For those of us with little more than a passing interest in football, the World Cup can be a trying time: TV schedules given over to hours of asinine punditry; lagered-up chuckleheads occupying every good seat in your local; brainless football-centric anthems on the radio. Thankfully, those splendid people at Indiecater are on hand to right at least one of these wrongs.
The idea was simple (though doubtless very difficult to bring to fruition) - get 32 different bands to each adopt one of the qualifying countries for South Africa 2010, and then write them a song that somehow distils both their national character and the spirit of football. The fact that the end result is such a glorious success should be a great source of pride to the bands and the compilers alike.
Highlights come thick and fast - Standard Fare bring on Mariachi verses twinned with the kind of sweetly catchy chorus that made
The Noyelle Beat so enjoyable; The Dirty 9s echo the gothy pomp and drama of early (read: 'good') Placebo; Pearse McGloughlin tugs wistfully on both guitar and heart strings; Hunter-Gatherer make with some thundering and portentious Kraftwerkisms - and they go on and on. The quality is never less than good, and often more than great, which is quite a feat when considering the number of tracks here present.
To have brought together so many bands, with so many styles - harmonic pop, new wave, lo-fi electronica and anything else that can huddle under the wide umbrella of 'indie' - and have made the result so enjoyable is astonishing. To then go on to sell it for so little is frankly ludicrous, and makes not buying it an absurd notion.
32 tracks, 32 bands, and all for the price of a pair of pints. It'd be rude to refuse.