The Bonus Track: Wilco, Country Funk, Walking on Sunshine, Lana Del Rey

One becomes two

A solo album by a duo? Well, nothing’s ever been entirely straight in Wilco world and so it continues with the September release of a solo-not-solo album from Jeff Tweedy. To explain: Tweedy was planning to release a solo album and was getting help demo-ing the songs from his 18-year-old drummer son Spencer. It soon became apparent that Spencer’s input was, um, instrumental in shaping the sound of Sukierae, so now the album is being put out under the duo name of, appropriately enough, Tweedy. Listen to the track “I’ll Sing It!

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Make it funky, cowboy

Using labels to describe music can be restrictive: but they’re still all we have and until someone comes up with a better idea we’re stuck with them. But just as the music on the Country Got Soul compilations didn’t always fit neatly into that title, so it is with Country Funk 1967-1974, the second instalment in the series begun in 2012 from the ever-­excellent Light in the Attic label. CFII is out in August and among its many obscure gems is Townes Van Zandt’s “Hunger Child Blues”

Here we go again

Some ideas are just so fantastically naff and naffly fantastic that you can’t help but admire their sheer audacity. And so it is with the upcoming feature film Walking on Sunshine (opens 27 June), which not only nicks the Mamma Mia idea of getting its stars to sing, but also follows pretty much the same plot trajectory. Still, it does contain the likes of Leona Lewis singing “the greatest hits of the 1980s” and has, according the bumph, “all the makings of a smash-hit summer movie”. No Abba songs, though

Next week’s biggie…

Hugh Montgomery reviews Lana Del Rey’s second album, Ultravoilence. Watch the video for “West Coast”