Over The Wall are the nicest men in rock. They don’t deserve to have their session come out two years late.And yet here we are. Of all the footage that got messed up in our tech-meltdown, this was worst affected. We filmed this session on a wet, grey February afternoon in 2010. Over The Wall were playing at the launch party for Leith Records, on The Leith Agency’s barge, and we got them upstairs to the foosball area with a couple of old keyboards to sing us some songs.

Based in Glasgow, Over The Wall released their first record, Treacherous, at the end of 2010 on Motive Sounds. It’s the kind of album that will force you to smile from ear to ear, almost as much as their live shows, even though the subject matter is not always upbeat. Drum machines, cheap keyboards, rock guitar licks, and Gav’s soulful voice combine to make the most odd, fun records of 2010, and a favourite of ours ever since.

The first song is “The Crucible”, a standout from the album. While on record the song climaxes with an almost metal solo-fest, this version focusses on the rather more subdued first part, all organ-like keyboards and snooker-based drama.

The second song here is “Children, Don’t Eat the Cake”, a song we know nothing about other than it’s great. It’s a more musically upbeat track: classic Over The Wall cheap drums and keys, with more hurt and loss (possibly) in the vocals.

Having toured the British Isles in 80 days (kind of) last year, OTW have been a bit quiet of late. We hope that means there will be a new record coming soon.

Gav and Ben, sorry again for the delay, we hope you like this.

This has been a long time coming. We should apologise to Three Blind Wolves for taking a year to get this session up. We’re sorry. We had some pretty major technical difficulties that we won’t go into here.After we got our shit together, we managed to scrape together enough footage for these two great songs.

Three Blind Wolves are based in Glasgow and were born from Ross Clark and the Scarfs Go Missing a couple of years ago. After a couple of EPs and singles, they released their mini-album ‘The Sound of the Storm’ at the start of last year, and it’s just been re-released on Communion Records.

Both songs here come from ‘The Sound of the Storm’. Two bursts of slightly folky, country blues for the 21st Century, played here by a stripped down version of 3BW but with enough racket to let you believe there might be all 4 of them up there if you closed your eyes.

Three Blind Wolves play the West End Festival at Oran mor, Glasgow on 18th June 2011. You should go.

So, sorry guys. We really didn’t want to have to wait this long to get these videos out. We hope you can forgive us.

And so we come to the end of our SXSW adventures, with our final session, from The Wave Pictures. Only 5 months later than planned. Sorry boys.

This session was even less straight forward than the epic Efterklang debacle. You see, our filming equipment is pretty compact and mobile. Acoustic instruments not so much. So when the bands didn’t have the acoustic stuff they needed, we made arrangements to borrow some. While our Efterklang acoustic guitar never arrived, unfortunately the nice guy who lent us one for The Wave Pictures had brought a guitar with a few problems, which meant it couldn’t be used. Not to worry, we thought, this is SXSW. There will be 10 guys with acoustic guitars walking past in the next few minutes. Nope. Eventually, we happened upon Gino. Or rather he happened upon us, with his weird hybrid boombox/amp thing blasting out some 80s beats. You can see him at the start of the first video. Singer and guitarist David Tattersall whipped out the electric guitar he had brought for the gigs and plugged it into the beast.

So what we got was a lovely, if slightly odd, reverb drenched rendition of a couple of Wave Pictures songs, with bassist Franic on backing vocals and drummer Jonny on snare.

First track, “Tiny Craters In The Sand”, appears on their 2009 album If You Leave It Alone. The second, “Now You Are Pregnant”, was one half of a double A side single in 2007. Both show off that effortless twinning os the catchy pop hook, albeit a little off-kilter, with a quirky and intelligent turn of phrase. David Tattersall has always reminded us of a young Darren Hayman in that way. There’s a subtlety to a Wave Pictures melodrama that is comforting to anyone who’s ever been an awkward teenager or twenty-something. Seeing these played out in the glaring midday sunshine of Austin brings out some lovely qualities you might never notice watching the band back in grey old Blighty. And we’re thankful for that.

Find out more a thewavepictures.com

It’s typical of OtBT that we would only get round to organising a session with one of our favourite local bands when both band and us were half way around the world. And so it was that we took Broken Records down an alley.

We’d seen Broken Records live umpteen times over the past few years and loved their debut album, Until The Earth Begins To Part, so when they agreed to do a session for us at SXSW, we were pretty excited. When we met them and they wanted to play a brand new song for us, we were even more excited.

That song turned out to be “A Darkness Rises Up”, a song they would record during the sessions for their second album, Let Me Come Home, which began a week after this was filmed. At the very start of the episode you will see an early live version of the song, played a few hours after we shot the session, in the venue who’s back door we filmed beside. The acoustic version we filmed consists of frontman Jamie on guitar and vocals and his brother, multi-instrumentalist Rory, on violin. It’s, frankly, ace, and you should go and download it, before watching the video.

The second track is “If Eilert Loevborg Wrote A Song, It Would Sound Like This”, a track from their 2009 debut. A live favourite of ours for a while, the usual, almost Russian style opening has been replaced with a some vigorous muted strums to lead straight into the up tempo intro. If you listen very carefully, you’ll hear the banging and revving of some Austin bin men, not oblivious but certainly unimpressed with two pasty Scottish boys playing music (with two more filming) and getting in their way.

Broken Records’ new album, Let Me Come Home, is out next Monday, and you should order it.

Find out more at brokenrecordsband.com

4ad have asked us not to podcast these videos, so unfortunately if you’re a podcast subscriber, you’ll still have to stream these on the site.

We filmed Winter Gloves at SXSW all the way back in March, by the side of the creek that flows through downtown Austin.

Montreal’s Winter Gloves were one of the bands we stumbled upon by chance the first time we went to Austin, and we’d been hoping they would tour the UK ever since. Fortunately, they agreed to play some songs for us on their side of the pond while we were there this year.

We’ve got two songs here, something old and something new.

The first track, Party People, appears on their debut album, About A Girl. On record it’s all rock n roll riffs and synthy swagger. By the side of a babbling brook in the Austin heat it’s all sunny handclaps and glockenspiel with the sounds of the creek and the madness of SXSW audible in the background. These stripped down versions show that behind the riffs and the noise, this band have great pop songs.

Strange Love is the second track, and also the second track on new album All Red. It’s bass and glock heavy normally, with a funky LCD Soundsystem type groove to it, albeit with singer Charles’ lush high vocals instead of James Murphy’s gruff monologues. Our version features those wooden stick things, and frankly, who doesn’t love those wooden stick things. Again, the funky, trendy swagger is laid bare to reveal a finely crafted pop song.

Winter Gloves are currently on tour in the US and Canada. Find out more at myspace.com/wintergloves

In our second SXSW 2010 session, we took Indianapolis newcomers Burnt Ones out onto the streets of SXSW, spitting distance from the mayhem of 6th Street, sat them on some steps and asked them to translate their stomping glam snarl onto an acoustic guitar and a tambourine. Easy-peasy.

They almost didn’t make it. Their van had broken down on the way to Austin and were carrying gear into the venue moments before taking to the stage. Live, they’re a fuzzy, banging, wide-pupilled cross between T-Rex, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Jesus & Mary Chain, all glam beats and ringing guitar riffs, the low-end rhythms of bassist Brian and drummer Amy (who plays standing up, awesomely) pounding away under singer Mark Tester’s woozy half-snarl. To be honest, they didn’t really sound like a band that would even know what an acoustic guitar did.

