Hi-res album artwork

This album is a dark, sulky, scuzzy record, with elements of psych-rock, garage and old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. At times it’s more upbeat and aggressive, and at times, like the fantastic Ghost Herd, it’s more downbeat and menacing.

There are two editions as well, a standard black vinyl version and a very limited special edition on marbled vinyl.

01. Wasting
02. Slave Exchange
03. Ghost Herd
04. Past Due
05. Pignose
06. Give Me the Pill
07. Dada Brown
08. Wicked Lady Jam
09. Pair of Lives
10. Dead Golden Girls
11. Strange Wolf

Hi-res album artwork.

Weald is the first LP by Rob St. John, released on gatefold 12” vinyl by Song, by Toad Records of Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2011.

“And they will sit, and they will talk, in darkened rooms, in deserted villages”

Weald is an Old English word from which the concept of a ‘wild’, a ‘wooded’, and a ‘dark, dangerous’ place in the landscape has emerged.  This record reflects this multiple reading of a shifting physical and emotional landscape, where a host of meanings and histories underlie a palimpsest surface.  For example, Stainforth Force is a waterfall near the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, a symbol of change, fallibility and renewal.  Meanings emerge and drift away on gusting washes of sound, spiralling lyrics are open but rarely confessional; echoing a British, rural Dirty Three, Low, Bert Jansch or Phil Elverum, intoned in a deep, Lancastrian tone.

“The first light calls a father home, and I am hardly asleep, and I know”

A writer and researcher interested in the shifting natural and cultural histories of Britain’s upland landscape, St. John ties this record to some imagined contour between the bleak Lancastrian moors and the cobbled wynds of Edinburgh, creating a narrative of transition, obscured meaning and quiet revelation.

“We paced a beat just slipped again, whirled and knotted, the weak end of a strong line”

Weald was recorded partly in December 2010 by Ian Humberstone from Tissø Lake (with whom Rob will share Your Phantom Limb as a split seven through Song by Toad in October 2011) on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in a Cambridge kitchen draped in freezing fog; partly in St. Michael’s Church, Oxford in the bright dawn; and largely in February 2011 over two days in a shutter-drawn house in northern Edinburgh with Neil Pennycook from Meursault.

“In these words, what my love is.  And in time, the dying imperative.”

It features a host of friends and collaborators including Humberstone, Pennycook, Brendon Massai (Viking Moses), Tom Bauchop (UNPOC), Malcolm Benzie (eagleowl), Owen Williams (Two Wings), Tom Western and Seb Reynolds (Keyboard Choir, Braindead Collective).  It follows 4 years of U.K. and European touring, and two critically acclaimed (and quickly sold out) EPs through Scottish micro-indie label Fife Kills:.

“On the horizon, clouds became islands, betrayed some silent and some still sea”

Side A:
01. Your Phantom Limb
02. Sargasso Sea
03. Vanishing Points
04. The Acid Test
Side B:
01. Stainforth Force
02. Domino
03. Emma’s Dance
04. An Empty House

Hi-res album artwork – House on the Hill artwork – Your Phantom Limb artwork

Rob St. John – Your Phantom Limb by Song, by Toad

Ian Humberstone – House On The Hill by Song, by Toad

The House on the Hill / Your Phantom Limb 7″ split single, released on 10th October 2011 by Song, by Toad records of Edinburgh, Scotland, marks the first object produced by a creative friendship spanning many years between Humberstone and St. John.  Recorded by Humberstone to half inch tape on a whirring old Tascam reel-to-reel recorder over the course of a handful of fog-strewn days in a frozen Cambridge kitchen in winter 2010, the songs share a somnambulant analogue glow, splitting into pop hooks hidden under well-wrapped layers of warm instrumentation.

This recording is the document of the heavy winter, the cold, cloistered kitchen, and the array of available instruments.   St. John was close to getting carried away with the heavy dub possibilities offered by a tape-delay unit; Humberstone resurrected a once-learnt childhood clarinet. A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts.  Your Phantom Limb is a haunted thing: a hymn that spectral sinners stop to sing.

This is Ian Humberstone‘s first release under his own name. Between 2005 and 2009 Ian released three records as Tissø Lake and toured the U.K. and North America under that name, playing DIY shows in basements, houses, scout huts and churches.

Whilst Tissø Lake featured a rotating band of musicians who floated in and out of both live shows and recordings, this first solo outing is a pared down affair supplemented by the sweeping violin of Malcolm Benzie (Eagleowl, Woodpigeon). The House on the Hill is an abandoned farmstead in Exeter (head north out of the city centre on Stoke Hill, take the first bridleway on the left and follow the path through the trees).

Digital download: Bandcamp (the rest coming soon)

Hi-res album artwork

We’ve wanted to have this on vinyl for a very long time, but it is only now we’ve been able to afford it.  There was no way around remastering the album, as it had never been mastered for vinyl before, so there are some subtle changes from the versions of the songs you’ll hear on the CD, but just so no-one feels ripped off by the re-release, if you email me a picture of you holding your CD then I’ll send you a free download of the mp3s of the new versions.

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.

Side A:
01. Payday
02. Crank Resolutions
03. All Creatures Will Make Merry
04. Weather
05. One Day This’ll All Be Fields
06. What You Don’t Have
Side B:
01. Another
02. New Ruin
03. Sleet
04. Song for Martin Kippenberger
05. A Fair Exchange

This is singer/songwriter Lach’s highly anticipated sixth studio album, titled Ramshackle Heart, and featuring former member of Slowdive and Mojave 3, Neil Halstead as co-producer, vocalist and instrumentalist.  The album itself was recorded at Halstead’s studio in Cornwall.

