Riding out the inevitable backlash against their ultimately brave decision to not just remain a touring museum piece and suddenly start writing new songs, chances are that their new single ‘Hear Me Out’ may actually get the attention that a new single by one of the greatest and most revolutionary guitar bands of all time deserves. Paz Lenchantin – bass player for the last six years – is given full reign to take on duties, her heavenly voice soaring over this and even better is the cover of T Rex’s camp glam classic ‘Mambo Sun’ on the other side. Not at all the done thing any more, we realise, but you might even consider putting your hand in your pocket and buying a copy.
Hear Me Out taken from Pixies’ new double A side single “Hear Me Out / Mambo Sun”. Once again Pixies were part of musical landscape. With such a prolific catalogue, though, there are inevitably loads of great songs that have slipped through the cultural net. So, to celebrate their new single ‘Mambo Sun’, cover of a T Rex classic.
Guitar, Vocals: Charles Thompson Drums, Percussion: David Lovering Guitar: Joey Santiago Bass Guitar: Paz Lenchantin Backing Vocals: Paz Lenchantin Engineer, Composer, Writer: Marc Bolan
We decided to cover a song from Frank Zappa’s first album “Freak Out” released back in 1966. It’s called “Trouble Every Day” and we found it very relevant to these times which is strange and sad that after all these years we’re still on the first page! We are condemning these horrible nonsense actions against the Black Community and condemning police brutality! We need to learn more and these actions against black people need to stop right now and we need to stop it.
All proceeds goes to NAACP Legal Defense Fund. We all need to listen more and learn more and if you see something that we’re doing wrong call us out and we will do better. Let’s keep fighting for Justice and Peace!
Originally released June 6th, 2020 Lyrics – Frank Zappa
I first heard this song when I was in my early 20’s, on a mix cassette that my then girlfriend’s cool older brother made me. I was instantly entranced – there was something so evocative about the arrangement, the transcendental and romantic lyrical imagery, and Buckley’s deeply soulful voice. I knew one of these days I’d cover it. Took me twenty-plus years to find the right situation to do it. Josh and Anaïs Mitchell (and the stellar assemblage of players on this recording) took this song in a new direction that made me fall in love with it all over again. Long live buzzin’ flies, ringing mountains, flowing rivers, and seabirds who knew your name! — Eric D. Johnson
Kate Davis A singer songwriter from New York, The first single from Kate Davis’ record ‘Strange Boy’ was originally released January 15th, 2021. ‘Strange Boy’ is a track from the album of Daniel Johnston’s‘Retired Boxer‘. Released in collaboration with the Hi, How Are You Project, a non-profit organization that provides a platform for the exchange of ideas and education on mental well-being, Davis will release Strange Boy, a unique rendering that is named after the eighth song on Johnston’s original masterpiece.
Squirrel Flower’s cover of Liz Phair’s “Explain It To Me” from her 1993 debut, ‘Exile in Guyville’ serves as the A-side, backed with a new Squirrel Flower original. ‘Explain It To Me’ has been one of my favourite songs since I first heard it when I was 14. I made this recording in my basement while experimenting with self harmonizing for the first time in a while. “Chicago” is a rework of an old song I originally released in 2018. It’s from a studio session a while ago and it never got used, so my brother and I put some extra guitar on it during quarantine and voila.
Ella O’Connor Williams, also known as Squirrel Flower, I originally wrote it in 2015 when I lived in the Midwest. Put it on when you’re lost/moving/found.” – Ella Williams (Squirrel Flower)
It feels like ages ago that Bedouine, Waxahatchee and Hurray for the Riff Raff toured together on a sort of indie triple bill (it was actually 2018). While the three acts make dramatically different music, they complemented each other well on this tour and share some influences as well — as evidenced by this belated cover of Big Star’s classic “Thirteen” (which is often more readily recognized by its opening lyric, “Can I walk you home from school?”) that found its origins during the tour, when Bedouine , WaxahatcheeKatie Crutchfield and Riff Raff singer Alynda Segarra would sing it together onstage.
