Pull Up The Covers

This is a tough one. Do I buckle down and get on with the covers post I've been threatening for what feels like months and for which I have far too many suitable choices tucked away, just waiting to be revealed, or do I swerve that one yet again and share a whole slew of curious and interesting tunes and tunesmiths I've discovered just in this past week or two?

Decisions... decisions...

I'll toss a coin. Heads it's covers, tails it's new stuff.

Drum roll please...

Heads it is! Covers here we come!

I want to say up front that not all of these covers are necessarily what you might call good. Some of them are quite badly-recorded live versions, others are seriously ill-advised takes on highly inapporopriate songs. The whole point of covering a song in my opinion, though, is to do something different with it. If it's just going to sound the same as the original then I'd rather listen to the original, thanks.

With that warning firmly in mind...

Gay Bar (Trad Version) The Iron Boot Scrapers

I don't usually bother with this kind of thing but there are exceptions. As far as I can tell, the Iron Boot Scrapers are a bunch of mischevious, quasi-steampunk buskers specializing in unlikely covers. They seem to mostly play weddings and functions. This performance comes from a wedding, although who booked them to play it is the question we all want answered. Clearly it wasn't anyone who was in the room when the video was taken.

I think this falls squarely into that worrisome category, "Funny Once." Maybe not even that, if it wasn't for the reaction of the audience. I doubt we shall be seeing band on the blog again but I'd be delighted to run across them in a market town shopping center on a Saturday, scandalizing the shoppers and frightening the horses.

Heroes - Livid Kittens

Geez. We're taking no prisoners today, are we? What a way to begin. Heroes is a difficult song to cover, not just because Bowie is an almost impossible act to follow but because it basically chugs along for six minutes, picking up momentum as it goes and most people who attempt it run out of road before they even get halfway. 

Not Paige Harvey and Jonny Five. They just keep building and building like they never want to stop. Until, quite suddenly, Paige does. Jonny seems a little disconcerted. He keeps going a little longer and then its all over. The drummer rides the crash cymbals a little too much for my taste but he's way back in the mix so it doesn't matter. 

The sound on that last one was a lot better than I remembered but even so perhaps we should have something a little more professionally engineered, if only as a palate cleanser.

Goodbye Horses - The Airborne Toxic Event

Q Lazarus's classic by way of Joy Division apparently. It did always have something of a post-punk feel to it of course but this is full-on Futurama Festival fodder.

For such a supposedly obscure song, an awful lot of people have had a go at it. Like this next lot, for example.

Goodbye Horses - Urban Heat

Now we're moving into New Romantic territory although you can clearly hear the transition. Depeche Mode would seem to be the bridge over which we're crossing to get there. New Romantics were just post-punks who'd gotten at the dressing-up box, anyway.

The Whole Of The Moon - Fiona Apple

The queen of re-interpretation would have to be Tori Amos but Fiona Apple could clearly run her close if she'd a mind. One thing a truly great cover can do is make you see a familiar song in a whole new light and that's what this did for me.

I must have heard Whole of the Moon by the Waterboys dozens of times before. I never much liked it. I'd put it in a bucket with Come On Eileen or Wonderwall, one of those ubiquitous songs everyone can't stop themselves joining in with, whether they like them or not. Until I heard this, though, I'd never actually listened to it.

And now I have, I'm still not at all sure I like it. Not as a song. I love Fiona Apple's performance of it, though. And it really is a performance. She kicks the crap out of it!

Bad Moon Rising - Rasputina

I was just about to post Rasputina's cover of Lana del Rey's Video Games when I came across this. I'm hearing it for the first time literally as I type this. Now, that's a cover even Bob Dylan could be proud of. It's barely recognizeable!

It's another fine example of the way a cover can refresh an overly-familiar song and bring it back to life. Bad Moon Rising is pretty indestructible but Rasputina damn well dismantles it.

Video Games - Rasputina

By comparison, her take on this one is positively faithful. I've heard it a few times now and I can't shake the impression Rasputina isn't really familiar with the song other than as something she's covering. I'm sure that's not the case but it has this strange, empty quality that her stuff never usually has. The rhythm is weirdly metronomic, too, and then it just suddenly stops. Very odd.

Say Yes To Heaven - Fontaines DC

Oh, now a theme develops! A bit late, isn't it? Grian Chatten, showing he can actually sing instead of just declaim. Well, sort of. He's picked one of Lana's less-celebrated classics and the band give it the full moody. I'm pretty sure that one line - "I've got my eye on you" - sounded a lot less stalkery when Lana sang it.

