Fucking typical. We spend the day recording with PAWS for the split 12″ I’ve been going on about so much recently, and then I spend two or three hours getting preliminary mixes together for them before heading up to their show at the Electric Circus.

Then, because I am a fucking idiot, I come home and start faffing about with the mixes. Never mind your actual judgement, your hearing actually changes when you get drunk (I think you perceive the upper registers far less, but I’m not sure, it could be the other way around) so mixing music is a pretty stupid thing to be doing.

I don’t think I did much damage of course, mostly because I didn’t really change much, and also because I have found the bit in Logic where I can rewind to an older version of the file, but I did sit up until half three in the morning mostly just because I am so excited about the record. Muppet. It’s a good thing to be this excited of course, but given how shite I feel this morning I am not sure it was the best way to express it.

Anyhow, I dearly wish someone could be made to go and fetch me coffee.  Sometimes these basic personal maintenance tasks seem so completely unreasonable – maybe it’s a hangover from being either a student or a child, but I honestly think that the sink could be overflowing at the moment and I couldn’t be arsed to get up and stop it flooding the house.

So, please do de-lurk, answer the following five stupid questions, and then waste what little productive time there is in your average Friday afternoon by fannying around on the internet with us.

1. What do you get so obsessed with you stay up far too late doing it?
2. What is the one trivially simple task you really can’t be fucked with when you’re having one of those ultra-lazy moments?
3. Back to basics snack you could really do with at the moment.
4. If I offered to buy you any album at all right this minute, what would you choose?
5. If you could obliterate all your responsibilities this afternoon, and be entirely free to do as you please, how would you spend it?

It’s hard to resist the idea that somewhere round the corner from you there exists a collection of talented fuckers making amazing music entirely out of the view of the world’s music chatterati, so despite the fact that this lot are clearly far more from Newcastle than they are from Edinburgh, I will confess I felt just that little bit more curious when opening this email than when opening many others.  Not least it’s unusual to hear about a band from Edinburgh who no-one’s told me about already.  Even if *cough* they’re really from Newcastle.

The other thing this lot have managed, which is really rather funny, is to make a total hypocrisy of my recent post descrying remixes. I know I joke about it, but this is where the local nepotism possibly did come into play after all.  Generally, finding sentences like ‘here is our amazing song and here is a remix of it’ sends me straight to the delete button, but in this case the combination of Shift-Static being a local band, of the email being nicely worded and the remix being attributed to Waskerley Way, who are a band I know and like, meant that I felt I really should listen.

And if they are reading, the poor fuckers in Shift-Static are probably wondering why I’ve got to the fourth paragraph of a writeup of their music without mentioning the slightest thing about it.  I apologise for this, but I suppose I just wanted to give you some sort of impression of what surfing my inbox every day is actually like.  Things get deleted so fast that even I myself am fascinated by what it is that nudges me to listen more closely to something.

Anyhow, now that I have (apologies to the band) finally got round to discussing the music, it’s not a thousand mile away from the LeThug stuff I wrote about last week.  It’s definitely electronic pop music, although there is perhaps a little more shimmering than shoegaze going on here.  In fact, for all Il-1 is glitchy and uncertain, by the time the second song – Thanks, Thugs -  kicks in, we are into the kind of territory which Goldfrapp and The Pet Shop Boys managed to straddle so successfully: that particular kind of electronic music which, whilst I assume it will please its core audience of electronic pop fans, will also thrill conservative and relatively narrow-minded indie kids like myself.

The remix mention came about because the band themselves highlighted both the original version of Sky Burial as well as the aforementioned remix of the same song, both of which take centre stage here as a one-two in the middle of the EP.

I’ll admit that the clean, clear female vocal delivery of the original, for all it is lovely, strays a little too far into the polished pop world for my own personal taste.  Not that far, because I still really like the song, but perhaps a little further than anything I am likely to end up truly loving.

The Waskerley Way remix, however, for all it doesn’t do much, just seems to add both enough haze and enough heft to get me to really love what really is a simple, excellent song.  By this point Saint Etienne are strongly evoked, or possibly even the briefly incredible Dubstar, and I find myself looking back wistfully to that period in the mid-nineties when I first started to explore electronic music.  This has a lot in common with a lot of the things I first took a chance on when trying to expand my listening palette from indie to broader sounds, back when I was a teenager.  Yes, it was that long ago.  Fuck off.

