Suitcase Orchestra will be coming to you live and direct from the Beeb Beeb Ceeb tomorrow night. There will be chat and a few records at BBC Tees from around 9pm.

BBC Boffins are currently busy whittling down the provisional playlist of 500 songs.

If this goes well, we’re looking at organising next year’s BBC Electric Proms.

Around eighteen months ago, when I first stumbled upon Woodpigeon by clicking a link from Edinburgh band Eagleowl’s website, all that was available was the free six track e.p. Houndstooth. It was a delicate collection of tentative folky songs and I loved it right away. Now, a year and a half later, the song count on my i-pod has reached 120 and I’ve seen them live more times than is probably sensible or indeed plausible given the thousands of miles of land and ocean stretching between their home and mine. To say that Woodpigeon’s Mark Hamilton is prolific would be a serious understatement.

Die Stadt Muzikanten is Woodpigeon’s third album and is the sound of a band growing in confidence and enjoying exploring the parameters of their own music. At the core of this record is the same sound and feel as that on the Hounstooth e.p. but now the music is stretched and pushed in all sorts of different directions. There are brass brands, plucked strings, loops, drones, fuzz and distortion, rich orchestration, accordions, ethereal backing vocals, speeded up tapes – this is an ambitious and expansive record, by turns stark and lonely and pulsating and intense.

After the disarmingly frank autobiographical content of their first two albums, this collection of songs is more third-person, inspired as it was by Hamilton’s ancestors’ journeys from Europe to a new life in Canada. His vocals are no less heartfelt though. What marks Woodpigeon out from the rest of the indie-folk pack is Mark Hamilton’s voice which has a bleeding quality more reminiscent of Chairman Of The Board’s General Norman Johnson or Al Green than Simon & Garfunkel.

Those quick off the mark with the album will also get an additional album entitled Balladeer: To All The Guys I’ve Loved Before which contains songs recorded since the Die Stadt Muzikanten sessions. Hamilton is keen on giving his songs away, hence the 120 on my i-Pod.This time he’s given away the best song he’s ever written: An Entanglement Of Weeds. Sweeping strings over a ghostly echoing loop, it tells the tale of a twelve year old boy drowning while trying to save his friend and was recorded recently with Steve Albini – proof if needed that Woodpigeon will continue to push their music to its limits.

Die Stadt Muzikanten is released in Canada and Japan on January 12^th, In the U.K. and Europe on March 1^st and in the U.S.A. on March 9^th.

Woodpigeon will be playing a string of dates across Canada over the next two months, details on their MySpace here.