Put your rose-coloured glasses on, and Nashville's a wonderful place to go to make music - even if you don't find the love of your life in the process, as ex-Catatonian Cerys Matthews did making 'Cockahoop'.
For one thing, it's an entire city of people preoccupied with (the business of) music, songwriters-for-hire and supremely professional musicians who'll not only do your songs up a treat for 'you', but tell you about their sessions with Glen Campbell and Dolly Parton into the bargain. Of course, it's also a place with a soul of 100%-authentic pure plastic where the best music is dreamed up by skint outsiders (see Lambchop) or made in the teeth of the musically and politically arch-conservative system (ask Steve Earle or Robbie Fulks).
And what a lovely little carousel 'Cockahoop' often is. A bright, sweet, pretty-sounding record full of dressing-up-box enthusiasm, it's one the relevant Big Boys will see as a neat bit of grown-up "positioning", far away from Britpop's flogged horse and a band that was rarely as compelling as its frontwoman. It is, of course, full of "credibility", or at least a buffed-to-a-shine menu of mandolins and horns and weepingly syrupy pedal steel and Dylan (yeah, 'Bob Dylan'!) sideguy Bucky Baxter producing admirably and cleanly.
There's plenty to charm here. Lead track 'Chardonnay' - improbably co-written by Hugh Cornwell - may be hard to take seriously in a post-'Footballer's Wives' world, but it's a deft choice that plays on our knowledge of Matthews' bibulous singleton past. Cerys' own 'Caught In The Middle' is a sleepy sweet-natured delight, 'Only A Fool' is a starry-eyed and winsome swoon, and it'd take a heart of stone (or Anne Robinson) not to warm to Welsh hymn 'Arglwydd Dyma Fi'.
That said, Matthews' voice - an acquired taste, and on a good day none the worse for that - is the kind of cracked instrument Nashville sidemen rarely have to work around, and the workarounds, here, don't always work. A folksily rattletrap 'La Bague' is just plain shouty, and it's impossible to tell if the Matthews-penned 'The Good In Goodbye' is a good song or not, with Cerys straining to carry the bluesy tune. The result suggests Janis Joplin, with bad catarrh, shouting into a strong wind. And not in a good way.
Perhaps most disappointing of all is a cover of the Handsome Family's exquisite 'Weightless Again', which Cerys spotted on an alt.country compilation featuring the kind of innovative acts that Nash Vegas considers with amused contempt. Sadly, this version - tricked up with plinky bits that suggest sessioners gamely going for "weird but cute" and Cerys stumbling around Rennie Sparks' poignant words looking for a tune, or a clue - singularly fails to capture its spirit. On the other hand, the Handsomes should take a page from Music Row's career songwriters - and hey, just think of the publishing royalties.
