The Excast is so named because I am playing a lot of people's former bands. There's Shane MacGowan's Nipple Erectors, Phil Chevron's Radiators, Shilpa Ray's Beat the Devil and Billy Bragg's Riff Raff. I concentrate so much on new music these days that I often decide whether or not I like a band on the basis of a handful of demos, maybe a single, sometimes a debut EP, stuff like that. And of course, bands don't stumble into the world fully-formed, it takes some of them ages to become brilliant, and a lot of the time the initial [...]
Well thirty-four seems little different to thirty-three, apart from the fact that it seems to involve a severe headache and an aversion to bright lights. What I need is a lunch and the King's Wark and a couple of pints and I'll be right as rain. Hopefully. You'll be blindly indifferent to know that after my back injury (yes, months ago) I am now finally feeling brave enough to go back to playing some gentle 5-a-side football again. It's weird with backs - I've done some running, and it feels fine, but because I'm not all that confident [...]
The Times have raised something of a stink recently by announcing that they are going to start charging for the online content of their newspaper. This isn't new, exactly, because a lot of newspapers started out that way on the web, but quickly dropped all these clumsy logins and memberships and payment schemes because in the face of free and unlimited services like the Guardian and the BBC they quickly realised that they were losing out massively in the scramble for eyeballs, which is the one criterion everyone on the internet seems to agree is the key to influence, importance [...]
It's Fresh Air time again, and once again Ruth and I have a splendid live session. We might even have Ruth's voice back, just to make matters even more special. This week The Pineapple Chunks are going to play live in session for us. And instead of being sensible and doing it acoustically we are going to end up having the full band in the studio and are going to just have to try and find some way of arranging the mics so that we pick it all up. Basically, I think we are going to [...]
Ooh, interesting interesting. And really rather weird. Erik Gundel introduced himself to me as 'that guy from Motel Motel' and whilst I liked a lot of their songs, I find this vastly more intriguing. With this sort of strange stuff the sequencing is always crucial, and in this case it is executed really well. We're gently lulled in with a spot of unthreatening instrumentalism in the form of Turkulent Indigo. Then Birdy sort of hints at where the rest of the EP is going, but is still rather a tame version of the music language in which this [...]
I'm not sure what's happened to his Sussex Wit, because it's very much business as usual for Mr. Flynn on his new EP. It seems a little churlish to complain when business as usual produces songs as lovely as this, but nevertheless this seems a little like treading water. More accurately, what it seems like is a few songs which were left behind from the body of work which resulted in A Larum last year. I know the bands are actually all linked one way or another, but The Mountain is Burning does sound like the missing link [...]
It's annoying, I'm sure, but I find it really hard not to compare this to this year's other solo release by the front man of an early-nineties arch indie hipster band, Julian Plenti. Alternatively, I suppose, you could compare it to the Strokes' last and best album, First Impressions of Earth. In either comparison Phrazes For the Young fares really rather badly, in my opinion. It comes across as a light, eighties synth-pop facsimile of the best Strokes stuff with all the bite removed. And it certainly lacks the invention of Plenti's inconsistent, but often very good, solo [...]
Rough and raw? On Song, by Toad? Never! And bloody hell this is rough. I reviewed Ryan Schmale's previous release late last year, but is rather definitely a different beast. There remain almost none of the glowering, atmospheric songs of this record's immediate predecessor, and in their place a near-unrelenting cloud of angrily sneering guitars. There's a whiff of old time rock 'n' roll at times too, although just the barest hint. I was reminded of early (really early, as in: when they weren't just a bit dull) Raveonettes just a little at times, but the association was [...]
Christ, people are getting this shit up and running early this year. I am not much of one for festivals, frankly. All the tents and mud and rock 'n' roll rather fails to float my boat most of the time, and the sheer numbers of people really do put me off. I never did like people all that much. But there are a couple which I quite like, and they have both made unprecedentedly well-organised announcements this afternoon, so I thought I should pass them on. Fence Homegame. [...]
Having made such an almighty pig's ear of last week's listings, I find myself wondering if the gigmosphere really is as thin as it looks this week, or whether I've just managed to make another spectacular arse of spotting the good 'uns again. There's something a little different happening, actually, because Joey Comeau and the Loose Teeth Press are going to be at the Bowery as part of their reading tour tonight, which sounds rather interesting. Also, the Charity Baw at the Roxy on Saturday looks like a bit of a spectacular, [...]
