Porlolo - Meadows

I only found this band recently, and I am absolutely delighted with this album.  Delight is probably the right word for the music as well, which simply leaks loveliness into your life as if it had an infinite supply to spread around.  It’s somewhat fitting that the last song should be called Charm School too, seeing as that is a lesson Porlolo could teach you in their sleep.

Porlolo have quite a lot in common with the likes of Laura Viers and other thoughtful, slightly introverted acoustic campfire ladies.  That’s a slightly glib stereotype, but particularly in the vocals I can hear a real ‘type’ here, I just can’t quite figure out how best to describe it.

A month or so ago, when I first wrote about them, I posted two song which I didn’t realise were actually from this album, although Turning on Heels went by a different name back then.  The feel of the record is a little different from the vibe you’d pick up from just those two songs though.  There’s more hush, more tension, more cinema in the record, and less folky prettiniess.  Reverbed guitar undercurrents growl away at the back of songs like I Don’t Know, bringing just a little crunchiness to an album that is otherwise delivered with a very light touch indeed.

This kind of stain on such an immaculately lovely fascia gives the album a bit of depth which I rather like.  Definitely worth investigating.

Porlolo - Turning on Heels

Porlolo - I Know, I Know

MySpace | More mp3s | Buy the album from CDBaby (it’s not live yet, but hopefully will be in the next couple of days).

Ghostkeeper & the Children of the Great Northern Muskeg

I honestly didn’t get this album the first few times through, and now I have no idea how that could have happened. The hooks, delightful little tunes lapsing into growly guitar, it’s all spot on. Maybe I was just having a dopey week - it does happen, you know.

This reminds me an awful lot of a less strident version of Ravens & Chimes’ brilliant Reichenbach Falls last year, albeit without the ringing piano.  The guitar rhythms are slightly awkward, the whole presentation slipping from the melodic to the vaguely off key and abrupt, and then backagain without much warning.

It’s almost like they’re a band that could write a perfect pop song if they wanted, but they just chose to baffle everyone by smuggling it into their lives under the disguise of an album of discordant indie.  It shouldn’t take long to grow on you, but it may start quite low on your radar.  First time through it just didn’t sound very good, but once I’d separated the sound from the standard difficult indie guitar album and the hooks from the standard radio pop and started to understand quite how brilliantly the two are put together then it really started to climb swiftly in my affections until suddenly I realised that I’d decided that it really is superb.

And what do they do once the growl of the guitar and the slide of the music threatens to get a little much?  They slip in a gorgeous splash of drummer Sarah Houle’s gorgeous vocals or breezy harmonies, just to set you neatly back off balance once again.  It’s excellent; Mrs. Toad will hate it, but I think it’s great!

Ghostkeeper - Cruisin’ the Chev

Ghostkeeper - Afternoon Girl

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The Waiting Room is Father Fucking Christmas

DC is giving away all sorts of goodies on The Waiting Room this week. In fact, he’s giving away all sorts of things that I would rather like to win myself, bar a couple of things which I have already. I was supposed to write this last week, but given it appears I have some sort of Black Belt in Fuckwittery, I managed to miss it by a week. Idiot.

Anyhow, all you have to do is listen to last week’s episode and email DC with the weight, pounds or kilos, of his suitcase when he flew back from the States the other week. The podcast itself is mostly about that trip and the bands he encountered there, so there should be bags of good things to listen to. I’m just downloading it myself, so I’ll be listening in a wee while.

Last week’s Waiting Room - the one with the competition.

Anyway, the goodies to give away are as follows:

The Builders & Butchers / Loch Lomond split 12″ - signed by The Builders & The Butchers
The Builders & Butchers Debut CD Album - signed by The Builders & The Butchers
Samantha Crain & The Midnight Shivers T-Shirt - size Adult Medium (US)
Anni Rossi CD Albums Scandia + Insects Kissing
Parethetical Girls 7″ Picture Disc + CD Album Safe As Houses
The Jones Street Boys CD Album Overcome
Or, The Whale CD Album Light Poles & Pines

I can promise you, that Builders & the Butchers album is still the best thing I’ve heard since I tiptoed in to the blogosphere a couple of years ago, and Loch Lomond are brilliant. Samantha Crain is bloody marvellous too, and I’m really looking forward to seeing her at Pickathon in a couple of weeks, and to hearing her new album. When Mrs. Toad and I get drunk, The Builders & the Butchers is pretty much the first thing we reach for in the evening. The only row is whether to play Black Dresses or Spanish Death Song first.

The Builders & the Butchers - Bottom of the Lake

Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers - Bananafish

Loch Lomond - Nothern Knees, Trees, and Lights

Beck - Modern Guilt

You know, this is actually pretty good, for the most part. I’ll confess, my expectations were pretty bloody low for this album, given the extreme variability of Beck’s recent work.  Actually, the extreme variability of all of his work.

