Jonnie is a Glasgow-based artist, recently signed to Manchester label Red Deer Club, who was formerly known as Down the Tiny Steps (Fence Records) and is currently part of Inspector Tapehead (Song, By Toad). This is actually a self-release but seeing as we are both friends and fans of his, he kindly offered to let us make it available in the Toad shop.

Jonnie invited this rich cast of talent to record one of their songs in a minimal format and persuaded them to grant him carte blanche in adding instrumentation as he saw fit. The result is a strong and eclectic long player of unique arrangements which will be launched with a one-off performance at The Captain’s Rest.  The launch will feature 9 of the 10 acts, with each act playing 2 songs in intimate fashion.

“This project was about getting lots of people who I think are immensely talented onto a release together. I’m very proud of the album and if it turns any fans of one act onto any of the 9 others, then I’ll have achieved what I hoped to.” – Jonnie

Jonnie Common presents DESKJOB – album preview (paper)clips by Jonnie Common

“Jonnie Common has pulled a sonorous blinder with Deskjob” - The List
“Finely-produced electronic interjections and scrappy folk shanties” – The Scotsman
“bouncing astral straddling ditties that share the Beta Band’s penchant for a scued up, ragtag tune” - Drowned in Sound

Hi-res album artwork.

“Gentle and spooky guitar pop, alternately sadly sweet and disturbingly arrhythmic.”

This is the second album by Montreal’s Trips and Falls. I’ve actually had a copy of this record since very shortly after releasing their debut in early 2010, but various circumstances have conspired to nudge the release date back to this Autumn.

Their flair for song titles is obviously still in evidence, but in general this album is perhaps a little less weird than the last.  Lyrically it’s still just as bittersweet, but the music is a little gentler and if anything the sad duets are a little more dominant on People Have to Be Told.

01. I’ll Do the Dishes, You Do the Laundry
02. Good People are Always so Sure They’re Right
03. I Learned Sunday Morning, on a Wednesday
04. Is That My Soul That Calls Upon My Name?
05. Marginally More Than Mildly Annoying
06. That is a Big Door!
07. This is all Going to End Badly
08. Why Should Now be Normal?
09. That’s What She Said

Charlie Ward is a professional sound engineer, and the rough, old-fashioned style of this record will come as something of a surprise to those who are more familiar with his clear and lovely recordings for the likes of Frivolous Laura and Katzgraben.

Moving to London to study and do sound work, he spent the last three or four years writing songs for a band that never quite existed despite his efforts. After a while, he decided to do it himself. The result is The Party’s Over, an album recorded in London and Glasgow, in rehearsal rooms and houses, on tapes and discs through valves and converters.

01. Portland Street Pt. 2
02. Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone
03. Fante’s Last Stand (right-click, save as for free download)
04. The Werewolf Hop
05. Brick and Bones
06. The New Gang
07. Walking on Eggshells
08. You Talk too Much
09. Portland Street Pt.1
10. Closing Time

Hi-res album artwork.

Officially released on the 6th December, you can pre-order Today I Need Light now if you like (these things always help small labels with cashflow, and it means you won’t forget under the pressure of Christmas shopping either!) and we will post a copy out to you as soon as they are made.

This is an album that speaks to the movement and passage of time that colour it. From the tumult of “Catholic Boys in the Rain” with its introductory alcoholic litany (read by Glasgow poet Tom Leonard), to the hopeful and elegiac closer “A Pleasing Companion”, it is an unfolding tale of gentle redemption.

01. Swallows
02. Lit Out
03. The Virgin’s Lullaby
04. Catholic Boys in the Rain
05. Pale Water
06. The Star of the County Down
07. Met (a Storm)
08. Her Window
09. A Pleasing Companion

Turn on the Long Wire was completed with the help of the Scottish Arts Council, and combines loops and layers of both digital and analogue tracks, many of which are strings and many of which simply highly treated recordings of Yusuf’s own voice.

The first 300 copies of this will be hand-folded, and one of thirty different designs issued at random (well, unless you buy one at a show, in which case you get to choose, obviously).

1. Your Story
2. Time to Kill
3. Rosalie
4. The Key Underground
5. Thin Air
6. Stepping Stone
7. Eastern Sun
8. Turn on the Long Wire
9. Christabel Blues

Hi res cover art.

Digital download: iTunes – eMusic (coming soon) – Amazon mp3

Digital Downloads: iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

This album was recorded over a couple of weekends at our house last year. Frances from Animal Magic Tricks recorded three songs with Neil and Pete from Meursault, and then Kenny came around for the second weekend to add his songs to the mix.  This album really wasn’t planned, it’s just that by the time Frances had added her touches to the three Meursault songs on the second Sunday, everything just seemed to belong together.

It’s all messy as hell, there are clicks and noises and all sorts going on, there’s even a cameo performance from our idiotic cat Floyd in the first song, and yet the resulting album is one of the strangest, most beautiful records I’ve heard in a very long time.

