Yes, this coming Wednesday, the fifteenth of February!!! Get it in yer diaries! This is going to be the Edinburgh launch for Randolph's Leap's rather excellent new album Randolph's Leap and the Curse of the Haunted Headphones . It's a brilliant album of lo-fi charm, moving effortlessly from humour to pathos, and will be available on Peenko Records on a limited run of 30 tapes. Well, 29 as far as you're concerned, because I will be having one. Also on the bill will be Molly Nilsson, who is pals with friends of ours [...]
One of the things I've noticed since I started working in the music industry is how much fun it has been. Sure it's a challenge, and there are times when it can get you down, but fuck, you go to gigs all the time, you hang out with your pals, you have a few drinks, you share awesome experiences together at amazing shows, and even the dreadful ones generate a sort of camaraderie based on mutual awkwardness. It's fun, it really is fucking fun. It's culture too. Not high culture of course, and there's no way you could [...]
I don't think I approached this record with breath quite as bated as a lot of the rest of the Scottish music community. I love RM Hubbert live; watching him play the guitar really is one of the most mesmerising things you'll see, and the sincere but humourous chat inbetween songs is as engaging as the actual performance. At the risk of enraging classical guitarists everywhere, however, I will venture that there are limitations to what you can achieve as a solo acoustic guitarist playing entirely instrumental songs. Not that his recorded stuff was bad by any means, [...]
The fact that this album is self-titled makes the headline for this post look like a bit of a joke, doesn't it. How many Djangos does one album title need, after all. Anyhow, at the risk of repeating a little bit too much of this week's podcast , these guys have been described in a few places, somewhat tenuously, as an Edinburgh band. It's a nice thought, but while they did indeed emerge, to the best of my knowledge, from the Edinburgh College of Art, I think they're now based in London and have released their debut [...]
The Twilight Sad were one of the first under the radar Scottish bands I ever really 'discovered' for myself, although oddly enough it was actually American blogs where I first started to hear about them, despite their being from just down the road, relatively speaking. This is their third album, and despite a subtle shift evident in their second, represents by far the most decisive move yet away from the walls of squalling guitars which played such a part in the making of their name. They have adjusted from a devastating combination of heart-rending vocal and [...]
Yoofff, wake up, my dozing brain! I think I am going to blame Mrs. Toad, but we have recently taken to having weekends of such epic sloth that even by seven in the evening on Monday my brain is still very much stalled. Of course, back when I had a day job this still used to happen of, except I had to sit at my desk looking fucking useless all day. It's just that now when I spend a day being just a little bit vacant and useless - or glaikit as the Scots rather excellently [...]
Ah, Tartan Shortbread, that most wonderful of sardonic Scottish put-downs. For those unfamiliar with the term, this is the offhand dismissal used to describe the sort of mawkish, clichéd tourist tat which masquerades as Scottish heritage and culture for those with woefully little imagination. Alternatively, I suppose you could say that Tartan Shortbread is a blanket term for Scottish heritage as a sort of motorway service station take on national identity. Anyhow, given I work very much at the coalface of the DIY music world in Scotland, I find that I have been oddly unsupportive of [...]
I know this 'what's your blues name' nonsense has been floating around the internets for a while, but I thought it might be fun for Friday's traditional buggering about - just click on the image to have a proper look. In other news, I will be wearing a fucking penguin suit tonight, for something like the first time in three years. I fucking hate those things. I'd rather be a man than a woman at these formal events, because at least we have a simple uniform and don't have to give a fuck about being judged for our [...]
Except I shan't be mostly mastering because in all honestly I have no fucking idea what that is. Apparently it is tweaking the teeny-tiniest of things in the final mix of a song and still somehow making the most significant of differences. I've heard a good masterer get the most amazing clarity of instrumentation from a shitty, over-compressed mp3 file, to the extent that it sounded amazing on vinyl. We tend to use Reuben Taylor for our mastering these days. As well as being a lovely (if slightly mental) fellow, he does an amazing job for a very [...]
I think that the readers of this website will be more aware than most of the direct correlation between the obscurity of the music they listen to and the overall quality of a person's character. In fact, never mind correlation, I think it's fair to say that there is almost certainly a direct causal link. No one can argue, surely, that ceasing to listen to chart music will improve your soul - in much the same way that no longer reading the NME will liberate your brain and give you a wonderful feeling of clarity and, more importantly, [...]
You might not believe me, given how much Lana Del Rey's ubiquity began to irritate me towards the end of last year, but I was actually rather hoping I would like this. You see, when people get an almighty slagging I automatically end up pulling for them a little even if, as in this case, that kind of means pulling against myself. And to be fair, Del Rey has received some almighty slaggings both from anyone with any sense at all as well as, a little less enjoyably, from quite a few people with none. I [...]
Alright, I know that by the end of January you are supposed to stop using terms like 'new year' but I reckoned it was about time for an update on these matters, and that seemed the most appropriate way of phrasing it. So, with a flurry of album launches coming up in the late Spring/early Summer, we have a small but exciting fistful of gigs to tide us over until then, which I will list below. Apart from the aforementioned launches, which we'll generally try and do somewhere a bit strange, I am looking at putting on as [...]
With one EP already to their name, out for free on Glasgow's brilliant Wiseblood Industries, this is the debut album proper by Now Wakes the Sea . Contrary to what their name might hint at, they aren't a nasty emo band, in fact a wonderfully muffled, slow-moving lot. Most bands who use these atmospheric, lo-fi productions methods do so to produce music which is raw and aggressive, daring you to tease the tune out of the static if you have the stamina. Now Wakes the Sea, on the other hand, for all they have a [...]
The Muppets win at everything. That's all I have to say on the matter. In other news, Mrs. Toad and I went out into the garden this weekend, to try and tackle the small jungle which has slowly been developing since the Summer. The weather has been so spectacularly shit since July and August that we just haven't been out there, so our window boxes have all died and every bed was overrun with weeds. Still, due to our particularly indelicate methods of gardening - a little closer to slash and burn than anything you might [...]
Video: Vimeo - YouTube Photos: Flickr Audio: zip download: right-click, save as This session was recorded in Glasgow before Josh's performance at Oran Mor on 22nd November last year. The first attempt to record a session with him was at Stereo, but recording in a venue really didn't work out, so this time we decided to take up the kind offer of Phil from PAWS to record it in his bedroom instead. Again [...]
Fucking typical. We spend the day recording with PAWS for the split 123 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 [...]
Hmmm, reading the email I was sent by Shift-Static, there is a definite emphasis on their Edinburgh associations which seems entirely absent from any of their other PR material. So if they were trying to prey upon my nepotistic instincts then they, erm, probably had a point actually. 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 [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
Song, by Toad
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