Now Hear This! September 2010 Issue 91
CD, 2010, Heftbeilage, Digisleeve

matrix: CA WORDSEPT10 @
15 brand-new tracks hand-picked by The WORD
With Issue 91 Of The Word



1. Chris Difford - 1975
The Squeeze stalwart’s song may be a fantastic retro glam stomper full of hard-won wisdom, but the delivery method is none-more-21st-century. Though the album is out on CD later this year, Difford is also delivering it track-by-track to your desktop.
From the album Cashmere If You Can

2. James Yuill - Movement In A Storm
There’s more than a little party-starting house music DNA in this title track from a British singer-songwriter who uses a laptop instead of a guitar. There’s folktronica in Yuill’s music too, plus a whole lot of New Order, Nick Drake and Radiohead – making it perfect for a Word rave.
From the album Movement In A Storm.

3. Larsen B - The Gold Cup
One of the loveliest recent discoveries, this Hertfordshire three-piece combine all the most succulent bits of Fleet Foxes, British Sea Power, The Divine Comedy and – oh, go on – Coldplay and Snow Patrol. Big melodies and big emotion are what it’s all about.
From the album Musketeer

4. Imelda May - Sneaky Freak
Rockabilly is working-class music, the sound of tattoos and quiffs and hair grease, so maybe it’s no surprise that it should take root in the hard-knock Liberties area of Dublin as well as the America of myth. “My brother played a lot of rockabilly,” says Imelda May, the youngest of five Dubliners who grew into the first Irishwoman to top the Irish charts since Mary Black. “I borrowed a tape from his bedroom and it just absolutely blew my mind. It was Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. The guitars would screech, and I could hear Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps in the background screamin’, absolutely screamin’ on some tracks. It was half frightening and half fantastic.” A leg-up from Jools Holland, who had her on Later before she signed a major deal, helped drive on a career that has seen her share the stage with Van Morrison, U2 and the Scissor Sisters, and duet with Jeff Beck at the Grammys. Her second album proper comes out in September and we commend it heartily.

5. Vandaveer - Before The Great War
If you can keep an untrembling lip throughout this beautiful song, which concerns the tough but heroic life of singer Mark Heidinger’s old Kentucky grandma, then you’ve simply no soul. His band Vandaveer play folk, rock and pop in a style that makes them all new.
From the album Divide And Conquer

6. Eels - Oh So Lovely
We are long-standing proponents of the argument that Mark “E” Everett is our new Leonard Cohen and our contemporary Neil Young rolled into one. This warm, hopeful track comes from the third of his break-up-then-cheer-up trilogy of albums.
From the album Tomorrow Morning

7. Alex Cornish - Once More I'm Put To The Test
Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Alex Cornish’s second album promises to expand on his charismatic mix of proper, Van Morrisonian songwriting and Coldplay-like hookiness. Inventively, he’s making a special advance edition of it available now, with three songs that won’t appear on the final version. More details at www.alexcornish.com.
From the album Call Back

8. Los Lobos - Yo Canto
The low-down growl of primal rock and roll has been in and out of favour several times since Los Lobos resurrected Chicano blues with How Will The Wolf Survive? back in 1984. In today’s world of The Dead Weather and Them Crooked Vultures, however, they may be more in tune with the times than ever. Those enticed out of the rock-band comfort zone by Manu Chao or The Gotan Project might also fancy something with a bit more meat on its bones like this. On this 15th or 19th album (depending on which you count) the East Angeleno band sound blissfully fresh, as though their Latin-rhythm and rock-blues is an idea that just occurred to them. “Every record feels like the first one,” says singer-saxophonist Steve Berlin. “We’re starting from zero and trying to do the best we can.” This track, Yo Canto, is a Colombian cumbia tune, a rhythm derived from old slave courtship dances that Los Lobos transform into a big old fist-pumper and a joy to the ear.

