As per last year we shall once again be streaming the Song, by Toad New Year’s House Gig live for those of you who are either at home sick or in a different time zone and hence grateful of the entertainment.

Again, as the player slows the whole page down I’ll put it below the break, so just click through and you’ll be able to see Kev from River of Slime play a short set around 10pm, Neil from Meursault play solo acoustic from about 10:45pm and then another half hour set (or so) from Kev at about half past midnight. Do say hello in the chat thingy too, so I know you’re there. I may have to type very quietly, but I will respond! Live stream player below the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

(Full Toad Session can be found here.)

So, I may have been a little tardy to make this an actual Christmas present, but The Savings and Loan would like to make you all a present of their self-titled EP, which you can download for free from their Bandcamp page.

This EP formed the basis for their debut album Today I Need Light, which we released on Song, by Toad Records at the end of 2010. They then added a couple of songs, re-recorded a couple and embellished a couple more with a little extra instrumentation to flesh out the full album, and the band wanted to make this available as a free download so you can see where it all came from.

I actually received a copy of the EP anonymously before I ever started Song, by Toad Records and that’s how we ended up working with the band.  Enjoy.

01.Easter – Somethin’ American This might be the first time such an unknown song by such an unknown band has ever been given top spot on any of my end of year lists, but they were absolutely brilliant live when they played up here in September, and this song is just fantastic, as are the other two songs on their Soundcloud page.  It’s less lo-fi than a lot of the DIY stuff I’ve listened to this year, and the squalling solos which tease Easter’s songs to an end evoke loads of old school US indie music.  This gives quite tight pop songs a loose, expressive, emotive finale and when they get going live these bits really are amazing.

02.Crystal Swells – Patent Trolls This is another absolute peach of a song which went straight from a PR email to the very front of my brain for the entire year.  I had this on tape in the van for months, and I go back to it again and again.  This one is probably more menacing, compared to the reckless pace of the rest of the album, but that opening riff and the crescendo to which the song builds are just absolutely fucking blinding.

03.Ringo Deathstarr – Do It Every Time Alright, this is the highest-placed pure pop song on this list.  A simple guitar rhythm and a simple tune, delivered with plenty of pace and energy.  This is one to leap around to, pure and simple, and just about the best one of its kind this year.

04.The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 I played this on the podcast last week and struggled to introduce it then, as I probably will now. Firstly, I have hardly heard anyone sing anything about the twin towers attacks without sounding just a little bit forced and uncomfortable when doing so, but this manages it with some aplomb.  And then to have that kind of subject matter twinned with such and incredibly rousing song is an odd and absolutely brilliant juxtaposition.

05.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit This was one of those ‘what the fuck am I even listening to?’ moments, the first time I heard it. It’s old fashioned music, what I can only really describe in my cultural ignorance as soda-stream pop, and it’s not that unusual exactly, there’s just something weird about it.  It’s a bit unsettling, a bit out of focus somehow, and at the same time absolutely brilliant.

06.Josh T Pearson – Thou Art Loosed The solo album may not hark back to Lift to Experience all that much, but this song, the first on the album, seems to have just enough of that shimmering texture to link the two eras of Josh T. Pearson’s music together.  And that repeated “I’m off to save the world” seems to rather sadly presage the tales of personal failure which make this album so uncomfortably compelling.

08.Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon A muffled, growly mess, but it’s got such momentum and drive that I can’t stop listening to it.  It’s rough, muffled, growly shoegazey guitar stuff with a great riff.

07.Jonnie Common – Photosynth Alright, it’s possible I might have included this when it was a Down the Tiny Steps song, so including it again seems like a bit of a cheat.  Doesn’t matter though, this is pop brilliance.  And the video was shot in our back garden too!

09.Timber Timbre – Woman Is that seriously a sax on there?  Why yes, yes indeed it is, and it’s brilliant.  This is one of the biggest songs on the album and one of the most surprising too, given the relatively extravagant instrumentation.

10.Milk Maid – Back Of Your Knees I am absolutely delighted with the band’s Toad Session recordings, not least because I was so apprehensive about the actual recording process.  This might be my album highlight, as much for its more raucous live incarnation as this excellent version.

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1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

 Lach, whose album Ramshackle Heart came out on Song, by Toad Records in July this year, and scored a clean sweep of great reviews in every single glossy music monthly in the country, which is not something we have ever managed before.

