Gordon Gano: with friends like these, who needs to sing?

Albums like Gordon Gano’s ‘Hitting The Ground’ are more rare than the moonflights because this is an assemblage of artists to make this a ‘compilation’ of stellar proportions. Lou Reed and John Cale singing songs on the same album outside Velvet Underground (first ever, if not mistaken), PJ Harvey, Frank Black, Linda Perry, They Might Be Giants… With friends like these, no need for the former Violent Femme-r to sing? No, he does it on three songs.

So, the man wrote these tailor-made songs and started phoning friends he amassed over two decades in the business as a well-respected underground artiste; not difficult to imagine? Well, not actually. To get to this album we have to look at Gano’s outside career, his numerous side-projects that produced even three musicals and film director ‘David Moore (‘Hitting The Ground’, ‘Polish Spaghetti’) just happened to experience one of Gano’s musicals, Carmen: The First Two Chapters’. Recognizing Gano’s extraordinary talent as a songwriter, Moore recruited him to write the soundtrack to his new film ‘Hitting The Ground’. The plot is based around the theory of entropy, which in this case manifests itself when a college student photographs a person jumping out of a window that triggers a copycat sensation that spirals destructively out of control.

Gano composed everything (bar Reed’s ‘corrections’) and enlisted some of contemporary music’s finest artists to interpret his songs. The album opens with PJ Harvey’s take of the title cut, a sonic attack with distorted guitar salvo that would get zombies rattled at midday. ‘Catch Them In The Act’ is Lou Reed to legendary perfection and the only song that is co-credited, as the VU-head changed some lyrics; “If you are going to have somebody change your lyrics…” reasons Gano.

Linda Perry, former 4 Non Blondes leader and recent Pink collaborator, delivers a soulfully rocking vox on ‘So It Goes’ but Frank Black excels on intensity-padded ‘Run’… Cale’s piano and vocal on ‘Don’t Pretend’ was a dream-cum-true for Gano that might have gone unfulfilled in the case of his version of the title songs; it sounds like it was written for John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon but the semi-retired anarcho-punkist’s passing on the opportunity, Gano is doing his impersonation. At the same time it offers a comparison of his musical styling to other artists…

Is this a gem? Preciously priceless!

8/10