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 the 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.

Friday's (Fail To) Grab Bag

  No nonsense. Just get on with it. Mostly games this time. A little music at the end.

Hope You Like Our New Lack Of Direction

I'm about ready to call the Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt revamp a bust. I have more than a hundred and sixty hours in the game since it went into Early Access, thirty-five hours since the new version arrived, benched my old character and mandated a re-start. 

It's the same game.

I suspected as much almost from the start but last night I beat the fourth boss to win access to the fifth "storied" realm and found myself back on the exact same path I was traveling months ago. There's Nellie Bly, standing on top of a spur of rock next to a decommissioned portal, explaining you'll never get to Nightingale so you might as well help her fix the machine so you can go to somewhere else, a place she's found called The Watch.

I was honestly hoping never to see The Watch again. It's where the old game ran into the buffers of a half-assed, unfinished "end game", in which a solo rpg morphed clumsily into a lobby MMO with no point or purpose. I was dearly hoping that would be the part of the game they'd fixed because it really, really needed it, whereas most of the parts they have changed didn't need it anything like as much but it looks like all the effort has gone into the crafting tidy-up. That and those so-called "stories", absolutely none of which I noticed as I followed a series of repetitive tasks and battled a series of tedious bosses.

All of which makes it sound like I don't like the game, which isn't the case. My feeling is quite the opposite. I like Nightingale a lot, which is why I've played it for all those hours. I liked the original and I like the new version well enough, too. 

It was nice to come back for a second run and enjoy a slight variation over the first few sessions but much though I enjoyed the hunt for parts to fix Nellie's portal and all the side-quests that spring up along the way when I did them earlier this year, I don't particularly want to do them all again just now. I think I may have to give Nightingale a rest for a while. 

I'd still recommend the game to anyone who likes base-building rpgs with light survival trappings and who hasn't already tried it. It looks good, plays quite smoothly and the crafting and building are more than decent. It's very much an Early Access title in the sense that it isn't finished yet but what's there is sound and solid. 

If you're waiting until it is finished before jumping in, though, I wouldn't advise it. It's far from clear the whether the developers have any clear vision of what they want the finished game to look like and it seems less likely all the time that they'd have the resources to get there even if they did. Might as well play it now if you're going to play it at all. It might not be there later.

 

You've Lost Me Now

Off the back of that, I'd like to talk about something I've mentioned before: Steam Achievements. They can be quite instructive on the health of a game, especially taken in combination with Steam charts. 

Before Realms Rebuilt, Nightingale had just a few hundred players by Steam's count. That jumped to six thousand on the update but after a couple of weeks peak concurrency is down by a third and slowly falling. Still, it's a clear and definite improvement. 

The achievements tell a different tale. I have four post-revamp achievements. Each of them is for beating a boss and gaining access to the next Realm. The percentage of players who've managed any of them is tiny but that's because it's calculated against all the players who have the game in their Steam Library, not against those playing right now. 

Most people who ever played Nightingale no longer play, so the low numbers are to be expected. What's telling is the relative numbers that have completed each of those four Achievements. Since they were only added with the update and since they each represent completion of a mandatory step to progress through the storyline, the achievements record the degree to which that much-hyped new narrative approach has persuaded people.

The result is not encouraging. At time of writing, just over 9% of players completed all the tutorial
quests in the Abeyance realm but only half of those managed to get to the end of the Realm that followed, Sylvan's Cradle. By the end of the third realm, Welkin's Reach, the numbers had almost halved again and less than two percent have made it past the fourth realm, Magwytch Marshes. 

That is a serious problem for the new direction. If the story was compelling, it wouldn't be shedding almost half of its audience at the end of every chapter. Perhaps if there actually was a story, that would help. Maybe they should think about adding one. 

 

Meet New People. Then Kill Them.

For all its narrative shortcomings, Nightingale is doing a very much better job of holding my attention than Throne and Liberty. When I was posting about the new game yesterday, I was quite keen to get back to it and play some more. When I did, though, I found myself losing interest much sooner than I expected.

I did some more quests. They were okay, no more than that. Still, I was having a reasonably amusing time, running about doing things for people I didn't know or care about, which they could have been doing for themselves. 

The place was very busy and the server was struggling a little. I remember thinking a couple of times that I'd probably be having more fun if I waited until the crowds had moved on. Then I got disconnected and dumped to desktop, which I have to admit did break the flow and temper my enthusiasm a little.

Still, I came back to try again. A quest took me to the edge of the area I'd opened and on a whim I carried on to see what might be over the next hill. A lot fewer people, as it turned out, which felt better, so I kept going. 