So whether they’re from Newcastle or Edinburgh, whether you’d call them electro-pop (shudder) or alternative-indie-elec.. oh alright, I’ll stop now.  Whatever you reckon this stuff is, it’s very, very good.  When the band got in touch their only sales patter was “I really think its in your ballpark”.  And they were right, it really is.

Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way Remix)

Download for free from Bandcamp

You have no idea how many times I’ve read about people referencing Captain Beefheart when describing the music I love, but for some inexplicable reason I have never really explored his music.

The other day someone shared the video above on their Facebook timeline thingy and for the first time I actually listened to some Beefheart.  And you know what, pretty fucking good don’t you think.

After that I happened across this phenomenal video for The Blues Are Still Blue by Belle & Sebastian.  I am not convinced they gave permission for this directly, so it is yet another case of the sort of thing SOPA and IP fundamentalists will be stopping.  Nevertheless, Stuart from B&S is clearly chuffed to bits with the video, which goes to show that a large amount of grey area exists in copyright violation between what dying commercial behemoths want to demand from the government and what artists actually feel harms them.

Anyway, after that I was buggering about on the internet some more (I told you this was going to get tedious, didn’t I) and then I happened across some early Nirvana videos.  Really early Nirvana videos.  In fact, if the YouTube blurb is to be believed, some of the very earliest ones.

Those of you who listened to the Slackercast this weekend will know that I am in the process of digging back through some of the early US indie rock and slacker rock which is inspiring so many of today’s lo-fi garagey bands.  I was kind of aware of this stuff at the time, but only vaguely.

Most of the music I was into, even in my last years of high school, when you’re supposed to be being all rebellious, owed more to my parents than my peers, so I actually didn’t get as deep into this kind of stuff as you would think.  Pretty good videos though, eh?

Oh, and while I was buggering about I also happened across this trailer, which takes the form of a parody of recent low-budget British films.  And let’s face it, whilst it’s a little heavy-handed it’s still pretty funny, and rather accurate.

And so umm.. yes. I’ve been buggering about on YouTube. Fascinating, this shit, isn’t it.

This weekend’s podcast will be the Josh T. Pearson Toad Session, so I thought I might offer up a wee teaser just um… well, I’m not really sure actually, it just seems to be the done thing these days.

This session was actually filmed through in Glasgow before Josh’s show at Oran Mor in November.  To avoid the pitfalls of trying to film the session in a venue where people are trying to do other jobs, we decided this time to record in Phil from PAWS‘ flat, which happened to be just down the road.

The full session, along with the usual ten minute mini-documentary, interview podcast, song videos, mp3 downloads and photo gallery, will all go up on Saturday, but in the meantime here’s the Toad Session version of Country Dumb, played sitting on Phil’s bed next to a distinctly disinterested Stephanie, who also took most of the pictures for the session.

Apart from the number of my friends who work there, it’s difficult to feel any real sympathy for the lumbering dinosaur that is HMV.  Nevertheless, I do find the company’s struggles quite fascinating, and they really do seem to be on death’s door at the moment.

Generally when I end up discussing this with anyone it tends to be solely within the context of music retail.  What will the slow death of HMV do for smaller independent shops?  What will it do for music sales when the only remaining large high street retailer finally vanishes?

These are valid and interesting questions of course, but they tend to lead to quite narrow discussions about what little remains of their business model.  HMV is struggling not just because music retail is fucked, but because the whole retail sector is in turmoil.  In the wake of the disruption caused by the internet, out of town aircraft hanger superstores seem to be fine and high-end boutique retailers seem to be fine, but HMV is neither of these things, so it is facing difficulties both by virtue of its place within the retail environment, as well as the more sector-specific issues caused by the fact that the selling of mp3s quite simply makes shops redundant in the first place.

At first they thought games and DVDs would save them, but the only reason those products aren’t just as problematic for retailers as music is simply that the files are larger, so as solutions go, that was obviously always going to be short term. Then for some utterly inexplicable (and borderline hilarious) reason they seemed to decide recently that the selling of headphones and mp3 players was the answer to their dreams.

The actual design of the shops themselves is fucking awful, so no-one wants to actually go there just for the sake of spending some time, and almost everything they sell is either directly downloadable from the internet or more easily and cheaply bought there instead.  And still they flail about, like a beetle which has been half crushed but somehow won’t just die.  It’s a bit like watching the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail desperately try and insist that he isn’t beaten.

