Wow, double label-spam in one day. Outrageous! What has the internet come to.

Anyhow, next week we will be announcing the result of the great Beer vs. Records face-off, but we have a couple more tunes to put your way first. This is from Le Thug Lager and is available on the download card which comes with the 4-pack of beer, which you can still get in The Good Spirit Co. in Glasgow, any branch of Vino in Edinburgh and I think possibly Rough Trade East in London. The beer is bloody lovely, but this tune is absolutely something else. I remember after we recorded these guys all of us just sitting down saying ‘fuck me, was that as good as I think it was’ to one another, generally followed by ‘yes, yes I think it bloody was’!

You can, of course, get the Split 12″ here. And it too is fucking ace!

Never have I been more grateful to be out of town than when this was being filmed. Whilst it is pretty damn great to have a video on the label which involves George Bush and Tony Blair in knickers and suspenders, as well as a lingerie-clad David Cameron flicking the Vs at Alex Salmond, a lot of my pals were roped in to ‘appear’ in this one, and I was able to avoid this entirely by being in a different country. Phew.

Anyhow, it’s turned out brilliantly, so a massive thanks to the team who put it together. As you can see, it’s far above the usual production standards of the DIY shite we tend to cobble together, which gives me an odd sense of both pride and awkwardness. Does that mean we’re professional now? Nah.

Anyhow the album, Murderopolis, is out on Monday and we are what is technically known as very fucking excited. The band have a got a wee tour at the end of June to support the release and will be going on a bigger one in the Autumn, so don’t miss out on your chance to see them – they really are excellent live.  All the dates are here, so have a look for when they’ll be nearest your place, and keep an eye on their site for the September tour dates too, once we start confirming them. Oh, and of course, don’t forget to go here and buy the album – it’s all about the money, after all. Cough cough.

As those of you who are unfortunate enough to follow my incessant, vacuous rambling on social media will probably know by now, we have released the first single from the new Adam Stafford album, and it is called Please.

We struggled a bit with the singles for this record actually, because for all there are a couple of tunes which are obviously more easily digestible and immediate than the rest of the album and which I suppose most people would call the ‘obvious singles’, they aren’t actually all that representative of the kind of record you would be buying. For all Please sits nicely on the album itself, the overall record is odder than this one song might lead you to imagine, so what do you do?

Well, we could always have made the awesome title track or something like Invisible Migration the tunes we used, but then we’d be sending a seven and a half minute long, densely layered and distinctly weird tune out to radio and expecting them to play it. And that, with the exception of one or two shows, quite simply isn’t going to happen. So do we hobble our chances with radio and trust to our mailing list and social media contacts to make sure that is a worthwhile pay-off? Or do we just send out the most hummable tunes and hope no-one gets too much of a shock when they buy the album? I don’t know, and perhaps that’s a conversation for a different time.

In any case, this is a splendid, splendid tune, gently soulful, with a hard-panned mix which reflects Adam’s fascination with old Motown records. I think I mentioned before that we’ll be co-releasing this with our pals at Kingfisher Bluez in Vancouver, giving Adam every chance of achieving what we at Song, by Toad like to modestly refer to as Total World Domination. I am really looking forward to getting my hands on this album, just for my own sake, and I think that’s how record labels should be run – so there!