But hey, what do we know? We got two tracks, the single, “Gonna Listen To T-Rex (All Night Long)”, and “Sunset Hill”, both barnstormingly loud electric tracks in their original forms, here stripped all the way back into almost whimsical quiet. You can’t hear much of it on the tape (thankfully), but not 100 yards behind us was the unholy racket of SXSW in full flow, and as the band strummed and thrummed their way through the session, this little corner of Austin suddenly became an oasis of wearily smiling calm.

The single is out now on 7″ and you can order it straight from the band via BurntOnes@gmail.com although they’re almost sold out. The debut LP will be out in July 2010. Visit them at myspace.com/burntonesforever

Back in March, Off The Beaten Tracks took an almost deserved week off to head over to Austin, Texas for the South By Southwest festival. We’d been chatting to our friends from My Old Kentucky Blog, and since they’d decided not to do anything at SXSW with their Laundromatinee series of sessions,they asked if we’d like to go and film some bands so we could share the results. That’s downright neighbourly, we thought, and off we went.

We did five sessions in total over the four days. Those will be going up in the coming weeks, but to open it all up, we were dead chuffed to bag one of our favourite bands at the moment, the glorious and inventive Efterklang.

All the way from Copenhagen, the Efterklangers had been fully warned about us, that we hated recording drums or electronic instruments because they sound rubbish outdoors, that we liked bands who arrived with portable instruments, and that we usually need to be able to get the sessions done quickly, as we’re often not 100% allowed to be in the locations we choose. Efterklang took that information on board, had a think about it and cheerfully showed up with flightcases, a synthesizer and various percussion bits and bobs. It was one of those afternoons.

Since we now needed power, and a roof, we ditched our initial location ideas and managed to persuade the very nice people who ran the AOL Seed Lounge, based inside Austin’s cavernous Convention Centre to let us take over half their exhibit and generally make a bit of a mess.

After an epic period of faffing around uncoiling cables, clapping, playing with synths, doing flute scales, waiting for an acoustic guitar to show up, losing the acoustic guitar, finding it again, drinking AOL’s fridge completely dry, dropping things, and admiring the collapsible furniture we eventually got round to recording the band. Well worth the wait as it turned out.

Not usually an acoustic-sounding band, we got two tracks from February’s Magic Chairs album, the woozy and floaty ‘Alike’, with its insistent thrum of rhythm, and the sparser, more staccato ‘Raincoats’, with its syncopated jerkiness offset with some jolly acapella shouting. The band seemed to think this was the first ever acoustic airing of this track, so we’ll probably claim that as an exclusive of some kind.

The second half of ‘Raincoats’ – where they bang a flightcase with a big stick – might sound bit weird, but for a nice change, this isn’t our fault.

Efterklang are on tour at the moment and will no doubt pop up at a bundle of festivals over the summer, too. The album Magic Chairs is out now through 4AD.

4ad have asked us not to podcast these videos, so unfortunately if you’re a podcast subscriber, you’ll still have to stream these on the site.

Ever since we started filming sessions there have been a couple of local bands we wanted to shoot more than any others. One of them is Meursault. Having tried to arrange this many times over the past year, we finally found ourselves with a free afternoon, a plan hatched over too many beers, some brand new songs from their forthcoming new album, and some extra people to provide handclaps.

And so it was that we ended up in Craigentinny in the ‘burbs of Edinburgh, as Milo explains below, and then Portobello beach for stripped down renditions of two brand new songs from their new album, All Creatures Will Make Merry.

Our roving reporter Milo was in attendance for the first part of of the shoot:

“On a beautifully sunny but freezing cold February afternoon in Edinburgh,  Meursault, one of the city’s best up and coming bands, arrive at a little known location ready to film a session with Off The Beaten Tracks.

The place in question is the William Henry Miller Mausoleum in Craigentinny.  An imposing block of stone, raised on a concrete plinth and adorned with intricate biblical friezes, the memorial seems thoroughly out of place from its surroundings in this otherwise non-descript suburb north of Portobello. To one side, a small car park, for the patrons of the bowling green at the back. And all around, suburban houses.

It turns out that when the mausoleum was built after Miller’s death in 1848, it was surrounded by fields that were part of what was then the Miller estate. But it’s now hidden away by the effects of urban sprawl, with very few people even aware it exists.

Neil Pennycook, Meursault’s songwriter and frontman, discovered it on a trip while an art student, and was inspired to write a song about the unlikely burial place. It is this song that the band play today in the shadow of the ornate tomb, accompanied on handclaps by a bunch of eager friends, fellow musicians and enthusiastic fans.

Afterwards, I ask Pennycook why he chose Miller, a man who though Scottish born was most notable for being an MP for  Newcastle, as the subject for a song. “There isn’t so much a coherent story about him, there’s just all these little chunks of information. It got my imagination going because I came to see this spot 3 or 4 years ago and it seemed like a really grand thing to have for just anybody. So I figured if there wasn’t any information about this person that I would try and create a bit of a folk story.”

Pennycook tells me he took the bare bones of what’s known about Miller and created a myth around it. “There’s lines in the song that aren’t based on any concrete facts, but that’s how stories develop really isn’t it? These tiny fragments of truth that people in the area add their own mythology to.”

But the facts that do exist are strange enough. Apparently, as eluded to in  the song itself, Miller himself specified he be buried 40ft below ground, and that the “magnificent tomb” be erected in his honour – for which he set aside a princely sum in his will. So bizarre were his requests that they led to the rumour that he was a “changeling”, a concept with a rich folklore of its own. This unlikely suggestion was even published in the book ‘Old & New Edinburgh’, published in 1890 (see edinphoto.org.uk for more info).

No doubt Miller’s ghostly ego would be delighted, should it ever escape from the ground, that his memory has now been immortalised in popular song, with a lasting impact which can never reduced by the close vicinity of residential properties or bowling greens.”

Milo McLaughlin

The new Meursault album is available to pre-order from Song, by Toad Records. You can also purchase their first album, EP and two 7″ singles there.

Part 2 of our Sick Kids Sunday series (watch Part 1) sees 2 bands from Glasgow playing songs for us in the near dark of the upstairs bar in the GRV. Both Sparrow and the Workshop and WOODENBOX with a Fistful of Fivers have an upbeat raucous Americana feel which lends itself to the stripped down acoustic sessions as well as it does to their much louder on stage performances.

Sparrow and the Workshop are Jill, Gregor and Nick, a multicultural group of musicians who’ve been together for a little over two years. They’re currently on a long tour supporting Idlewild. And they’re awesome. First track “You’ve Got It All” is the lilting opener from their mini album ‘Into The Wild’. “Medal Around Your Neck” is a track from their forthcoming album ‘Crystal Falls’, due out 12th April 2010.

sparrowandtheworkshop.co.uk/

The incredibly-monikered WOODENBOX with a Fistful of Fivers have a more of a bar room, deep South Americana feel with plenty of brass. The two tracks here are “Draw A Line” from their forthcoming album “Home and the Wildhunt”and self-released first single “Twisted Mile”.

myspace.com/awoodenbox

The fine people who organised the Sick Kids Sunday event in Edinburgh in January let us have some space to record some sessions that day. We recorded five sessions, including our last episode as well as Rob St. John and Men Diamler. Part 2, coming next week, will feature the last two bands we recorded that day. We were really happy to get sessions from these two while they were in Edinburgh for such a short time, and we felt they went well together.

