VA - Now Hear This! (The Word Magazine, July 2010)

Tracks
01. The Border Surrender - Blood In The Snow (4:31)
02. The Apples In Stereo - Hey Elevator (3:48)
03. The Divine Comedy - Assume The Perpendicular (4:08)
04. Tim & Sam's Tim & The Sam Band With Tim & Sam - Summer Solstice (4:17)
05. Ed Harcourt - Heart Of A Wolf (4:15)
06. Jen Olive - Robot Boy (3:40)
07. Gogol Bordello - My Companjera (3:23)
08. Bettye Lavette - Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad (3:58)
09. De Staat - My Blind Baby (5:15)
10. The Coal Porters - Sail Away, Ladies! (3:26)
11. Phosphorescent - The Mermaid Parade (4:23)
12. Seth Lakeman - Tiny World (3:23)
13. ISA & The Filthy Tongues - Honey For Sale (3:47)
14. Hawksley Workman - Chocolate Mouth (3:28)
15. Shellsuit - Iraqis In Shellsuits (3:06)

Total time: 58m 48s


What's on the CD with the July issue

1. The Border Surrender - Blood In The Snow
Is it still Americana if it sounds a bit British? This north London four-piece bring the heat haze and dust devils back from the True West of the shared imagination, and we’re delighted to have the gorgeous lead track from their debut EP to open our CD too.
From the digital EP Blood In The Snow

2. The Apples In Stereo - Hey Elevator
They call it “retro-futuristic super-pop” and they’re signed to Simian, the label run by Elijah Wood, aka Frodo from The Lord Of The Rings. Seven albums in, Robert Schneider’s ever-shifting sunshine-indie-pop collective should really be a more widely known delight.
From the album Travellers In Space And Time

3. The Divine Comedy - Assume The Perpendicular
Just as XTC found themselves revitalised by their excursion into ’60s garage-psych in the guise of The Dukes Of Stratosphear, so The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon finds himself back on his game thanks to the restorative effects of his cricket-pop side project The Duckworth Lewis Method. It appears to have added extra nonchalance and charm to the work of Hannon, whose new (tenth) album applies hand-crafted Divine Comedy values to subjects as diverse as blue-blood sex scandals (hence the title), male insecurity, love and the perfidy of the banking industry. The track we have chosen is a genteel, urbane class-warfare song. “My only weapon is music,” he says. “All I can do is write a rather scathing song.” Too modest, we think. If that’s not enough for you, his musical of Swallows And Amazons will premiere at Bristol Old Vic in the autumn. Hip-hurrah for the polymath of pop.
From the album Bang Goes The Neighbourhood

4. Tim & Tam - Summer Solstice
They labour under the unwieldy name of Tim & Sam’s Tim & The Sam Band With Tim & Sam but there is nothing remotely unwieldy about this bucolic instrumental. The full (lovely) album is downloadable from all the usual suspects but if you want a hard copy then prithee hie thee unto www.timandsam.com forthwith.
From the album Life Stream

5. Ed Harcourt
Piano-bashing libertine Mr Harcourt is beloved of this magazine and his fifth album sees him refine a musical persona perhaps best described as “English Tom Waits playing Heathcliff”. The record is a mighty set of grown-up pop anthems.
From the album Lustre

6. Jen Olive - Robot Boy
Word hero Andy Partridge of XTC has signed Californian talent Ms Olive to his Ape House label and describes her as “this astounding allegro algorithm from Albuquerque”. With its otherworldly preoccupations and her interdimensional voice, she has invented a new genre: science folktion.
From the album Warm Robot

7. Gogol Bordello - My Companjera
Given that this New York “gypsy punk” band’s music is a rampaging mixture of ska, klezmer, hip hop, rock, folk and all things Eastern European, you’d imagine that all berths were full and there wasn’t much room to incorporate anything else. You’d be wrong, though. Their key figure Eugene Hütz, a Romani-Russian émigré and an incendiary presence on stage, moved to Brazil in 2008 and so Gogol Bordello’s fifth album brings in the wild rhythmics of South America to a sound that already resembles a benevolent riot in the Peoples Of The World section of your local museum. Trans-Continental Hustle is also their first record to be produced by Rick Rubin, who helps Gogol Bordello’s mixture of influences to reach its delirious critical mass. Gogol Bordello are a sight to behold live, but in the absence of any immediate shows you could do a lot worse than recreate the decadent excesses of Mitteleuropa at home with this fine record.
From the album Trans-Continental Hustle

8. Bettye Lavette - Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad
Back when there were no “cover versions” but simply a repertoire of songs that everyone played, a storming soul reading of the hits of the day was part of everyone’s required pop diet. A five-decade veteran of the music game, from Atlantic Records to The James Brown Revue to Muscle Shoals to disco, Bettye Lavette understands this better than most. Growing out of an inspired performance of The Who’s Love Reign O’er Me at the 2008 Kennedy Centre Honours, her new album takes classics from the British Invasion and all that followed, and flips them back to their R&B roots. The Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and the Stones’ Salt Of The Earth get a blistering rework, as do Macca’s Maybe I’m Amazed and even Ringo’s It Don’t Come Easy. We were sorely tempted to go for her version of The Word by The Beatles but this mighty take of Derek & The Dominos’ Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad does the trick admirably.
From the album Interpretations - The British Rock Songbook

