'Horfes Turn'd Jockies' is a great introduction to the Seattle-based web label The China Sea Recordings Concern, where the label's roster cover songs and artists that have influenced them. Which thankfully means, that this album that is free to download from China Sea Recordings Bandcamp.
The album opens with label Boss Marc Laurick's version of John Cale's China Sea. It boasts a really cool arrangement and put a smile on the face of this particular Cale nut. It's good to hear a cover of a song that wouldn't be a first choice of Cale song to cover for many. Casey Ruff then tackles Warren Zevon's Splendid Isolation and plays it in the style of the Waterboys and it sounds damn good for it too.
Rory Gannon takes a nice and loose approach to In The Heat Of The Night, so much so that I almost didn't notice what he was singing first time I heard it. By the second or third listen it was much clearer that this was a nice little re-invention with more of an Americana feel to it but with an almost Peter Laughner tone to the acoustic guitar playing.
Then we get to one of the reasons you need this album as Jon Rooney bravely takes on covering Nico's Evening Of Light: a very cool choice of song and it's re-worked to have an almost nursery rhyme feel to it until the piano's hit in a real jarring moment that captures some of the madness of the original and it's this slight jarring that makes it work so well.
Phil Gammage bursts out of the speakers with a monster version of the Velvet Underground's Guess That I'm Falling In Love. It is just brilliant garage rock. Phil's vocals have a great sound like they have been recorded in a big echo-ey room; they boom out and it has a brilliant guitar freak out in the middle that makes it an essential cover for any Velvets freak. Congratulations also for picking a tune that isn't covered on any of the 6 Velvets tribute albums I have.
|
Skip Heller chooses the only song I'm not familiar with, John Hartford's No End Of Love and it probably suffers for being unfamiliar, but it's in no means bad as Skip sounds not unlike Bob Frank but not quite as weathered. Just for me it doesn't hold up too well when it's followed by Graham Brice: a musician I'm not familiar with, taking on Robert Wyatt's Sea Song. Again, it's not the most obvious of choices but this is a brilliant version that has all the emotional engagement needed to carry it off.
Colin J Nelson then covers Alex Chilton's Holocaust, a song I had two covers of before I ever heard Alex singing it. This version, while not as fragile or fractured as Alex's original, has plenty of the fraught drama brought as previously to the song by both Rainy Day and Pauline Murray.
The album then closes on a nice downbeat note with David Guilbault and Jason Goessl's version of It Never Entered My Mind, the old Lorenz Hart classic is almost crooned to a very discreet acoustic guitar backing. Always a brave move to sing a song that has been covered by everyone from Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra to Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney et al, but David Guilbault and Jason Goessl's take is every bit as rueful as Sinatra or Chet Baker's versions. A good way to close an excellent label sampler.
This compilation will doubtless make you want to hear more music by most of the people featured. So it's most definitely worth the download.
China Sea Recordings online
|