I did some enjoyable exploring. The game sure is pretty to look at. I started searching for teleport stones to add to my map, it always being handy to have them opened before you need them for questing. That took me through a number of dangerous areas but nothing seemed to run as fast as my wolf travel form and aggro drops fast so I just kept running and everything was fine.

Until I ran past a player and they killed me, that is.

They were doing one of the many open-world events designed for guilds. These are everywhere and they seem to be highly competitive. A guild ranking of some sort gets broadcast when they end. 

The events also turn the area where they take place into a non-consensual PvP zone. I was well aware of that - it's clearly flagged - but I figured anyone doing the events would be too busy with their own stuff to bother with someone just passing through. 

Yeah, nope.

Being ganked as I ran past a guy looting a wagon marked my first and so far only death in Throne and Liberty. I stopped being bothered by being ganked sometime around 2002, so I just respawned and got on with it but once again it put a dent in my momentum. I decided to avoid the conflict zones and go around the coast but there wasn't to much to see down on the beach and when Beryl came bounding in looking for attention I was very happy to stop and give her some.

At the moment I don't feel especially motivated to log back in. It all seems a bit pointless when there are so many other games I'd rather play. Still, it is the new hotness, until the next new hotness comes along, so I imagine I'll give it another go. I don't think it'll be staying in the rotation for long, though. 

 

Alien Invasions 

What might take its place is X-Com. Or X-Com 2. I've been moaning on about wanting a good, turn-based, tactical RPG with a focus on team combat since I finished Solasta and decided I was too mean to stump up for Baldur's Gate 3. 

I've read so much about how good the X-Com series is that when I saw these two were on offer on Steam for 90% and 95% off it seemed silly not to buy them, so I did. I had a momentary feeling of dread that I might already have them in my Amazon Prime collection but no, I don't. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they turned up there in a month or two but that's a risk you have to take when you buy anything.

My question now is whether I should play them chronologically or whether the second is a significant improvement on the first, in which case maybe I should start there. I think there's some narrative continuity but I have no idea if the story is actually important. I mostly just want to do the fights. 

And now for the audio-visual section of our presentation... 

In A Dream, All In A Dream

That's Dreamworld. I read about it on MMOBomb and was surprised I hadn't heard about it before. It describes itself as "a groundbreaking Sandbox MMO, where all players create together in a single infinite world " but the part that interests me is the AI integration, which "allows players to generate their own 3D models in-game using a text prompt".

The game is running a "public test" next week and all you need to do is ask for access through Steam, which I have done. I'm very curious to see how those AI tools work. I did try another game in development that purported to use something similar and it did not impress but this one looks a lot more sophisticated. It'll be interesting to see how it works - or doesn't. 

Cue Outro

Can't have a grab bag with no music. And what sort of music do we like around here? Well, let's see. Among other things, we like smart, intelligent indie bands, we like cover versions, we like Lana del Rey. Put them all together and what have you got?

Say Yes To Heaven - Fontaines D.C.
(Original Lana del Rey)

Not the most obvious choice, is it? I see they're not dressing like EMF any more, either. Maybe Liam got to them. He does that. It's his gift.

Past, Present and Future

Thinking of Lana, which I pretty much always am, I watched a couple of old interviews recently, from back when she was Lizzie Grant. They're like music all in themselves. I thought I'd share just one really short clip...

"I just wanna do something I can be the best at."

Mission accomplished, then.

Pardon My French

I probably ought to be posting about the Nightingale revamp today but I forgot all about it until I saw Azuriel's post so I won't be doing that. I have the update downloading now, all 28Gb of it so maybe tomorrow. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and finish the Covers post I keep talking about. 

I went through all the possibles this morning and narrowed it down to ten or twelve good ones so all I have left to do is put them into some kind of order, write some words, find them on YouTube, embed them, change the sizes, do the header ...

I might have left this a bit late. I'd better get on with it.

Les Cactus - The Last Shadow Puppets

(Jacques Dutronc cover)

I regret not getting into the Arctic Monkeys a lot sooner than I did and I regret missing out on the Last Shadow Puppets even more. Still, better late than never, eh? I'm not sure if it's Alex Turner or Miles Kane who has the great taste in covers but they did this and they did This Is Your Life by the Glaxo Babies, who I used to go see play locally when I was still a teenager (Just about...) and whio I thought I'd never hear covered by anyone, ever. We've had that one before or it'd be here now. (Don't say that. You know why.) 

They also covered I Want You/She's So Heavy by some band called the Beatles but I guess even that has a kind of hipster cred - I mean, it's hardly Hey Jude, is it?