They are so very fucked that they recently had to donate 2.5% of themselves to their suppliers to restructure their debt profile and remain something approaching legally solvent.  That sounds to me like a suspiciously sneaky way of phrasing a confession that they couldn’t pay their suppliers for their stock and hence had to offer them equity instead, in order to keep trading.

And presumably the likes of Disney, Warner’s, Sony and their ilk are still sufficiently determined to maintain a foothold on the high street that they feel they have no choice but to accept.  I suppose they aren’t comfortable with Amazon and places like Tesco’s being their main outlets and feel they need something in the centre of town as well.

HMV have sold a lot of our albums too – well, those above a certain threshold of nationwide profile anyway – so I can understand the major labels being scared of letting them go to the wall. I suppose that in their position, once you’ve let that one get away it must seem like you are pretty much giving up on selling music on bits of plastic in future, and that is still too bit a piece of pie to give up on just yet.

But honestly, I can’t imagine why you would ever shop in HMV.  It’s not a particularly appealing ‘destination store’, and Amazon has better choice and better prices.  If you are looking for specific or obscure stuff for the collector then buying direct from bands or labels or highly curated physical or online shops will always be a better bet.

Funnily enough I can see more hope for small independents that I can for HMV.  They can make a difference with knowledgeable and personable staff, they can make the shops themselves nice places to go without a rebranding directive from central command, and they have more freedom (and one would assume more inclination) to engage with the local music community as well.

I wouldn’t suggest that this is anything like a simple blueprint for running a successful indie shop, but it certainly feels like a more viable basis for a business than anything HMV can conceivably twist themselves into at the moment.

I do find myself wondering what happens if they do cease to exist though.  It may be to the advantage of the smaller shops, I can imagine that, although it may just serve to drive more people permanently towards Amazon instead.

From the perspective of the smaller labels from ourselves upwards, however, I wonder a little about the potential collapse of HMV and the removal of yet another ‘middle step’ for artists on the way up from obscurity to viability.

When 6Music was under threat one of my main worries was the gap it would leave between amateur podcasters and mainstream XFM/Radio1 exposure, and the enormous amount of resources and luck it would take to bridge that gap.  If HMV were to go I sort of worry about the same thing, but this time in terms of unit shifting.

To make a step from low level indie success to the kind of success required to become a viable, full-time professional band, you have to from selling a relatively small number of thousand albums – which you can do by selling through the band and label websites, at gigs and in small indie shops – to selling albums in the tens of thousands. I am not sure if you can do that currently without the kind of casual ubiquity provided by reasonable placement within high street shops.

Maybe I’m wrong about that of course.  I certainly have no love for HMV, and the desperate flailing generated by what appears to be their death throes is downright comical, but every time a piece of the existing music infrastructure crumbles I do inevitably find myself worrying a little about the implications.  As the established routes to viability collapse, those of us at the bottom are basically stuck here until we can figure out new ways to build those bridges, and the more of the existing structures which collapse the longer that will take.  That’s a commercial nuisance to us as a label of course, and it is a tragedy for the potentially great bands trapped in obscurity, who might otherwise have been able to actually crack it to at least some level.

But nevertheless I find it difficult to mourn at all for a company who have built great, ugly, cavernous shops and yet don’t seem to have the faintest idea what to put in them, and who even as their last limbs are hacked off keep loudly insisting that they will bite you to death. I used to actually shop in HMV regularly, you know, but I can’t possibly imagine anything they could turn themselves into which would ever make me really want to go back.

I think he was a little nervous about how people would react to it, and in general I think Shaw's relationship with how people react to his music is a funny one.

However much I enjoyed his performance, there was nothing I could say which would persuade him that he wasn't shit.  And when he introduced 10,000 Sentinels he awkwardly added that it was a 'crowd pleaser' in a way that implied that he had difficulty actually believing people who get excited about his stuff. It's not that I think he wants to be disliked of course, but I do get the impression that if there is one side of the artistic deal with the audience that most discomfits him it is the tacit courting of praise.

Consequently, the noise he mentioned seems more a product of this kind of awkwardness rather than a particular stylistic contrivance, which means that for all there are times when it isn't all that pretty to listen to, it is never as jarring or intrusive as this kind of thing can be.  In fact it fits as naturally and comfortably into the music as the acoustic guitar and piano with which you might more normally associate this kind of internal monologue.

