Remake/Remodel

I think that a cover is one of the hardest pieces of music to make. More often than not, the artists are trying to cover a well-known song. As a result, the people listening to your music are going to be familiar with the original. The challenge becomes making a song that splits the difference between paying homage to the original song while also putting your own stamp on it. Many artists fail to strike this balance.

On the side of failing to pay homage to the original song, a clear example of this is Suicide’s cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” I think that this is an amazing song. That said, it is not a cover of “Born in the USA”; it is Martin Vega chanting about American musicians over an archetypal Suicide key-and-drum-machine rhythm. An example of a failure to put your stamp on a song is a cover I talked about not too long ago: Grace Jones’s cover of “Tomorrow” from her first album. Sure, it adds a disco sheen to the classic show tune, but you would be hard pressed to tell me anything about Grace Jones as an artist from it. She sounds like a woman who was handed a piece of music and told to hit her mark.

So, in the process of trying to make a cover, the artist is already trying to strike a fine balance. We can make this project even harder by trying to cover an entire album. Again, they are trying to redo a thing that is important to both many fans as well as themselves. As before, artists and bands don’t want to fall into the trap of their version being too literal, like The Queers did with their version of Rocket to Russia, the Ramones’ 1977 album, but it does need to have some points of reference to the original so that it is recognizable. Otherwise, the band is opening itself up to claims of being hacks.

For this post, I’m going to consider three cover albums and how well they accomplish this balancing act. I picked covers of albums that I already had a solid working knowledge of so that I could consider the cover version fairly. The three that I ended up choosing were Brothertiger’s Songs from the Big Chair (Tears for Fears); Pure Bathing Culture’s Hats (The Blue Nile); and Vegyn’s Blue Moon Safari (Air). I think that all of these albums are actually rather successful at their aim of paying tribute while giving the album its own spin, and I think that one of them is actually a bit of an improvement upon its source material.

The first album I’ll discuss is Brothertiger’s version of Tears for Fears’ 1985 Songs from the Big Chair. The original album is a grand statement, a swirl of thoughts derived from the band’s obsession with primal scream therapy and intricate musicianship. It is a beautiful, accomplished album that withstands the test of time. That being said, it is an album that would take well to being covered as one can find interesting ways to channel the emotionality of the music while tinkering with the sound.

Brothertiger very much succeeds in his efforts to pay tribute to this classic album while making it his own. He brings in many touches from chillwave such as tropical synths, lively drum patterns, and relaxed vocal performances. The result is an album that retains the shape of the original while also sounding distinct to the artist covering it. Consider the song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

The original version is very sincere. The music is anthemic, the lyrics are direct and focused. The passion of the band is clear from the start. Brothertiger maintains the grand sweep from the original, substituting some fuller synths and a more modern guitar sound for the original 80s production. He also does something rather interesting with regard to the original: he makes it danceable. With the new instrumentation comes a slightly quicker tempo, giving the song a livelier pace. This cover feels like it would slot well into a relaxed house/roof party set, unlike the original, which would absolutely kill the vibe.

There are places on the cover album where Brothertiger plays closer to the original, and it still works well. Such an example is his version of “Heads Over Heels.” The song does not require too many modifications. It is already a sweeping, romantic song that slaps. Brothertiger brings in some extra sonic details like a running marimba line, but he doesn’t futz too much with the structure of the song itself. And, in this situation, this is to everyone’s benefit. He still sounds like himself, but the original is still lurking in the corners, which is how a good cover song should work.

The next album that I’ll discuss is Pure Bathing Culture’s take on the classic Blue Nile album Hats. I have talked about this album before on this newsletter, but I don’t think at length. This is not going to change today. The short version of anything I would say about this album is the following: it is a classic, beautiful album. While its technology sounds dated, it is a stone cold nocturnal masterpiece, full of both romance and deep longing thanks to the lyrics and voice of Paul Buchanan.

Before I started listening to their cover, I wondered what Pure Bathing Culture would do with Hats. On the one hand, it makes sense as an album for them to cover because they are a synth-pop band and Hats is a purely synthetic album. However, I wasn’t totally sure how they could get across the more intangible elements of the original, particularly the emotions. It turns up that my fears were misplaced.

I think that something that helped on this front was the gender inversion in the singing. Replacing Paul Buchanan on vocal duties is Sarah Versprille, the lead singer of Pure Bathing Culture. While the words didn't change, the vibe was different. Versprille’s singing is a bit more welcoming than Buchanan’s. In addition, the vibe of Pure Bathing Culture is a bit hazier than the stark one of The Blue Nile. This combination of elements allowed for the band to keep the original longing of Hats, but make it feel less distant and more intimate.