Miles Kane is also partly responsible for one of my top ten favorite Lana del Rey tunes, Dealer, which comes from what's supposed to have been an album's-worth of songs they recorded together. Every bloody Lana out-take and demo leaks except the ones you really, really want to hear, right?

Les Cactus - Jacque Dutronc

I'm not going to paste in all the  originals full-size for these but there are a few I don't want to throw away on just a link. Also, fair warning, there are quite a lot of French acts coming up. Maybe I should just front-load them. Yes, I think that's best.

It all started when I looked up something by Serge Gainsbourg and ended up down one of those notorious YouTube rabbit holes that are so damn easy to fall into and sometimes so revelatory. The internet in general and YouTube in particular has made it possible, easy even, to shake prejudices that otherwise I would have taken with me to the grave. I mean, who knew French pop before Daft Punk was good?

Les Cactus - Vanessa Paradis

(Jacques Dutronc cover. Oh. You knew that.)

Good things always come in threes, right? More to the point, Vanessa tees up the next one perfectly.

Joe Le Taxi - Petite Meller 

(Vanessa Paradis cover)

A fan-made video, using a whole bunch of clips from other Petite Meller videos, which is one way to do it. Probably means that this will be a dead link in a year but no-one is ever going to come back and try to click on it, so so what? Anyway, the entire internet will be dead by then if you listen to some people, so so so what, what? Eh? Eh?!

Ces Bottes Sont Fait Pour Marcher - Muguette  

(Nancy Sinatra cover)

Okay, I admit it. This is what I think of when I think of french pop music from the sixties. Kitsch covers of kitsch songs or kitsch originals that sound remarkably like songs you already know. Which is how I found Muguette.

As I was tumbling down my rabbit hole I happened to hear Ne Fais Pas Le Tete by Katty Line and I thought to myself well that sounds familiar, which led to me to wonder if any of the many French Ye Ye girls had actually covered Nancy's classic stomper and of course they had.

Ce N'est Pas Un Vie - Pussy Cat  

(Small Faces cover)

I thought this sounded remarkably familiar, too, which it should do, seeing as it's the Small Faces' Sha La La La Lee with the title changed. And quite possibly the rest of the words, too. 

When I was about sixteen or seventeen I once did the lighting for a school dance. There was a band playing and a friend of mine was in it. He later played keyboards and did some of the vocals for the band I was in, although only for our first three gigs, which was how we got a review that compared us (Inaccurately but favorably.) to Capt. Beefheart but for this band, which I think was his older brother's outfit, he was on drums. I was in the wings, supposedly working the lights but actually doing something entirely more interesting with a girl I ended up going out with for about two weeks. My pal Chris, who was also doing the lights, had to do the whole thing. He was quite good about it, considering.

The band played mostly covers, as you'd expect at a school dance. They did Sha La La La Lee. Can't help but think of that night every time I hear the song. Even in French.

All Shook Up - Camp Claude  

(Elvis Presley cover)

Transitioning smoothly out of the francophone pop phenomenon by way of a band whose origins I still haven't entirely figured out. They certainly have french connections. I suspect they might be French-Canadian. I'd look it up but where's the fun in that?

I thought I'd heard all their stuff but there was an EP I missed at the end of last year and it's all covers. All of them great, too. Could have used any of them but this is the one with the video so that's the one we're having. 

They seem to have been doing this one for a while, too. There's a live TV performance from 2017 I like but not as well as this.

Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) - Oktavia  

(Cover ... Your guess is as good as mine.)

This is where things get messy. This is a cover but not only had I never heard the original before, I'm not entirely sure what the original is. I came across it while I was doing a bit of "research" on AI music, which this isn't, not really, but even before I got started I found myself deep in a subculture about which I know a little but understand almost nothing.

The singer is a vocaloid, meaning it's produced artificially. How? Don't look at me. I don't know! I mean, I've read quite a bit about it all  and I know who (What?) Hatsune Miku is but I'm still not at all clear on how it actually works. 

There are lots of variants on Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) on YouTube but I haven't had much luck working out which is the ur-version. Plenty of them have millions of views so that doesn't help. Most of them have a name or a pair of names appended to the end (GUMI, GUMI&Rin, GIgaP&Shooze...) but I get the impression at least some of those are the names of the vocaloids used in the cover. 

Also, I'm not sure cover is the right word. It seems to me these are more like remixes. Further research is required but if anyone is already deep in this and wants to school me on how it works, the comments are right down there.

These Days - Miley Cyrus 

 (Nico cover... or is it?)