Anyhow, as you may have noticed in August, the engine room behind the New York Antifolk scene has now moved to Edinburgh and as such is the subject of a documentary on BBC Radio Scotland, which broadcasts in about forty-five minutes, and again on Sunday the 1st January, and will be available on the iPlayer after that.

I am not entirely certain, I have to confess, about how overseas people can hear the thing, but I am sure that the more determined of you can figure something out. Kids can crack this shit in minutes these days, can’t they?

11.David Thomas Broughton – Ain’t Got No Sole The first song we heard from DTB’s fantastic album, and perhaps the poppiest of the lot.  Catchy, unusual and immensely hummable.

12.Kurt Vile – Baby’s Arms Another album from which it is tricky to extricate just one song as a highlight, but for some reason I’m giving this the nod above Jesus Fever or Puppet to the Man. I think it’s the most late night and glass of red winey song on the album, but it’s close.

13.The Sandwitches – Lightfoot Are you still allowed to describe songs as joyous romps these days?  Because that’s what this feels like, an idiosyncratic, gleeful romp of a song.

14.Josh T Pearson – Country Dumb It’s hard to pick out just one song from this record, but this one seems to stand out for some reason.  Maybe it’s related to the number of times I’ve heard it and the circumstances, but there’s an unsettling fatalism to this which lifts it above the autobiographical confessional of the rest of the album.

15.John Knox Sex Club – Above Us the Waves This kind of sincere, epic grandiosity is really difficult to pull off without coming across as a bit po-faced or joyless, but this is just spell-binding.

16.Jonnie Common – Summer Is For Going Places There are so many incredible songs on this Jonnie Common album I could easily have picked four or five for the Festive Fifty, but I didn’t want the whole thing to be dominated by one or two artists.  Summer is For Going Places is as laid back and infectious as the rest of Master of None.

17.Crystal Swells – Mellow Californian Another masterpiece of feral, overloaded lo-fi brilliance.  And no matter how messy they make this stuff, Crystal Swells always make sure the pop song isn’t lost, so it may not sound like it, but I reckon they know exactly what they’re doing.

18.Yoofs – John Actor is Monkfish I love the chorus on this, the vocal refrain, how well-controlled the momentum of the song is – and once again we have an unknown DIY band with two songs in my Festive Fifty.  Keep an eye on Art is Hard Records in the new year.

19.Hookworms – Teen Dreams For unheard of DIY bands to produce stuff with this much oomph is unusual.  This is from a self-titled 12″ now out on Faux Discx, and it’s, well, epic, I suppose is the best way to describe it.

20.Easter – Damp Patch For a band with three songs on a Soundcloud page and nothing else, I am a bit wary of over-stating my own enthusiasm for this band.  They have a sort of slow-burn to them, but then that spills over into raucous endings, a bit proggy, a bit krauty and all messy.  This track isn’t their most aggressive, but it’s bloody great.

21.Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Of Scottish Blood And Sympathies Epic, post-rocky, shoegazey awesomeness from a band who threw their biggest beast of a track down right at the very beginning of their debut album.

22.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams The weird sense of otherworldly fuzz on this record made it absolutely compelling from the first listen.  It’s like listening to a lost gem from the sixties with a brain so addled you can barely make out the stereo.

23.Jarad Miles – Miles Away Rocketship is a lovely record, and there are some gorgeous, touching songs on it, but perhaps the quietest, most low-key one of the lot caught my attention the most – touching and full of pathos.

24.Pillars and Tongues – Thank you Oaky Grandiose and beautiful, rich and enveloping – if one song sums up why you should own and love this album then I reckon it might be this one.

25.The Sandwitches – Heaviest Head In The West As much as the jaunty, carefree pop songs on this album caught my attention, one of the best songs on the album is this one, which is both far darker and contains one of the most arresting, enigmatic squeals in pop history.

26.Elbow – Lippy Kids I am not all that into the new Elbow album, but this track is an absolute blinder.  It’s gorgeous, and contains some of Guy Garvey’s most poignant lyrics.

27.Crystal Stilts – Shake The Shackles It wasn’t all that consistent an album, but there are some cracking songs – sort of like the Ringo Deathstarr album in that sense – and this is the best of them.  The crooned delivery almost has a New Romantic edge to it, but the rest of the song is shoegazey, garagey goodness.

28.FOUND – Machine Age Dancing The wonky breakdown in this had me sending text messages to the band the first time I heard it.  Songs like Vincent Gallo and Anti-Climb Paint may have been well familiar to FOUND fans by the time Factorycraft came out, but they kept plenty of gems to themselves, and this is one of them.

