YES! Finally a smooth ass instrumental cover of one of the great Outkast songs of all time.
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - Spottie by ArtDontSleep
Showing posts with label covers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label covers. Show all posts
Face Wrecking Nonsense
This track is devastatingly good. The whole comp is fun. Awesome electronic musicians re-imagine popular music of the last 50 years. Everybody wins. Friends of Friends, I wish we were friends, because you're consistently putting out music I love.
Cover Songs: "Shimmy Shimmy Ya"
Whoah. Prince Fatty has a new album out and on it is this cover of the ODB standard:
Get a free download of another track off the album here.
Get a free download of another track off the album here.
Video: Darkstar "Gold"
Darkstar covers an old Human League B-Side. It's a tidy little track. It's really just waiting for a ridiculously hard bass-to-the-max remix though. Darkstar has an album coming out on Hyperdub Records October 19. Look for that.
Covers Week Bonus
Bill 'Ravi' Harris and the Prophets kick out a funky ass cover of the Meters' bayou break "Cissy Strutt"
Covers Week #7
Covers Week #6
Sticking with the sub-theme covers of film scores that we began with the previous post, let's go ahead and get into what may be one of my favorite covers of all time - Big Youth's cover of the "Theme from Shaft."
Covering a tune like this could go horribly wrong in the wrong hands, but this jam is just incredible. So laidback. Seriously hard chilling is the only thing you can really undertake while listening to this. Professional leisure.
Covers Week #5
Today's installment is a doozy - an epic, slow-building film theme as translated by the Memphis legends Booker T. & the MGs. Their take on the theme from the 1968 Clint Eastwood vehicle (directed by Ted Post) "Hang 'Em High."
Now that we're five days into this little experiment, I just want to let you know that the cover theme is a bit of double entendre. Not only was it something I've been thinking about for awhile, but I've been on vacation for the last few days, making a conscious effort to be unplugged from the computer for a while, and so the covers have been covering for me...
Covers Week #4
I don't think Parker's cover really gets identifiable until around 45 seconds in when he hits notes of the title line. I pondered using the Lauryn Hill version, but what's the fun in that.
This Maynard Parker record Midnight Rider is actually all covers, and if you go back in the archives with the helpful search function, you might find a post I did last year with his version of "The World is a Ghetto," which is one of the coolest instrumental covers ever.
Covers Week #3
The third installment in the covers series brings us to a real treasure. This time around, we have legendary latin-soul musician Joe Bataan taking on The Dreamlovers' timeless oldie "When We Get Married."
Just in case you're not familiar with the original...
Covers Week #2
The second installment in the covers series brings us into some truly strange territory...A psych-blues-rock cover of Cat Stevens' "First Cut is the Deepest"courtesy of Koobas - a British group from Liverpool - off their album Barricades (1969). Highly recommend chasing down a copy of this record.
Covers Week #1
After a terrible storm wiped out a bunch of household electronics - including my router, an iPod dock/speakers, a TV and some other odds and ends around the house, I've been going through some archives, and so to make that feel more productive than nostalgic, I'm going to indulge myself with a week of themed posts - rare covers - sometimes beautiful, sometimes bizarre - never the original artists.
To kick things off, we're going to go with a tune everyone knows, in a version you might not have ever really expected - unless you expect things like funky sitar covers...
Ananda Shankar's version of the Doors' classic "Light My Fire"
This comes from Shankar's 1970 album Snow Flower. The album also contains a sick cover of the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash," but I chose the Doors cover because it's a little weirder. You should track down a copy of this album if you're into funky sitar jams - not all covers either.
Ananda Shankar's version of the Doors' classic "Light My Fire"
This comes from Shankar's 1970 album Snow Flower. The album also contains a sick cover of the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash," but I chose the Doors cover because it's a little weirder. You should track down a copy of this album if you're into funky sitar jams - not all covers either.
Song of the Week: "Emotional Rescue" by Freedom Dub
I have to be honest here, I don't know anything about this song, this group or the circumstances surrounding it, but I do know that this is the best Rolling Stones cover I've ever heard. It's chill, yet upbeat. Smooth with a bounce. I first heard it a couple weeks ago while sailing (mostly drinking in a boat, and trying not to get thrown into the ocean) and, if you're able, I would highly recommend listening to this song in a boat in the sun.
Unfortunately, I don't have an embeddable version, so you'll just have to grab a copy and trust that it is the jam.