On the subject of what constitutes a cover, here's an interesting case study. This was posted on a YouTube account by the name of MileyCyrusFans with the rubric (Nico Cover) appended. And it is, in the sense that Nico recorded the song on her first solo album, Chelsea Girls. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that most people who know the song would think of Nico in associoation with it before they thought of anyone else but she didn't write it.

Jackson Browne, who plays guitar on the album, did. He wrote it specifically for Nico. Astonishingly, given the elegaic feeling of looking back in time to an earlier version of yourself that it so perfectly evokes, he was just sixteen at the time. Nico, of course, has always been older than god.

Nico's album came out in 1967 and Browne didn't get around to releasing his own version until 1973. @MileyCyrusFans acknowledges Browne's authorship in the details but that knowledge clearly doesn't make it a Jackson Browne cover as far as they're concerned.

To make things even more complicated, the arrangement Nico used, which Wikipedia credits to her, has been followed by many subsequent artists, including Miley, but when Jackson Browne recorded his version he used an arrangement originally created by Gregg Allman, earleir in 1973. But things gets fuzzier yet.

Wikipedia may be wrong about Nico being responsible for the arrangement in the first place. I was skeptical, thinking that it sounded an awful lot like the kind of arrangements John Cale was doing for his early solo albums like Paris 1919. Cale was in the studio, played on most of the tracks and wrote or co-wrote some too but he wasn't credited as either Producer or Arranger. Those roles fell to Tom Wilson and Larry Fallon respectively but Fallon's distinctive string and flute arrangements were done at Wilson's request and overdubbed later without Nico's knowledge or agreement.

So, when Miley covers the song, is she covering Jackson Brown or Nico? And if Nico wrote neither the tune nor the lyrics and possibly didn't have much to do with how the song turned out other than the way she sang it, is her version a cover, even though it had never been recorded before? Are all songs sung by singers who aren't also credited at least as co-composers covers?

No, of course they aren't! That would be silly. Let's move on.

Let's Get Lost -  Fontaines DC  

(Chet Baker cover)

They get better and better, don't they? Give them another couple of years and I reckon they could make an album their fans hate as much as Arctic Monkey's fans hated Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. And it'll have taken them half as long to get there.

Probably should have a couple of fast ones to finish with. Send everyone out into the cold night air sweating and buzzing.

Deceptacon - Blondshell  

(Le Tigre cover)

I fucking love Blondshell! I fucking love Deceptacon! I don't love the mix but you have to take what you can get when it comes to audience recordings.I'm just happy I get to see and hear it at all.

Deceptacon - Le Tigre

I'm not hiding that behind a link!

Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've?)

 Le Butcherettes  

(Buzzcocks cover)

Remember last time, when I posted Le Butcherettes cover of Miley's Wrecking Ball and I said I had another by them that was even better? That was it!

And we're done. Managed to get through less than a fifth of the covers I had bookmarked. I guess I'd better do another one of these pretty soon...

About The New Idea

I've been threatening to do a Covers post for a while now. The day has finally come. I wasn't planning on it but then the former drummer of the Kaiser Chiefs introduced me to my new fad band and I thought yes, it's time.

It's funny how these things happen, isn't it? Synchronicity, I suppose. Or maybe quantum entanglement. 

I'm not sure I've ever consciously listened to a Kaiser Chiefs' song. I certainly couldn't name one. You'd think I'd have less than no interest in clicking through a link to read about some new band their old drummer'd put together. 

And I wouldn't, if Nick Hodgson, to give their old drummer a name, hadn't decided to call his group Everyone Says Hi. First off, that's a great name for a band. Second off, it sounds oddly familiar. 

And it should. It's the title of a David Bowie song. It was on his 2002 album, Heathen, of which I'm pretty sure there's a copy somewhere in the house and which I've certainly heard a few times.

Hodgson didn't know what it was when he chose it:

“I’ve got a list of band names and in my band names list it said ‘Everyone Say Hi’. I thought ‘OK, that’s unusual, I’ll go on Spotify to see if there’s a band already called that’, which is what I always do. Usually there is but this time it just came up with that Bowie song. But the Bowie song is ‘Everyone Says Hi’ and I had Everyone Say Hi and I thought ‘I’ll change it to that because I love David Bowie’. I didn’t know [the song].”

That's a long-winded way of explaining how I came to be reading about a band I wasn't particularly interested in listening to, although their debut single, Brain Freeze, isn't at all bad (It also happens to be co-written by someone who also co-wrote Lana del Rey's seminal Video Games, but if we go much further down the synchronicity hole we may never come out...) but it doesn't begin to explain why I'm writing about it now.

