Listen here, with notes!
The subject of what a cover song should be could span pages and pages and posts and posts in its own right, but I think it mostly boils down to this:
Does the cover expand on the spirit of the original?
There's two parts there: expand, and spirit of the original. A rote recreation fails on the first count, and if you're abandoning the later, well, at the extreme end, you get something like the legendary Aphex Twin Lemonheads remix exercise.
This album fails on that latter count damn near that badly. You can tell something is up circa track 2 when a murky song sharing the occasional lyric with a Strokes song lurches by in an altogether different key, tone, tempo, instrumentation, and, well, spirit. This disinterest continues intermittently, and culminates in the disappointing (if unsurprising) piss-taking Heems cover of NYC cops, which completely skips the song as a point of musical inspiration and uses its theme as an excuse to launch into an otherwise unrelated anti-police-violence rap manifesto.
It turns out that whole thing was doomed to be a fiasco from the beginning: read those notes at the link above and look at people saying things like "I'd never really heard this song before yesterday". Is it any wonder you failed to capture anything about it when you randomly wove a couple of its elements into some hastily assembled B-Side-quality composition in your usual style? That's fucking insane, what a clusterfuck of execution from an organizational standpoint. Note also the reoccurrence of the phrase "when I was given this song to cover". Contrast that to (spoiler alert) the same online rag's sister project to have artists cover OK Computer, where the oft-repeated phrase in the writups is "we asked for this song because...".
All things considered, this a surprisingly compelling, listen in spite of itself, and its a shame that the overall mismanagement undercuts the thoughtful contributions of the likes of Owen Pallett, but look, if people don't even give a shit about the songs they're covering you're not going to get expansions of the spirit of anything, except maybe the spirits of a dozen or so wallets. Is it too late to call this 11 Mixes for Cash? 2.5/5
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