With their last Like A Version cover being a Sheryl Crow number, it’s not a shock that HAIM have brought a Shania Twain classic back into the triple j studio with them for their latest effort.
“It’s hard to cover Shania, she is a queen,” the trio say, but proceed to make it look easy with their stripped-back take of lush keys and soul-piercing guitar licks, clearly having fun with the lyrics.
It’s not the transformative take we usually hope for from a Like A Version number, coming off more as a light remix considering how on-point the vocal take is, but it’s hard to argue with such a great live version of a stone-cold classic. Like A Version is a segment on Australian radio station triple j. Every Friday morning a musician or band comes into the studio to play one of their own songs and a cover of a song they love.
We want Haim back after they delivered a stunning live performance of ‘Want You Back’ in triple j’s Like A Version studio.
The Afghan Whigs who lost guitarist Dave Rosser to colon cancer almost exactly one month ago. Today, the alternative icons are paying tribute to their fallen band mate with a cover of one of his favorite songs,“You Want Love”. originally by the band Pleasure Club.
“Pleasure Club was a legendary New Orleans band and Dave Rosser and I had spoken for years about performing this song,” said Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli . “In light of his passing we decided to record it in his honor.”
“You Want Love” originally comes from Pleasure Club’s 2004 album, their second and final full-length. The band’s original singer and songwriter, James Hall, returned to lend his voice to the tribute cover.
Evergreen is a new benefit compilation for Hour Children, an organisation that helps incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and their children successfully rejoin the community with a view to building healthy, independent, and secure lives. You can pre-order it right now over on Bandcamp, both digitally and on cassette tape.
Released on July 10th, the compilation features Hand Habits, Free Cake For Every Creature, Sitcom, and much more. Taken from said compilation,Fraternal Twin’s cover of Songs: Ohia’s “White Sulfur”, a tender reworking that sits in the nightly ether between both of the two artists’ work.
Inspired by one of its numerous, crushing passages, the kind of which Jason Molina so excelled at carving out of the paralysing emptiness (“It’s a very powerful, personal and actually pretty political lyric that seems to express something like a friend that lets you down in a big way“) Fraternal Twins’s take on the track is a dimly lit and beautifully fragile homage, Tom Christie’s wavering vocal drifting sullenly above the DIY-instrumentation that makes his own work such a compelling journey.
never forget it was triumph we once proposed
instead, you would trade our mission for mission words
“White Sulfur is, since the first time I heard it years ago, one of my favorite songs,” Christie tells us about his choice to cover the track. “The guitar melody is just so bleak and Jason Molina’s voice resonates over the recording. It captures a very specific unnameable feeling for me…”
The singer/model/actress has a part in the movie as Baby’s mom, but it’s almost more exciting the hear her fresh material. Now, her contribution to the OST has been revealed, and it turns out it’s a cover of The Commodores classic “Easy”. Though the track may not be original, it is the first solo song we’ve gotten from Ferreira for quite some time. Her take on “Easy” is, perhaps unsurprisingly, smoky and sultry, but still with that solo guitar break.
Baby Driver is British director Wright’s story of a talented getaway driver who relies on his own personal soundtrack to get ahead. It stars Jamie Foxx, Kevin Spacey, and Jon Hamm among others. Sky Ferreira plays the mother of Ansel Elgort’s lead character, Baby
This recording of “Easy” was produced by Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich.
Music From the Motion Picture Baby Driver Official Soundtrack
Two-piece scuzzy pop band The Gooch Palms are proud Novacastrians – they feature the city a lot in their homespun video clips, and even called their (excellent) debut album Novos.
Now they have taken the next logical step and covered Silverchair’s ‘Tomorrow’ – the dark little song that made young musos around the Newcastle, Australian region believe that anything was possible, as long as you had a few friends, some instruments, and a garage.
As they explain, “We were mucking around in rehearsal one day in LA and Leroy just started playing the beginning of ‘Tomorrow’ out of the blue. We were coming back to Australia for our album tour so we thought it could be cool to pay a ‘Goochies style’ homage to the band that inspired both of us growing up as a couple of ratbags in Newcastle.
“We were both big fans of Silverchair and it was so crazy seeing three kids from our hometown get so big all over the world and definitely lit a fire inside both of us, to give music a crack! So we played it live on that last Aussie tour and it went off so after we got back from Europe we decided to pop into the studio and record it.”
Welles make music that’s influenced from the past but is authentically present. It’s the thoughts and sounds of a busy and energetic mind. Their debut EP Codeine came out April 28th
I heard Sgt. Pepper’s in ‘97 – that album built every bike ramp I had from ‘97-’02 at least. I saw Queen on public access television and that was awe-inspiring. I saw local bands in Arkansas playing “Surf Wax America” in a shed in Fort Smith and that turned me green with envy, gave me a yearning to be the one playing live music late at night. There were tangents, small town dreams of athletic success, maybe be a poet, maybe get comfy with Nascar and Busch Lite in the river valley, marry a mobile home, but when I think of these tangents there’s always a soundtrack. A slide show riddled with clips of Electric Wizard, CCR, White Album, Bleach, Dead Moon, and my homemade attempts. In the end I’d be awfully uncomfortable doin’ anything else.