First up is Rob St. John, former and future resident of Edinburgh, currently in exile studying in Oxford. He is joined for the first track, “The Acid Test” by a member of his band, Bart from eagleowl, on backing vocals. The second track, “An Empty House” is a brand new track. Both have that fine combination of hushed, fingerpicked guitar and Rob’s deep velvet vocal.

myspace.com/robstjohn

Next we have Men Diamler. Richard, as he is otherwise known, was kind enough to play us some tracks before he jumped on the overnight train towards the South of England to play a show the next day. We get one quiet country tinged new(ish) song in the form of May, and one bigger, more boisterous song in the form of “Black As A Cat In The Morning”, which towards the end literally had us stunned.

myspace.com/mendiamler

James Yorkston and Adrian Crowley teamed up to play Sick Kids Sunday 2 in Edinburgh in January. Being the organised people we are, we emailed them both the night before to ask if they would play some songs for us. Thankfully, they had some time and indulged us. Yorkston and Crowley were here to play the songs of Daniel Johnston, but in the deserted upstairs bar of the GRV, we were treated to one DJ cover and one Camper Van Beethoven cover.

An a cappella version of “True Love Will Find You In The End” was up first. Like Johnston himself, this version is woozy and flawed, but with a sense of fun, and the two voices intertwining are an interesting change from the original. It took a few takes and some jokes about bad breakfasts to get through it, but the results are lovely.

Next was a version of the classic “Take The Skinheads Bowling” by CVB. Stripped down from the original’s sunny, scuzzy indie pop, the two voices and one acoustic guitar version here takes on a more melancholy feel, and is all the better for it.

Thanks to Martin, organiser of Sick Kids Sunday, for sorting us out with bands and space to film.

Two more episodes covering four more bands from Sick Kids Sunday are coming in the next few weeks.

When we contacted Trespassers William about doing a session for us, we hadn’t realised that they were touring with Glissando. When we found out, we had to ask if they wanted to do a session too, and they kindly obliged, despite singer Elly not feeling too great.

So another hazy session coming from the lovely Palm House in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Core members Elly and Richard are joined here by Paul, one of a large revolving cast of members.  The first of the two tracks is a new one, “The World Without Us”, which you can hear in demo form on the band’s Myspace page. It’s a super sparse song, with two seldom-picked guitars and a funereal keyboard backing Elly’s haunting voice. The second track is a cover of the Low song, “Venus”. This is a slightly more upbeat track (not an often-used description of Low’s output) than the last, but it still retains the sparseness. This song also allows us to marvel as Richard plays glockenspiel with two pens. Pretty well done too, Richard. In the background you will spot some utterly bewildered tourists, sheltering from the rain, not fully understanding what was going on.

Later that night we would be treated to an unbelievable performance as support to Trespassers, showing that Glissando are just as incredibly beautiful and evocative and  talented as their tour mates.

myspace.com/glissando

When we heard that Trespassers William were coming to town for the first time, we knew we had to ask them to play some songs for us. When the day came the weather was standard Scottish autumn (dull and raining), but luckily we were rescued by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

As most people in Edinburgh will know, the Garden is a huge, wonderfully serene space near the city centre, with a Victorian Palm House in the middle of it. Before their incredible show at the Wee Red Bar, we picked up Anna-Lynne and Matt, as well as touring mates Glissando (their session coming next week) and headed for the warm, echo-filled glass structure, and out of the rain and cold. Among the different types of palms and other plants, the duo sat down and played us some of their beautiful songs. The acoustics were amazing, as you can hopefully hear, and Anna-Lynne’s voice especially sounded jaw-droppingly sweet.

The two songs here can’t be found on any official recordings. The first, “Appointments”, is a Lotte Kestner song (Anna-Lynne’s solo project) but is not on her album China Mountain, and has so far only surfaced in some live videos. The second, “Surrounded”, began as a TW song but a version was also done by Tunnel-Tunnel (Anna-Lynne’s side project). Yes, she’s a busy girl (Matt also has a side/solo project, Disinterested). Both songs are classic TW, all gently picked melancholy and strummed lap-guitar underpinning that pure, soaring vocal.

trespasserswilliam.com / myspace.com/trespasserswilliam

We would like to thank the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh for the use of their lovely venue, and Kirsten Murray for helping out with the session.

Donate to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

It wasn’t our fault. We know we said we’d take bands into interesting nooks and crannies, we know we said we’d make them do it acoustically, we know we said it would all be done in nice HD video… and we know that we’re about to present Amazing Baby using electric guitars in near invisible lighting conditions, without having even left the damn venue. It was either that or not get them at all you see. So, yes – we know what we said. But no, we’re not sorry at all. 

In a superb brace of hipster credentials, Amazing Baby don’t just live and work in Brooklyn, one of their number was even in a band with MGMT, when they were all at college together in Connecticut. This, apparently, is more than good enough for some of the lazier parts of the internet, and those folk should probably just go watch the pretty moving pictures now, I’m sure a kitten will be along soon.

For the rest of us though, Amazing Baby present some happy conundrums, which all come from the slightly schizophrenic makeup of the creative engine behind the band, singer Will Roan and guitarist Simon O’Connor. We, rubbishly, thought we could describe them respectively as the ‘psych’ and ‘rock’ parts to the lineup. Perhaps more eloquently, O’Connor was once described by the NME as looking like “a Faith No More-loving metal-head who wandered into the wrong audition by mistake”, which pretty much sums up why, when you take a listen, you will keep thinking about MGMT, shortly before getting kicked in the face.

We managed to get two songs out of them on the day, their recent single ‘Headdress’ and a cover of The dBs’ ‘Black And White’ and we’ve decided to call this our first ‘semi-acoustic’ session. There’s something very pleasing and earthy and true about a band perched slightly awkwardly on the side of a half-built stage, with a jerry-rigged set of amps and no preparation whatsoever – easily as challenging as doing it acoustically, we reckon. Granted, the picture quality’s not ideal, but we had shown up uninvited in the middle of soundcheck and the nice people at Sneaky Pete’s quite rightly had better things to do than worry about us, so we’re glad we got what we did – as, we are sure, will you be.

When we started this project, we were looking to find out what happened if we took artists we loved on record or on stage, and find out whether they would sound better, worse or different when taken out of their natural live or recorded habitat. Anti-folk hero Jeff Lewis – predictably – managed somehow to sound incredible with no instruments at all, just sitting alone on a giant novelty chessboard next to a building site. 

This session almost never happened. Since Jeffrey had come straight from a festival appearance, and there had been some issues with – in no particular order – guitar tuners, parking, stage times, sound engineers and a second-hand bass amp, by the time we’d all got set up we were pretty confused. But, as we’ve come to learn, the unplanned often throws up the unexpected – and so we ended up on the giant chess set on Edinburgh’s Cowgate, sited precisely where the dressing-room to the old, long burnt-down and much-loved La Belle Angele venue used to stand.

For openers, Jeffrey took us back to an oldie – ‘Pounds’, his whimsical and satirical mockery of the double-meaning in the Queen’s own currency. Now, we’ve loved recording all the bands we’ve featured, but watching someone take the music out of the equation and forcing you to focus on nothing but the lyrics and their delivery was a bit special. And it only got better.

Second track was a new one, at the time still only called the ‘Untitled Mosquito Rap’, it’s quite possibly the most elaborate rant against tiny insects ever devised. Seriously, the man really, REALLY hates mosquitos.

