Now Hear This! April 2011
CD, 2011, Heftbeilage, Cardsleeve

matrix: CA WORDAPRIL2011 @
15 brand-new tracks hand-picked by The WORD
With Issue 98 Of The Word





What's on the CD:

1. Nicole Atkins - Vultures
You want auspicious? Singer Nicole Atkins was born in Neptune, New Jersey near the Shark River. If that doesn’t inspire you to make dark and near-mythical rock and roll we don’t know what will. This track opens her second album Mondo Amore, which is the product of three years’ work, three different band line-ups and at least as many different sounds. But in this case the lengthy run-up makes sense because the album mixes knowing, string-driven ballads, multi-level harmonies, muscular break-up songs and Zeppelin-grade rock. "I wanted to get to the roots of the music I really loved," she says. "Blues, country and psychedelic rock. The visual I had in my head was a girl wearing a really glammed-out Ole Opry dress in the alley of a New York bar, smoking a cigarette." What else? She’s recently been touring with The Avett Brothers, she lives in Brooklyn and she’s pen-pals with David Lynch. Now go and have a listen to the album.

2. The Morning After Girls
Luxuriant modern psychedelic rock recorded in a church in the Australian outback. The Morning After Girls formed in Melbourne in 2001 and in a decade that’s seen them move back and forth between home and New York they’ve honed an intriguing sound that sits between The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Slowdive and even Oasis.
From the album Alone

3. Bing Ji Ling - A Little Love
No, it’s not a Chinese lady but Quinn Luke of The Phenomenal Handclap band with delightful, upbeat Isley Brothers-style pop soul and a confusing name that is, apparently, Mandarin for ice cream. If he’d called himself The Supersoul Sunshine Power Hour or something, we’d all know where we are.
From the album Shadow To Shine

4. Acid House Kings - Are We Lovers Or Are We Friends?
You probably already know that this much-loved Swedish trio are purveyors of glorious, sun-blasted, singable pop rather than psychedelic rave wig-outs. If you don’t, the fact that their first album in six years shares a name with the famous hands-in-the-air Ibiza anthem probably won’t clarify matters. But never mind. Though Acid House Kings hark back to the classic days of pre-misery, pop-positive indie rock, they also share dance music’s euphoria gene. Among the inspirations they cite for the new record are the French beat-pop of the ’60s, the Beach Boys and the "super-uncool" sound of Sweden’s touring dance bands. This track shows what they’re good at: gorgeous melodies, a feelgood sensibility and a wry sense of humour. Pleasingly, they scrapped half of the album because it was insufficiently cheerful (bands usually do the opposite, to seem deep). Say it loud: happy is the new miserable.

5. The Human League - Into The Night
Philip Oakey, Susan Sulley and Joanne Catherall remain one of our unimpeachable national treasures. Almost 30 years since Dare, and with every opportunity to take advantage of the lucrative revival circuit, it’s to their credit that they keep their music current with a new album that connects fully to the boiling energies of club culture. "We’ve got this 30-year history that can kick us in the head," says Susan Sulley. "We wanted to get back to making music again so we wouldn’t be just stuck in one genre." Credo is produced by Sheffield electronic experimenters I Monster and released by equally hip label Wall Of Sound, an indication of the esteem in which the League are held on Planet Rave. It finds the group once more enormously relevant. As label boss Mark Jones puts it: "This generation of pop artists is the first to say it’s not about the Stones and The Beatles, it’s about The Human League and Heaven 17."

6. The Unthanks - Gan To The Kye / Traditional, arranged by The Unthanks
The artistes formerly known as Rachel Unthank & The Winterset have swept the board at folk awards and gained a Mercury nomination. This fourth album features traditional songs like Gan To The Kye but the music stretches out into places that are too big for the "f" word and too imaginative to be called anything as silly as "post-folk". Last was recorded in a snowbound farmhouse and a Victorian wooden maltings hall – smell the history! – but it sounds, if anything, beyond past and future. Having collaborated elsewhere with artists as diverse as Robert Wyatt, Antony Hegarty, Portishead’s Adrian Utley and Damon Albarn, they’re in the process of forging a new kind of traditional music. "These songs are about life at home, love, hope and death, things that matter to us," says Becky Unthank. "But we’re not singing them from our voices because they don’t belong to one person. They’re someone’s testimony. We’re passing on the stories, and I like that part of it."
THE UNTHANKS formed 2009 Newcastle, Northumberland
Members:
Rachel Unthank (vocals, cello) [Member of: Rachel Unthank & the Winterset, The Unthanks],
Becky Unthank (vocals, autoharp) [Member of: Rachel Unthank & the Winterset, The Unthanks],
Niopha Keegan (vocals, fiddle) [Member of: Rachel Unthank & the Winterset, The Unthanks],
Adrian McNally (piano, drums, dulcitone, marimba, autoharp, percussion),
Chris Price (guitar, bass, ukulele, dulcitone)