For that, we need to dig deeper into the short interview, in which Nick Hodgson answers the somewhat random question "How do you see the landscape for bands now?" Nick takes it as his opportunity to big up a scene I'm pretty sure no-one reading this knows exists. I certainly didn't and I don't think the NME journo did either:

"There’s some good stuff. Do you know The Molotovs? I love what they’re doing. They’re only about 15 and they’re playing in these venues full of 15-year-olds and they’re throwing themselves around and getting onstage and joining in. It’s like, ‘So the kids are still excited by bands’. They’re in a scene with a load of other bands, all the same age. You need to think of a title for the scene."

As you can see, whoever put the page together for the NME included a link for the one band Nick names, the Molotovs. Since I'd gotten that far, I clicked on it to see who they were but it goes nowhere. Apparently NME doesn't even have a placeholder for the Molotovs yet. 

Of course, that just made me more curious so I went to YouTube to see if I could get a look at these guys, whoever they were. It didn't take long to find out. NME might not know who they are but oh boy, YouTube sure does! I spent about an hour and a half, last night and this morning, going through some of the dozens of live performances uploaded by fans, venues and the band themselves.

The Molotovs are very good, compelling even, which is weird because the very last thing they are is original. It's really hard to do what they're doing without sounding like a tribute act or a pastiche or, god forbid, a covers band. They don't sound anything like any of those. They sound like what they are - a guitar band. Apparently they do still exist. Who knew?

They have a bunch of very solid, convincing originals but we'll get to those in another post. What matters today is that they do a lot of covers. (We got there in the end!) More importantly, they somehow manage to make some very familiar songs sound fresh and thrilling, even though they don't change anything very much. My rule of thumb for covers is that they need to be quite different from the original to be interesting but sometimes just giving it everything you have works, too.

It's not just the performances, which are electric. It's the audience reaction. Nick Hodgson talks about "a scene with a load of other bands", something I struggled to find evidence for, unfortunately, because if there are more bands like this, I want to know about them, but what he says about venues being full of people the same age as the band, who are purportedly still in their teens, "throwing themselves around" is right there for everyone to see. And enjoy.

As for the songs, originals and covers both, I have been known to comment on the way these days everything sounds like everything else. Also, how originality is hard to come by any more, a line which puts me in somewhat uncomfortable company with any number of ageing rockers, whose irritatingly narrow-minded, short-sighted and often just plain ignorant observations litter my feeds day by day. 

It's a valid observation but an unsustainable complaint.  There's nothing remotely wrong with drawing inspiration from the past as well as the present, as Cindy Lee would surely tell you.

Who's Cindy Lee? You may very well ask. She's the widely-acknowledged genius behind the recently-rleased two-hour concept album, Diamond Jubilee, which I've had playing loudly the whole time I've been writing this. It's the album that got a rarely-awarded 9.1 review on Pitchfork back in April, after which it was added to that publication's tally of the best albums of 2024 so far.

As an incendiary live review on Stereogum a short while later went on to explain, Cindy Lee is smoking hot right now and everyone wants to say they were there when it happened, although since she's been recording as Cindy Lee ("the drag queen hypnagogic pop project of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, former guitarist and lead singer of Women", as Wikipedia puts it), for around a decade now and her debut 2020 album was long-listed for the prestigious Polaris prize, it's a bit late to be claiming discovery rights. 

The current album, which is bizarrely hard to buy, being available for a recommended donation of $30 only through a GeoCities page, which also contains links on how to listen to it quite legally for free, is over two hours long and sounds, as one YouTube commenter appropriately puts it, like "All the things I love about the last 50 years of rock and roll distilled perfectly into one collection". The past now present in the future. (I may have used that line before. I said originality was hard to come by.)

But I'm not here to talk about Cindy Lee. She can wait for the next What I've been Listening To Lately post because for all the ineffable familiarity of Diamond Jubilee, I don't believe it features any actual covers. And covers are what we're here for today, right? 

And that was a pretty lengthy lead-in so we'd probably best have some, hadn't we?

A Town Called Malice - The Molotovs (Jam cover)

Unsurprisingly, the Molotovs do several Jam covers. This one, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, When You're Young... They also cover the Clash, the Undertones, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, Supergrass, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Pretty much all rock and roll is here, so long as it's fast and doesn't last longer than three minutes. 

They don't seem to go much on the sixties, or not as much as you'd expect, which is a surprise, but I guess they have that decade pretty much covered with the gear they wear. There's always room for another Mod revival...

What I Like About You - Lillix (Romantics cover) 

Talking of provenance, I have Syp to thank for this one. I knew the Romantics' original, which is great, but I'd never heard Lillix' cover, which is brasher and brattier. Makes sense it ended up on the soundtrack of the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Freaky Friday, which now I come to think about is also a cover. Only with movies, we say "remake". 