Finally, we got something really unexpected, with Jeffrey taking on The Fall’s driving, snotty ‘Wings’ from the Perverted By Language album, acapella. Even without the insistent drums, the nagging guitars, the rumbling Hacienda basslines or the youthful contempt of Mark E Smith’s original, we reckon you’re left with something just as dry, wry and fascinating as the original – three adjectives as easily applied to Jeffrey himself.

thejeffreylewissite.com

Moustache Of Insanity. Moustache. Of. Insanity. Say it out loud – go on – and then try to take it all seriously. Savour the feeling, the realisation that music is not necessarily there to be taken seriously, not even a little bit. Then, if you’re half smart, you’ll realise that anyone who does apply that sort of seriousness to it all is probably not the type you want round your place, drinking your booze. Moustache Of Insanity are SO not that guy.

The boys from Moustache Of Insanity are, by contrast, the perfect party guest – musical, funny, charming and way less of an idiot than you are, by a country mile. They were in town at the same time as Allo’ Darlin – Bill, who had a tache before Movember was popular, also plays with them – and because that meant we had two things to do at the same time, meant we weren’t as prepared as (ahem) we could have been, so we ended up winging it a bit when it came to finding a location. Ambling up towards Edinburgh Castle though, we thought we’d struck gold with what was described as a ‘nature sanctuary’, but what effectively is a small garden with a bench, some needles and a lot of empty super-strenth cider bottles strewn around the place.

After a fair bit of clambering over locked gates and so on, we finally get all set up and despite the garden supposedly providing some kind of protection for bunny rabbits and squirrels and stuff, it was still the windiest spot on God’s green earth. As if trying to prevent the band from taking off like Mary Poppins wasn’t tricky enough, we also found out that we had an audience of a local nutbag, showing his appreciation by smashing his bottle against a wall and glowering like we’d all insulted his sister. Still, the fear of being murdered added a certain zip to proceedings.

Both tracks here are perfectly-formed little snippets of daftness, with Nik’s tiny little keyboard and Bill’s acoustic guitar chattering along behind the stream of wry and well-crafted lyrics. It’s like The Ramones writing Belle & Sebastian records. Initially these tracks sound a little throwaway, but a repeat listen reveals a truly heartfelt, almost melancholic feel in these genuine love songs.

Anyway, we’ve got two tracks here, ‘Email’ and ‘Cheese And Freckles’, and we bet you can’t make it through either one without smiling broadly at least twice – and if you can come up with a better criteria for awesome pop music than that then … well, you’re beyond our or anyone else’s help.

moustacheofinsanity.com / myspace.com/moustacheofinsanity

Charity events can so easily become self-congratulatory, parochial and dumb; this one blew our damn socks off. Off the back of a fairly daft suggestion over some beer, came this, the singer from one of 2010′s brightest (and least industry-created) hopes, teaming up with the singer of one of Scotland’s most-buzzed new acts, to play their own and others songs, in an Oxfam store, as part of Oxjam Edinburgh. Yeah, it was amazing.

Scott (Frightened Rabbit’s singer – he’s on the right) and Neil (singer from Meursault – the slightly louder one) performed seven tracks that afternoon, but we’ve chosen three here since it basically means we get to throw in the ‘something old, something new, something borrowed’ pun again. It’s also a fantastic mix of one-offs – you probably won’t see any of these songs done this way again.

First up is the boys belting their way through the F’rabbit classic ‘Old Old Fashioned’, a foot-stomping yee-hah of a song, something familiar as a warm blanket to long-time fans of the band, but made even richer with the addition of Neil’s harmony. This was the first song they played on the day, and it set the scene in spades.

For ‘something new’ we got something we were really pleased with, a new Meursault song that – at the time – was so new it didn’t even have a title. In the grand tradition of Meursault, there’s a touch of the sea shanty, with a lyrical sense of wisdom beyond years. It’s also a good introduction to Neil’s astonishing foghorn of a voice, which – for the first time in our case – we managed to record without it sending the microphones into meltdown.

As a cover version finale for this session, the boys also chose a song by Desc, called ‘Joy’, the perfect vehicle for spot of vocal sparring, and a cracking track given a long overdue airing again.

There’s been a lot of blog guff about both these bands over recent months – and they’ve both got much-anticipated albums due next year – but it was a particular kind of pleasure to see these two together. A charity even this may have been – but it wasn’t just Oxfam that got something special out of it. What a treat.

See photos from the session at Blueback Hotrod

Watch our original session with Frightened Rabbit, including the first recording of their new single, ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’

While stormy weather pounds on the British Isles, we thought it was as good a time as any to finally get round to putting out our session with the charming Allo Darlin’. When confronted with chirpy pop outfits like this one we usually try and point out how they don’t conform to a stereotype of relentlessly sunny folk singing charmingly amusing songs about daft little topics – but to be honest, there’s just no way round it. They’re exactly like that, so we suggest you just suck up the cynicism and enjoy.

Opening the session, we have recent single ‘Henry Rollins Don’t Dance’, a tale of musical differences, Henry Rollins and, er, dancing to Abba. Twee? Not at all. And if that wasn’t sweet enough for your tooth, there’s also the chirrupping Kiss Your Lips, which is about exactly that. Only they tasted a bit funny. Because of the candy floss. In France. Obviously.

Anyway, Allo Darlin are super-nice, super-pop and super-cheery – put your huffy, pale hipster winter sneers away and get some sunshine in an otherwise dreary day.

Links:

myspace.com/allodarlin

allodarlin.com

Good things come to those who wait. We recorded this session way back in August, but for various reasons we’re only able to put it on the site now. The Xcerts are perhaps not the normal type of band we feature in our sessions, but having seen them live a few times over the years, and with the album a regular on our music player of choice for months now, we were keen to pin them down for a session.

We met the band during the Edinburgh Festival, ahead of their headline show at the GRV. Having scoured the city for locations that weren’t overrun with tourists, we decided on a small courtyard just behind our favourite old-town pub, The Jolly Judge. What had been a fairly quiet spot, however, was soon full of tourists, kids, workmen and the biggest dogs we’ve ever seen. It all makes for an interesting session though. Most importantly, the songs are great.

We get two songs here. The first, ‘Aberdeen 1987′, is our favourite song on the album. Quite different to everything else on ‘In The Cold Wind We Smile’, it’s probably the song that will sound most similar to the album version using this stripped back setup.

The second song was ‘Do You Feel Safe?”, a previous single, which sounds quite different here to it’s loud, rocking album version. Drummer Tom swapped his glockenspiel for an empty beer barrel ‘borrowed’ from the pub. This take was almost abandoned half way through when the two largest dogs we’ve ever seen came bounding past, almost taking half our equipment with them. The band, being consummate professionals, managed to carry on regardless.

We at OTBT suffer from a constant and terminal case of puppy-esque over-enthusiasm – in fact, that was how the whole thing started off. “Fancy putting a project together based around stuff we have absolutely no expertise in, experience doing or knowledge of? Hell, how hard can it be? More beer? Excellent”.

We still haven’t learned our damned lesson. We’re still wide-eyed and giddy about the bands we get to film, and one of the biggest problems we have is finding the time to fit everyone in, with an absolute truckload slipping through the cracks on a weekly basis.

Which is why we get so demented and happy when something completely unplanned works out. Hell, we’re lucky if our most carefully laid plans come off, so when we get a piece of luck like this one, it keeps us up nights, grinning like goons.

While stumbling around one Saturday generally making a nuisance of ourselves filming Beerjacket (his awesome session is coming soon, too), and whilst trying to work out how to use a set of mind-blowingly expensive cameras that we’d convinced the lovely people at The Skinny to sort out for us, we’d ended up outside the Wee Red Bar with fifteen minutes to kill. And as if the gods of all acoustic sessions came together at once, we turned round and saw Julia And The Doogans just hanging around on some benches practising for their evening show. At which point our inner puppies kicked in and we bounded over and asked to get a couple of tracks down.