Big Star, of course, is arguably the greatest power-pop group of all time. Led by singer-songwriter Alex Chilton, they released just three albums in the early ‘70s, which were barely noticed at the time but their legend grew over the years — they were covered and feted by the Replacements, the Bangles, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub and many more — until the group reformed in 1993.
Bedouine explains how their cover came together. “This all started in 2018 when I opened a three-bill tour for co-headliners Waxahatchee and Hurray for the Riff Raff,” she wrote. “We threw the idea around of doing a song together but weren’t sure what. I was backstage in Columbia, Missouri, when I realized it was the anniversary of Big Star’s ‘93 reunion show that had also taken place in Columbia.
I was fiddling around with the song in my dressing room when Katie and Alynda walked in. Suddenly I remembered there were 3 verses to split up. We played it as an homage that night and every night after. After the tour wrapped up, I think it was Kevin Morby that insisted we track and share it. Down the road, Katie wrote me that she would be in LA so I tracked the guitar and she came by to visit and put down her part. Down the road some more Alynda put down her part from New Orleans and sent it over the ether. Now we finally get to share it.
Swedish duo First Aid Kit have shared a cover of Willie Nelson classic “On the Road Again.” We recorded this cover a couple of years ago and recently found it while digging through the archives. The song is a country classic, it feels like we’ve known it forever. Because of the situation with COVID, sadly, the theme of the song has never felt more relevant than it does today.” On a similar theme, First Aid Kit are donating all proceeds from the cover to Crew Nation, a charitable fund “created to help people working backstage that were supposed to be working on shows planned for 2020.”
The band explains about their new cover,
We’re excited to release our version of “On The Road Again” by Willie Nelson. We recorded this cover a couple of years ago and recently found it while digging through the archives. The song is a country classic, it feels like we’ve known it forever. Because of the situation with COVID, sadly, the theme of the song has never felt more relevant than it does today.
We made a video for the song using cellphone footage from our tours throughout the years. Going through all those videos made us emotional. It made us realize how much we appreciate being able to roam freely around the world. How much we love the feeling of playing live for people, in the flesh. How much we miss our incredible band and crew.
The song also acts as their first new recording since the respective releases of their Ruins and Tender Offerings albums in 2018.
Members/sisters Johanna and Klara Söderbergtook reminisce about their lives on the road as touring musicians in the cover’s affiliated video, which features a collection of archive concert and traveling footage. Though the video is nostalgic at its core, the two do a marvellous job of keeping the song light-hearted and uptempo for a fun listening experience as we all continue to dream of the day when Americans can return to a life of travel and attending concerts together.
We can’t wait to be on the road again! Until we all safely can be, we hope this song and video brings everyone some joy and hope for when that day comes. Our proceeds from “On the Road Again” will be donated to Crew Nation to support the global touring and live music community devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chris Isaak’s haunted 1989 sex-jam “Wicked Game” must be one of the most-covered songs ever recorded. Over the years, virtually anyone with any interest in Lynchian romanticism has tried out “Wicked Game,” to the point where it’s almost a cliché. In recent years, we’ve run an essay about all those “Wicked Game” covers, and we’ve also spoken with Isaak himself about the phenomenon. Last year, Lana Del Rey sang “Wicked Game” with Isaak at the Hollywood Bowl. That’s a hard spectacle to top, but then we might never have had a “Wicked Game” quite as heavy as the one that we get today.
Kristin M. Hayter, the heavy experimentalist who records as Lingua Ignota, has made some truly dark and entrancing music in the past few years. Most recently, she released the monster track “O Ruthless Great Divine Director” back in March. Today, Lingua Ignota has dropped her cover of “Wicked Game” cover as part of the latest Bandcamp Friday.
There’s no metal in Lingua Ignota’s “Wicked Game” cover. Instead, she’s built it around a soft flourish of piano and a distant, discordant sample of Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1960 work Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima. Daughters frontman Alexis Marshall adds deep, portentous backing vocals, while Lingua Ignota turns “Wicked Game” into operatic, miasmic darkness. It’s a really fucking cool cover. Listen below.
