Turn back—oh, oh—the hands of time.

It just occurred to me that I've been blogging covers for more than three years, so to celebrate I've decided to do what I rarely do and revisit some gems from the past. Below are tracks I posted in 2004 that are either reader or personal faves (and, in a few cases, just weird/bad tracks that amuse me). I know a lot of readers didn't know about me back then. I believe I timed these so that they could be burned to audio disc for posterity, should you be so inclined. Enjoy!

Collections from 2005-2007 forthcoming.

(Unrelated: Buy Threadless shirts!)



Copy, Right's Best Posts of 2004 (and one accidentally from 2005) Revisited

01 The Frogs "Vacation" (Go-Go's cover)
Originally posted October 12, 2004.

02 Jason Falkner "Photograph" (Def Leppard cover)
Originally posted November 2, 2004.

03 The Quakes "The Killing Moon" (Echo & the Bunnymen cover)
Originally posted November 2, 2004.

04 The Deldagos "Mr. Blue Sky" (ELO cover)
Originally posted June 29, 2004.

05 Aroah "Cupid Come" (My Bloody Valentine cover)
Originally posted April 7, 2004.

06 Jamelia "Numb" (Linkin Park cover)
Originally posted September 7, 2004. (Actually, this is not the studio version that was in that post but a later live recording because I couldn't readily find the studio track in my millions of back-up discs. You get the gist.)

06 Hikashu "The Model" (Kraftwerk cover)
Originally posted July 16, 2004.

08 The Notwist "Johnny & Mary" (Robert Palmer cover)
Originally posted March 14, 2005. (D'oh! I thought it was 2004. Whatever.)

09 Pixels "Gigamuffin" (Pixies cover, sort of)
Originally posted November 22, 2004.

10 Low IQ 01 feat. Yukari Fresh "Anarchy in the UK" (Sex Pistols cover)
Originally posted July 22, 2004.

11 The Softies "Together Forever" (Rick Astley cover)
Originally posted March 29, 2004.

12 My Chemical Romance "All I Want for Christmas is You" (Mariah Carey cover)
Originally posted December 19, 2004.

13 Solex "Shady Lane" (Pavement cover)
Originally posted March 9, 2004.

14 The Balenescu Quartet "Pocket Calculator" (Kraftwerk cover)
Originally posted June 18, 2004.

15 Cinerama "All the Things She Said" (t.A.T.u. cover)
Originally posted March 29, 2004.

16 Macha & Bedhead "Believe" (Cher cover)
Originally posted March 9, 2004.

<17 Mogwai "Don't Cry" (Guns N' Roses cover)
Originally posted October 26, 2004.

18 Sobaki Tobaka! "In Your Room" (Depeche Mode cover)
Originally posted June 2, 2004.

19 Class "We Don't Have to Take Our Clothes Off" (Jermaine Stewart cover)
Originally posted May 27, 2004.

20 Clem Snide "Beautiful" (Christina Aguilera cover)
Originally posted March 5, 2004.
 

Throw off your mental chains.

I want to blog about a few of these (aka warn you about some of them), but I have a friend visiting from out of town and I don't have the time. Sorry, yo.

Edit, Thurs. May 24, 7:35 AM Central Time: One of my web hosts has been having intermittent DNS issues and is working to fix it. If you've had difficulty downloading these tracks, my apologies. I just uploaded them to a different host so they should be working momentarily. Please give it a moment and refresh your browser and try again.

Bob Nanna "Emperor's New Clothes" (Sinead O'Connor cover)

Beat Crusaders "New Song" (Howard Jones cover)

Gazzara "Turn it on Again" (Genesis cover)

Graveworm "Holding Out for a Hero" (Bonnie Tyler cover)

Kaiser Chiefs "What Time is Love?" (The KLF cover)

Len "Cool it Now" (New Edition cover)

Rosa "Let the River Run" (Carly Simon cover)

Shizuka "If you Need Someone" (The Field Mice cover)

Siela "Plainsong" (The Cure cover)

Sunshiners "Shake the Disease" (Depeche Mode cover)

Tarkio (Colin Meloy) "Goodbye Girl" (Squeeze cover)

The Wonder Stuff "Inside You" (Pop Will Eat Itself cover)
 

No, I would not give you false hope.

Happy Mother's Day to all you crazy moms reading. As promised, here are a few mom-themed tracks. I barely managed to post this in a timely fashion, but am proud that I have. Now if I can get it completed before the Survivor finale, we'll all win! That means I can only give comments on a few tracks—which, let's face it, are always more about me than the songs anyhow—so I'm sure you'll live.

Sadly, most songs about or referencing mothers or mamas or moms are not always the most sentimental or forgiving, and I apologize for that. Still, I think I managed to find a decent balance. Sure, it was difficult to narrow it down so that only one track mentions a desire to kill a mother and have sex with her corpse, but somehow I did.

Dana & Karen Kletter "Your Mother Wants to Know" (Scrawl cover)
I've previously mentioned my former Scrawl obsession, and this song is the one that really sealed the deal for me. I was so excited to learn that it's been covered, and I think this version adds a new dimension to it. The original, obviously, delivers the same message lyrically, but does so with a jaded tone I so related to at the time I first heard it. Not that the delivery can't be bitter AND sentimental, of course, but this cover makes me feel sadder for the mother than the protagonist, and the original does the opposite.

Bongwater "Julia" (Beatles cover)
John Lennon loved his mom. When he wrote this, anyhow.

Neutral Milk Hotel feat. Chris Knox "Mother" (John Lennon cover)
As you might imagine, it gets pretty screamy at the end. Be prepared to turn the volume down a bit unless you're into that.