Unfortunately for us, since our power animals are puppies and everything, this means that we are extremely well-meaning, but that something usually gets broken – and this was, by some considerable margin, the least professional session we’ve yet stumbled our way inexpertly through. Considering that one of us once fell in a river during a session, this is some achievement. We are still not sure whether the band are convinced that the cameras were running – indeed, in a recent Myspace blog, Julia described us as ‘hilarious’. Not talented, visionary, creative, exciting, or even competent, but ‘hilarious’.

Like clowns.

Anyway – the last laugh’s on us, because we caught two tracks from a band that truly blew us away. In the weeks after we recorded the session, a few articles sprung up from the usual sources which will give you the background on the band, but we hope this gives you a feel for what everyone’s on about. Glasgow-based and less than a year old, Julia & The Doogans make a noise so rich, so charged and so damn tasty that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. In particular, you’ll never watch the X Factor again without comparing every two-bit, glory-seeking cheap hack songstress’ feeble warble to Julia’s suckerpunch of a voice, all soft and fractured one minute, and bursting your nose the next, all to a soundtrack that slips between high glory and gut-wrenching despair in the space of seconds.

So – if being puppy-like and stupid means we get to run into bands this good by accident, we think that’s fair.

For those of you who know us in real life, this may come as a surprise, but we here at Off The Beaten Tracks are – honestly – good-natured souls really. So when the folk behind Oxjam Edinburgh came asking, we didn’t even draw breath. What started out as a genuine attempt to join in with a group of folk who were (and are) genuinely trying to make a difference in the world we all live in, ended up on one Sunday in Leith as a collection of sessions that we are slightly miffed we didn’t come up with on our own.

The Oxjam Edinburgh (buy tickets) event is going off on 23rd October across many venues in Edinburgh, and is going to be brilliant from top to bottom, so if you haven’t got your ticket yet, you should do that right now – but in the meantime, we’re delighted to have been a part of the build-up, and to have spent the afternoon in the company of all these bands, and to have caught them all live and in real time.

First up were The Last Battle, who showed up with more babies than were necessary, but with less instruments than they needed. Not only that, but they’d never – not once – played in front of any crowd at all. We think you’ll agree, given that this is a record of their first ever live outing, that this outfit have promise beyond nomal expectations. Great things beckon, we think, great things.

The second act up here, Meursault, on the other hand, have no need at all to prove anything to anyone. All this session does is prove that they may well be peerless amongst the capital’s super-dense and super-talented music scene. Even if Neil’s voice threatened to destroy our microphones.

Meanwhile, Adam from the ever-attention-grabbing Y’All Is Fantasy Island joined in the fun with a set of songs that quite patently should have been electrified, but that – acoustically – still demonstrated how scared you should all be of plugging him in. The man’s a force of nature, and no mistake.

To finish up, there may be no more loveable, no more admirable, no more understatedly musical outfit at work today in Scotland than The Occasional Flickers, who managed to drop in a truly cuddly set of unbearably grabbable songs, almost without anyone noticing how knockout they were. Just magic.

It was a really great day for us to be a part of, and we’re delighted we got to share it – all we ask in return is that you support the bands you see here, and buy your ticket to Oxjam Edinburgh.

Bands playing are Frightened Rabbit (Scott solo set), Meursault, Dead Boy Robotics, Conquering Animal Sound, Y’All Is Fantasy Island, Jesus H. Foxx, The Last Battle, Woodenbox With a Fistful of Fivers, Pose Victorious, Come On Gang, Boycotts, The Occasional Flickers, Chutes, The Little Kicks, Le Reno Amps, Paper Beats Rock, My Electric Love Affair, Shellsuit Massacre and more subject to confirmation…

Venues are Cabaret Voltaire, Sneaky Pete’s, The City Cafe, The Bowery and The Wee Red Bar.

We met Blue Roses after the soundcheck for their gig during the Edinburgh Festival. They were tired, hungry and hadn’t really known the session was happening until that morning due to some communication issues. However, they soldiered on with smiles on their faces and treated us to two songs before the heavens opened.

Due to time constraints and the fact that you can’t move in central Edinburgh during the festival without tripping over a tourist, we headed back to the same graveyard where we took The Thermals a couple of months before, albeit a different part of the huge site.

Blue Roses is the solo project of Laura Groves, but live she has a small band with her. Here we get two songs with Laura and Sadie, with drummer Josh sitting this one out.

The first track is Doubtful Comforts, the first single, released earlier in 2009. This version has less plink andplonk than the recorded version, but is every bit as warmly ethereal.

The second track we got, just in time, is Coast, . It’s difficult to see on the video, but about half way through the song, the Scottish summer weather (rain) kicked in, slowly getting heavier throughout the remainder of the song. The girls heroically kept going with a knowing grin to each other, impressing the foreign tourists who encountered more than they bargained for when they decided to have a nose round the historic site.

Check out the Blue Roses website or Myspace for more.

We spoke to Stormy Seas a really long time ago, but life got in the way for us and them, and it took us till recently to organise a session. So on a very windy, sunny day, Stormy Seas took us up the back woods for some fun. Please pardon the bad wordplay. There’s more of it to come.

Stormy Seas are 5 boys based around Newhaven, and have been playing their particular brand of dirty, folky, dare-we-say sea shanties around Edinburgh since the end of last year. Unfortunately the band were a man down on the day, but we think you’ll agree that the boys put on a marvellous show without him.

The day was super windy, or stormy, you might say. We set up in the woods up the back of Newhaven, surrounded by dogwalkers and kids on bikes, and we got a few songs while the trees shook around us.

The two songs here are ‘Apple Tree’ and ‘Bird In A Cage’, both gloriously forlorn pieces of folk, modern but with plenty of tradition. While the accompaniment is warm and inviting, the urgent vocals bring a different dimension to the songs, not least a tinge of sadness.

Find out more about The Stormy Seas at their Myspace. They’re playing plenty around the place over the next few months, so make sure you catch them live.

For our tenth session, we managed to get something a little bit special, the first performance of FOUND using their latest art installation, Cybraphon, as a backing band. Cybraphon is – by some distance – the barmiest object ever conceived by anyone, anywhere. Tommy from FOUND describes it as ‘a musical cupboard with a personality that’s attached to the internet’. Bear with us – this could take some time…

FOUND aren’t just a band, y’see, they’re an art collective, and quite a bonkers one at that. What they’ve spent over six months conceiving, designing, engineering and constructing is a collection of acoustic instruments, housed in an antique wardrobe, engineered to be mechanical and then electrified it so it can be controlled externally as well as programmed. It’s also connected to the internet.

When we met up with them, the Cybraphon was only just operational, not yet the finished article, like C3P0 in The Phantom Menace – works fine, just not decorated yet. This in no way takes away from the astonshing impact of the thing. It looks like something out of Jules Verne, chock full of Victoriana, rare and antique instruments and the equipment used in early experiments with electricity, but attached – preposterously – to an Apple laptop.

It’s going to be installed over August 2009 in the Inspace Gallery in Edinburgh, where it will spend its time scanning the internet for references to itself, scanning the contents and dependent on whether discussion of it is positive or negative, will play music that reflects online discussion. If someone says it’s a stupid idea, Cybraphon will be sad, and clicky little dirges will spew forth; if we all cheer madly, and applaud its genius, it will be deliriously happy and we’ll get the soundtrack accordingly.

FOUND themselves have composed various pieces for Cybraphon, but today we were treated to three of their own songs, while the cupboard gleefully clicked and whirred and droned and pinged away in the background.

