I forgot to include this in the New Order post a few weeks back, and I like it a lot. It's my favorite on Cobra Verde's all-cover album, Copycat Killers.
The Finnish humppsters have a new(ish) album of bizarre oompa covers out since the last time I posted anything from/about them. It still seems as if the lyrics of their versions have little, if anything, to do with the lyrics of the originals, but I still don't know Finnish, so I can't be sure. The Sounds's "Living in America" was one of my favorite songs a few years ago, so that's the track from Humppasirkus I chose to share here.
I think a reader sent this track to me. When I saw the title, I thought it might be a Brenda K. Starr cover. It took me about a minute into the track to figure out where I recognized this song from. It was so familiar, I knew all the words, I knew when to expect the sax solo, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how I could so intimately know a song and not instantly remember the name the original artist. It makes sense though. When a song is from a soundtrack you've listened to a million times in the '80s that was sandwiched between songs by INXS and Echo and the Bunnymen and other artists you'd actually heard of at the time, your ought-era recall will understandably be off. Ahhh, The Lost Boys soundtrack, how could I have forsaken thee? God, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea obscure soundtrack-related covers. Yay, Gavin!
*Edit: Apparently this is originally by The Call and Tim Capello covered it, which makes sense since The Lost Boys soundtrack was chock-full of covers. I plead ignorance, as I was never a fan of the Call and Capello's was the first version I heard and the version I believe Castleton covered.
I swear, if Swedes are covering anything, I'm so there!
As a pre-teen/teenager, I listened to Beauty and the Beat more than any other album, I think. It always kind of bothered me that the Go-Go's had such a poppy squeaky-clean image in the mainstream but really wrote such sad, dark songs that weren't making the charts. Granted, those were poppy too, but they were no "We got the Beat." This is one of the Go-Go's's (?) more optimistic tunes covered by some innocuous pop chickadee I've never heard of who really didn't change it up all that much. I still like to see it being covered though. (It's on the Sky High soundtrack, which is full of far worse covers than this, to be sure.)
From a live performance on a radio show. Shit. Remember all the M.I.A. buzz in the blogosphere back in the day? I feel it was warranted, but I almost forgot all about it.
Portland, OR, punks whose "riffs" actually remind me more of glam-metal like Poison's than that of anything punk, but whatever. I've certainly heard worse.
The cover part of this track doesn't start until about 3 minutes or so in, but I'm liking it. Because it's Devendra and it's a cover of R. Kelly that isn't "I Believe I Can Fly" or "Ignition." I still wish I could go back in time and relive and better document the R. Kelly/Jay-Z show I went to in 2004. (The first day of their later-defunct 2004 tour, I believe.) That was some crazy shit.
Good or bad, this sounds to me what I imagine my friends and I hanging out, messing around with a 4-track and deciding to cover this song would sound like. Hmmm. Maybe I should get on that project, come to think of it.
There's a reason this exists. I'm just not certain I've discovered it yet.
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