Good song, bad cover...
Tied in to our discussions on the AV Club Undercover thread this is the prime example of what I was talking about in that thread…..
Beck is doing a record club thing where he gets people together and they cover an album. They’re in the middle of (of all things) INXS’s “Kick”. This is Beck, St. Vincent, Liars, and Os Mutantes doing “New Sensation”.
This (the song performed here) is a great song. It stands unto itself as something I’d like to listen to.
However, for what I look for, it’s an awful cover. It shares the same song name and the lyrics and maybe very slight bits of the vocal melody. And that’s it. It’s not enough to call it a “cover song”.
I like it for what it is though. It just would be a much better original song with new lyrics.
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And now listening to this again and adding to the wtf aspect of it, I realize this version of New Sensation sounds moderately like another INXS song (Not Enough Time).
Coupla things:
- My god is Annie Clark a pleasure to behold. I have such a crush.
- I had no idea The Liars and Beck were buddies, but it makes sense. I really thought their last album was super beck-y.
- I disagree that this version strays too far from the original. Comparing it to what I immediately think of as a gold standard for bad covers, The Breeders doing The Beatles’ Happiness is a Warm Gun, you can tell what song this is. It’s just slower with a different arrangement. They didn’t fuck with the structure, changed the melodies or harmonies, or make any drastic changes to the composition itself. It’s just a new — and decidedly awesome — arrangement.
I think if you didn’t know going into it, or hear them rehearsing more closely to the original, then you wouldn’t recognize it without the lyrics.
I’ll try and settle this tonight. Anna was a huge INXS fan so she knows the original probably much better than I do. I’ll play this for her without the intro stuff and see if she can recognize it before they get to the chorus. If so then I’ll concede maybe I’m judging it as a cover too harshly. Although it is a great song/arrangement unto itself. And I agree about Annie Clark.
John said:Coupla things:
- My god is Annie Clark a pleasure to behold. I have such a crush.
This is really the only thing I took away from this video. I’ve always thought she looks pretty strange on the album cover but she is really pretty when she’s like, moving and stuff.
I don’t like this cover. Way to take a song that has an incredible energy to it and make it boring.
Jay, you clearly haven’t watched her Blogotheque yet: http://www.blogotheque.net/St-Vincent,3448
Matthew said:I don’t like this cover. Way to take a song that has an incredible energy to it and make it boring.
Exactly. I got tired of waiting for it to kick in and skipped to well into the second half of it and, upon finding it never kicked in, rushed back here expecting to read that’s why the cover was bad. Thanks, Matt.
Sammy said:I got tired of waiting for it to kick in and skipped to well into the second half of it and, upon finding it never kicked in, rushed back here expecting to read that’s why the cover was bad.
Clearly, this is the proper way to listen to new music.
O.K. so I played the audio of this for Anna who was an original INXS superfan back in the day and asked her to identify what song it was. The only thing that even remotely made her know what it was, was the lyrics. Which again, does not a cover song make.
Huh. I did not expect that. I concede.
O.K. this is the first song off of this whole project that I think works as a cover. It keeps enough of the original to be recognizable, but it mixes it up enough to make it something slightly difference.
Wow, sooo yeah. That was outstanding.
Seriously. That was everything that is GOOD about cover songs.
I was prepared to hate that based on your track record, but that was really good.
Another great cover: Mumford Sons do Vampire Weekend’s Cousins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZHv3qazVBY
Really, I think I"m just a giant sucker for any non-nu-metal cover of 80’s pop music. Here’s guitar-tappy virtuoso Andy McKee doing Africa’s Toto, which I will shamelessly admit has made me get all teary-eyed on more than one occasion. THE ORIGINAL, that is. Yeah. Really.