Starburster - Rachel Chinouriri

As several people in the YouTube thread point out, this really isn't an easy song to cover. I'm not quite as convinced she "nails it" as they are but it's a game go. She seems a lot happier on the chorus than the verses with all those tumbling words that she has to read off the iPad she's got resting on a music stand.

I can't talk, though. When I was the singer in a band I could never even remember the words to songs I'd written, let alone anyone else's. One of the biggest gigs we ever did, or in front of the biggest audience anyway, which was only a few hundred people, I had to have a folder at my feet with all the lyrics so I could glance down and refresh my memory whenever I forgot something. Which turned out to be all the time.

Booster Seat - Asha Jeffries

I don't have a cover of a Rachel Chinouriri song but this is thematically appropriate in that the two major sources of contemporary cover versions known to me are Radio One's Live Lounge and TripleJ's "Like A Version". Both of them require artists also to come up with a cover if they want to come on and do a song of their own. 

You might expect that would mean a lot of lacklustre attempts at obvious targets and there is some of that but mostly it either seems to bring out the competitive streak in certain musicians as they try to outdo and replace any previous memory of a well-known song or to make themselves look super-hip by picking a deep cut from someone else's back catalog. 

All of that can be amusing but then there are the good ones. The ones where a band or a singer goes after a genuine favorite that means something to them and does their absolute best to let everyone listening share some of what they're feeling. That's Asha Jeffries, here.

I've heard this song in its original by Spacey Jane because Spacey Jane is a really great name for a band and I've several times been caught by it. I don't like Spacey Jane though and until I heard this cover I didn't like this song either. Plenty of Australians do. It was both a hit and an award-winner there. I'm still not convinced but I love this version.

Close To Me - Lola Young

Lola Young blew up on TikTok in the U.S. not long before it was banned for almost five minutes. It's tempting to think of her as a British Chapell Roan but I don't think that holds. She has one hell of a big voice and judging by her choice of cover here, very good taste. The original is by the Cure.

Flagpole Sitta - Kelly Clarkson

There is a third, reliable source of odd and curious covers but it's one I rarely mention for the simple reason that every one of those covers is by the same person - Kelly Clarkson. It's highly unlikely I'd even know about them if it wasn't for Stereogum, where at least one staffer has a real thing for Kelly's seemingly random rifling through the indie back catalog for the Kellyoke segment of her eponymous TV show.

Thanks to their diligence in pointing it out every time she does another surprisingly heartfelt version of some minor indie hit from fifteen years ago, I've watched her tear the guts out of a dozen or more minor classics and it's always an enjoyable ninety seconds or so. The reason I don't usually link them here is that she rarely does the full song. 

She doesn't here, either. She cuts at least one verse. She keeps it going for a couple of minutes but the original by Harvey Danger is almost twice that long. The reason I'm including Kelly's truncated take here is partly because she does a really good job on it (She almost always does.) but mostly for the minute and a half after the song ends, when she explains how she grew up listening to the song and makes it absolutely clear, just in case you were in any doubt, that she knows these indie classics she keeps covering. It's her show and these are her choices. I hope she doesn't run out of favorites any time soon.

Take On Me - Pacifica

If it was all starting to feel a bit too slick and professional for you, here's a cover of Aha's annoyingly catchy 1980s earworm as done by Inés and Martina, an Argentinian duo who go by the name Pacifica,  seen here playing on a carpet they've dragged onto someone's flat roof. 

It's a very rock cover of what I always found to be an irritatingly mannered piece of Scandie synthpop. It's from their album Freak Scene for which, unfortunately, they appear to have neglected to cover the Dinosaur Jr. track of the same name. Pity. It's one of my favorites.

And that's going to have to be all for today although God knows I've barely made a dent in the pile. We didn't have Jarvis Cocker doing Tina Turner's Private Dancer or Blossoms covering Charli XCX's 360 and bringing Rick Astley out at the end to join in. And I haven't even touched the two dozen consecutive versions of Led Zeppelin's incomprehensibly famous dirge Stairway To Heaven from the ABC (That's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.) special edition of "The Money or the Gun"... 

Just to be awkward, I'm going to close with one that isn't a cover at all. I thought it was going to be but I was wrong. Was my face red?!

B. A. B. Y. - The Brunettes

The Brunettes is the band Princess Chelsea was in before she was Princess Chelsea, along with Jonathan Bree, who I always think of as "that guy with a stocking on his head." I was investigating their back catalog when I happened upon this, which I naturally took to be a cover of the R&B shouter originally recorded by Carla Thomas in the 1960s and later covered - to absolute perfection - by the magnificent Rachel Sweet.

It isn't. It's an original. And it's good, too.