29.Tom Waits – Hell Broke Luce This is far from a vintage album, but the deranged crashing about of this song is probably as close as Bad as Me gets to vintage Tom Waits.

30.Palms – Wolf Despite the really, really rough recording (those cymbal crescendoes actually quite hurt my ears) this is still clearly a brilliant song.  It’s a more brooding approach to garage rock (and I use that term, as with all genre terms, extremely loosely) than some of the more frantic stuff I’ve heard this year, and is a song I played something like ten times consecutively the first time I heard it.

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1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

Here’s the first installment of the Song, by Toad Festive Fifty for 2011 – a collection of the fifty songs I have been enjoying the most this year.  The fifty themselves and the precise order can hardly be described as definitive of course, because you know how fluid things like ‘favourite’ songs can be, but roughly speaking this is the stuff I have been enjoying the most in 2011.

Just as a note, in order to make it a broader representation of the bands I’ve liked the most, I have made it harder and harder for bands to have a song featured on the list the more they already had on it.  So a band’s second song got a relatively free pass, but their third would be nudged down a wee bit, to try and encourage variation and stuff like that.

31.Anna-Anna – Mirrors of America I’m aware there are very few women represented on this list, and a lot of those who are seem to share the ghostly, incredibly still delivery, albeit in a more folky setting, with Anna-Anna.

32.Sonny and the Sunsets – Home And Exile I could have half of this album on here, but this one always stood out, as a gem of retro, slightly woozy pop.

33.Quiet Americans – Summer House Straightforward lo-fi garage stuff this, but a hugely, hugely hummable tune.

34.TV Girl – Benny and the Jetts Simple and enjoyable summery pop, but another one so hugely infectious you simply can’t stop humming it.

35.Yoofs – Sidewalk I love the guitar effect, the riff, the energy, everything.  Keep an eye out for this lot on the brilliant Art is Hard Records in the new year.

36.Zed Penguin – This Town A bit of a departure for an Edinburgh band, this. I think my favourite part might be the gorgeously tremulous guitar sound Matthew gets from his hand-built amp.

37.David Thomas Broughton – River Lay On an album as good as Outbreeding it takes an awful lot to stand out, but this does.  For someone who can be a little obtuse, this is such a warm, welcoming record and this track epitomises it as well as most.

38.Evil Hand – Returned In Time These guys don’t exactly push themselves forward, and their releases can be a little erratic, but when they nail it their songs are as good as anyone in Scotland at the moment.

39.Powerdove – Sickly City Ghostly, slightly disorientating, and hypnotic.  This is possibly the finest song on an album which makes a gorgeous job of using minimal instrumentation and glacial pace to turn those three characteristics into a truly beautiful album.

40.Emit Bloch – Dorothy (New Version) Given how much I loved the gorgeous acoustic version of this song which I heard last year, it’s almost inconceivable that I should then also love a big glossy pop version too.  But I do.  Good songwriting, it seems, trumps even my lazy habits.

41.The Honey Pies – Hair of the Dog Boisterous and enormous fun, this album is a gleeful romp through rock ‘n’ roll cliches, but done with such verve that you can’t help but enjoy it.  This is a bit of a Clash throwback, the most raucous song on the album and probably my favourite.

42.The Low Anthem – Ghost Woman Blues After the genius of Boeing 737, The Low Anthem show they can have just as much impact at the opposite end of the spectrum with this gorgeous ballad.

43.Loch Awe – I Will Drift into 10,000 Streams For a band who do things I like and things I don’t, this demo came out of nowhere a few months ago, and I love it.  The slow drum beat, the really sparingly used electric guitar, the way the two voices work together… fine work!

44.The Blue Runes – Stream For me to get into a classic/psych rock EP made by a band from Puerto Rico wouldn’t have been a particularly great bet at the start of the year, but The Blue Runes released a brilliant EP, and this track is probably the biggest track on it.

45.Adam Stafford – Shot-down You Summer Wannabes A cracking song by a guy whose music I only got into embarrassingly late in the day, considering how long ago his debut solo album was released.  Nevertheless, a couple of storming live performances did the trick, and I am now entirely converted.

46.Horsecollar – Christopher A jaunty little piano line stands out immediately, but the rest of this song is bloody great too – a presumably unheard monologue delivered to a friend, and a stand out on a fine album.

47.Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On A gorgeous song on a gorgeous album.  This record is a little more approachable and a little less creepy than the last, and lush, lovely songs like this one are the reason.