9. The Coal Porters - Sail Away, Ladies
Led by former Long Ryder and expatriate Kentuckian Sid Griffin, The Coal Porters play alt-bluegrass in various raucous and life-affirming flavours. In Sid’s own words, their new record offers “the sensibilities of The Band and the punch of The Clash”. It was produced by longtime Ramones and Phil Spector collaborator Ed Stasium at his home in the Colorado Rockies, and breathes with the natural beauty of the area as well as rattling like a boxcar full of moonshine. It appears that The Coal Porters are on a bit of a high: Austin360 magazine rated them second only to the reformed Cheap Trick at this year’s highly competitive South By Southwest festival. Sung by fiddle-player Carly Frey, Sail Away, Ladies! is an old Kentucky tune that pre-dates the American Civil War and was a skiffle favourite in the UK in the 1950s. “To us, it symbolises our taking something tried and true but soupin’ it up for the 21st century,” says Sid, and we can’t say fairer than that.
From the album Durango

10. Phosphorescent - The Mermaid Parade
A lovely, lazy piece of modern country (let’s not say “alt”) from Athens, Georgia-born and Brooklyn-resident Matthew Houck, who has recorded as Phosphorescent since 2003. The Mermaid Parade is Coney Island’s annual fancy-dress festival, wherein folk wear fish tails and not much else. The Grand Ole Opry it ain’t.
From the album Here's To Taking It Easy

11. De Staat - My Blind Baby
If the blues was cheap music made for instant consumption with the most inexpensive tools available, does it follow that laptop rock and roll is the blues of the 21st century? Disappointed by the music scene in his native Nijmegen, Dutch music student Torre Florim constructed his album onscreen using Tom Waits, Talking Heads, Queens Of The Stone Age and MIA as his guiding lights. “I like to use the old sounds of the blues and stuff,” he says, “but I record it in a completely modern way, layer by layer, recording in a hip-hop or techno way – copy and paste.” Three years later the music had developed into something that needed a band to play it. He assembled a group of friends, they learned the songs and De Staat (The State) became a runaway success in Holland. The album is now coming out in the UK and it summons up that thrilling moment when it turns out that a DIY project can punch its weight with the big boys. Worth investigating.
From the album Wait For Evolution

12. Seth Lakeman - Tiny World
If you like Mumford & Sons, Sparrow And The Workshop and/or Laura Marling, then Devon-born folk-rock wizard, multi-instrumentalist and fiddle specialist Seth Lakeman is your man. “We love the Zeppelin acoustic thing,” he says of his festival-friendly band. A one-time backing musician for Kate Rusby, Lakeman was something of a pioneer for the modern amalgam of traditional music and all-listeners-welcome pop, winning a Mercury Prize nomination for his second album Kitty Jay in 2005 and a Top Ten placing for Poor Man’s Heaven in 2008. His new album is his most user-friendly yet, with Tchad Blake of Crowded House and Tom Waits fame producing and a swathe of righteously upbeat songs encompassing the financial crisis, the sadness of soldiers dying in battle and Billy Bray, a 19th-century tin miner who almost drank himself to death before having a religious awakening and becoming a Methodist preacher.
From the album Hearts And Minds

13. Isa & The Filty Tongues - Honey For Sale
Sounding exactly like a Deep South, swampbound incarnation of Echo And The Bunnymen, Isa & The Filthy Tongues comprise Goodbye Mr Mackenzie’s Martin Metcalfe and singer Stacey Chavis (aka Isa) of Portland, Oregon. It’s a Scots/Pacific Northwest cultural exchange with a detour via the bayou.
From the album Dark Passenger

14. Hawksley Workman - Chocolate Mouth
Who said drummers should stay at the back? Canadian Mr Workman – real name Ryan Corrigan – learned drums from the age of four, practised throughout his teens and matured into a frenetically prolific artist who sometimes takes an album from idea to final master within just a few weeks. “A lot of artists get maybe a year away from a record they’ve just made and they hate it,” he says, “But I never take more than a day per song, so by the time it’s finished I’m still in a honeymoon with the record.” His music is big on the ramshackle delights of the DIY ethic, with everything from Michael Jackson to Chick Corea to The Smiths in the mix. As the name indicates, his workrate is relentless: he’s produced other artists – notably Tegan & Sarah – as well as cranking out 12 albums over the past decade. Chocolate Mouth comes from a typically unconventional double-album-that-isn’t, with the rock-folk Meat disc coming out first, followed by the electro-pop Milk album as a digital-only release.
From the album Meat/Milk

15. Shellsuit - Iraqis In Shellsuits
Like Ewan MacColl in a box-fresh pair of Adidas Sambas, this Liverpool band take folk music back to the big, bad city. This is a sharp song about racism driven by bleak humour as well as anger.
From the album Walton Prison Blues