Another Form of Relief

The Pavement reunion tour is now well and truly on it’s way around the world.  The band is just now wrapping up it’s dates in Australasia, and will next be onto Japan before heading on to Europe and the US.  Reports from these early dates seem good, with some pretty spectacular setlists being played each night.

To coincide with this, the lovely people at Filthy Little Angels have put together a Pavement cover album entitled (what else?) Show Me A Word That Rhymes With Pavement.  Collecting 17 artists, including Horowitz, Cats and Cats and Cats, Benjamin Shaw, Billy Ruffian and a whole bunch of other hip and happening types.  The compilation covers both obvious and more obscures ends of the Pavement back catalogue.  As is inevitable with things like this, some work better than others, but it certainly hits a lot more than it misses.

MP3 Cats and Cats and Cats – Cut Your Hair

MP3 The International Karate Plus – Box Elder

The entire 17 track Show Me A Word That Rhymes With Pavement album is available now as a free download from Filthy Little Angels.

I wonder just how many posts in a row can have at least some tenuous Pavement connection on here.

Today we have a cover of Box Elder from Pet Ghost Project. I have to admit to not being familiar with with Pet Ghost Project, which is apparently just one man by the name of Justin Stivers. Which is pretty remarkable given the kind of full band sound that he manages to evoke with this cover. Box Elder is one of my favourite Pavement songs, ticking all of the boxes of what made the band great. It takes a hell of a lot to come up with something even half as good as the original, but Stivers manages to make it his own.

For those keeping up with the Pavement reunion scores at home, it’s now confirmed that there will “definitely will be” UK gigs in the “summer time”.

The 8-bit Album is the kind of project that I’d usually ignore. I’m not really a fan of entire compilations of covers or remixes, even if it’s of one of my favourite bands by a bunch of bands I’ve never heard of. And if that wouldn’t put me off, this almost certainly would:

“The songs on this compilation have mostly been created using original videogame hardware running home-brew software, and vary radically in style, from minimal ‘one man and his Game Boy’ compositions to 8-bit inspired full band performances.”

I only listened to one song from this as I was under the impression it was a remix, but then I started to explore the others. And you know what? It’s bloody excellent. It’s exactly what it’s described as. Weezer covers that sound like they were put together on a Game Boy. It’s not all perfect, with the compilation having a few more purely instrumental covers that I’d ideally like, but it’s a minor quibble. It’s more hit than miss, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

The entire 14 song 8-bit Album is available now as a free download from Pterodactyl Squad.

One of the lovely things about indiepop is how timeless much of it is. At times it’s difficult to assess exactly when a song comes from just by listening to it. Case in point is The School’s cover of The Left Banke’s And Suddenly. Now obviously if you’re already familiar with The Left Banke, this exercise is rendered rather meaningless. I knew the song was a cover from when the band played it at Indietracks, but I had no idea it dated back to 1967. A song 42 years old that sounds like it could one of The School’s own creations.

Searching For The Now 6 is out now on Slumberland Records. Vinyl only, of course.

Malcolm Middleton continues his “girl band cover project” with a cover of Ladyhawke’s My Delirium. Now, unlike the last one he did, I am at least vaguely familiar with this particular song. Not through every really hearing it, but via a friend who on occasion will repeatedly sing the same little bit of the chorus. While changing it to “delerium”.

There is probably no way I can honestly write about this thing without coming across as a snob like last time, so I’m not going to attempt to compare the versions. Nor should I try and figure out why I quite like this when what I’ve heard of the original has me wanting to destroy my eardrums. Standing on it’s own though, this slots in as a fairly typical Middleton effort, coming across as a stripped down plea for his own sanity. Which is probably a reasonable course of action when you spend your days covering songs like this.

Two covers in a row? Could it be part of some run of covers posts? Well, it’s either that or just the order I happened to open things in my inbox. Go with whichever version suits you more. On the upside, I am at least vaguely familiar with the song being covered today. I don’t actually like it, but it’s something of a step up. Nothing against the original by a singer whose name is either Mia or M.I.A., it just isn’t really my cup of tea. I hear the kids like her though, so once again, odds are they will probably hate this one.