1. Leave Me to Lie Alone in the Ground
2. King
3. Bubble
4. Sleet
5. Crank Resolutions
6. By 11 O’Clock She’d Left
7. The Perfume of Mexican Birds
8. Soil
9. Please Don’t Send Me Home

High res album artwork

1. Sugar on Your Sheets
2. Yarvil
3. A Fillet of Bozo
4. Sam
5. I am Your Pedigree
6. Grooming
7. Listen With Your Ears, but Look Through a Telescope
8. WCMJ
9. Pherenzik Tear
10. Pegswood’s Day in the Sun

High res album artwork.

Digital download: iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

This album is rather different from its predecessor, and I genuinely have no idea what Meursault’s growing army of fans are going to make of it.  It’s denser in many ways, dirty and noisy, and yet as sad and heartbreaking as you’d expect from the band.

When we were writing all the press blurb, Neil decided to describe the album as ‘epic lo-fi’ and even though that is an almost totally meaningless term, it still seems to describe All Creatures pretty well.  With two new band members joining, there was a danger that the cello or the electric guitar would end up swamping this record, but it’s all been handled very carefully.

I think the first time I heard this album through I pretty much summed up what I felt about it in a single sentence: there’s not so much as a weak twenty seconds on here, anywhere.

1. Payday
2. Crank Resolutions
3. All Creatures Will Make Merry
4. Weather
5. One Day This’ll All Be Fields
6. What You Don’t Have
7. Another
8. New Ruin
9. Sleet
10. Song for Martin Kippenberger
11. A Fair Exchange

High res album artwork

Digital Downloads: iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

This gorgeous EP sees Loch Lomond add a new lush pop sensibility to their earlier eerie folk tunes.  It was released on Hush in the States a few months ago, and now we’re giving it a UK release.

High res album artwork

1. Ghost of an Earthworm
2. Night Bats
3. Spine (MMIX)
4. Holiday
5. Wax & Wire

High res album artwork

Jacob from Trips and Falls emailed me this album ages ago, and I absolutely loved it. If it weren’t for this release being on the horizon, it would have been up at the top of my list of albums of the year last year, but in September they agreed to release it on Song, by Toad Records so I have to hold off until my 2010 lists.

This is just a strange album altogether, but it’s full of surprising pop moments. It’s a record with You Should Really Get Yours and Prelude to a Shark Attack back to back – one of the weirdest and one of the prettiest songs on the whole label.

1. How Do You Do…
2. We Were Like Strangers Today
3. And in Real Life He Wears Corduroy Pants
4. Breaking Up With My Mormon Missionaries
5. You Should Really Get Yours
6. Prelude to a Shark Attack
7. Memoirs of a Martyr
8. Thanks for Sharing
9. Damaged Goods

His lyrics have a touch of bitterness without any self-pity, personal without being self-absorbed, and his music is rough but still strangely hummable.  Basically it’s just really good songwriting, which will show through no matter what the recording style.  Anyhow, for those of you who read Song, by Toad on a regular basis, you’ll already know that I love this particular recording style anyway.

1. Shiver on a Twist of Fate
2. My Ex-Identity
3. Tip of the Tongue (The Quiet One)
4. Three Miles of Expectation
5. The Vacuum or the Void (Do You Feel?)
6. Two Tone Pill
7. Where the Dogs Go Free
8. Lost Soul on a Roll (That’s Me)
9. A Shade Away
10. In and Around On You

Digital download: iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

1. Oh, Messy Life
2. I’m Half the Man You Were
3. Elegy for the Good Times
4. Trying to Be Good
5. Xa Xa Xa
6. Matter

Digital Download – iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

1. Nothing Broke
2. Red Candle Bulb
3. Love or Limb
4. William Henry Miller Pt.1
5. William Henry Miller Pt.2

Digital download – iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3.

1. Sleeptide
2. For the Thoughts You Never Had
3. Blanket
4. Blackout
5. Motherfucker

Digitial download: via Amazon mp3 – eMusic – iTunes.

1. Salt, Pt. 1
2. Statues of Strangers
3. The Furnace (Alternate version for preview.)
4. Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues
5. Salt, Pt. 2
6. The Dirt & the Roots
7. A Few Kind Words
8. A Small Stretch of Land
9. Ampersand After Ampersand
10. Lament For a Teenage Millionaire
11. Oh, Neighbourhood!

Digital download: via Amazon mp3 – iTunes – eMusic.

1. The Hanging Tree
2. Dancefloor
3. Poor Man’s Son
4. Sweet Annie Lee
5. Lady of the Calico (Album Version)
6. Salesman Song

Digital download: via Amazon mp3 - eMusic - iTunes.

1. Design
2. Fearing Lothian
3. Hidden Forces
4. Skorpion vz.61
5. Crossing off Titles in Books
6. Seeing Ben Lomond
7. Nae Drama, Hae a Dram

If four quid seems a bit steep, or you’re just taking a chance on something, you can download a zip file of the mp3s here for nothing. Obviously we’d prefer if you bought the CD, but we’d rather you gave it chance if you were unsure, so feel free.