sneaky suspicion I was going to really like the music, and boy oh boy was I right.  It makes all the ‘rock, hip-hop, funk fusion’s next big thing’ emails easily worthwhile.

Toadcast #131 – The Brocast

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01. Hot Lava – Pink Lemonade (02.52)
02. Burnt Island – Hiding Out (07.42)
03. King Post Kitsch – Monomaniac (11.26)
04. Glass Animals – Leaflings (19.17)
05. Allister Izenberg – Little Swan (24.24)
06. Television Keeps us Apart – Voices (33.22)
07. Ola Belle Reed – High on a Mountain (41.01)
08. Clarence Ashley – Cuckoo Bird (51.54)
09. Willard Grant Conspiracy & Telefunk – The Cuckoo (54.23)
10. Soft Cat – Blackbird (62.41)

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)

Jesus fucking Christ.  I think I may actually have a badger living in my mouth.  Or a muskrat.  Or one of those little yappy dog bastard things which always make me want to feed them to our bloody cat.  Gin is raping my brain.  Fucking bastard.

To make matters worse, that insufferable weasel Mrs. Toad is malingering at home, lolling around in bed, watching movies on iTunes and generally just doing bugger all.  I WANT TO GET SICK!  I never get fucking sick.  If I ever have time off work it’s either because my back is crippling me, which doesn’t feeling like being sick at all because it doesn’t give you proper sick voice, or I am skiving.  Now, however, I feel a nap in the disabled loos coming on again.

Actually, writing the word loo in the plural form there makes me think, not all that surprisingly of… Rebecca Loos!  The disabled Loos!  I think her pig-wanking episode was the pinnacle of reality TV – the ultimate in self-parody by a medium already happily digesting its own sphincter.
For those who missed it, there was a reality TV programme over here a good few years back called On the Farm or something like that, where the same old cast of desperate E-Listers moved into a farm for a bit and spent their days doing ordinary, everyday farm jobs.  No-one, however, seemed to think through the implications of showing one particular everyday farm job live on television: that of inseminating livestock.

So a woman, who was effectively famous for no other reason than the wielding of her vagina, ended up masturbating a pig live on television, and with that particular act removed from the utilitarian farm environment and brought into the realm of entertainment (particularly the realm of ‘salacious entertainment for the means of getting ahead despite being devoid of any observable skills besides the possession of an enormous pair of breasts’, which is Miss Loos’ specialist genre) it turned from tedious chore into bestiality.  Which was brilliant.

Why was it brilliant?  Well apart from the ‘Christ has anyone thought about what she’s actually doing?‘ factor, which was pretty good in itself, it was such an amazingly clear illustration of what is actually going on in reality TV.  These people, basically, are humiliating themselves in order to become famous.  They are sufficiently desperate for fame – and fame in and of itself as opposed to fame as a by-product of having a particular talent – that they consider having the entire nation point and laugh at them on live television to be a suitable price to pay for that fame.  How much humiliation will they collectively be prepared to tolerate?  How desperate are they to be in the public eye?  Well Rebecca gave us our answer – desperate enough to wank off pigs on the telly.

1. Most dignity-free celebrity moment on reality TV.
2. Invent a new reality TV programme.
3. Most pointless celebrity.
4. Favourite trashy celebrity (being even slightly worthy disqualifies anyone from this, so choose carefully please).
5. Biggest surprise celebrity attention-whore who turned up on reality TV despite you previously thinking they had some dignity.

This week’s five songs are taken from a compilation I made about seven years ago, comprised of stuff I ended up selling on because I had no room left on my CD shelves.  Looking back at what’s on it though, I do wonder what the fuck I was thinking.

Lift to Experience – Waiting to Hit

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – St. John Street

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Dan Bern – New American Language

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Solomon Burke – Diamond in Your Mind

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Pete Yorn – Strange Condition

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Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years.  That’s weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident.  Certainly I didn’t have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that’s a different story).

