For all their apparent innocence, at the centre of many of our best-loved nursery rhymes lies a dark heart. This has been fully exploited by Scottish musician Bill Wells for these unusual reworkings with an impressive cast of special guests, from indie heroes to New York jazzers. Yo La Tengo and Karen Mantler bring a stark jazziness to the tale of Three Blind Mice, and Björk-ish vocalist Amber Papini brings an appropriately sinister edge to Humpty Dumpty’s terrible fall. It doesn’t all work, but some of the rhymes translate surprisingly well. Ride a Cock Horse (featuring Yo La Tengo and Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake) sounds unusually pensive. Perhaps best of all, the combination of Wells’ arrangement and Bridget St John’s vocal turns Ding Dong Bell’s tale of watery graves into a Randy Newman-type ballad. Like much of the material here, it’s best sampled by an adult audience.