WELLES – “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” Father John Misty Cover
Recorded Live: 3/31/2017 – Paste Studios – New York, NY
Middle Kids are a Sydney-based bundle of sheer buzz at the moment, but in our books it’s more than justified. Their debut EP is an astounding listen and hit single ‘Edge Of Town’ has been a huge song everywhere and bowls us over every time it pops up in our playlists .
Today, they have a new gem for us in the form of a glimmering piano take on ‘Fill In The Blank’ by Car SeatHeadrest, performed as part of their live Sirius XMU Sessions recently. The guitar-based original makes it through the translation brilliantly, maybe even ending up as our preferred version as it comes out the other side.
Of course, Middle Kids are just paying it forward with this cover, having recently been honoured by Something ForKate frontman Paul Dempsey with beautiful arranged version of their hit single .
For more live gems checkout Middle Kids, they’re heading out on tour with Ryan Adams
The majority of us first heard “Superman” in 1986 as covered by the Athens band R.E.M on their fourth album, Lifes Rich Pageant. The first cover on a R.E.M. album was an early example of a hidden track, unlisted on the jacket and buried at the album’s end. The jangly guitar in the original no doubt appealed to R.E.M., but it wasn’t enough to make Michael Stipe enthused to sing lead. So Mike Mills cheerfully handled that job (his debut as lead vocalist), with Stipe on background. The R.E.M. version was actually recorded a couple years prior during sessions for Reckoning and features a screeching intro which came from pulling the string on a Japanese Godzilla doll.
So why do we know the R.E.M. cover better than the Clique’s original? Put it down to quality, popularity, and novelty. The Clique was regional and obscure to begin with, while Lifes Rich Pageant marked the advent of R.E.M. breaking out of college-radio-darling status and into the mainstream. R.E.M. also featured greater instrumental prowess than the Clique, thanks to the work of guitarist Peter Buck, drummer Bill Berry, and bassist Mills. The polish of Pageant‘s lead single “Fall On Me” and the power pop feel of “Superman” captured new listeners who may not have been moved by Stipe’s mumbling obscurity on earlier albums. Also, the original comes off feeling a bit stalkeresque, while the cover is more confident and powerful – just like Superman, no doubt. Add in the novelty components (weird intro, Mills lead vocals, hidden track, obscure cover) and there’s a lot of interesting angles to view the R.E.M. version . R.E.M. – Superman (The Clique cover)
White Whale was one of the great independent record labels of the 1960s. Their flagship band was the Turtles, but they also had an interesting support cast, including Dobie Gray, Nino Tempo and April Stevens, and Warren Zevon, who wrote some of his earliest songs as a member of White Whale’s staff. White Whale also signed Houston “sunshine pop” band The Clique and turned them into a studio project, replacing all but lead singer Randy Shaw with studio musicians and providing Shaw with songs to sing. One of those songs was “Superman,” written by producer Gary Zekley, who also cranked out hits for The Grass Roots, Spanky and Our Gang, the Mamas and the Papas, and Jan and Dean. The Clique found “Superman” too bubblegum for their liking, but followed the label’s desires and recorded it in 1969 for their only White Whale release. “Superman” was the B-side to the Clique’s biggest hit, “Sugar On Sunday,” but was pretty much forgotten until 1986. A quartet from Athens, Georgia plucked one of their B-sides from obscurity seventeen years later.
The Clique – Superman (original)
The original songs that are not nearly as well known as their cover version(s) and to analyze what factors combined to make the cover more popular than the original. Oftentimes the cover is simply better than the original. Sometimes it’s a generational thing; put 25 years between an original and a cover and it’s no surprise when Generation Y doesn’t recognize Generation X’s original. A cover version of an old, semi-obscure song featured in a new hit movie or TV show can also explain how a cover can overwhelm an original.
While the official kickoff of A.V. Undercover’s eighth season is still a week away, we thought we’d whet your readers’ proverbial appetites with a special bonus track in advance. In the video above, the lovable scamps in TheRegrettes take on Sweet’s “Fox On The Run,” a song that you might be familiar with . The up-and-comers tackle “Fox On The Run” with a youthful ferocity that would seem a little daunting if you didn’t know the group’s lead singer, Lydia Night, is actually only 16 years old—and thus far more full of energy than the vast majority of us old fuddy-duddies.
The Regrettes’ debut record, Feel Your Feelings Fool!, is out now on Warner Bros. The group kicks off a run of summer tour dates in the USA very soon.
“Kero Kero Bonito is one of exceedingly few bands that all four of us in Frankie Cosmos love and admire with an equal fervor and, to be honest, we wanted to cover ‘Fish Bowl’ even before they asked us to be a part of this project. One of the absolute best parts of doing what we do is forming friendships with like minded artists around the world, and occasionally getting the opportunity to collaborate with them. We had a blast arranging and recording this song.”
Every week in May, the U.K. band will release a remix of its music done by other artists, starting today with FrankieCosmos. Front person Greta Kline’s straightforward indie-pop songs are similarly short, sweet and a little bit sad, and her band’s take on the song “Fish Bowl” is more of a charming cover than a remix.
The Fat Angel Sings 