48.Lady Lazarus – Nazarite Oath Ghostly, unsettling and lovely at the same time, this has a lot in common with the excellent Powerdove.

49.Silverbacks – Atta Boyz Simple this one: a cracking pop tune, good riff, and extremely hummable.

50.Pet – What You Building Another song which came as a bit of a surprise, given Edinburgh doesn’t generally do this kind of music all that well, but this is lovely.

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1-10 | 11-30 | 31-50

 Here we are at the penultimate podcast of the year, and the one immediately preceding Christmas.  I really don’t like 99% of Christmas music so there’s pretty close to none of it at all on here, although I have made a couple of exceptions as a lazy sort of nod to the season.  Let’s face it, if the druids can be arsed dancing about like idiots around Stonehenge and people can fall out over half-defrosted turkeys then I can probably make the effort to shove a couple of token musical nods onto a single podcast, can’t I.

I actually take a lot of this podcast from my recently-published albums of the year list, and from my as-yet-unpublished Festive Fifty, so it’s a bit of a yearly roundup as well.

And in fact, seeing as Christmas is a Sunday, I won’t actually be posting until Boxing Day now, so this will be the last post before Christmas so umm, in the off-chance I don’t bump into you on Facebook, Twitter or down the pub, I better wish you Happy Christmas now, hadn’t I.

Direct download: Toadcast #206 – The Scroogecast

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01. Tom Lehrer – A Christmas Carol (00.23)
02. The Black Tambourines – Bad Days (05.09)
03. The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 (10.42)
04. Timber Timbre – Woman (13.31)
05. Sons of Joy – Pig (20.25)
06. The Japanese War Effort – Our Land Could be Your Life (24.51)
07. Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand (31.37)
08. Earth Girl Helen Brown – Girls of My Dreams (35.39)
09. Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon (41.37)
10. The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name (47.46)
11. Sons of Joy – In the Bleak Midwinter (58.07)
12. Sons of Joy – Coventry Carol (60.00)

 So, ta-daaah, here we go, what all right-thinking people have been enjoying most this year.  And if you haven’t been enjoying these most this year, then dammit, what do you do when I tell you what opinions to have about music, ignore me?  Surely such a thing is inconceivable.

As those of you who listened to last week’s podcast, where I played two songs from the more forgotten albums on my first ever Albums of the Year list (2004), I am actually more fascinated by these lists in retrospect than at the time.

Looking back at this list in five or ten years, the interesting albums won’t be the ones I am still listening to, but the ones I am not.  I am sure practical details, like whether I have them on vinyl or tape or just digitally, will play a role, as will drifting fads and fashions.  But sometimes it really does just seem to be random – albums just drift out of favour for no really obvious reason.  Or, as has been the case with Kurt Vile this year, some albums seem to remain favourites for ages, despite not necessarily being the ones which grabbed you the first time.

So enjoy, this is what I have been mostly enjoying this year.  And a fine list it is too, I hope you will agree.

 10: The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient This is a very late entrant to this list, because for some reason I didn’t really listen to this album at all until the last month or two, but it’s bloody brilliant, managing to drift from ambient dreamers to Springsteen-like rockers to melancholy acoustica perfectly seamlessly. And the other joy of it is: another back catalogue to explore, too!

The War on Drugs – Your Love is Calling My Name

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 9: Pillars & Tongues – The Pass and Crossings This is a stunning album from what I think must be my favourite record label of the year: Empty Cellar.  They have released three albums in my top twenty this year, and worked with the artist who released another, and that’s before we get into the singles.  This album is grandiose, beautiful and all those words like sweeping and elegiac which journalists love to use so much.  Except in this case it actually is.

Pillars & Tongues – Palms to Tell

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 8: Milk Maid – Yucca This record is actually a collection of lo-fi home recordings, but somehow the end result has got real style. Not charmingly rough and ready style, although it has that too, but a real sense of swagger.  It’s not as frantic and noisy as a lot of its lo-fi brethren this year, either.  Recording Milk Maid’s Toad Session was probably one of my favourite things this year.

Milk Maid – Can’t You See

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 7: The Sandwitches – Mrs. Jones’ Cookies A little like Sonny & the Sunsets, this album doesn’t entirely click on every single song, but it does on most.  And beyond the pop tunes, there’s a wild, wailing quality to this which had me scrunching up my face in incomprehension for the first few listens.  ‘What the f…  did they just… are they…serious?‘ It didn’t take too long for it to click though, and I have since been foisting this record on visitors to our house all year.