Filming inside the secret location that is the heart of the Cybraphon project (really just a Portacabin, which is why the light’s so bad, sorry), we got ‘You’re No Vincent Gallo’ up first, with the full band version’s throbbing bass replaced with Ziggy’s banjo and the Cybraphon’s glitchy tinkling.

The treats just kept on coming, with the second track of the session being a version of ‘Admission Number Two’, taken from the 2007 LP ‘This Mess We Keep Reshaping’. The Cybraphon here takes the dixie-narco stompiness out of the original and replaces a clicky sense of mischief. Cracking stuff.

Leaving the Cybraphon to cool off, we venture outdoors for a bit, and gather the band round the discarded skeleton of an unused sculpture for a foot-stomping version of ‘Anti-Climb Paint’. Any band who can pull off all the good bits of the Violent Femmes, without sounding dated or plagiarised deserves your love – a cracking version of a great track, and a grinning full-stop to by far and away the oddest but artiest session we’ve done yet.

FOUND will be unveiling Cybraphon from 3rd August at Edinburgh’s Inspace Gallery, where they’ll also be doing a live performance on the 13th. Tickets are free, but ticketed, and available at .

We met Randan Discotheque three months ago to record this session. Due to some scheduling problems and technical difficulties it’s taken us till now to get it on the site. Forgive us. It’s been worth the wait though.

We met singer and guitarist Craig, percussionist Doug and mandolin/guitar player Olly at the Edinburgh College of Art, where by some miracle we got access to a couple of places we really shouldn’t have. We got two songs, both stripped down to bare bones folk songs, completely changing the tone from their electric versions which the band play at gigs.

The first song, “Heather The Weather” was recorded on a balcony near the top of the new Art School Building, giving us a lovely view of Edinburgh Castle from an angle which most people don’t get to see. We were told a story about shady businessmen and buildings changing hands, but we won’t go into it here. “Heather…” is tribute to cheery Heather Reid who presents weather reports on BBC Scotland. Fittingly, the Scottish weather showed its true colours, with rain looming and wind causing us to worry about the recordings. Poor Doug looked a little crestfallen as his percussion setup was stripped down to the quietest possible to avoid it drowning out everything else.

Heading back downstairs to less wind and less vertigo, we were taken to the Sculpture Court in the main building. The sculpture court is a lovely, echoing chamber of light, where casts of the friezes from the Parthenon line the walls of the corridor. With art school types wandering past, barely noticing that a band was bellowing out songs in the midst of this otherwise quiet hall, we recorded “Let’s Call It Dirt”. Actually untitled at the time, this song, even more than the last, is a very different take from the version that can be seen at normal Randan gigs. The echo chamber effect of the hall adds a totally different dimension to the song, and we feel lucky to have caught it

Randan Discotheque – Off the Beaten Facts

1. Randan Discotheque is actually a four piece normally. Hugo de Verteuil normally plays guitar and keyboards, but couldn’t make it.
2. The new single, “Daily Record May 18th 1993″ is out 31st August as a limited edition 7″ on The Bonjour Branch label
3. The band’s name came from an old sign which singer Craig stumbled upon in a small Italian town. Honest.
4. There’s all sorts of art type stuff going on with Randan and Craig himself. Check out their site for more.
5. You can find them on Myspace

Wow, we were excited about this one. For our first ever non-UK act, we managed to somehow persuade none less than The Thermals, Portland OR’s finest, to join us for some evening sunshine, some fairly daft banter and three cracking acoustic tracks.

The band had been delayed at sound check, so we’d ended up waiting around for a lot longer than we’d planned. Our new friends from the My Old Kentucky Blog were also over from the US to watch us record The Thermals and in between drinking and telling tall tales about Edinburgh, it occurred to us that we could carry this theme of hanging around for stuff we like on into the session. So, naturally, we snuck into the graveyard of Greyfriars Kirk to find our spot for the evening.

The story goes that this very churchyard is where one daft little dog guarded over its dead owner’s grave for fourteen years, in an actual parable of loyalty beyond death. It’s pretty popular with tourists, as you’d imagine. The churchyard itself though is actually chock full of notables other than just the dog guy, though, with the architects who built the city and the politicians who ran it all interred in sometimes astonishing tombs, all covered in skulls and bones and other weird-looking sculpture. The kirkyard is also reputedly haunted by the restless spirit of the infamous “Bloody” George Mackenzie, which is said to cause bruising and minor cuts and grazes on those who come into contact with it. We all came out unscathed, thankfully.

With the evening sun nice and low – and having roped our new friends in to do the glamorous job of keeping the branches out of the bands faces (thanks Wendles) – we got three acoustic corkers from the new album, with the first up being the title track and single ‘Now We Can See’. Live and on record, it’s a full-on anthemic belter, a shouty, sweaty, grinning lunatic of a song – stripped down to just Hutch’s guitar, the band’s voices and a bunch of handclaps, it’s just as powerful and just as insistent, a lesson in how a punk rock band with good songs don’t need distortion and volume to prove a point.

For our second track of the session the band put together one of their slower ones, How We Fade. Head-nodding and toe-tapping, it manages to retain the menacing sonic undercurrent without it seeming weird among the sunshine and the evening birdsong.

Final track of the evening was I Let It Go – all rumbunctious and pogo-ing when plugged in, here it’s stripped back and gets taken from the garage to the grassland. It’s still got the energy of the record, and Hutch’s voice cuts through like a foghorn, but with the flavour of a Sunday morning, rather than a Saturday night – cracking stuff.

Find out more about The Thermals at thethermals.com

The barmy and brilliant Jesus H. Foxx first ran into each other in 2007, as a four-piece. While the current count of band members now sits at an unwieldy seven, they’ve somehow tamed the early ramshackle sound into a glorious racket that manages to stay true to their original scruffbag roots but with added pop goodness. High time we got them in for a session, then.

We meet them all in the reading room at Edinburgh’s Bowery, a small room off the basement of what used to be Lady Glenorchy’s Parish Church. Lady Glenorchy herself was the daughter of wealthy parents, who married one of 18th century Scotland’s wealthiest landowners. After he died, the good Lady went about spannering the inheritance, not on hats, but on chapels, ones that were designed to allow preaching by, and education for, those who could not be accommodated in existing parish church buildings. She built loads, including this one, which originally had a school in it. Given the oddball directions and many layers to the Jesus H Foxx way of doing stuff, we figured that felt about right.

For starters we got a version of Oh Messy Life, the first track on their EP, as well as the opening salvo live. In full-on electric glory, it moves from its grand folk choir opening, and descends into staccato riffs and refrains – stripped down here, it becomes a more shuffling and friendly beast.

Matter closes out both the EP and their current live shows, but we ended up with it second here. Very different in tone from much of the rest of their set, it’s almost hymnal in parts, with the bare minimum of instrumentation suddenly joined by soaring voices and swooping harmonies.

For the final track, we moved outside to The Pleasance, for the view of Arthur’s Seat and for a jumpy, grinning version of I’m Half The Man You Were. The band’s love of American acts shines through, and few of their songs sound so like early Pavement as this one. It’s not a criticism – after all, if you’re going to sound like any band, Pavement is hardly a poor choice, plus it’s a very difficult trick to pull off. It lopes along with chirrupping guitars, slacker vocals and moments of pure pop glory – a fine way to round off the day.