At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious ex-girlfriend and was working at a pretty shite company in London and really had no ties at all.  Basically, if I hadn’t accidentally got hammered and ended up in bed pawing enthusiastically at a tolerantly indifferent yet-to-become-Mrs. Toad, the chances are very good that I would have ended up somewhere foreign, quite probably in East Asia somewhere.

I am an industrial designer by trade, and judging by some of the unutterable guff coming out of China I could actually have had an extremely healthy and well-paid career out there by this point.  Actually, fuck it, my career over here is actually pretty respectable anyway, it’s only because I am so focussed on music at the moment and because Mrs. Toad makes so much more than I do that I sometimes forget that fact.

I went to gigs down South, and I’d started writing about music online, but not to anything like this extent.  I was a designer who fannied about with web stuff occasionally, not a musical muppet whose day job required monumental amounts of patience to tolerate his extra-curricular distractions.

So yes, it turns out that never mind her tolerance for all the work I put into this nonsense and her funding for my errant ideas, just meeting Mrs. Toad had a massive influence on the very existence of this website.  Primarily I suppose because the dull, domesticated, middle class existence into which I was lured required me to find something to go a bit mental about because the other option was a mortal dose of cabin fever.  Pick your madness.

1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*.  Where would you choose to interfere?
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head

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Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Trials of Harrison Hayes

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The Flatlanders – Going Away

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Supergrass – Moving

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*

[After his highly successful stint Toadsitting while we were away on holiday, Euan returns to write what is going to become a monthly column in our new Sunday Supplement section.  You can find more of his stuff on his blog, at his gigs or with his band, so please go and have a sniff.]

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

This quote is taken from the film Almost Famous about a young music fan who, by accident, ends up on the road with a rock band, documenting their every move for Rolling Stone magazine and living out his wildest dreams. It’s still one of my favourite films, if for nothing else, the legendary Tiny Dancer moment, possibly more to do with Kate Hudson though. Anyways, the quote above is at a point in the movie when Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character Lester Bangs is giving advice to a naïve and young William Miller about music, musicians, journalism and ultimately life. It became quite an important statement in my life, firstly because I am highly uncool. And secondly because sharing music and wanting to involve everyone in the music I love has, over the years, become the currency in which I deal most. Mix tapes for the ladies that I had a fancy for. Mix CDs for friends, force-feeding them the music they didn’t know, or love, but in my head should. Sharing a love of music. It was important when I was 15 and is as important today as it was back then. Fuck, lets be honest, we’re all using this site ultimately because we share a love of music and not for the witty remarks of the likes of Matthew and Dylan! It’s one of the best feelings when you share music and people get it. It’s what makes it great being a musician and also writing about music which you love.

Recently Mr Toad (another highly uncool individual I should add) reviewed a gig by Willard Grant Conspiracy. I made a comment on his site that I had never heard anything by this artist, though I knew of them and felt that he was an artist which I would love and should know more about. As a result, Matthew made me a cd of what he considers to the finest moments of Willard Grant Conspiracy or, if you prefer, an introduction the music of the artist. Whilst I was babysitting songbytoad during Matthew’s holiday to Italy I did an “introducing” piece on Elliott Smith as Mr Toad had little knowledge of the man. I guess the Willard Grant Conspiracy cd was his way of returning the favour. And I’m glad he did. There’s a bit of Richmond Fontaine in there, a large chunk of Nick Cave and a nice little touch of Sparklehorse. All mixed together to produce Willard Grant Conspiracy.