The Sandwitches – Summer of Love

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 6: David Thomas Broughton – Outbreeding This is a disciplined and polished pop record from a man more commonly known for spending most of his gigs figuring out just how much he can antagonise his audience before they give up altogether.  A favourite of mine since I first saw him at the End of the Road Festival in something like 2008 or 2009, I couldn’t have been much more surprised by this album, but it’s fucking brilliant nevertheless.

David Thomas Broughton – Nature

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  5: Kurt Vile – Smoke Ring for my Halo I am getting into ‘every damn list on the internet has this album on it’ territory here, but balls to it, I still love this record.  I actually struggle to explain why though, because it’s not gripping, weird, striking or anything.  It is, in fact, an entirely straightforward collection of songs crooned over fairly minimal guitar, bass and drums, at a relatively middle of the road pace.  But for some reason I find the whole album one I have gone back to again and again and again all year.

Kurt Vile – Puppet to the Man

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 4: Crystal Swells – Goethe Head Soup This is one of the mostly ferociously-recorded things I’ve heard all year, with barely the slightest quarter given to the listener’s more delicate aural sensibilities.  But underneath all the buzzing, distorted racket, and despite the headache-inducing nine-minute kick in the ears that is the title track, this mini-album holds a half dozen of the finest pop songs I’ve heard all year.

Crystal Swells – Waco, Wasilla, Waikiki

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  3: Jonnie Common – Master of None Pure genius, this one.  This album has charm to spare, but it’s not as straightforward as it seems.  The actual sounds Jonnie uses in assembling his songs are really quite unusual, but the results are pure, joyous pop.  He seems to have pulled off the trick of being an experimental musician, but keeping that fact completely undercover, and making us all think he’s created the pop record of the year.  Which of course he has.

Jonnie Common – Hand-Hand

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2: Timber Timbre – Creep on Creepin’ On I don’t know what it is about the ghostly voodoo stuff these guys do which I love so much.  Certainly with the increasingly deep arrangements there is a certain theatricality to this record, but then instrumentals like Obelisk and Swamp Magic could as easily be found in one of Tom Waits’ more flamboyant nightmares as they could on the stage, or indeed a contemporary pop record. Creep On Creepin’ On is never pompous or overblown though, and displays a remarkable deftness of touch, particularly with the more

Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On

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  1: Josh T. Pearson – Last of the Country Gentlemen I hesitated a long time before putting Last of the Country Gentlemen at the top of this list. Apart from the fact that at times the word enjoyable isn’t exactly the right one to apply, the whole album seems to belong in a slightly different category to everything else.  It’s just different to all the other albums, and it feels difficult to actually compare the emotional response to this to the emotional response I’ve had to everything else.  But in the end, between SXSW, Homegame, an aborted and a successful Toad Session, the number of times I’ve heard these songs and the effect they’ve had on me, there is little doubt that this, even if it isn’t my favourite album of the year per se, is still the album which dominated 2011 and is almost certainly the album by which I will remember it.

Josh T. Pearson – Thou Art Loosed

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11-20

 Right, all the amateurs have had a go, and we’ve seen disturbing amounts of Bon Iver and PJ Harvey on lists from Bradford to Boston this year, but it’s time for those of us who really know what’s good and what isn’t to step up and set the record straight.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the definitive list of what’s been good this year, so you can all stop pretending to care what Drowned in Sound or Pitchfork think, and find out what you should really be thinking about music.

That’s all bollocks of course, and I am not stupid enough to believe that my list is any better than anyone else’s (apart from not having PJ Harvey, Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes on it of course), this is just a list of what I have been enjoying the most in 2011.  As I’ve been listening to a lot of DIY garagey stuff, I’ve actually listened to an awful lot of EPs and mini-albums and stuff like that, so I’ve been pretty loose with my definition of what an album actually is, so you might well think a couple of these picks are cheating a little bit.

 20: Horsecollar – You’ve a Big Heart, Sweet Tiger For a DIY pop album recorded on what appears to be the tiniest of budgets, this record more than makes up for its technical shortcomings by having charm, wit and pathos all engagingly interwoven to produce an album which is both hummable and incredibly likeable.

Horsecollar – Courtland Street

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  19. John Knox Sex Club – Raise Ravens I actually think this record is slightly uneven, which may enrage a few people I know who think it is entirely brilliant.  When these guys hit the heights, though, they are absolutely spellbinding, both on record and live.