Old 97's "Mama Tried" (Merle Haggard cover)
Speaking of mothers and Merle Haggard, when I was about 8-10 years old, my mother took me to a Merle Haggard concert at the Holiday Star Plaza. During the intermission (weird that there was an intermission at a concert), an old woman passed out on the floor and started vomiting, which mildly traumatized me. I could think of nothing else for the duration of the show. Not even during "Okie from Muskogee."

Pioneers "Mother and Child Reunion" (Paul Simon cover)
I'm not a big reggae fan, which is a shame considering the multitudes of reggae covers that exist. This track, however, makes me very happy.

The Section Quartet "I Wanna Get A Mohawk (But Mom Won't Let Me Get One)" (AFI cover)
Sometimes mothers are right, kid.

Stone 588 "Dream for Mother" (Christian Death cover)
The aforementioned sexist, matricidal, necrophiliac Mother's Day classic.

The Hydes "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadow)?" (Rolling Stones cover)

Satirine "Mama's Boy" (Ramones cover)

Bouncing Souls "Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?" (Misfits cover)

Glen Meadmore "There's No One Like Mother to Me" (Carter Family cover)

Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen "Your Mother Should Know" (Beatles cover)
 

We could be sister and brother.

Awesome local music blog Radio Free Chicago has an all-cover podcast available for your listening pleasure here. I will respectively disagree with the writer's assertion that Nick Cave's cover of Pulp's "Disco 2000" is particularly genius, as I've long found it surprisingly and disappointingly tedious, but to each his or her own, yes? (Particularly considering some of the cheesy or otherwise questionable covers I actually like, no?) Still, you might hear covers there you've never heard and you might love the Nick Cave track, so what are you waiting for?

Hmmm. Podcasting...

Just a boy who's meant to sing this song.

Okay, when I make a mistake I admit it. Had I known years ago that the Internet would become what it has become, I might have actually tried a little harder to sustain a committed relationship beyond a few weeks and perhaps might have revised my plans to never have a child. But how could we have ever predicted that we would eventually live in a world where we could record our young children singing karaoke versions of My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade" for all the world to hear?

Brendan - Welcome ...

Holy crap, that's adorable. Weird the things that actually make my biological clock almost want to tick, no?
 

You want to see whatever common people see.

As you all know, YouTube is rife with covers by people no one has ever heard of who happen to have webcams, but every now and again you'll stumble on something/someone who isn't total crap and is just plain charming and cute. It doesn't seem remotely possible that it would be legal for me to find someone born in 1987 so damned adorable, but it is. I cannot believe 1987 was 20 years ago.

Anthony Hill covers Pulp and Lily Allen, respectively:

I've been changing my mind.

It's amazing how long it takes to perform everyday tasks when the scroll wheel on your mouse suddenly stops working. I practically feel as if I'm Laura Ingalls (and her numerous siblings) having to do homework with chalk on a small personal slate. I'm working on posting a mom-themed post before Sunday. We'll see how long it actually takes me.

Hmm. I think I've hit a mid-entry change of heart and have decided to post a few tracks before the mom post. I did it quick, so the tags might not be as detailed as I generally like them to be. Here goes:

Mollycuddle "U Mass" (Pixies cover)
Mollycuddle is a sickeningly cute name for a band. Or a child carrier.

De Saloon & Denisse Malabrán (of Chilean group Saiko) "Erase/Rewind" (Cardigans cover)
In this cover, Denisse Malabrán's sounds a bit like my friend Ami's, though not quite as good. Lo, I like seeing people cover Cardigans songs besides "Lovefool," paricularly with south American accents, so it's all good to me.

S.H.E "Bie Shuo Dui Bu Qi (Everytime)" (Britney Spears cover in Chinese, I think)
I'm too lazy sans functioning scroll wheel to talk about S.H.E, so I'll let Wikipedia do it for me. They've done a lot of covers.

DJ Goldfinger feat. Felisha "Runaway (Goldfinger's NRG Single Edit)" (Bon Jovi cover)
It's just your standard cheesy dance cover, yet still somehow a million times better than any of the crappy performances by American Idol contestants on Bon Jovi night. I know, I know. I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up in the first place. (Aside: I hate Blake sooooooooo much.)

[spunge] "Circle in the Sand" (Belinda Carlisle cover)
A band whose name includes pointless brackets would generally fall off my radar just on principle, but for a dime-a-dozen ska/punk cover, it could certainly be much worse.
 

We all look elsewhere.

Just in case you're not obsessively checking what I add to my blog roll, I feel I need to point you in the direction of Absonderpop—as well as its German-language counterpart, should that interest you—where you can download originals, remixes and many many covers of whatever song is featured each entry. Seriously, if you like what I do and enjoy collecting as many covers as possible in a range of genres, you'd be remiss not to check it early and often.
 

I got nothing to say I ain't said before.

Lambchop "This Corrosion" (Sisters of Mercy cover)
It's a genre I never got too obsessed with, this dark alt-country-meets-chamber-pop stuff, and I'm not sure why since I actually quite like it. Well, I was once temporarily obsessed with 16 Horsepower, but that was about a decade ago. Anyhow, I'm revisiting it, and find that I love it when these type of outfits cover goth staples.


Speaking of 16HP, for your viewing & listening pleasure, allegedly they chose Joy Division's "Heart and Soul" as their final live song ever:

I can tell that we are gonna be friends.

If you're looking for a great way to kill just over an hour, one of the charming Drunk Country fellows has a delightful, informative covers-themed podcast currently available for listening/downloading here. Highly recommended.