Word Magazine 086 - Now Hear This!: April 2010
CD, 2010, Heftbeilage, Cardsleeve

The Word TracklistingGuide:
1. The Kissaway Trail - Three Million Hours
This Danish fivesome specialise in ecstatic megapop à la Flaming Lips, Polyphonic Spree or Arcade Fire. This first track on our CD is, amazingly, the last on theirs – so you can picture what precedes it.
From the album Sleep Mountain
2. Tunng - It Breaks
Proud beard owners and employers of little-used instruments, Tunng have laboured under the "folktronica" tag but it does scant justice to their bright mixture of traditional music, alternative pop and whatever else they fancy. This optimism is particularly in evidence on their fourth album, ...And We Saw Land, where their sound is fuller than ever, diminutive singer Becky Jacobs takes centre-stage and good cheer reigns. "A friend called it 'epic folk disco brass'," says co-founder Mike Lindsay, "and I'm not sure you could call any other Tunng record that." It's the result of a mind-expanding couple of years for the band, which saw Lindsay producing tracks for Speech Debelle's Mercury Prize-winning album and Tunng touring with Malian bluesmen Tinariwen. "They showed us you don't need structure as long as there's presence, emotion and groove," says Lindsay. "It taught us that everything is open and adaptable." A lesson for us all there.

From the album And We Saw Land

3. Lord Executor - Seven Skeletons Found In The Yard
Bloodthirsty 1938 calypso by Trinidadian star Lord Executor, from a splendid new Honest Jon's compilation of songs about murder that ranges across the years and styles, featuring Jimmie Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Sonny Boy Williamson and others
From the album Murder – Songs From The Dark Side Of The Soul
4. Jónsi - Boy Lilikol
The epic chorales of Sigur Rós are long-standing Word favourites, so we are delighted to bring you this preview of the solo
LP by their singer and co-architect Jón Thor Birgisson. Following Riceboy Sleeps, last year's chiefly instrumental album, Go is a big old blast of North Atlantic exhilaration and proof that, even if their economy has disappeared overnight, Iceland's hardy populace are not letting it get them down. Contrasting with Sigur Rós's giant curtain walls of guitar (why has no one yet called it the "glacier of sound"?), Jónsi's solo album is a joyous toybox of a record. Brass, strings, oddball percussion, woodwind and piano are in full spate, chiefly arranged by Björk/Antony And The Johnsons collaborator Nico Mulhy. The cumulative effect is both of a piece with Sigur Rós's quasi-religious anthems and completely different from them. It's an explosion of pure delight and we think you'll like it. Pop fact: "lilikol" is Hawaiian for passionfruit.


From the album Go
5. Robin Hitchcock & The Venus Three (featuring Johnny Marr) - Ordinary Millionaire
There is prolific and then there's Robyn Hitchcock: solo artist, Soft Boy and psychedelic gentleman about town. Ordinary Millionaire is the product of one of his countless side projects, a collaborative work featuring his west London neighbour John Paul Jones as well as Nick Lowe and Johnny Marr – who co-wrote this song. Backing the entire record are The Venus 3: Peter Buck of REM on 12-string and acoustic guitars, bassist Scott McCaughey of The Young Fresh Fellows and Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin. The resultant album was an exercise in self-discipline: how quickly can you make a really good record? "It's a west London version of the Basement Tapes, recorded in six days in my house," Hitchcock told us. "We miked up the kitchen and the living room and we did it there. It's a great elegiac summit on the rotting corpse of indie rock, and you are going to love it." He was right too.

From the album Propellor Time

6. Turin Brakes - The Invitation
Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian have mixed folky-acoustic pop with unabashed soft rock since their Mercury-nominated debut The Optimist in 2001. This lovely selection from their new, fifth album heads out into space both inner and intergalactic – think Radiohead's The Tourist or Radio 4 Shipping Forecast theme Sailing By.
From the album Outbursts
7. Duke Special - Mother Courage
We're always up for a fearless artistic gesture here at The Word, and we take our collective hat off to Belfast composer and pianist Duke Special – aka Peter Wilson – for pulling off not one but three at the same time. This box set contains two albums and one EP that bristle with a seedy, sepia-tinged, 78rpm magnificence. The Silent World Of Hector Mann is based on Paul Auster's Book Of Illusions, and on the Huckleberry Finn EP Duke Special records, for the first time, five Kurt Weill songs from his unfinished musical based on the Mark Twain novel. There's also the Mother Courage album – from which we present the title track – with Duke's songs for a new production of Brecht's famed play of war and hypocrisy. The three interrelated projects were funded by fans via an innovative online pledging site. Investigate further at www.pledgemusic.com/projects/131 – "write a song with Duke for £100" is still available.