[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met. He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week. Cheers C&B.] To me modern German music has always been about the monosyllabic pioneers of Krautrock. Can. Faust. Neu! Or perhaps the ear-shattering crunch of Einsturzende Neubauten's strategies against architecture. Brilliant stuff, but forbidding too; and sometimes a little too Baader-Meinhof for my bourgeois ass. [...]
[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met. He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week. Cheers C&B.] To me modern German music has always been about the monosyllabic pioneers of Krautrock. Can. Faust. Neu! Or perhaps the ear-shattering crunch of Einsturzende Neubauten's strategies against architecture. Brilliant stuff, but forbidding too; and sometimes a little too Baader-Meinhof for my bourgeois ass. [...]
[The internet has a habit of making friends of strangers and I guess I would have to describe Campfires & Battlefields as my best friend-I've-never-met. He is one of the longest standing readers and commenters of this blog, and has written another two fine Sunday Supplement posts for us this week. Cheers C&B.] This lot first caught my attention because they take their name from a character in the "Port William Fellowship" novels of the American novelist and poet Wendell Berry, one of my favorites. At its best, Berry's writing is thrifty [...]
I think it would be only fair to describe this podcast as a little bit messy. We recorded it immediately after first Craigcast two weeks ago, and so by the end of it we were all fucking hammered. I promise I have tried to edit out as much of the madness as I could, but it was difficult. The problem with incoherent drunken rambling is there don't tend to be a lot of natural breaks, so it was devilishly hard to cut down. Anyhow, this won't be the first or last time you listen [...]
I know I hammer on about guilty pleasure on this blog a lot mostly, I would imagine, because I am an incredible snob and so some of the things I used to listen to horrify me. If you think I judge you by the shit you listen to, just think how twisted and confused that mockery must become when turned inward upon the giant Hydra of Hypocrisy which dwells inside me. Fuck it though, I am not going on about that today, but that is the reason for the songs I have chosen, so before you [...]
Hello again, Ruth and I are back on air tonight on Fresh Air , Edinburgh's student radio station. As per usual we'll be having some live session stuff, this time from The Japanese War Effort . Jamie is a bit of a band-whore actually, and plays in the Occasional Flickers and Conquering Animal Sound as well as ploughing his own solo furrow. It's this stuff, however, which is my favourite. I haven't much idea what it will sound like, stripped back to the extent that it will need to be in order to be [...]
I get more than a little jumpy writing things about stuff like this, because I am far from knowledgable and, as someone who is almost always against the wars that 'we' have fought recently, it can seem a bit rich to me, writing about the people who fought in them. My Granddad was a marine in WWII though. He drove a landing craft in the D-Day landings, he pitched up in Singapore and Madagascar, fought in the Pacific and, erm... I don't know much else to be honest, because he doesn't really talk about it. He'll [...]
This is the second of today's introductions to other projects by people in Song, by Toad Records bands. Nightjar's The Moth Tra p, Toad Records' first full release, was the work primarily of Andy McKay of the now sadly deceased Celebrity Chimp, and an Edinburgh gentleman by the name of Jack Richold. Nightjar itself was just a one-off project, but Jack of course has continued to work on his own things since Andy moved to London. One such project is The Sea is Salt, which is a partnership between Jack and a young lady called Faith, whose [...]
Today I'm going to introduce you to a couple of under the radar projects which are both related to Song, by Toad Records bands. In both cases I don't really know what the future of the respective projects might be, because I don't know how far either is going to be pushed, but they are both very good and I thought they needed sharing. Firstly we have The Douglas Firs. This is a side project of Jesus H, Foxx drummer Neil Inch, and has been bubbling under for years. He's been working on this album for ages, but [...]
This is something of a departure from the first couple of Loch Lomond records - the sublime Lament For Children EP and full length Paper the Walls - despite the fact that nothing has changed all that much. There's been a shift of tone, only a slight one mind, but one which has nevertheless had a big effect on the overall impression of their sound. The best way I can describe it is to say that the slightly macabre fairytale atmosphere, which was only present in the subtlest of shades before, has pretty much gone now, and with [...]
Vampire Weekend - Cousins
‘09 Been Kind
WKND PLYLST!! This has nothing to do with NEW MOON!
