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hirezA couple of weeks ago, the Nouvelle Vague CD turned up on the floor by the letterbox and I didn't waste too much time before jamming the thing in the player and then opining hereabouts that it was a fine thing. After banging on about that and then the Bis cover of 'Love will tear us apart', I was reminded that I'd gone on at some length and with (un)surprising vitriol in various Googlable places that there could be no good JD covers and (probably) that the world of popular music would be far better off without the perpetrators of same.
Interesting thing (well, to me anyway): Had I got old, mellow and hopelessly out of touch and turned into the filthy sort of Guardian-reading bastard that the JH-R of twenty years ago would have cheerfully called a clueless old hippy fuck (under his breath, mind), or had the general state of JD covers gone up in the world? Or had I been working from a pitifully small sample?
For whatever reason, but probably akin to the one the good Dr. Thompson mentions toward the front of 'Fear and loathing in Las Vegas', once you've started collecting bad things that you know will do you no good, it's rather hard to stop. The upshot is that there are a bunch of other tracks that I feel I ought to mention. In no particular order...
Madonna vs. The Sex Pistols - Ray of gob. This is a particularly inspired pairing. A great handful of Matlock guitar was just what what 'Ray of light' needed to give it some bollocks, so this is what you get. A hands-in-the-air moshpit special - Reach for yer fookin' lager.
The Passions - I'm in love with a German film star. And rightly so. From the part of the 80s where a delayed guitar chugging away could do absolutely no wrong. Sublime.
The Farmer's Boys - In the country. Yes, a Cliff cover, and the reason that I will always dislike Alphaville (the bastard Belgians, rather than anything to do with Lemmy Caution). Y'see, that week both bands charted and both were slated for a slot on Top of The Pops. It was just just down to Alphaville making it over from Belgium - if they couldn't make it, then The Farmer's Boys got to be popstars in the nation's living rooms for three minutes. As it was, Alphaville found the right ferry and ended up one-hit-wonders, while BazFrogMarkandStan have been sadly ignored by all save a few obsessive Peelites.
Moving vaguely in the direction of JD, we find Razed in Black - Everything's gone green. Which pretty much proves my point that a lot of modern EBM thieves from early New Order. Sure it's been tarted up some with overdriven bass and some 303 squelching, but it still sounds fresh enough to have fallen off the end of a IoC CD. Or maybe... It's pretty obvious to anyone with ears that there's a definite similarity between Giorgio Moroder, Bobby O and early 80s New Order. Meanwhile, I can hear bits of Hazel Dean in a lot of IoC/Apop. Which means it's all outcroppings of various aspects of Pounding Sodomite Disco, but of course all heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, progenitors of all good music. (I suspect putting forward a Grand Unified Field theory of music is a sure sign of being a complete wanker, so I shall stop right there and merely point at this: http://www.gepr.net/genre2.html and indeed the myriad classifications of dance music.)
The chaps over at the Shadowplay site cosider the 1979 Peel Session version to be the original and best. While it's got the robustness of a band at the top of their game, to my ears it's not FAC23, which has been polished up to sound a little less... Blokey.
The Arthur Baker version found on one CD or other around the release of 'Permanent' (probably) is... Quite bad. It sounds mostly like a bad Jean-Michel Jarre cover before going painfully out of tune as a squad of monkeys hurl typewriters out of the windows. Far worse is to come, however. Simple Minds (Yes, I know I was warned off, but down these mean covers a blithering idiot must go) hand over a housey version that sounds like Groove Armada only more shit than usual. Then the 'singing' starts and it's like a chorus of Sirius Cybernetic robots have been parachuted in. The noises themselves are rather nice - lush 'Tour de France soundtracks'-ish sweeping strings - but it's entirely the wrong thing bolted to the wrong song, so it's just an ugly mess of sticks and wires.
Moonspell, thankfully, don't seem to stray from what they know. I'm assuming their day-job is that of a Nirvana tribute band, since that's what they've done here: a JD cover in the manner of a Seattle grunge band, only with a bit of Theremin-like noise and a quiet bit in the middle where you can clearly hear them taunting the original and poking sticks through the bars of the cage they're keeping it in.
I have no idea who or what The Frames are, but I suspect a yodey-bodey Irish band, given it's all a lot epic and fiddle-driven. A crunchy (ie horribly overdriven) live version with audience participation, clapping in time and shouting. Though strangely good. Similarly, the identity and disposition of 'The King' is a mystery. As you might guess, however, it's in the style of Elvis accompanied by Billy Idol's backing band. Very strange indeed. On one hand, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a 'proper' Elvis version. On the other, it's a concept so wrong that Godzilla and the Tetley Bittermen would join forces to destroy it utterly. It's all gone a bit average, really.