Find out more about Jesus H Foxx at their Myspace

Uncharacteristically blazing sun and the soft rolling Water Of Leith provided the backdrop to our latest excursion into the fresh air, this time accompanied by the delightful Honeytrap. Fresh(ish) from a rousing appearance in the capital the night before – with the apres-gig entertainings ending brief hours before we met up – we dragged them down to the river to play.

To start the day off right, we got ‘To America’, a shimmering pearl of gypsy indie, a Jarvis-fronting-Beirut, tempo-changing balalaika of a song, with an exhortation to move to America that may or may not be entirely serious.

For seconds, we got a song they wrote in Norway called ‘Marit With Children’, which we needed to record without drummer Brendan, for fear that he’d burst into flames in the searing heat.

Before we all died of heatstroke, we retreated back into the slightly less fierce Lord Mayor’s garden where we were treated to the final track of the day ‘Mussolini’s Son’. To be frank, by this point the sun had clearly gotten to everyone a bit, which should become apparent in the video. Sorry about that.

Honeytrap – Off the Beaten Facts

1. Drummer Brendan is scared of dogs. So when Satan’s own German Shepherd showed up during filming (complete with pentangle collar decoration), he scarpered.
2. There are two Dans in Honeytrap – one is big, the other not so much. One is therefore called Big Dan, and the other Little Dan. Functional, rather than imaginative.
3. Brendan has some horrible stories about poo.
4. Big Dan likes the boardgame Risk, but seems to think that the conquest of each different region wins you a relevant hat of some kind.
5. Big Dan also is also the best in the band at rolling down hills.
6. Honeytrap have an album out called Follies In Great Cities…
7. …and they also have a Myspace to boot.

Something old, something new, something borrowed… Okay, we didn’t get anything blue, but in our latest session with the utterly marvellous Scott from Frightened Rabbit, we got the classic ‘Be Less Rude’, a brand new track ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’ and a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘Song Against Sex’. Not a lot’s better than that, if we’re honest.

We sat Scott down in Edinburgh’s Dunbar Close, a little-known public space off the Royal Mile laid out in the style of a 17th-Century garden. Which, as far as we can tell, means ‘gravelly paths, uncomfortable stone benches, a madman with a toy flute, and some hungry looking plants, all set underneath a damn helicopter festival’. Still, none other than Robbie Burns used to go drinking and whoring at Mrs. Love’s Oyster Bar which used to be nearby back then, so who are we to complain?

‘Be Less Rude’ might be getting on a bit these days, but it’s easy to forget how much of a little gem it is, taken from the debut LP Sing The Greys. The reason we like this song so much is because it’s a bit like being taught manners by your indie mum. That, and the judicious use of the word ‘shite’ halfway through.

Bloody helicopters. Didn’t they realise we were trying to record some acoustic indie rock? The second-track filling in our three-track Frightened Rabbit session sandwich sent us a bit giddy – a brand new track (unreleased, and so-far virtually unheard outside of a couple of low-key gigs) called ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’. Taken from the recording sessions currently going on in deepest, darkest Fife, it’s one of the possibles for the new album, due next year. We like, lots – even if he almost gets drowned out by the bloody helicopters.

As a full-stop to the day, Scott gave us a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘Song Against Sex’. A tumbling, relentless stream of word and melody, it’s made even better than the original by his uncanny impression of Chewbacca in the more excitable vocal bits.

Three cracking tracks, a day full of sunshine and sound, and the promise of a third blow-your-socks-off Frightened Rabbit LP – some days it actually IS worth getting out of bed.

Frightened Rabbit – Off the Beaten Facts

1. There were children present in the garden during ‘Be Less Rude’. Notonly did this not stop him using a sweary word, but he even claimed ”I’ve said worse to younger”.
2. Inevitably, what with playing solo in a public garden in front of some bemused tourists, Scott got a bit self-conscious. He got over it by, as he put it, “giving it the full Susan Boyle”. We’re pretty sure there’s a gag in there involving hairy Scots, but we’ll let you come up with one on your own instead.
3. From the start of June, the band will be holed up in East Lothian, where they’ll be working on new tracks with producer Peter Katis, who did The National’s ‘Boxer’ album – the new album’s due next year.
4. Scott has a worrying depth of knowledge about 90s rave-pop giants N-Trance…and is a particular fan of their singer Kelly Llorenna
5. The Frightened Rabbit cover of N-Trance’s ‘Set You Free’ was, he is at pains to point out, a genuine tribute to a great piece of music, and not just some ironic piss-take…
6. …which is why he was so surprised to read the internet comments of one particular N-Trance fan who’d heard the cover, and who voiced their displeasure by suggesting something unpleasant involving his sister.
7. Frightened Rabbit play bigger venues in the US than at home, so to teach us ungrateful buggers back home a lesson, they’ll be back in the US and Canada during July for both the Pitchfork festival in Chicago, and the Siren festival in New York, as well as a string of other dates from Hoboken to Montreal. Details are on their Myspace and attendance is mandatory.
8. Frightened Rabbit have a Myspace, don’t you know.

Our second Homegame session comes from Slow Club, Moshi Moshi signings and nicest-people-ever. Charles and Rebecca braved the icy Fife winds to record two songs for us at the end of the pier in Anstruther, and didn’t complain once.

Slow Club seem to unfairly suffer from identity confusion. Many people we spoke to wondered why they would be playing Homegame, having put the Moshi Moshi signing and appearances together and assumed they’re hipster indie kids. Others see the acoustic guitar and the lack of other band members and peg them as folkies. The truth is they have a little of both, but lots of neither. A bit folky, a bit indie, a fair bit rockabilly, the songs are pretty, joyful ditties with plenty of heartache and a little wide-eyed naivety.

The first track the pair were nice enough to play for us is Wild Blue Milk. To be released with “It Doesn’t Have To Be Beautiful” in June, it’s a perfect showcase for the beautiful vocal harmonies whick Slow Club use to such great effect Everyone we’ve shown this song to has been instantly converted. Watch for Rebecca slowly losing the use of her hands from the cold.

The second track is “Christmas TV”, a Christmas single with a difference: it’s good, and doesn’t sound Christmasy. With lines like “Its okay that I pray you will miss your flight and stay with me another night” it focuses on the extra emotional strain that the festive season brings. If you’ve ever been alone at Christmas, it’s guaranteed to break your heart.

Dylan was nice enough to take the photos for us on this session, and he took some of his own too.

Slow Club – Off the Beaten Facts

1. The debut album, “Yeah So” will be released through Moshi Moshi on 6th July 2009
2. The band claimed on their Myspace that Homegame was the best weekend ever. We can see how.
3. Normally Rebecca plays drums and some odd percussion while Charles plays guitar, but here they both play guitar and sing for your entertainment.
4. Slow Club songs have featured on two high profile TV adverts in North America, as well as the season finale of “Chuck” in the US.
5. You can find out more at their Myspace.

It’s amazing the stuff you see when you get out of the city for a day. Open spaces, for example; birds of prey, epic views, rolling hills and clearer skies; and Malcolm Middleton in the loft of the Fisheries Museum in Anstruther.

It was Matthew from Song, by Toad who asked us to pitch up with him to Homegame and record a couple of sessions. And why not? The annual festival run by Fence Records takes place in picturesque Anstruther, in Fife over 3 days, and features most of the artists involved with Fence, as well as other pals and guests.

We met up with Malcolm on the Saturday afternoon, and took him down to the uber-quaint Scottish Fisheries Museum. In the dark loft amongst old fishing baskets, stuffed bunnies and a frankly disconcerting model of a man in a hat, Mr. Middleton was nice enough to do two tracks for us – both of which have still to be released.