From the album The Stage, A Book And The Silver Screen
8. Ian King - Death & The Lady
There is a mystic association between the most ancient of English themes and the boomingest dub reggae, a link that Dreadzone, Ultramarine and The Orb have highlighted. It rises once again on this album by unconventional Yorkshire-born folk-roots artist Ian King – "a dry-stone waller by trade and a punk by nature" – who partners up with dub king Adrian Sherwood for this fascinating record. Panic Grass And Fever Few takes English folk songs, traditional ballads, political broadsides and a few of King's originals and transposes them into the pulse and throb of modern production. It's not a reggae album as such but metaphorically it puts a dash of Lee "Scratch" into your glass of English perry. As heard on Radio 4's Loose Ends with Clive Anderson, Death And The Lady was first noted as being performed by a Mrs R Sage in Chew Stoke, Somerset in January 1907 but it's certainly older than that and it's certainly never sounded like this.

From the album Panic Grass and Fever Few
9. Josh Rouse - Lemon Tree
The "country-folk" tag, once gained, can be hard to shake off, but Nebraskan-born, Tennessee-raised singer Rouse confounds expectations. Following a move to Valencia, he immersed himself in the music not just of Spain but that of the wider Latin and South American world, including Brazilian, Venezuelan and Cuban styles. The resulting album, self-mockingly titled "the tourist", mixes English and Spanish singing, and Midwestern and transatlantic pop. "I know it's kind of funny, this Midwestern guy doing Brazilian songs in Spanish," he admits, a bit too modestly. Central to the record is the influence of the Cuban singer and pianist Bola De Nieve ("Snowball"), whose life story reads like a movie script: black and gay, he was accepted into the Castro establishment as a key Revolutionary. Rouse covers a handful of Bola De Nieve songs alongside his own written in similar styles to compelling effect.


From the album El Turista

10. Lou Rhodes - It All
A distinctive voice from Manchester, Lou Rhodes first made her name with the trip-hop duo Lamb and then won a solo Mercury nomination in 2006. This, her third LP, marks a reunion with Lamb partner Andy Barlow and it's the first release on atmospheric breakbeat act The Cinematic Orchestra's new label Motion Audio – but her music remains still additive-free acoustic goodness.
From the album One Good Thing

11. Drive-By Truckers - Drag The Lake Charlie
It's officially "rock o'clock" as this diesel-sodden Georgia-Alabama band resurrect the spirit of Lynyrd Skynyrd, marry it to that of Soundgarden and apply the results to modern concerns of joblessness, lost cars and all-night benders. This is Southern rock with its brain in gear and a keen sense of irony.
From the album The Big To-Do
12. Sennen - A Little High
If you have shoes prepare to gaze at them now, as Norwich quartet Sennen summon up the heyday of Ride, Spacemen 3 and Swervedriver and reconstruct the original sonic cathedral of sound. The key to the shoe/nu-gazing experience was that moment when the guitars were so loud and multifarious that blissful surrender was the only option. In that respect it had less in common with rock and roll than with prime trance and rave, and this exultant track delivers those particular goods in style. Sennen's second full-length album, Age Of Denial (as opposed to the age of consent) reveals their facility with "shoe"'s other indispensable component: the pop angle. Behind the wide-open vistas and blasted soundscapes, these are melodic creations owing as much to Teenage Fanclub as Chapterhouse. It's exhilarating stuff and it has to be said that it makes a lot more sense coming from the primal Fens than from the cosy old Thames Valley.


From the forthcoming album Age Of Denial

13. Victoria and Jacob - With No Certainty
Electro's twitch and glitch works so well with indie-pop songwriting that we're amazed it didn't catch on earlier. The music of this London-based duo is somewhat deeper and richer than the smash-hit likes of Owl City – remember where you heard them first.
From the debut single.

14. El Goodo - Talking To The Birds
There's a heat haze over the canyons, buzzards circle above, mariachi horns sound and you'd never guess you were in south Wales. These protégés of the Super Furry Animals remind us of Love, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Kinks or, more contemporarily, The Zutons.
From the album Coyote

15. White Hinterland - Icarus
Singer Casey Denier and her bandmate Shawn Creeden used to write Laura Nyro-ish adult pop on piano. Then they moved to Portland, Oregon and started working with loops and bleeps instead. This is a lovely wash of arctic pop that mixes Joni Mitchell with Björk.
From the album Kairos