Thankfully, V/Vm pitch up and effect a cover by (as far as I can tell) playing the whole thing through a ring-modulator, which makes it sound like it's being played by an itinterant squad of strolling daleks down a 10 metre length of gas pipeline while they accompany themselves with disc cutters and rotary sanders. Their other version sounds like Reg Nullify.
Stanton-Miranda, it says here, is Miranda Stanton from Thick Pigeon. A mid-80s Factory band. Since it appears that The Other Two helped out on at least one of their albums, it's entirely unsurprising that this version sounds like Brotherhood-era New Order. This is no bad thing at all. Equally placed in the 'rather good' bucket are an un-named string quartet. If you've heard the Balanescu versions of Kraftwerk, it's like that.
In The Nursery and Kismet both turn in worthy dirges, though Kismet at least manage to sound like 3Mustaphas3. A lot like the Mutaphas, in fact. Invisible Limits owe something to Eddie and the Hot Rods. Twenty quid, by the sound of it. Meanwhile Fallout Boy begin with earnestly strummed acoustic guitar before turning into... Oh, this is what the kids call 'Emo' isn't it? I think I know a Weddoes tribute when I hear it, thanks all the same.
The Cure offering, though live, is... Not all it could be. I mean, 'In between days' proved they could knock off a good New Order cover if they felt like it, so what's the problem here? Then there's the Swans. I'm fairly sure that those versions were the reason that I formed the viewpoint that there could be no good JD covers in the first place. Unfortunately, even after the passage of (I dunno? Twenty years?) I still find them more than a little grim. One version sounds like they're about to burst into 'Don't fear the reaper' or 'Veteran of the psychic wars' and the other is... No, I can't stand to listen to any more without wanting to hurl things out of the window. Sorry.
To change the mood a little (I've been posing down the pub), Kaycee sounds like she's imitating Bjork in Thomas Dolby's sonic laboratory of 'bloink' and 'scrop'. [FX: Googlage] Ah. They'm a band, one of whom DJed at Tresor. That makes a lot of sense. Damn fine. In similar vein, we find Bis clattering along with vocoder and/or Bell Labs speech-synth and SIDStation. Damn fine too.
Right. That's quite enough of that. I'm going to listen to 'Longshot kick de bucket' and 'strict machine'. A lot.
Interesting thing (well, to me anyway): Had I got old, mellow and hopelessly out of touch and turned into the filthy sort of Guardian-reading bastard that the JH-R of twenty years ago would have cheerfully called a clueless old hippy fuck (under his breath, mind), or had the general state of JD covers gone up in the world? Or had I been working from a pitifully small sample?
For whatever reason, but probably akin to the one the good Dr. Thompson mentions toward the front of 'Fear and loathing in Las Vegas', once you've started collecting bad things that you know will do you no good, it's rather hard to stop. The upshot is that there are a bunch of other tracks that I feel I ought to mention. In no particular order...
Madonna vs. The Sex Pistols - Ray of gob. This is a particularly inspired pairing. A great handful of Matlock guitar was just what what 'Ray of light' needed to give it some bollocks, so this is what you get. A hands-in-the-air moshpit special - Reach for yer fookin' lager.
The Passions - I'm in love with a German film star. And rightly so. From the part of the 80s where a delayed guitar chugging away could do absolutely no wrong. Sublime.
The Farmer's Boys - In the country. Yes, a Cliff cover, and the reason that I will always dislike Alphaville (the bastard Belgians, rather than anything to do with Lemmy Caution). Y'see, that week both bands charted and both were slated for a slot on Top of The Pops. It was just just down to Alphaville making it over from Belgium - if they couldn't make it, then The Farmer's Boys got to be popstars in the nation's living rooms for three minutes. As it was, Alphaville found the right ferry and ended up one-hit-wonders, while BazFrogMarkandStan have been sadly ignored by all save a few obsessive Peelites.
Moving vaguely in the direction of JD, we find Razed in Black - Everything's gone green. Which pretty much proves my point that a lot of modern EBM thieves from early New Order. Sure it's been tarted up some with overdriven bass and some 303 squelching, but it still sounds fresh enough to have fallen off the end of a IoC CD. Or maybe... It's pretty obvious to anyone with ears that there's a definite similarity between Giorgio Moroder, Bobby O and early 80s New Order. Meanwhile, I can hear bits of Hazel Dean in a lot of IoC/Apop. Which means it's all outcroppings of various aspects of Pounding Sodomite Disco, but of course all heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, progenitors of all good music. (I suspect putting forward a Grand Unified Field theory of music is a sure sign of being a complete wanker, so I shall stop right there and merely point at this: http://www.gepr.net/genre2.html and indeed the myriad classifications of dance music.)
