YOUNGSTRR JOEY releases new album GRILLED WIIG in Feb

YOUNGSTRR JOEY releases new album GRILLED WIIG in Feb

Youngstrr Joey produces lo-fi insomniac rock. Recorded in a Glasgow bedroom between 9pm and 5am, he deliberately tries to make his guitar sound as weird as possible, yet he’s also capable of writing incredibly distinctive yet infectious pop, a combination that makes this collection of work incredibly compelling.

Taken From influential Scottish label Song By Toad’s Tadpole Series, these cassette releases provide a platform for artists to experiment, play around and generally push themselves out of their comfort zone in ways that aren’t normally associated with a full album release.

About Song, By Toad

Song, by Toad Records is one of Scotland’s most determinedly unfocussed and wilfully idiosyncratic institutions.

Matthew Young, the label’s founder started out with a blog back in 2004. Song, by Toad quickly grew to be one of the most influential British new music blogs within the year, and the site quickly evolved, adding weekly podcasts and live sessions – recorded live in Young’s Edinburgh living room. Session alumni include Mumford & Sons, Sam Amidon, Josh T Pearson, Joanna Gruesome, Paws and Clem Snide’s Eef Barzelay.

Soon regular gig promotion, which happens under the banner of BAD FUN, was added to the mix and by the end of 2008 the success of the sessions, particularly the recording, and the futility of shouting about music on the internet led to the foundation of a record label. Song, by Toad Records’ first release was the underground success ‘Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues’ by Meursault, an album The Skinny named in its top twenty best Scottish albums of the decade.

Since then the label has gone from strength to strength, albeit by heading off on one weird tangent after another. There are regular releases from some of the UK’s most determined iconoclasts, such as David Thomas Broughton, Rob St. John, Adam Stafford and Jonnie Common, more conventional album fare from Sparrow and the Workshop and Meursault. There are also long-running label projects, such as the Split 12″ series (all recorded in Young’s living room) and the collaborative Magpie Series, where a collection of disparate musicians such as King Creosote and various musicians from the label come together for a week to improvise a record based on existing songs, which is then released under a one-off project name.

Since moving back to Leith in 2014 the label has acquired a warehouse studio called The Happiness Hotel (it’s a Muppets reference) which it will be using to expand the sessions and to encourage the artists on the label to take more chances, explore more odd collaborations, concept albums, experiments and just generally create a sort of creative engine room. A lot of these will be released on the low-key cassette series Tadpole Records, and others on Song, by Toad Records itself, while yet others will simply be given away for free on the internet.

So who knows what the future holds for the label, apart from the almost inevitable over-work and too many ideas. This year already sees Edinburgh band Plastic Animals releasing their debut album, a new record from Adam Stafford, and a trans-continental triple-vinyl release with David Thomas Broughton, as well as three different Split 12″s on the go, including Viking Moses, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Micah P Hinson, a couple of label bands, and a whole Split 12″ recorded in New York’s National Opera Centre by Matthew Young’s brother Ben, during the three months the label briefly relocated to Red Hook in Brooklyn at the end of 2015.

Xsnoize Author
Mark Millar is the founder of XS Noize and looks after the daily running of the website as well as hosting interviews for the weekly XS Noize Podcast. Mark's favourite album is Achtung Baby by U2.

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