7. Alex Winston - Sister Wife
It’s soaring, cosmic, slightly mentally odd singer time as this Detroit-born newcomer sets out her bewitching stall. Alex Winston has a voice like a firework and an interest in, well, everything. One to watch!
From the album Sister Wife

8. Zoey van Goey - You Told The Drunks I Knew Karate
Song title of the month from a band who sound like they’re from the most rarified hipster regions of New York, but are actually Glasgow-based Anglo-Canadian-Irish Scots. This, their second album, is a winning mishmash of harmony and chaos with a title inspired by Powell and Pressburger’s classic movie
A Matter Of Life And Death.
From the album Propellor versus Wings

9. Hannah Peel - You Call This Your Home
A former collaborator with Tunng and The Unthanks – yes, them again! – Hannah Peel’s otherworldly folk-inflected adult pop is rich and fantastically charismatic. This track was a limited-edition single last year, and flies the flag for what is many people’s album of the year so far.
From the album The Broken Wave

10. Blancmange - I'm Having A Coffee
Dons of electro-pop in the Soft Cell/Pet Shop Boys/Tears For Fears era, Blancmange were also the connoisseur’s choice both for songwriting (Living On The Ceiling is great and all, but what about Waves or God’s Kitchen?) and unique delivery (their version of Abba’s The Day Before You Came matches the original for fatalistic drama). Now they are, in the parlance, back back back and everything that made them amazing is still there – relentlessly memorable tunes, elastic electronics, Neil Arthur’s no-compromise-to-soft-southerners flat vowels and Pandit Dinesh’s groove-engendering percussion. On this track, their old Alan Bennett domestic surrealism is back too. Even new album Blanc Burn’s cover art and logo are in the old Anglo-pop-art style. "It’s probably a better time for us to ‘return’ than ten years ago," reckons keyboard wizard Stephen Luscombe. "Well, we’re not leaving it for another bloody ten," replies Neil. Good thing too.

11. Frankie & The Heartstrings - Ungrateful
Quiffed up, full of belief and connected to the Postcard Records pop mainline via producer-mentor Edwyn Collins, Sunderland’s Frankie & The Heartstrings are the Young People’s Band for the Word reader. Lest you doubt their commitment to excellence, singer Frankie Francis says the album is named after Knut Hamsun’s epic psychological novel. "It’s a term that invokes all our inspirations, be they musical, literary or physical, for the cause. We have overcome many sacrifices on our own individual journeys and gather a bigger passion for the cause each day." Forward, Frankie & The Heartstrings!
From the album Hunger

12. Mountaineer - The Real McQueen
They’re a loose collective from Germany, so obviously they’re going to sound like Steely Dan gone South American or a 1972 version of Prefab Sprout. Bossa nova folk is the watchword – we are hard pressed to recall another lovely spring pop record that namechecks Lord Byron. But we bet you can.
From the forthcoming album The Real McQueen

13. Those Dancing Days - Can't Find Entrance
It’s full-on, no-messing, New-Order-meets-Blondie new wave gorgeousness in this frenetic selection from the Stockholm band’s second album. As special guests at Belle & Sebastian’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in December and wistful songwriters, Those Dancing Days are often called "twee" but that surely won’t outlast this song, which resembles a massively cheered-up Love Will Tear Us Apart. Being composed of five females, the band is also often compared to 1960s girl groups, which is a bit lazy although they are very big on melody. All together now: death to false indie!
From the album Daydreams & Nightmares

14. John Vanderslice - Convict Lake
This Bay Area resident produced a couple of Mountain Goats albums, and you might remember his old band MK Ultra. His tenth album is built on analogue "sloppy hi-fi" principles, and it’s very likeable indeed.
From the EP Nothing Was Delivered

15. Penguin Cafe - Landau
Every good cafe owner hands the business on to his son at some point. Here Arthur Jeffes, son of Penguin Cafe Orchestra progenitor Simon, continues his late father’s work with music that’s definitely in dad’s style – melodically optimistic, circuitous but simple, and somehow time-honoured and modern all at the same time. Simon Jeffes, who died in 1997, had wanted to make non-traditional folk music but could not have forecast how PCO would connect with future phenomena like dance music, Balearic beat and the sort of smart and thought-provoking electronica typified by Orbital. (Arthur remembers that when he was 14, people like Andy Weatherall and The Orb began coming round to his dad’s place for dinner). This new Penguin Cafe debuted at the 2010 BBC Electric Proms and featured Northumbrian smallpiper Kathryn Tickell, who – spooky – has also worked with The Unthanks, also on this month’s CD. What a small world it is.