But ultimately, this is not a review of Willard Grant Conspiracy or the mix cd Matthew made me. No, this is more about the brilliance that is sharing music. Sharing musicians you love. Just sharing. So, I’m going to encourage you all to write a piece about your favourite artists. How you came to love them. What it is that makes them so special to you. Anything you want, about anyone you want. And I’m going to ask you to send them to me at trampolinemusic@gmail.com Whilst I don’t write full time for Matthew, I do have my own blog over at The Steinberg Principle and I would like to publish the pieces sent to me as a series of “Introducing” pieces. So yeah, if you find a spare 5 or 10 minutes in your day, if you’re bored at work, or if you actually just like this idea, send me your thoughts and I will post them on my site from time to time.

This is an oddly tricky review to write, because I am so familiar with all of these songs already.  This album sees Robert Fisher and a bare-bones band revisit their back catalogue and rework an album’s worth of material in more low-fi style that than in which it was (generally) first released.

This recording was done with a small group of musicians who formed the core of the band in the early days and, according to the website, is intended to capture the “living room nature” of their early performances.

Those of us who have seen the band live a couple of times won’t be all that surprised by this project, because the band seems to work this way most of the time anyway: they can be as grand or as minimal as you like, and no song seems to have a particular need to sound a certain way – Fisher and the band simply adapt the songs to the arrangements available at the time.  Even in my limited (four gigs) experience, I have heard a lot of these songs played several times, and sound very different each time.  Consequently it’s little surprise that they might want to commit some of these other incarnations to record – in a way it’s a little silly for a band who can sound so different from one gig to another to have only one recorded version of each song available.

As it is the new versions, even when I like them less than the originals, which inevitably happens a couple of times, are wonderful to listen to.  The scratchy renditions of the likes of Ghost of the Girl in the Well actually bring a little more unpleasantness to the song which enhances the rather nasty nature of the original lyrics, similarly with Mary of the Angels. Skeleton is completely different, without the full band drive of the version on Let it Roll, and whilst I prefer the originals of the likes of Fare the Well and Painter Blue, these recordings certainly more than do the songs justice.

Which brings me to why I find this a difficult album to review.  I am a big fan of this band, so I am fascinated by all of these songs, but I genuinely can’t imagine what they would sound like to someone new to the music.  You lose something by the low-fi approach, but you gain something as well, and I know what that brings to someone who knows the music, but if this is the first time you’ve encountered this band then you’re own your own.

In many ways this is entirely representative of their work, and in many ways it really isn’t.  It’s just the sound of a band who like to play with their music exploring what the songs can sound like and giving them a whole new character.  In many ways I am actually just surprised that more groups don’t do this kind of thing.

Willard Grant Conspiracy – Ghost of the Girl in the Well

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – Mary of the Angels

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

DO NOT WORRY!  This is not a podcast stuffed full of tedious moralising and empty pontificating and generally depressing garbage about a subject far too weighty and philosophical for this sort of half-arsed internet enterprise.  In fact, towards the end it really gets quite chipper.

Basically, there are so many extraordinarily good murder ballads that that particular aspect could so easily have entirely overtaken a podcast ostensibly about prison, crime and criminal justice.

This week, however, I have still managed to marginalise the role of the murder ballad, because the concept of death incorporates so many disparate emotions and aspects that simply doing a whole podcast about murderous folk tales and their musical counterparts seemed unnecessarily narrow.  So you get this.  Which starts out a little heavy but becomes positively gleeful by the end, I promise you.

Toadcast #86 – The Deathcast

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01. Willard Grant Conspiracy – Painter Blue (03.01)
02. Samamidon – O Death (12.33)
03. Eels – Going to Your Funeral (22.31)
04. Melanie Rivaud & Strange Weather – The Fall of Troy (Tom Waits Cover) (25.05)
05. Bob Frank & John Murry – Jesse Washington 1916 (31.53)
06. Bruce Springsteen – Dead Man Walking (37.02)
07. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Up Jumped the Devil (41.15)
08. The Men They Couldn’t Hang – The Green Fields of France (48.26)
09. Elvis Costello & the Attractions – Tramp the Dirt Down (57.02)
10. Chumbawamba – Passenger List for Doomed Flight 1471 (66.35)