Sat, 23 April 2011
No, no, don't worry this isn't some sort of chillout special (although we did actually do one of those once upon a time). The only reason this is called the Chillcast is because on what was a beautifully sunny day for the rest of Scotland, Edinburgh performed its age old trick of drawing a freezing sea mist off the North Sea - the haar, as it's called - and turning a lovely Spring day into a damp, chilly sulk. Bastard. I realised a while back that I don't actually cover all that much Scottish music, despite the location of this blog being quite a prominent feature of the thing. This week, though, we have something like five Scottish (or Scottish-based) bands on this, and all of them relatively under the radar ones as well. Anyhow, I am off to play nicely with Mrs. Toad's colleagues for the rest of the day, in some sort of horrific bonding exercise. Ah well, it pays the bills I suppose, and it's not like she doesn't have to spend an awful lot of time hanging out with my 'colleagues'. 01. The Sandwitches - Summer of Love (00.11) |
Sat, 16 April 2011
Sparrow and the Workshop recorded one of our first ever Toad Sessions. In fact, they were the first band I ever recorded all on my lonesome and, after a few rather panicked emails to my little brother who knows about this shit, it all seemed to go pretty well. So, not content with merely asking Meursault to join them on their next tour of England, they upped the level of niceness by offering to come round the house and record a sort of album preview podcast for their next record. Spitting Daggers comes out in a couple of weeks, and the band came over to get pissed, to talk utter balls and to play a couple of songs from the album and a few others they've been listening to recently. A good, and very drunken, time was had by all. 01. Tegan & Sara - Walking With a Ghost (00.24) |
Sun, 10 April 2011
Video: Vimeo – YouTube The more I read about Johny Lamb from Thirty Pounds of Bone before this session, the more nervous I became. The internet seemed to be full of all sorts of tales of him being reclusive, antisocial and very, very hard on interviewers. Now, the press can be a little unreliable at the best of times, and personality-based reports of this nature can vary from person to person, but it almost comical how completely different this session was to my expectations. Johny was friendly, perhaps a little shy, genuinely chatty and a lovely guy. In fact, in terms of the interview podcast I think this is probably the most interesting one we’ve ever had. Thanks are due to Mrs. Toad for the splendid bacon sarnies, to Dylan and Fiona who took the pictures, and to Matthew who did a lot of the filming. As per usual we have the podcast below, the freely downloadable session mp3s underneath that, followed by the videos we made for all the individual songs. The tracklisting for the podcast is at the very bottom of the page. Enjoy! 01. Thirty Pounds of Bone – The Maritime Line (Toad Session) (11.02)
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Sat, 2 April 2011
It is a very, very fine Spring day indeed, this morning in Edinburgh, and so needless to say I am going to spend it in my office talking to imaginary people on the internet. This week we are simply going to have a bit of a trawl through my inbox. As I mention halfway through the podcast, I now have unlistened albums totalling a mighty one day, eighteen hours and thirty-four minutes worth of music. So if you are wondering why I haven't reviewed this that or the other, then that probably has something to do with it. The trickiest part, of course, is that it's not enough to simply have listened to something. To actually have anything resembling an intelligent comment to make you need to listen to something really quite often, and know the ins and outs of an album pretty well. This takes a lot more than just a once-over lasting for one day, eighteen hours and thirty-four minutes. 01. The Lovely Eggs - Don't Look at Me (I Don't Like It) (00.40) |