John Knox Sex Club – Katie Cruel

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  18. The Quiet Americans – Medicine Alright, alright I know that I suppose I should strictly call this an EP, but I told you I was going to be a bit loose with that particular definition on this list.  I bought this on tape a month or two ago and it has hardly been out of the van stereo ever since: simply awesome pop tunes, and that’s why it’s on this list.

The Quiet Americans – Be Alone

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  17. Edinburgh School for the Deaf – New Youth Bible These guys have rather inevitably gone a little quiet since they lost a guitarist to the charms of London earlier in the year.  Nevertheless, before he left, they fortunately found time to crank out this ambitious, epic bit of grumbly shoegaze.

Edinburgh School for the Deaf – Love is Terminal

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  16. Dirty Beaches – Badlands This is perhaps the pinnacle of my fad for unlistenably muddy recordings, which has rather dominated my listening this year.  It’s murky as fuck, but there’s something enthrallingly obtuse about it at the same time which, even months later, I still can’t put my finger on exactly.

Dirty Beaches – Sweet 17

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  15. Powerdove – Be Mine This is an incredibly beautiful record of wonderfully constructed music.  A combination of the skeletally minimal arrangements and the whispered, barely audible vocals just draws you in, to the point you’re almost staring at the stereo.  Also, unlike a couple of other albums which employed this approach this year, it is short enough and varied enough to be constantly engaging from start to finish.

Powerdove – Impact

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  14. Former Bullies – Golden Chains Former Bullies have been around for a good few years now, and I am admittedly rather late to the party.  They are part of a Manchester scene which I have really, really enjoyed exploring this year, and this album couldn’t have been better timed.  It’s as lo-fi as a lot of their contemporaries, but less garagey or loud, opting more for a laid back pop vibe instead.

Former Bullies – Golden Chains

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  13. Earth Girl Helen Brown – Story of an Earth Girl The first song I heard from this release dazzled and thrilled me in equal measure.  Following up on how the record came about introduced me to Sonny and the Sunsets, to The Sandwitches, to the 100 Records project, to Endless Nest and Empty Cellar, and was as such probably the single most effective mp3 emailed to me by a PR person since I started the blog.  And as for the album/mini album/EP/whatever itself, well it really is just fucking brilliant.

Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit

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  12. FOUND – Factorycraft It’s hard to tell what I actually think of this album.  I’d already danced like a fool to most of these songs so many times by the time the album came out, that it felt entirely familiar pretty much from the word go. But we had friends visit recently, and played them this, and it was the act of playing it to people entirely unfamiliar with the band that I remember exactly how good this record is. It is straightforward indie, by FOUND’s standards, but by anyone else’s it’s a really fascinating pop record, full of surprises and weird bits, but still, crucially, hooks as well.

FOUND – I’ll Wake With a Seismic Head No More

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  11. Sonny & the Sunsets – Hit After Hit This is one of those titles which almost entirely sums up the record itself: one pop gem after another.  I described it in my review, if I remember, as ‘Hill Valley 1955 doesn’t give a fuck’ because it is an odd combination of soda pop funtimes and a weird, slacker undertone which is maddeningly hard to pin down. Neverless, with tunes like this it can be what it bloody well wants, because this album is excellent.

Sonny & the Sunsets – Heart of Sadness

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1-10

 Well cock and balls this is brilliant.  Really fucking brilliant.  Generally I hate Christmas music, as you probably know by now.  It either sounds schmalzy and lame coming from indie bands when they play it straight or, if they don’t, it tends to sound too self-consciously anti-Christmas instead, and hence forced and awkward.

There are some notable exceptions of course, but this might be the best one yet.  I think.  I’m not sure.  It sets about Christmas music with such gleeful malice that I doubt you can really get away with calling it Christmas music by the end.  You certainly couldn’t play this at dinner.  Or indeed with other people in the house, most of the time.  But it’s fucking awesome.

Recorded without rehearsal in the space of a few hours, and presented on Bandcamp for the price of a donation to East Anglian Children’s Hospices, this takes a raucous shriek and a sawing violin and beats the living shit out of festive tunes for about half an hour in the best style possible.  I reviewed their recent EP a little while back, and this has a similarly joyously over the top approach.

Some is played with a straight face, however.  A couple of the tracks are actually rather lovely violin renditions of traditional carols which, robbed of their annoyingly religious lyrics, are really bloody lovely. Other tracks, however, like Go Tell it on the Mountain, are torn to such shreds and performed with such gusto that you have to assume they really are having a laugh.

Never mind though, this is by far the best Christmas album I have heard.  Fuck Low, this is better.

Sons of Joy – Go Tell it On the Mountain

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