I loved Mutations, I liked Guero, I sort of liked Odelay and Mellow Gold, I like most of Sea Change, but albums like Midnite Vultures and The Information rather passed me by.  Maybe I need a Best of Beck playlist, and then I could just give up on expecting his albums to be great, because pretty much none of them are.  Almost all of them contain great bits, some more than others, but really only Mutations is great all the way through.

This particular outing is not bad though, and explores something of an indie-rock vibe, before settling into slightly more uneasily electronic-tinged stuff that will come as no surprise to his more regular listeners. It actually sounds not at all unlike Radiohead a lot of the time. Maybe the man just needs to release six or seven track mini-albums in order to focus on the best stuff.  If you trimmed his albums down to that length he’d look like a genius, but for the most part the material ends up being a bit thin for twelve song long players.

This is no exception.  Gamma Ray is good, Orphans is excellent, Chemtrails and Modern Guilt are both good, but then things drift a little before picking up right at the end.  So as I said, pretty good.  But that’s about it.

Beck - Orphans

Beck - Modern Guilt

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So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish

I was reading Marcy’s excellent Lost in Your Inbox today and happened across a post of hers that gave me pause for thought, and just a little wistful remembering.

The last few years of my life have been relatively stable. I have been in Edinburgh for about three years, and was in London for three and a half before that, but I haven’t always been so sedentary. In the years preceding London, in reverse order, I managed the following: Cambridge - 18 months, Manchester - 6 months, Montreal - three months, Cape Cod - a year, Glasgow - ten months, Cape Cod - four months, Grongingen - ten months, Glasgow - three years, Manchester - one year, Vienna - three years, Singapore - three years. In other words, over the course of about fifteen years I upped sticks and vanished about fifteen times.

It wasn’t quite as crazy as that, but it was quite hectic, and most of the time it involved abandoning pretty much my entire life and all my friends and disappearing off with no more than a couple of suitcases to my name. Because of growing up in international schools where people changed countries, and hence schools, on a regular basis, I have seen so many disrupted friendships dwindle as well-intentioned letter-writing slowly tailed off. Consequently since high school, whenever I move country I tend to just cut the cord and go.

It’s very, very rare that I stay in touch with anyone from my past actually. Once gone, I tend to just look forward and try and make a life wherever it is that I have ended up and reading Marcy’s words I was reminded of just how many people I have ended up just abandoning to the swirling mists of my past - how many good friendships have been aborted, how many shared things have been forgotten, how much human kindness has gone unremembered.

It’s sad, I suppose, but it’s not a bad thing, I don’t think. There’s little point in stringing these things out beyond their natural lifespan. Most friendships are surprisingly context-dependent and there have been quite a few times when I have known them to have an uneccessary cloud cast over them by ill-advised and utlimately fruitless attempts to keep them going once the environment in which they first grew has ceased to exist. Nowadays I tend to just wrap them up in my history as good, complete entities and let them rest there. Some day a song or a coincidence or a conversation will remind me of them and there will be one of those warm, nostalgic moments where you relive that time for a little while, before setting it carefully back in place and returning to the present.

So it is sad I suppose. Or melancholy. But there’s a warm, happy core to the sadness too, so I still think it’s a good thing in most ways. Ironic, too, that I ended up marrying a girl I knew from high school and hadn’t seen for the best part of ten years by the time we met up again.

Tom Waits - Anywhere I Lay My Head

Michelle Shocked - Anchorage

Gene - I Can’t Decide If She Really Loves Me

Supergrass - Moving

Tom Waits - Shiver Me Timbers

Silver Jews - Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

I feel a little trepidatious reviewing an album by a group with such a pedigree, given I really know very little about them. I remember buying Bright Flight back in 2001, but I really never got into it so I kind of forgot about them, if I’m being honest. Groups like this, with their reputations and their all-star cast, are the sort that despite my generally reactionary nature, I feel I should like. It’s the kind of thing that tends to rear its head every time a new release comes around, and I find myself feeling compelled to feel something. Beck is a bit like that for me, as well.

So for all I’ve largely ignored the Silver Jews for years now, it’s always felt like a bit of a failing on my part, so I’m glad to be enjoying this new one. I’m not overwhelmed with joy or anything, but it’s a pretty good album. I suppose everyone knows better than I do what they sound like, but just for the record it sounds like classic alt-country, so archetypal in fact that it could be used as the epitome of the genre. There’s some rumbling Johnny Cash in the vocals and a lighter, more sunny roll to the music itself.

I wouldn’t describe it as jaunty, per se, nor is it particularly leaning towards that sort of West Coast pop that some people in this territory seem to employ. There’s just something satisfied and confident about the sound of it. I suppose when you’ve been on the scene as long as the likes of Malkmus and Berman then that might just come quite naturally. It’s nice though, and I’m sort of pleased I finally found a way to start to appreciate this band.

Silver Jews - Aloysius, Bluegrass Drummer

Silver Jews - Strange Victory, Strange Defeat

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