A short recommendation for you this evening.

Glasgow Podcart and Song By Toad recommended them, thus sheeplike I bought the album - albeit about two months later. I refer of course to Home And The Wildhunt, by Woodenbox With A Fistful Of Fivers. They're playing Falkland’s Big Tent festival this weekend, and the set should be fun.

They're another band with decidedly folky overtones, but not at all in the Meursault fashion of yestereve. We're talking altogether more upbeat, with more horns and stuff. According to Under The Radar, the album is heavily influenced by Ennio Morricone,…

Meursault work in HMV. Well, some of them do. And it turns out that’s a pretty good way of making sure your second album is prominently displayed around the ground floor, which in turn is a good way of persuading myself and abgb to buy it on impulse.

I won’t lie, Pissing on Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues was a pretty excellent debut to have to follow. But All Creatures Make Merry defiantly refuses to conform to the ‘difficult second album’ stereotype. Unless you don’t like low-fi, reverby guitars layered together with strings, electronica and folky vocals.* But if you…

Ever bought a CD because this one time you read a review in The Herald that mentioned an excellent track name and you thought, “no way could this be a negative financial transaction on my part!”?

My one is Cuddly Shark’s self titled CD, Cuddly Shark. The track in question was Jamie Foxx on Later With Jools Holland (I Heard You Sing The Worst Song I Ever Heard) – although since purchasing the album I have discovered that the part in parentheses isn’t actually part of the song title. It is a line from it though.

Some of…

Do you remember indie? Do you remember pop?

Try getting your claws on come honest-to-crikey indie pop, revived for your information by Edinburgh-based foursome Kid Canaveral.

Shouting At Wildlife is the band’s long awaited debut album, and it’s 38 minutes of delicious musical abandon. You needn’t take my word for it - everybody says so, from The List to The Skinny to basically the entire Scottish music blogging scene (which you may know is a vast and sprawling beast indeed). And it’s DJ Vic Galloway’s album of the month for July, which is NOW!

They've got synths! They've got…

There is but one tween girl I see at work who is yet to succumb to the vice-like grip of Bieber fever. The rest of them love him to the point of madness. One gives me regular updates on the shrine she has been creating at home. I've kept old magazines back to help her, in fact. What a despicable facilitator I am.

Anyway, by and large these are quite nice kids, which is a shame because from what I can gather he's an annoying little toerag with some worryingly misogynistic tendencies. Have you seen the music video for Baby…

Mind Chaos, the debut by Charming Carmen and the Hobnailed Bombadiers, is excellent.

It's also by a band from Oregon called Hockey - the opening sentence was a cunning ruse to see whether you were paying attention. I presume you passed. Well done.

abgb and I actually tried to see them play their live instruments in a gig at Cab Vol last September, but it sold out. How rude. I was surprised at the time, as I didn't think they were particularly well known - I personally found them by googling what gigs were happening in Edinburgh in September.…

Christopher Lee? Christopher Lee-gend more like! Cause he's a total legend, yeah? No? You're right. I'll work on that.

But seriously. What other 80 year old would record a metal CD? Much less a concept album about a 9th century Frankish king. If your granddad had the opportunity to do that, he probably wouldn't. He'd be all sitting in his favourite chair eating werther's originals, turning down his hearing aid before asking wearily, 'who is Charlemagne anyway? Some foreign type?'

That's right, your granddad is a sweet scoffing racist.

Christopher Lee isn't. He's a god among men.

Lyrically, Charlemagne: By…

All my friends totally <3 The Pictish Trail.

Well, that’s not strictly true. Madame Bellamy doesn’t really care for men singing with Scottish accents for a start. And I suppose there are a few people about who didn’t go to university in Fife, or take an interest in the live music scene there, and some of them probably don’t know who he is. But they ought to. He’s been on the The Culture Show, doncha know. Since when was that not mainstream enough?!

Anyway, it occurred to me a couple of months ago that I’d only actually head one track…

Panic! At The Disco eh. They’re fun.

I only have the one album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, and I’m not entirely sure how that came about. Drunken torrenting, maybe.

Anyway it was released like, five years ago and you've probably forgotten all about it by now. Although according to Wikipedia, it’s “a modern phenomenon in youth culture”. So maybe not.

There are strings! There are synths! There are even a few bars of ragtime piano in the mix. I’m unclear as to how much musical ability is involved in doing what they do, but they write some…

I've been listening to Efterklang today for the sole reason that the singles reviewer in April's Skinny refused to say anything about them on the grounds that "they don't need any help."

This sort of implies they are mega famous and popular, with all the limos and the bitches and whatnot. But I'm not convinced that this is the case. They are a Danish band who formed ten years ago, and they've hardly broken into the mainstream. I don't think they've even had any songs on BBC idents. Fail.

The album I have mostly been listening to (well, a couple…