While home last weekend I popped into HMV and came out with far too many CDs, the minute e went away singers and bands have been busy releasing albums – Lisa Hannigan, Jack L, Bloc Party, Snow Patrol, Razorlight among others but another jumped out at me – Live Lounge 3, another of BBC Radio 1’s compilation CDs filled with mainly covers.
I love and hate covers, they’re generally dreadful but I like to give them the chance and this certainly has a collection of the good and the bad. We start off with the Ting Ting’s acoustic version of The Gossip’s “Standing in the Way of Control” which would probably be interesting in itself but scattered here and there are samples of Snap’s “The Power” which makes it truly and bizarrely interesting.
To keep the link going, the next song is Dizzy Rascal’s version of The Ting Ting’s “That’s not my Name”, absolutely dreadful, no redeeming features at all.
Also on the dreadful pile is Pendulum’s “Violet Hill”, and the less said about the Streets’ “Blinded by the Lights” the better!
One disadvantage to assessing the creativity of a cover is if you don’t know the original, this is very much the case with Sam Sparro’s “American Boy”, it’s not too exciting but I don’t know if he destroyed or improved on the original…
Another one of these is Newton Faulkner’s version of Kate Nash’s “Foundations” but it’s a better song and so I don’t care so much that I don’t know the original but I can imagine Kate Nash’s distinctive voice singing it too, two for the price of one!
Kelly Rowland isn’t a singer that I would normally listen so I’m glad that instead I get to hear her song “Work” interpreted by The Feeling instead, I’m pretty sure that she didn’t sing it this way, I think I’ll stick with The Feeling’s version.
“I Kissed A Girl” is a fun song when sung by a girl but bring in the all male McFly and it can only end in mediocracy, after all boys kiss girls all the time…
But there is not just covers, a couple of nice original tracks slipped in when the complier wasn’t looking, like The Kooks “Shine On” or The Wombat’s “Moving to New York” which is so good that I thought it was a cover – ooops!
Paramore’s “Love’s Not A Competition(But I’m Winning)” is completely unrecognisable as a Kaiser Chiefs song which can be common with covers but the trick is to make it good as well, I think they might have gotten away with it!
Ida Maria doesn’t make much of a change to “Sweet About Me” just slows it down a little but at least she didn’t destroy the song like REM did with The Editors’ “Munich”, it’s awful, it’s like a cheesy cabaret song, euugghhhh, it’s like when Rolf Harris did “Stairway to Heaven” eughhhhhh!
And that was just Disc 1….