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the 2003 movie is the third version... I wonder who's in the one that doesn't star Lindsay or Jodie Foster? Oh, here we are.. it was Gaby Hoffman. No, me neither...

Dancing With Myself - Maren Morris (Billy Idol cover)

If I wanted to claim a thematic link, I'd call on bleached blond hair but I could also play the "everything is everything else" card again because this is seventies-goes-eighties-goes-now and punk-goes-alt-rock-goes-country and every other damn hyphenate you want to pin on it. 

It's also a shill for "Visible — the wireless company for independent people", who presumably not only commissioned it but wrote and directed the video, given the prominent product placement. Uncool, as I believe they used to say back in the sixties, when people pretended to care about that sort of thing.

Owner Of A Lonely Heart - Trevor Horne feat. Rick Astley 

(Yes cover)

This one takes a bit of unpacking. Yes were (Are, I suppose...) a prog rock band who were massively successful in the 1970s but who veered into the oncoming headlights of the pop singles charts in the 'eighties, when they teamed up with electro-pop producer Trevor Horne, the man often ceded responsibility for the sound of an entire decade, thanks to his work with the likes of Dollar, ABC and, of course, Frankie Goes To Hollywood. 

Before he did all of that, Horne had a band of his own, Buggles, remembered today solely for his involvement and for their one and only, annoyingly catchy hit, Video Killed the Radio Star. At the time, Buggles and Yes both happened to share the same management, so when singer Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman upped and left the prog band for reasons I cannot begin to remember or care about, their mutual manager thought it would be a jolly good wheeze to slot Trevor Horne and his bandmate Geoff Downes in to replace them.

I'd been a big Yes fan in my early teens and I still liked them by then, even though it would have been tantamount to an invitation to public ridicule to have mentioned it to anyone. I remember thinking it was a bit weird but these things happen. What doesn't usually follow is that the management-made monster lumbers out of the album charts into the top 40 but that's what happened. Anderson returned to sing the song, whose creative process was unbelievably convoluted, as this laughably detailed Wikipedia article explains, but eventually the track became Yes's most successful single and their only US #1.

Four decades later, Trevor Horne decided to remake a bunch of his old hits. By the time he got to this one, he clearly felt in need of a little light relief after digging through the bones of his past.  As Stereogum quotes him "When “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was mentioned, I thought of a nicely unlikely angle – a dance groove like one I’d heard on an unreleased 12” mix with evergreen Rick Astley singing Yes an octave down. It made total sense."

I'm not sure it did but it sounds pretty good all the same. And I bet Jon Anderson just loves it.

I Wanna Be Adored - Horsegirl x Lifeguard (Stone Roses cover)

Reportedly, Horsegirl get a bit ticked off with GenXers latching on to them while acting as though their timeless sound somehow belongs to only to men old enough to be their dads. I dread to imagine how they'd feel about someone in his mid-sixties grabbing on to it too. I mean, I'm too old even to make a convincing Stone Roses fan...

This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us

 The Last Dinner Party (Sparks cover)

I'm exactly the right age for this one, though, or the original, anyway, which I remember first hearing on the car radio on my way home from school. Like the Molotovs, the Last Dinner Party do a lot of covers and do them exceptionally well. Unlike the Molotovs, everyone knows who they are. It's weird who gets the attention and who doesn't, isn't it? I still can't figure why Starcrawler aren't huge...

Jolene - Beyoncé (Dolly Parton cover)

Then again, when it comes to people knowing who you are, there's famous and then there's F.A.M.O.U.S. That's both of them, of course. Takes some doing to cover a song like this and not have it run you over. That's why she's Beyoncé, I guess.

After Hours - Sandrushka Petrova (Velvet Underground cover)

In case you don't recognize the name (And why would you?) it's her out of Descartes a Kant. Remember them? No? Oh well...

After Hours is one of those songs everyone thinks they can cover. And mostly they're right. it's damn nearly bomb-proof. I bet it goes down a storm in karaoke bars. (Do you know, I 've never been to a karaoke bar? That's a life experience I should probably make for myself some day.) 

I've seen versions by everyone from Eddie Vedder and Antony Kiedis (Not together!) to six year-old Evangeline Lorelei (A lot better than you're imagining.) but I kinda like Sandrushka's slightly sinister take on what is, after all, a pretty bleak lyric. It's her phrasing.

And that, I think, is that. For this time. Be assured there will be more. Just not for a while. Next time it'll be all new stuff.

Well, new to me, anyway. And hopefully new to you, too.