For the first track, we got a version of “Made Up Your Mind”, the last track on his new album Waxing Gibbous, which is due for a June 1st release. It’s (relatively for Malcolm, anyway) musically chirpy and sweet, with trademark Middleton lyrics full of lost love and depression. It’s great. The loft was pretty dark, and the somber mood suits the subject matter as you would expect.

We got something a bit different for the second track. An instrumental acoustic track, “Returning” is taken from a still-in-progress album of instrumentals – with the Waxing Gibbous album imminent and the touring and publicity which that entails, don’t expect this to see the light of day any time soon. But it’s as impressive a display of guitar virtuosity as you’ll ever realistically need to hear. Unfortunately our first camera malfunctioned after half a minute without us knowing, so you’ll have to put up with some less than amazing visuals. We still thinks it’s good though.

You can see an interview from the same session and some live footage at Song, by Toad.

Malcolm Middleton – Off The Beaten Facts

1. The new album, Waxing Gibbous, is released on 1st June on Full Time Hobby
2. Malcolm claims this is his last solo album for a while. He wants to try other things, and come back to the Malcolm Middleton material later.
3. He feels that if we wants to do something drastically different, he can’t really do it under his own name.
4. On his Myspace he recently claimed his new album was nowhere near as good as Def Leppard’s Hysteria. Then he changed his mind.
5. Malcolm would like to write songs for other people. We’d love to see him write for Girls Aloud. Really.
6. There’s a song on the new album with rapping. Yes, Malcolm Middleton raps.
7. He’s also been recording covers of girl band songs to combat the boredom of waiting around for his new album to come out. So far he’s released three of them and they’re all great. Download them free at his website.
8. He’s played at Homegame for the last three years, despite having no real ties to Fence. They obviously just love him, and why not?
9. The Malcolm Middleton tour bus hits the road at the end of June to promote the album, taking in, sporadically, a bunch of major UK cities as well as some festivals such as End Of The Road and Field Day.
10. Here’s the now familiar links to the Malcolm Middleton Myspace and website.

For our latest session we took the many boys and girls of Team Turnip, gave them some fresh air and sunshine and watched their folky chamber pop blossom in the Edinburgh spring sun.

We picked Advocates Close as our first spot, which jinks down from The Royal Mile and emerges on Cockburn Street. One of the oldest remaining  closes in Edinburgh, it dates from the mid-sixteenth century and takes its name from one Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees, the last Advocate Of Scotland in office during the time of the Restoration, Revolution and Union. It’s also got a nice little sunlit platform halfway down that can fit a band that features drums, two violins, a glockenspiel, an omnichord and a mandolin.

We got a (ahem) cracking version of ‘Scramble Eggs’ here, a cheery, jolly-sounding slice of chamber folk that’s actually about the futility of war and the death of a friend – Sir James Stewart of Goodtree might even have approved.

From there we moved from the high walls of Advocates Close to the open spaces of Regent Road. With one of the richest backdrops in all of Edinburgh, featuring views to Arthurs Seat, the new Parliament at Holyrood and the Royal Palace itself, it’s also right next to the Robbie Burns monument and opposite the gargantuan old Royal High School building. Just right for a buzzing, string-laden version of This City Life, with its soaring chorus perfect for the wide open space.

As always, if you’ve got a suggestion for a band or know of an oddball out-of-the-way place that we should be using, get in touch.

Team Turnip – Off The Beaten Facts

1. Russell sings and plays guitar here, and is the creative engine at the heart of Team Turnip
2. A multi-instrumentalist, he even arranges the string parts, using actual written music and everything
3. The rest of the band are like a musical A-Team, gamely rushing to Russell’s aid when required for live duties from their secret lairs across England and Scotland
4. Caro and Emma, the violinists, are also Russell’s sisters
5. If you look at Mal the bass player, in just the right light, he looks exactly like Dave Grohl
6. Mandolinist Drew is daftly talented, yet seems to enjoy using his skills for evil – his mandolin-version of Generator by The Rumble Strips certainly hints at a black heart of pure darkness
7. He also carries a frankly worrying number of tyres around in his car
8. They’re currently recording a new LP, with Russell recently claiming that one track will sound – of all things – dub-step
9. You can catch Team Turnip (in one form or another) playing Glasgow’s 13th Note on 30th May, and Edinburgh’s Iso Lounge (as part of Leith Tape Club) on 25th June
10. You can found out all you need to know at their Myspace

Welcome to Off The Beaten Tracks, a musical project set in unusual surroundings. In our first ever outing, we’re thrilled to show off the fizzing art-pop of one of Edinburgh’s finest new bands Come On Gang, made all acoustic and velvety. Yum, yum, yum.

Musically, Edinburgh’s been in Glasgow’s shadow since… well, since pretty much forever, if we’re honest. With the honourable exceptions of Josef K and the Fire Engines, and despite a perennially buzzing but, um, “compact” musical scene, Edinburgh has never managed to become a hub of sound in the way Glasgow has. Instead, its cultural reputation is built on the titanic theatrical mess that is the Fringe and the International Festivals that swell the city to bursting point every August.

Recently though, there’ve been some exhilarating signs of musical life in the capital. Along with FOUND, Mersault and the recently-signed-to-4AD and soon-to-be-huuuge Broken Records, Come On Gang are right in amongst the buzzing melee of glorious noise coming out of Edinburgh – and, God bless ‘em – they gave up a Saturday afternoon on a blimming freezing January day to hang around outside a cafe in a strange alley off the Royal Mile to play some songs and watch us fumble around inexpertly with portable electronics. These are the results.

The first track, So Good Hold My Hand, was played outside The Deacon’s Cafe down Brodie’s Close, just off The Royal Mile. The site was once owned by Deacon Brodie – who we like for the fact that he invented a type of gallows on which he was eventually hanged – and was also formerly a barracks, a cut in the stone step where soldiers would sharpen their swords still remains. It is now a tearoom, run by the supernaturally patient Ivor, who graciously let us muck about outside and generally bring the tone down.

We did two tracks here, but – opting to avoid hypothermia – retired to bass player Trev’s flat, which in the fine tradition of Edinburgh’s tenements (and of course, Shallow Grave) has a huge bay window commanding views over the Firth Of Forth to Fife. We got a really stripped-down and slightly haunting version of Wood ForThe Trees for our efforts.

So – enjoy the tracks. If you’ve got a suggestions for a band, know of a strange location just crying out for a band to play in, or just want to say hi, drop us a line.

Come On Gang – Off The Beaten Facts

1. Come On Gang are made up of Mikey Morrison on guitar and Trev Courtney on Bass, with Sarah Tanat-Jones both singing and playing the drums
2. Mikey is Scottish, but in true Edinburgh fashion, the rest are immigrants to the city, Trev from Dublin and Sarah from Brighton
3. They reckon they never argue or have fights, but we think that’ll go out the window as soon as they go on tour properly
4. Trev thinks he can rap. To be fair, when he said hip, we did – in fact – say hop
5. Despite being a band that sounds like it has impeccably crafted influences, they say that there’s not a single band that all three of them like…
6. …in fact, they claim to be quite surprised at how the band turned out sounding
7. Live, they’ve played all over the place, and have moved in exactly the right circles, playing at T In The Park, and supporting Glasvegas and Florence And The Machine
8. They’ve released two singles so far, Wheels and Start The Sound. Both burst at the seams with joy and energy but don’t come close to the fizz of the live show
9. They’ve been invited to play at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March 2009, but they’ll be doing dates in Edinburgh and Liverpool before then
10. You can found out all you need to know at their Myspace