What Pale Young Gentlemen have done is strip the song down entirely to make it sound like something far more laid back. In fact, wrong as it probably is, the first thing that my mind compared it to was something off of a Jack Johnson album. Which is probably deeply insulting. The other point of comparison was Jenny Owen Youngs’ cover of Nelly’s Hot In Here, which is something of an improvement.

I’m not entirely convinced by it all, in so much as it’s nowhere near as good as any of Pale Young Gentlemen’s original recordings. It is however a pleasant little curio, which is perhaps all we can really expect when playing so far outside of one’s genre.

I’m always wary of posting covers where I’m entirely unfamiliar with the original version. Given I couldn’t identify one Girls Aloud song from any other, or that of any other girl “band” for that matter, I was going to give it a miss. I always enjoy new Malcolm Middleton material though, even if I tend to end up having a love-hate relationship with many of his songs.

What threw me about Call The Shots is that if I didn’t know it was cover, I probably wouldn’t think it was. I even had to go to Youtube to make sure there really was an original version, and although I could stomach no more than thirty seconds of it, it did establish that this was indeed a Girls Aloud song. All of which entirely undermines my hatred of mainstream pop. Now, the production is certainly different, but the underlying song remains the same. Yet I enjoy this and can’t stand the original.

Maybe Middleton is just suited to this kind of song (previous covers of The Saturdays and Madonna suggest this could be true), but it’s still a bit weird. How does stripping a pop song down to it’s most basic level, leaving only a vocal and an acoustic guitar, suddenly give it value? Ultimately it probably doesn’t, and it’s likely I’m just being elitist about this things.

Given the difference, it’s likely that fans of the original will probably dislike this, although I doubt very many of them are reading this anyway. If you do happen to know both versions, which one holds up better of the two?

Two and a half years after I originally wrote about The Young Republic on here, I finally got to see them live on Monday as they supported The Mountain Goats at ULU. Despite having a ton of Young Republic songs, it seems that the changes in the lineup have led to a new musical direction as they only played one song that I already know (the superb Modern Plays). The rest of the set was made up of far more country and folk influenced songs from their Idiot Grin EP, which isn’t really a bad thing. I’m just kind of disappointed I didn’t get to hear Girl From The Northern States. No matter though. The only other song I was familiar with was their cover for the night: Bob Dylan’s Isis. With a full band setup the song sounded superb, and while the recorded version below is rather more stripped down, it’s still a pretty damn good version of it.

I am not a fan of cover bands. I find the whole exercise to be rather pointless. If you’ve got musical talent, make your own music. If you haven’t, well, you’re probably in a cover band.

That said, I salute Iron Horse for doing something rather different. On a most basic level they are a covers band, as I can’t seem to find much in the way of original material from them. They have recorded cover albums consisting of songs by Metallica, Van Halen, Led Zeppelin. For the more indie minded, they have albums of songs covering Modest Mouse, and as demonstrated below, The Shins.

Best of all, Iron Horse are a bluegrass band. Now I can’t speak for most but I actually find bluegrass to be rather entertaining. I don’t really listen to any, but I love the twangy feel and anything that uses a banjo is always a winner with me. So hearing some of the classics by the Shins in bluegrass style is certainly an interesting, and rather enjoyable experience.

Is there some unknown credibility to be found in indie artists covering gangsta rap songs? Ben Folds put out a version of Bitches Ain’t Shit a while ago, and there are probably others at it too. Here we have Nina Gordon covering N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. Now, I know nothing about Nina Gordon beyond the fact that she used to be the lead singer in Veruca Salt, a band I’ve never listened to. I don’t know much about N.W.A. either for that matter. A good blogalist would probably try and learn something about these things to offer up some insightful commentary. Not me. I will however point out that I absolutely love this idea of adapting rap songs into other genres, in this case turning it into a gentle girl and an acoustic guitar combination. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t even realise she’s singing about capping motherfuckers with an AK-47.