If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right

As threatened, here's a whole post full of covers. It seems as though several new ones pop up in my feeds every day. I think I might be getting cover fatigue. Why should I be the only one?.

I was about to make some fatuous point about the way the worldwide web and music streaming services have shoved people doing other peoples' songs to the forefront of the culture but then I realized it was twaddle. It's been like that forever. The one really big difference now, in the days of the internet, is the speed with which it happens. 

It used to be that you'd go see a band and they'd come out for the encore and do some song by someone else you never expected them to even know, let alone cover, and you'd feel blessed and privileged to have been there and seen it. Now, every time any band covers any song by anyone even once, it's online in a dozen shaky phone saves before the band are even back on the bus. And if it's a half-way well-known band there's a squib on the music news feeds so everyone hears about it.

Plus you soon realize that band played that song on every fricken date on the tour so now it doesn't seem quite so magical after all. Ditto the endless albums of collections of curated covers by famous, semi-famous and wish-they-were famous artists of other famous or more often cult-famous bands and singers, not to mention the obligatory "my favorite songs or at least the ones we could afford the rights for" covers albums by acts maybe not quite at the top of their careers or conversely so at the top of their careers no-one can stop them indulging their every whim... 

...and the YouTube channels and radio stations that have everyone who comes in to do a set of originals also do a cover (Looking at you, TripleJ and Live Lounge...) and the bands and artists that make an entire career out of doing nothing but weird covers of unlikely songs (That'll be you, Nouvelle Vague, Postmodern Jukebox, Puddles Pity Party...)

So, yeah, there are a lot of covers. And yet, no matter how many there are, how glutted the market, a really good cover never fails to amaze and delight. I have a couple of dozen new or new-to-me covers in my covers folder right now, all gathered in the last month or so. It's too many for one post but we might get through half of them. I just have to make sure it's the better half.

Dog Days Are Over - The Last Dinner Party

 (Florence and the Machine cover)

Let's begin with the band of the moment. After a lengthy and extremely well-managed build-up, the debut album is finally with us and it's breaking sales records. There's a lot of hype and a deal of suspicion about Last Dinner Party but screw all that. The performances speak for themselves.

I've never been much of a Florence fan although she's always been popular in this house. I do like a couple of her songs, though and this is one of them.

It also gives me the opportunity to mention something really obvious about covers that I probably don't always emphasize enough, namely that for a cover to work as a cover you really do need to be pretty familiar with the original. Otherwise it's just a song. If they'd covered pretty much any Florence and the Machine song but this or Kiss With A Fist, I wouldn't even have known it was a cover without someone telling me.

This time, I think just about everything I've picked is so well known that shouldn't be a problem. Then again...

One Of Your Girls - The Last Dinner Party 

(Troy Sivane cover)

Case in point. I've never heard the original of this. I want to now, though. That's something a good cover of a song you don't know always does - makes you want to go listen to the original. Partly to compare, partly just to know. I always want to know.

Come to think of it, I probably should always include a link to the original. Or to the version that's being covered, since sometimes what you're hearing is someone's cover of someone else's cover. Hang on a moment - let me just go back and retro-fit a link to the original on that first one...

Okay. We're good!

What I Was Made For - Troy Sivane 

(Billie Eilish cover)

 

No excuse for not knowing this one. How many times has this song turned up in a post here, now? Gotta be four or five. I'd bet it won't be the last, either. 

There are a few ways to do a cover:

• You can take a very well-known song and do it very differently, which can be either genius or hubris or, in the case of transposing an upbeat, cheerful song into a minor key and playing it at half the original tempo, or taking a slow, sad song and punking it up, incredibly clichéd. 
• You can - and far, far too many people do - take a well-known song and do it exactly the same as the original, like it was karaoke night at your local bar and there was a prize at the end. 
• You can take an obscure song and do it however you like, same or different, because everyone will think it's yours anyway, unless you tell them. 
  

Or you can do it the hardest way of all, which is to take a great song, sing it straight, and still hope to make it seem like it was worth doing and you brought something new. Congratulations, Troy. It was and you did.

Barbie Girl - Janet Devlin 

(Aqua cover)

And now, in a practical demonstration of why you should never listen to anything I say, here's an upbeat song re-framed as a slow ballad in a minor key that's the very antithesis of cliché. Instead, it opens up the original, revealing a raw interior I, for one, never realized was there. 

I mean, come on! Did you? I've heard Aqua's Barbie Girl a thousand times. I've always loved it. It's a happy, bouncy, singalong nursery rhyme with a glam sensibility and a mindless refrain, made for bawling ironically when drunk. Isn't it?

