Morton Valence formed in the 00s and are based in South London. At their core is the real-life couple of ex-Irish dancer Anne Gilpin from Belfast and Robert 'Hacker' Jessett.
Jessett sings and plays guitar, trumpet and harmonica; Gilpin sings and plays keyboards.
The band name is an amalgam drawn from a "hick town" in Gloucestershire where they first recorded and a misspelling of a province in Eastern Spain.
Their debut release, Bob And Veronica Ride Again, won friends and admirers for its songs built around a semi-autobiographical story of a romance between a London slacker and a runaway girl which was accompanied by a 110 page novella.
There's no story book this time and while Me and Home James may have started as another concept album they obviously got side-tracked somewhere along the way.
Originally, the idea was for the songs to depict life as viewed from the back of an unlicensed minicab in London. This theme fits to the title track but you'd be hard pushed to see a Redrock Mountain on such a journey unless you've been drinking too much.
Perhaps the British couple were distracted by the Latin sensibility of the two Colombians in the band: Leo Fernandez (bass) and Alejo Palaez (keys, pedal steel guitar, electronica). The fifth member is a drummer named Daryl (Holler) from sunny Dagenham.
The English backdrop is also skewed by the fact that Country music lies at the heart of these twelve songs. The out of focus confederate flag on the cover is, however, there to signify that, while Nashville may be a significant influence, their "urban country songs" are by no means rooted in American soil.
Instead, the world of Morton Valence seems to inhabit a pre-modernist world of English summer rain, warm beer, milky tea and dead end jobs. Most of the songs are musical vignettes of a city that is losing its old identity as seen through the eyes of lonely or disillusioned individuals.
The first song on the album is The Death of the Cockney Amorist and the record closes with a reprise of sorts in a track entitled Renaissance Amorist. The London setting and the eccentricities of the English is immediately established through the fact that these titles derive from John Betjeman's The Cockney Amorist; a poem which begins with the lines "Oh when my love, darling / You've left me here alone / I'll walk the streets of London / Which once seemed all our own".
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Bad Times For Hare Krishnas is described as a homage Don Van Vliet but the wry reference to Sham 69's yob anthem "Hurry up Harry" is a world apart from that of the late Captain Beefheart. It tells the tale of a young man who loses his faith and becomes a civil servant.
A weakness of the album is that the tongue in cheek lyrics and black humour have a tendency to be too clever by half. These serve to undermine romantic themes as in "If I'm the river baby, dive in me" of If You Were A River or in the pledge I'm Gonna Stand By You "when your lips are turning blue".
Similarly, a song about a lonely woman pondering the banalities of life before finding true love is weighed down by its lengthy title: These Were The Things I Was Thinking Of And Then You Fell Out Of The Sky.
Woman In The Window has a quality akin to that heard in The Cowboy Junkies brilliant cover of the Velvet Undergrounds's Pale Blue Eyes in which the "light shines like a neon electric flower".
The Velvet's influence is also plain on Man On The Corner - the best, though least representative, track on the album which borrows heavily from the slow-building tension of Waiting For The Man.
All told, this album of intelligent art pop is hard to classify but this is just how Morton Valence want it. They are happy to be outsiders, shedding a witty though wistful eye on a changing world.
Morton Valence's Website
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