Metal Up Your Monday: Cover Versions

Brand new covers of Metallica by...

Jason Isbell

Miley Cyrus (and Elton and Chad Smith and, weirdly, Robert Trujillo)

Old covers of Metallica by:

Motörhead

Umphrey's McGee

And some kids (check the guitar solo)

Faux-gazi Filler for the Weekend

The past was terrific.


But I do not weep for the future.


Happy Saturday. Get out there and kick this much ass.

Your Number One Douche Has a New Album

Yes, I know. I have a problem.

I'm usually such a positive person, breezing my way through life like . . . like . . . like a Beach Boys song. (A good Beach Boys song, not garbage like "Kokomo.")

And yet there is someone out there who gets my goat so much that it makes me a compulsively negative person. Makes me an Internet troll, of all things. It's horrible. And it happens any time he is mentioned, gets a headline, or . . . lookee here, releases a new album!

Mike Love, y'all. Future resident of actual Hell. Current purveyor of musical Hell.

12 Sides of Summer is his newest auditory upchucking, and it's a dandy. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, the premier reviewer at AllMusic, gives it more credit than I would have (natch) but notes the "incredibly chintzy production that sounds like it was slapped together at home on a tablet computer."  Meanwhile, in the Evening Standard, Harriet Wolstenholme writes:

California Beach, a rare original song, opens with a quintessential Love lyric: “Where surfers are surfing and dancers are dancing/ You’re sure to find a honey that you’ll love romancing”. Ick.

We will get back to that rare original song in a minute, but let's get to Les Coole's review of the record:

Just dreck. I mean . . . dreck.

There you have it.  Bad covers of what Erlewine calls "shopworn summer standards" with putrid production and Mike Love's voice.  A voice, which does have a place in musical history, and is best highlighted here:

(I got that clip from a website called Crappy Music Monday in a post in which the first two sentences are "Mike Love is a douche-nozzle. Pretty much everyone knows this." Join the movement, people.)

Mike Love is 78, and it's understandable that a voice at that age will diminish.  Could be a good thing, but if the best descriptor for your vocals on an album is "wan," maybe it's time to hang up the baseball cap and just get back to supporting your pal Donald Trump's mission to Make America Like Kokomo For the First Time.

The songs... okay, so I created a playlist below featuring the originals, solid covers of those songs, and then Mike Love's 12 Sides of Summer renditions.  Have a listen and decide what you think.  (I know, you don't give a damn. Why do I get so twisted up?)

Example: You know The Rivieras' "California Sun," a beach all-timer with that Vox Continental organ and surf guitar that etches itself in the brain permanently. You may well know the Ramones' cover, with Johnny's pounding guitar and Joey's inimitable voice. And then you get this new version, a relatively inoffensive bongo-and-handclap stab with a robust backup chorus that juxtaposably dwarfs Dr. Love's frail warbling. Harmless but pointless. Steve Spurrier: "Not very good."

It's the same lot of tripe throughout, with a couple of things worth mentioning:

• He can't even cover the Beach Boys very well.
• If you can redo "Girl From Ipanema" with a sonic quality that says "What's two steps beyond elevator music?", well, you've accomplished something.
• A little media noise has been made about "Rockaway Beach," his take on the aforementioned Ramones, and how it's a crazy cross-culture mish-mash. It's not. It's not avant-garde, and it actually makes sense. The Ramones were punk rock but drew mightily from 60's sun and surf classics like the Beach Boys. Not a bad marriage. Well chosen, sir. But again, Mike Love's always nasally grating, now eunuchally impotent voice* coupled with mom's basement production utterly undercuts the result.

* From Mike Love's own website: "Love’s voice is a style of its own. He combines his steady bass/baritone with a whimsical intonation— indicative of the ultra-cool, self-confidence and innocence of the early 1960s."  

So he has his ridiculous description, I have mine.

• And finally, there's the original single that Rolling Stone calls "breezy."  It's called "California Beach," and if you astutely noted that Mike Love has covered "California Sun" and "Rockaway Beach" on the same album that he produces a "new," "original" song called "California Beach," good for you. That's not where the appropriating ends. To enable a true-side-by-side comparison, I've appended the playlist with some needless duplication. Obnoxious, eh?  Check it out. "California Beach" is "Rockaway Beach." (No, Finkle/Einhorn lovers, "Rockaway Beach is not "California Beach.")  All that's missing is a Cal Cal, California Beach chorus.  There's a reason the two tracks could not be placed further apart on this album, but it's still pretty brazen. This is "Riot in Cell Block 9" / "Student Demonstration Time" all over again.  Seriously. What a douche.

That's all, good people. Now back to my positively positive dipshittery.

Oh yeah... I also love this: http://cokemachineglow.com/features/pictures-of-mike-love-looking-like-a-douche/http://cokemachineglow.com/features/pictures-of-mike-love-looking-like-a-douche/

Gheorghe's 6-Pack: Cover Tunes

It's Friday.  Afternoon.  Just about Miller Time.

And that means it's time for a 6-Pack!

In the interest of spreading the love of good music, we will throw out six suggested songs by certain bands you may or may not know much about. Not much of a time commitment, just a little something to get the flavor and get you going.

Okay, so that's the charter of this recurring segment that actually recurs, but we're taking a bit of a different path today. We always like tributes here in the G:TB Music department, and we've trod over that ground a fair bit. So let's queue up some new or rare covers for you.

This Bud's for You

Three of them are mellowfied, deconstructed takes on otherwise peppy songs.  The final three are just interesting genre-twists. Have a listen and see what you think.

This may be your reaction to my 6-Pack playlists...

The last one I particularly like.  Eagles of Death Metal was the band playing in Paris when that terrorist bullshit happened there four years ago.  Theirs is a tale of slow recovery from that horribleness, not physically but emotionally. I'd have to figure that would fuck with me pretty good, too.  Their cover of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" was both a decent rendition and a mantra in the aftermath of that cowardly act of evil.

This week they released an album of covers called EODM Present Boots Electric Performing the Best Songs We Never Wrote.  Some interesting song choices for sure. I like the Ramones and Kenny Rogers tunes, but by far my favorite is the Wham! cover. If your heart needs some healing, by all means turn to Gheorghe Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.

And in a related move, it's been a while since we gave this guy the airtime he greatly deserves:

Have a great weekend. Be safe and be sure to enjoy something.

Toxicology

You can find lists all over the world wide interweb ranking cover songs that superseded their original counterparts.  For all of the cruddy renditions of great songs that exist, with more added to the junkpile every year, the ones that rise above please me greatly.  There was an ORF Rock show about this a couple of years ago.

As Jules would say, "Example."

"Superman," R.E.M.
"Hurt," Johnny Cash
"Tainted Love," Soft Cell
"The Man Who Sold the World," Nirvana
"All Along the Watchtower," Jimi Hendrix
"Hallelujah," Jeff Buckley
"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," Violent Femmes
"Sea of Love," Cat Power
"Trapped," Bruce Springsteen
"Renegades of Funk," Rage Against the Machine
"I Love Rock & Roll," Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

So I never really knew or cared about Britney Spears' song "Toxic." I can't believe I'm embedding a Britney song at G:TB, but it provides context.

Then I heard a cover of it some years back by Americana group Nickel Creek.  (No, not Nickelback.) Dug it major. Here's a more recent version.

And now, an instrumental surf version by a Canadian all-girl group in gold lamé?

Yes, please.

I can't turn it off.

These ladies are leaving Toronto and hitting the US this summer.  Look for them in NYC, Asbury Park, and Dunellen, NJ in August.