No, apparently not. I'm ashamed to say that until I heard this cover, I'd never really listened to the words before. And, yes, Janet Devlin has, as she says in the notes on YouTube, given the lyric a bit of a re-write, but after I heard her reading I went and read the original lyric and she's done no more than change the emphasis to bring out the dark desperation already there, trapped in the Aqua original. 

That's what a really good cover can do. Open up the original so you see it afresh. I have several more examples. Here's a good one.

 Super Trouper - The Japanese House

(ABBA cover)

I don't like ABBA. I have never liked ABBA. I'm as sure as I can be I never will like ABBA. Consequently, I have never really listened to the words of any of their irritatingly chirpy little ditties. I assumed, if I ever thought about it at all, that they'd be as dimly facile as the infuriatingly catchy melodies. 

Obviously, I was wrong. I won't say this cover opened my eyes to ABBA's virtues the way Sonic Youth's incandescent, revelatory version of Superstar revealed to me the sheer majesty, tragedy and genius of Karen Carpenter that had previously been hidden behind the glare of her public image, but it's certainly gone some way to make me take the Swedish legacy act a little more seriously. Or at the very least, to listen to what they're actually singing about.

Lose Yourself - Kasey Chambers 

(Eminem cover)

 

While we're on the subject of incendiary covers...

 

This is over eight minutes long but I insist you listen to it all the way through. It builds and builds until the catharsis of the release comes as a glorious explosion. This is a prime example of taking a song so perfect in its original incarnation it seems impossible to match let alone better and then doing it anyway.

 

Not that I'm saying Kasey does it better than Eminem. Not better, any more than Tori Amos' cover of Bonnie & Clyde is better. In each case, it's just better that both versions exist. Together they are more. 

 

Eminem is a legend for reasons and one of those reasons is his storytelling. All good stories thrive in the telling and Kasey Chambers knows how to tell a story. That's all.

Fade Into You - American Football 

(Mazzy Star cover)

 

There are songs no-one can cover and there are songs everyone thinks they can cover and all too often they're the same songs. No-one should cover Fade Into You. No-one can hope to match Hope. 

 

Unless...

Fade Into You/Lover - Suki Waterhouse

Mazzy Star/Taylor Swift cover

 

Or ...

 

Seriously, if you can do it that well and you have such great ideas for the visuals or you can make those kinds of connections... y'know what? Go for it.

 

Sweet Jane - (Hardly Strictly) Bluegrass

(Velvet Underground cover)

 

There are a lot of Velvet Underground covers. Really far too many. And of all the classics in the Velvets' back catalog, Sweet Jane has to be the most covered of them all. I once made an entire C90 cassette of Sweet Jane covers and that was in the 90s, when I didn't have YouTube to search them out for me. I didn't need it. I had enough on vinyl and CD already. Right there in my house!

That was about thirty years ago. How many of the things do you imagine there are now? Who'd imagine there'd be anything new to do with the old chestnut? Well, I guess you could get a bunch of bluegrass musicians with banjos and mandolins to back Chuck Prophet from Green on Red and see how that turned out...

I'd say it turned out just fine.

Flowers - Bowling For Soup

(Miley Cyrus cover)

Now we're out of the woods! Bring on the fun stuff!

I love Bowling For Soup. I particularly love the way they just go on and on being Bowling For Soup, never trying to be anything different or cooler or more respectable. Really a lot like Miley, now I come to think of it...

 

 

Intergalactic - ATARASII GAKKO! 

(Beastie Boys cover)

Some covers just feel inevitable.

Now all I need is for Atarashii Gakko! to cover Death To The Apple Gerls and my life will be complete.

Blue Skies - Lana del Rey

(Irving Berlin cover)

I may have been a tad sniffy about a few of Lana's covers in the past - I really don't like her version of Blue Velvet but then it's a very dull song - but she's done some absolute corkers, too. This is just wonderful. A complete re-imagining of a song so old and tired you might have thought it would be cruel to wake it up.

For once, I've had to attribute it to the songwriter, not the original performer, because honestly I have no idea which of the many recorded versions of this is reckoned to be the original. The true original version was by Belle Baker, who first sang it in an all-but forgotten musical called Betsy but as far as a cursory google search will tell me, she never set it to shellac or whatever they were using back in 1926.

I say we all agree this is the definitive version now and leave it at that. And the same for this post. I got half-way through the pile and I think I used all of the best ones so it would only be downhill from here if I carried on.

  

Okay, granted I didn't get to give you Rick Astley's take on Yes's Owner of a Lonely Heart but you can't have everything, now, can you?

I'll maybe save that for next time. Because there will be a next time. It's not like people are going to stop making covers any time much before the heat-death of the universe...