LA’s Death Valley Girls have made a name for themselves by churning out a desert-blasted blend of rowdy proto-punk and primitive heavy metal steeped in cosmic idealism and third-eye consciousness. Their first new offering since tearing a hole in the sky with their 2018 album Darkness Rains comes in the form of a two-song seven-inch, “Breakthrough.” The title track is a cover by Atomic Rooster, though the band discovered the track through a rendition by Nigerian outfit The Funkees. With its grimy guitar riffs, fire-and-brimstone organ, and combative chorus, it’s as if the song was originally written with Death Valley Girls’ brand of stark transcendental rock in mind.
But it wasn’t just the pulse and melody that drew the band to the song. “It spoke to me because of the lyrics about breaking free from an invisible prison… we all have invisible or visible prisons we are trapped in,” says vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Bonnie Bloomgarden. The song discovery coincided with the band’s interest in Damien Echols of West Memphis 3 and his ability to endure his imprisonment by learning to astral project through meditation. The b-side is another cover—a ramped up version Daniel Johnston’s loud-quiet-loud anthem “Rock ‘N’ Roll / EGA.” It’s a total rager, but it’s also a bittersweet song for Death Valley Girls as they had the rare privilege to briefly serve as Johnston’s backing band. Ultimately, the two songs have a deep and profound connection to Death Valley Girls, both in their spirit and in their aural alignment.
Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to offer up the “Breakthrough” seven-inch in a limited edition one-time pressing of 750 copies on Half Purple & Half Black colored vinyl
We’re not sure it was their desired effect, but Silversun Pickups’ new video for “Toy Soldiers” puts one thought at the forefront of our mind: What really happened with Martika, the Cuban-American child actress-turned pop sensation who had a No. 1 hit at age 19, collaborated with Prince on her second album and walked away from the music industry at age 22?
“Toy Soldiers” was Martika’s big breakout hit, and Silversun Pickups chose to re-imagine it while “thinking about songs from the ’80s that we loved growing up, that had a big radio moment and [were] part of our cultural DNA,” frontman Brian Aubert says of the tune, which was made with Butch Vig, who produced the L.A. quartet’s 2019 album “Widow’s Weeds.”
“This version doesn’t feel bombastic and over-the-top; it’s crackling and tiny at times,” Aubert says. “Butch really helped with this. I don’t think I’ve ever sung this intimately before. The guitar solo during it was very important to me, and we quickly realized that the solo worked during that time period, but not when we did it. We threw in a curve ball, some weird things, inspired by Johnny Greenwood. We put our weird stamp on it and it really came together.”
We were performing a cover of a song from The Lost Boys soundtrack for a for SiriusXM special and that got us thinking about songs from the ‘80s that we loved growing up, that had a big radio moment and was part of our cultural DNA. A song that you know right away when you hear it. We thought of “Toy Soldiers” as a great example of this and decided we should try and record it.
There’s something about this song that hits me emotionally – this song has always hit me that way. At first, it wasn’t about the lyrics, but the feel of it. To be honest, I was not initially aware what the song was about, but listening to the lyrics, it was clearly about addiction. Someone else’s addiction. It’s pretty painful and very personal. You realize it doesn’t matter what the shell is, what the production is, what the era is…this is obviously a very personal story that at first I wasn’t sure we could touch. We ended up framing it into our own world and we think it works.
We recorded this back in January and didn’t know where it would land, but now with this world the way it is, we felt it was a good time to release the song. We just wanted to shine a spotlight on MARTIKA and this song…_b
The video for the song, directed by Claire Marie Vogel and animator Aaron Hymes, captures the pandemic-era vibe. “Creating a video from a distance makes for many limitations, but I love how limitations can shape an idea,” Vogel says. “The song’s melancholy nature and the sense of isolation permeating the world right now were both very influential when writing the treatment. The video we made speaks to that collective sense of yearning and disconnection many of us are experiencing.”
As for Martika, the singer has said in interviews promoting occasional nostalgia tours that her retirement was a case of “too much too soon.” Surely there’s a longer story to be told there.
The Fat Angel Sings 