9. Martina Topley-Bird - Poison
More in-demand than at any time since she arrived on Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Martina is touring with Massive Attack. She made her latest album in a quick burst of lo-fi recording and the result is the most intimate and beguiling music she’s come up with in years.
From the album Some Place Simple

10. Bill Kirchen with Elvis Costello
If you’re thinking, Hmmm, didn’t there used to be a Bill Kirchen in Commander Cody And The Lost Planet Airmen? then award yourself a pub-quiz point because, yes, this is him. And indeed Bill’s old boss George Frayne, aka Commander Cody, appears on the guitarist’s new solo record of swamp-blues and fuzz-rock, playing keyboards on I Don’t Work That Cheap (as in, “You can’t pay me what I’m worth, because...”). The album Word To The Wise comprises duets both vocal and instrumental with artists with whom Bill has worked over the decades: Nick Lowe, Paul Carrack, folk-blues singer Maria Muldaur and more. Key among them is Elvis Costello. “We travelled around the country and collected those people,” says Bill, “but we sent the tapes of Man In The Bottom Of The Well to Vancouver for Elvis to put his vocals on.” If you hadn’t told us we’d never have known the difference.
From the album Word To The Wise


11. Richard Ashcroft & The United Nations Of Sound - Beatitudes
The product of an intense ten-day Brooklyn recording session with Chicagoan hip-hop producer No ID, this is a dramatic leftfield move for Wigan’s most famous son since George Formby. It’s not so much The-Verve-go-hip-hop as an injection of urban bump and grind into Ashcroft’s patent Big Rock soundscapes. Sidemen for Mary J Blige and arrangers who have worked with The Jacksons and The Temptations complete the picture.
“When I read about Gram Parsons’ dream of this Cosmic American Music when I was in my late teens, that stuck with me,” Ashcroft says. “That ambition to draw off the roots of music, but take it somewhere fresh. Everyone’s tired of nu-soul or nu-that, but the people I’ve worked with all seemed inspired to be working on something that perhaps has become a little difficult to label.” The result is his most adventurous record yet.

12. David Rotheray - The Sparrow, The Thrush and the Nightingale
When you’ve done 19 years as one of the key players in the unstoppable chart juggernaut that was The Beautiful South, naturally you’ll want to record your own magnum opus. In the case of Hull-born guitarist-songwriter Dave Rotheray that means “the first truly great ornithologically themed concept album of the 21st century”. This song, featuring the voice of distinguished folk man Jim Causley, was the first one Rotheray came up with and it led to a suite of chirruping, autmnal folk-friendly songs that give R.E.S.P.E.C.T. to the R.S.P.B. The album features more guest stars than the average big-ticket hip-hop album, with vocals from Kathryn Williams, Eliza Carthy, Eleanor McEvoy and more. If you enjoy this track it’s worth getting the full album for a sequel, The Sparrow, The Thrush And The Nightingale Part II, which closes it. Bird lovers should also be aware, says Dave, that “any resemblance to chaffinches, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”.

13. Josh Ritter - Orbital
This semi-marching tune by the US singer-songwriter from Idaho bowled us over with its sheer epic quality. Ritter is now on his sixth album, so he probably won’t need to return to his first discipline – studying neuroscience – any time soon.
From the album Runs The World Away

14. Justin Rutledge - Be A Man
Literary fact: this song was co-written by Booker Prize-winner Michael Ondaatje of The English Patient fame. Rutledge is a Toronto-based singer with tendencies towards the bookish (he once edited a literary journal) and the country-ish, with flavours of Hank Williams and Leonard Cohen in his work. After three solo albums and success in his home country, Rutledge collaborated with Ondaatje on a theatrical adaptation of the author’s book Divisadero. This inspired yet more songs and some advice on lyrics from the novelist. It turned into an album, The Early Widows, which in turn was produced by Word CD alumnus Hawksley Workman. Lyrics matter to Rutledge and he has been known to road-test them on Facebook. “Sometimes I would get two thumbs up, and other times people would be like ‘WTF?’” he says. “It was a really good way to gauge the strength of a line outside of the song.” If you’re after a bit of thinking country rock, you know where to look.

15. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse feat. David Lynch
This collaboration between mercurial everyproducer Brian Burton and Mark Linkous of modern psychedelians Sparklehorse was to have been released in 2009. A contractual spat with EMI meant it came out as a blank CD-R while the music “mysteriously” found its way on to share sites, in a business-pranking move worthy of The KLF. Now the music gets a legitimate release under sad circumstances following Linkous’s suicide in March. The wealth of contributors – The Flaming Lips, Iggy Pop, Jason Lytle of Grandaddy and more – is testament
to the esteem in which Linkous’s peers held him, as well as Danger Mouse’s undoubted pull as producer du jour. Most remarkable is this semi-spoken track with David Lynch, which seems to come from a radio station in a parallel universe. It’s both a fitting closer to this month’s CD and a fitting commemoration of a singular artist.