The chaps over at the Shadowplay site cosider the 1979 Peel Session version to be the original and best. While it's got the robustness of a band at the top of their game, to my ears it's not FAC23, which has been polished up to sound a little less... Blokey.
The Arthur Baker version found on one CD or other around the release of 'Permanent' (probably) is... Quite bad. It sounds mostly like a bad Jean-Michel Jarre cover before going painfully out of tune as a squad of monkeys hurl typewriters out of the windows. Far worse is to come, however. Simple Minds (Yes, I know I was warned off, but down these mean covers a blithering idiot must go) hand over a housey version that sounds like Groove Armada only more shit than usual. Then the 'singing' starts and it's like a chorus of Sirius Cybernetic robots have been parachuted in. The noises themselves are rather nice - lush 'Tour de France soundtracks'-ish sweeping strings - but it's entirely the wrong thing bolted to the wrong song, so it's just an ugly mess of sticks and wires.
Moonspell, thankfully, don't seem to stray from what they know. I'm assuming their day-job is that of a Nirvana tribute band, since that's what they've done here: a JD cover in the manner of a Seattle grunge band, only with a bit of Theremin-like noise and a quiet bit in the middle where you can clearly hear them taunting the original and poking sticks through the bars of the cage they're keeping it in.
I have no idea who or what The Frames are, but I suspect a yodey-bodey Irish band, given it's all a lot epic and fiddle-driven. A crunchy (ie horribly overdriven) live version with audience participation, clapping in time and shouting. Though strangely good. Similarly, the identity and disposition of 'The King' is a mystery. As you might guess, however, it's in the style of Elvis accompanied by Billy Idol's backing band. Very strange indeed. On one hand, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a 'proper' Elvis version. On the other, it's a concept so wrong that Godzilla and the Tetley Bittermen would join forces to destroy it utterly. It's all gone a bit average, really.
Thankfully, V/Vm pitch up and effect a cover by (as far as I can tell) playing the whole thing through a ring-modulator, which makes it sound like it's being played by an itinterant squad of strolling daleks down a 10 metre length of gas pipeline while they accompany themselves with disc cutters and rotary sanders. Their other version sounds like Reg Nullify.
Stanton-Miranda, it says here, is Miranda Stanton from Thick Pigeon. A mid-80s Factory band. Since it appears that The Other Two helped out on at least one of their albums, it's entirely unsurprising that this version sounds like Brotherhood-era New Order. This is no bad thing at all. Equally placed in the 'rather good' bucket are an un-named string quartet. If you've heard the Balanescu versions of Kraftwerk, it's like that.
In The Nursery and Kismet both turn in worthy dirges, though Kismet at least manage to sound like 3Mustaphas3. A lot like the Mutaphas, in fact. Invisible Limits owe something to Eddie and the Hot Rods. Twenty quid, by the sound of it. Meanwhile Fallout Boy begin with earnestly strummed acoustic guitar before turning into... Oh, this is what the kids call 'Emo' isn't it? I think I know a Weddoes tribute when I hear it, thanks all the same.
The Cure offering, though live, is... Not all it could be. I mean, 'In between days' proved they could knock off a good New Order cover if they felt like it, so what's the problem here? Then there's the Swans. I'm fairly sure that those versions were the reason that I formed the viewpoint that there could be no good JD covers in the first place. Unfortunately, even after the passage of (I dunno? Twenty years?) I still find them more than a little grim. One version sounds like they're about to burst into 'Don't fear the reaper' or 'Veteran of the psychic wars' and the other is... No, I can't stand to listen to any more without wanting to hurl things out of the window. Sorry.
To change the mood a little (I've been posing down the pub), Kaycee sounds like she's imitating Bjork in Thomas Dolby's sonic laboratory of 'bloink' and 'scrop'. [FX: Googlage] Ah. They'm a band, one of whom DJed at Tresor. That makes a lot of sense. Damn fine. In similar vein, we find Bis clattering along with vocoder and/or Bell Labs speech-synth and SIDStation. Damn fine too.
Right. That's quite enough of that. I'm going to listen to 'Longshot kick de bucket' and 'strict machine'. A lot.
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no subject
Date: 2004-08-29 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-29 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-29 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 12:27 am (UTC)this is what i get for working in camden market on the weekends...
no subject
Date: 2004-08-30 03:18 pm (UTC)Though, granted, I do see what you mean about it sounding a little like "Don't Fear The Reaper".
no subject
Date: 2004-09-01 04:42 pm (UTC)