To better explain this, let’s look at “The Downtown Lights” on both albums. In the original, Buchanan’s vocals sound more plaintive, the ruminations of a man staring out at empty streets in the night. The synths and drum loops are spare, creating a slight distance between the band and the listener. The main thing that Pure Bathing Culture does in their update is bring the listener closer to them. With the incorporation of some electric guitar and slightly warmer drum programming, Versprille, along with Ben Gibbard and San Fermin, closes the band-listener gap that was present on the original. The result is a track that both represents the spirit of the original while making it their own.

This balancing of the longing and romance of the original lyrics with the intimacy of Pure Bathing Culture’s instrumentation is what makes this cover album really work for me. Could the transformation been more radical? Probably, but I don’t think it was necessary to do so. I think they were able to get their love of Hats across while giving it their own particular flair. The two albums can hold equal space in my mind, which is another part of what makes a cover album successful as well.

Another thing that a cover album can do is completely blow something apart and put it back together. This is what Vegyn did with Blue Moon Safari. Using Air’s 1998 classic Moon Safari as the base document, Vegyn does the most out of the three albums in this dispatch. He completely strips the tracks down and rebuilds them in his image. The result is an album that improves upon the original.

If you have not listened to Moon Safari in a while, the album does still sound really good. It’s always satisfying to fall into the album’s gentle cloud of mellotron and synthesizers. However, it falls into a problem that many downtempo albums from the late 1990s suffer from: it has awful pacing. To write this dispatch, I relistened to the album for the first time in a while, and was shocked at how much the back end of the album dragged. The songs are good, but they are a grind, a rehash of ideas from their previous EPs and Super Discount. It does take away from my enjoyment of the album slightly, but not enough to overlook my enjoyment of many other tracks such as “All I Need” and “Remember.”

Vegyn’s reorganization works very well. The transition from “New Star in the Sky” to “Sexy Boy” is far less jarring than the original transition of “La Femme D’Argent” to “Sexy Boy.” Furthermore, the ordering of the album feels more natural. Moon Safari never had a thematic unity, so there is no reason to hold it particularly sacred. The whole album is a vibe, and Vegyn recognized this. What he did was create the best vibe that he could, and it works for me as a listener.

Given how I’ve talked about how he has completely taken the album apart and rebuilt, you might be afraid that nothing of the original still exists. That is incorrect. In every track, you can here elements of the original song there. For example, “Kelly Watch The Stars” is a great song and it has an extremely important theremin solo.

This solo remains in the rework. But many other elements of the song are gone like the lead synth line and the vocoder “lyrics” (It’s just chanting Kelly Watch The Stars over and over again). Even with this being the case, I knew that it was “Kelly Watch The Stars” before the spoken word section because enough of the original was still present to keep it recognizable.

This crazy experimentation goes on through the rest of Blue Moon Safari. Vegyn takes this album that he loves and pays homage to it while also providing a different way of seeing its pleasures. One of my favorite songs from the original album is “Talisman,” a grand piece of music with an insistent rhythm, a lovely string section and excellent synth lines. Vegyn’s rework keeps original elements in the song while adding a faster drum beat. His version brings the track closer to disco or house than downtempo. I don’t necessarily think one is better than the other, but I’m grateful that both exist.

By the time I got to the end of Blue Moon Safari, I both deeply enjoyed Vegyn’s new version and remembered why I liked the original so much. The original Moon Safari, even with its flaws, has so much sonic texture and intricacy that it can withstand such an intense reconstruction. The new version solves the pacing problem and provides a radically interesting way to enjoy a downtempo classic. This album serves as an excellent example of how far out you can take a cover album, making it your own while retaining the brilliance of the original.

With all three of these albums, the artists take the original and put themselves into it. As a result, their creations can stand along side the classics that they are paying homage to as their own successful documents. In the end, this is the true mark of an excellent cover.

To reinforce this last point, I’m going to end this dispatch with one of my absolute favorite covers: “Jealous Guy” by Roxy Music, the band whose song title I cribbed for this dispatch. I did not know that this was a cover for years. I’ve heard the original, but this is better.

Before you leave, the usual. Tell people about this whole project going on here. I’m still growing, and I’m really glad to see people reading and subscribing. In addition, next week’s post will be out of order. I am seeing the start of the Grand National Tour tonight in Minneapolis, and I am going to write a review of it for the Wednesday dispatch. The Spins will come out on the Saturday. This is a one-week switch; affairs will go back to normal the week of April 28th. To quote Jerry Springer, take care of yourselves and each other.