For you.
Unfortunately, I don't have an embeddable version, so you'll just have to grab a copy and trust that it is the jam.
For you.
Beck covers the Velvet Underground
Apparently, being awesome and successful leaves one time to do things that are awesome and potentially expensive. Beck is getting together with some friends to do unrehearsed covers of whole albums, and then releasing the 60s-esque layered videos. Here, Beck and crew take on Velvet Underground and Nico first, and this is the video of their rendition of "Sunday Morning."
Found via Stereogum.
Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico 'Sunday Morning' from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.
Found via Stereogum.
Light My Fire
If at any point in your life you went through a brooding, poet/rocker, adolescent rebellion-connoisseur phase then chances are you spent several years blasting The Doors, drinking beer, and pining for the 'tortured-genius' of Jim Morrison. Depending on how old you were during the 1990s, you probably also watched Oliver Stone's bio-pic, and if you were me, then you watched it with another Door's fanatic who screamed about how Jim Morrison never really whipped it out on stage in Miami, but that it was his finger instead, and that the subsequent criminal charges and bad publicity rattled the Doors and Morrison in a way they would never recover from. It was, according to him, the beginning of their downward spiral, and a great loss for American music.
In hindsight, I have no clue how true a statement that is. It's been nearly 10 years since I've seen the film, and while that moment is ingrained in my memory, the other part that I can still clearly recall is the scene after Jim dies when one of the band members sells the licensing rights to "Light My Fire." It was the end of that to-hell-in-a-bucket ride from anti-corporate rock-juggernauts into what the other angry band members deemed 'Selling Out,' shilling for the businessmen and not for the music...
The song went on to be covered alot after it hit the market.
Shirley Bassey does one of my favorite versions:
In regard to that scene in the movie, I don't know how this song being licensed really affects the legacy of the Doors in the least, and I'm sure that the remaining band members (unless they got screwed) were probably able to live comfortably for years off the royalties.
Jose Feliciano's take, which he also performed at the Grammy's in '68 or '69, and which probably made the band a lot of money:
There's something funny about the music of the Doors that makes it a perfect soundtrack for teenage rebellion (and/or experimenting with psychedelics), but their catalog has little of the lasting power of other artists from that era. While I will gladly put on a Jimi Hendrix or Beatles record and get reminiscent about the old days, I don't have nearly the same taste for the Doors that I used to. Not to say that if I'm out, have had a drink and hear something like "Alabama Song" on a jukebox then I have to run for the door. Just the opposite. I'll probably hoist a glass and sing the first verse if the mood is right. But for some reason I know a lot of people, myself included, who claim the Doors as a staple of their adolescence, and yet who haven't listened to them in years, probably since the first or second year of college at the latest.
This is probably my favorite of all the covers (mostly because of the bitchin' sitar):
Light my fire - Ananda Shankar
In fact, if I met someone between the age of 25-35 who said that he or she is currently a huge Doors' fan, and listens to them regularly, I'd probably judge that person in a pretty harsh light, partly for ignoring all the amazing things that have happened in the last 40 years of music, but also for probably never really escaping the period of life where Jim Morrison seems more like a tortured poet-genius than an entertaining rock icon channeling unresolved family issues and serious case of narcissism (although how many rock legends don't have a touch of that?) into some kick ass blues-based rock and/or intentionally obscure poetry about birds.
But besides the vivid memory of that scene in the Doors movie (which might have been one of the first times I was exposed to the concept of artists 'selling out' now that I really think abou tit), what is so interesting about the cover versions is that they do still appeal to me, now more than the original. I was playing that Ananda Shankar version in regular rotation (he's Ravi's cousin btw) for awhile, and while I get the same sense of familiar nostalgia from the covers that I would get from replaying originals of some Hendrix (Electric LadyLand is such a good album) or other artists who led my teenage self from classic rock to heavy metal to punk and beyond, I don't feel any more than mild aversion for the Doors' version now.
So, whichever Doors' member it was that thought it was a bad idea to license those songs, I hope the money helped you get over it, because honestly, these covers aided your longevity a lot more than artistic integrity, at least in my book. Except for the disco covers, which were actually pretty bad...I'd be upset about those too:
This is the only one I could find online, but I have two other disco versions on 45 that are much worse:
Possibly the worst cover though comes from UB40, you might remember their hit song "Red, Red Wine."
Light My Fire - UB40
The music business can be a dangerous game.
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