“I loved making this record,” explains Lach. “Neil and I met when our booking agents put us together as a double-billed tour through the UK. We hit it off and started dueting on stage off-the cuff. After the tour he invited me out to his studio, which lies in the middle of an old, abandoned RAF airfield to record this album. It features a few wonderful local Cornwall musicians that have been playing with Neil the last few years. It had a real misfit family feel, like when you discover an old shack in the woods and set-up your secret clubhouse. That freedom and camaraderie became the fertile ground from which the tracks on the album evolved. I think the album sort of mutates the genres we’re associated with, we were just having a good time playing.”

01. Another Night Without You
02. Break the Day
03. Everyone’s Therapist
04. She’s Brave Now
05. Stunned
06. Baby, I Don’t Want to Go
07. Lonesome For You
08. My Gangster
09. Blue Overcoat
10. Sensitivity

“Surrender to Summer” was conceived at the end of Martin Moog’s university career, where he studied Popular Music. Growing increasingly frustrated with high end production that many of his projects demanded, and developing a new fascination with distortion and noise, Moog began piling the effects upon his tracks, layering vocals, instruments and percussion under digital distortion and reverb.

With the development of hypnagogic pop (n.b. a Wire Magazine creation) in recent years, where pure pop is refashioned into a psychedelic haze of processing and obscurity – usually by twenty-something boys in tight trousers – many moments in the EP reflect this new trend in lo-fi electronic production, without ever aping them. Truly, the EP is about Edinburgh in the May sun, throwing your school books into the sink and lying in the park with a few bottles of Good Times ale.

01. Summer Sun Skateboard
02. Beach Buddies
03. Pool Attendant
04. Bucket and Spade
05. Yr Tanlines (Le Metrohead Version)

High-res album artwork

I don’t have any official info about the release just yet, but here is the review I wrote on Song, by Toad when I first heard this:

“Mrs. Toad always knows when I am going to get into something.  She walked into the room when this was first playing and asked what it was.  I said it had just arrived in my inbox, and she told me that I was going to like it.  Eh?  I said.  ‘Well, it’s rough and a bit atonal and the singer sounds like he’s not really arsed – basically it’s right up your street’.  And she’s right, it really is.

They’ve buried the vocals deep as hell on this, and they are barely enunciated to begin with, giving the impression of someone singing through a drunken stupour, carried along by the constantly crashing drums, which get a fucking good beating on this record, and the guitar which, while it sounds as off-balance as the singer, still fair snarls its way through the songs with some vigour.

They use some sort of keyboard thing (my knowledge of keyboards, as you can probably tell, is next to nil) to provide a constant wail through most of the songs and, a little like early Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, it seems to hold it all together quite well.  It’s almost like a crying child they give a good kick at the start of a song, and who doesn’t stop bawling until the end of it.”

01. King Corpse
02. Devil You Know
03. Ya Tu Sabe
04. Hungry

Hi-res album artwork.

The Danelectro Honeytone is a tiny little guitar amp, beloved of buskers for the sound you get from something so portable.  It also has a belt clip, which helps.

The title of this song was never really intended to stick – it was just a smart-arsed working title – but um… well, you know how these things work.

Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone is a four-song single, released on lovely coloured 7″ vinyl..

01. Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone
02. Penny Red
03. Alaska
04. Monomaniac

King Post Kitsch – Don’t You Touch My Fucking Honeytone by Song, by Toad

01. Blue Lead Fences
02. Carl Sagan

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

The singles include new recordings of William Henry Miller Parts One and Two with the full band, including new members Phil Quirie on guitar and Pete Harvey on cello.  Dan Willson from Withered Hand and Bart Owl from eagleowl provide guest vocals on Parts One and Two respectively.  The resulting recordings are really dense and layered, and some of my favourite things I’ve ever heard from the band.

1. William Henry Miller Part 1 (Single Version)

2. The Dirt & the Roots

Digital Download – iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

Buy as a pair £6 – These two singles are being released together because we see all four songs as going together, so you can buy them as a pair by clicking the buy button below.

The singles include new recordings of William Henry Miller Parts One and Two with the full band, including new members Phil Quirie on guitar andPete Harvey on cello.  Dan Willson from Withered Hand and Bart Owl from eagleowl provide guest vocals on Parts One and Two respectively.  The resulting recordings are really dense and layered, and some of my favourite things I’ve ever heard from the band.

1. A Few Kind Words
2. William Henry Miller Pt.2 (Single Version)

Digital Download – iTunes – eMusic – Amazon mp3

Buy as a pair £6 – These two singles are being released together because we see all four songs as going together, so you can buy them as a pair by clicking the buy button below.

It’s a gorgeous recording, too.  Both bands are indie-folk, to a degree, but where The Builders are more raucous and rattling, Loch Lomond are equal parts lovely and creepy.  To read the Skinny’s review, click here.

Oh, and for those of you who want to support what we’re up to here but don’t have a record player, fear not, because we’re slipping a CD-R of all the songs in with each purchase.

Loch Lomond:
1. Elephants & Little Girls
2. Field Report
3. Scabs on This Year
4. The Trumpet Song
The Builders & the Butchers:
1. When it Rains
2. Vampire Lake
3. Down to the River
4. The Rain