And that seems to be pretty much what this album is: a sort of stumbling, but insistent internal monologue - a sort of stream of consciousness, mixed with a large element of both mea culpa and self-administered pep talk. It's music you have to meet halfway, for sure, and won't just grab you and announce itself unless you yourself make the first steps, but it is an utterly gorgeous record if you pay it some time.

Creaking doors and scraped forks, and self-analytical subject matter could make for something rather uncomfortable, or potentially self-indulgent, but the music is so slow and understated that you feel more lulled into it than forced.  The gentle delivery also diffuses any real sense of self-indulgence, as Shaw seems more weary than angst-ridden, and doesn't sing as if he requires your exculpation. It feels more like a post-catharsis album than one which in and of itself is required to free the singer from anything in particular, and that makes it warm, approachable and a really lovely listen.

Benjamin Shaw - How to Test the Depth of a Well

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Audio Antihero

Ah well, Mrs. Toad’s two new cats are capering about the house like loons, so I suppose they’ll keep me entertained in the absence of significant musicfun.

What’s fucking happening in Edinburgh anyway? Neither the Liquid Room nor Cabaret Voltaire seem to be doing any significant booking anymore, are we just not considered to be worth visiting for a band who can attract a crowd above about two hundred people?  I mean, the smaller venues do a good job of bringing really under the radar bands here, but is no-one interested in booking anyone that people have actually heard of?

I love the Ides of Toad gigs, but we’re operating in venues with a capacity of a hundred or so – who the fuck is bringing the bands to the city who can pull a few hundred people to a venue?  No-one, it seems, although please do correct me if I’m wrong. Even DF and PCL seem to have decided there ain’t much point in bringing bands that they’ll happily put on in Glasgow through to Edinburgh.

Presumably we just don’t go, so as far as the bigger promoters are concerned there’s just no financial point in putting on bands here, and so to a degree we get what we deserve.  It’s a shame though.  Even when I first turned up here I’d regularly go to 200-500 attendance shows at the Liquid Room or Cab Vol.

Thursday 26th Jan: United Fruit, PAWS & Vasquez at the Electric Circus.

This is going to be good and loud isn’t it. PAWS are just back from recording their debut album down in shiny, shiny London so I reckon they’ll be in a fair mood to blow off some steam.  United Fruit are a band I tried to get through to Edinburgh in August actually, until it turned out they couldn’t make it, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing them too, as well as a local band Vasquez, about whom I know shamefully little.

PAWS – Bloodline (Toad Session)

Friday 27th Jan: Live Lounge, with Mike MacFarlane, HP Neilson, Jay Bharaj & Mike Kearney at the Electric Circus.

In the absence of more than a single relatively big ticket show in town this week, why not swing by the Circus on Friday for a bit of an Antihoot reunion, in the form of the humour of Jay Bharaj, the rather biting self-mockery of Mike MacFarlane and the smooth MCing and popsmithery of HP Neilson.

Recording for our upcoming split 12″ with Manchester bands Waiters and Sex Hands has seen pals recommend I have a good listen to The Meat Puppets too, if that’s the kind of stuff I’m into – particularly if that’s the kind of guitar sound I am enjoying at the moment.

So that’s what this podcast is loosely about.  As I explain, despite growing up at the perfect time to have been into all this stuff the first time around, I ended up being only vaguely aware of it, due to being almost entirely insulated in the bubble of the international expat community in Vienna at the time, and hence only really having MTV to introduce me to new music, beyond what I happened across by accident in the record shops around town.  Which generally wasn’t Dinosaur Jr.

Direct download: Toadcast #210 – The Slackercast

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01. Nirvana – Love Buzz (Shocking Blue cover) (00.26)
02. Feel Right – She’s No Good (08.47)
03. Shudderpulps – Time (10.46)
04. Spectral Park – Colours (16.13)
05. Dinosaur Jr. – Repulsion (24.24)
06. Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way remix) (30.20)
07. The Meat Puppets – Lake of Fire (40.54)
08. Sparklehorse – My Yoke is Heavy (42.57)
09. Narrow Sparrow – Spooky Head (47.40)
10. The Magnetic Fields – Andrew in Drag (52.00)
11. Pavement – Spit on a Stranger (59.40)

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

Squirrel Nut Zippers – Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter

The Cure – The Love Cats

Willard Grant Conspiracy – Cat Nap in the Boom Boom Room

Grandaddy – What Happened…

Soft Cat – Silver Babies Sun

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

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

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

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