This Week on Bandcamp rounds up our favorite covers to hit the site in the past seven days.
Bad news first: We didn’t find any good covers for this post. We did, however, discover five great covers (and a bunch of mediocre-to-terrible ones). No middle ground this week. So while the average quality of everything we heard was lower than usual, our cherry-picked set may be one of our all-time favorites. Funny how it works like that sometimes.
We’ve heard Heinali and Matt Finney cover Joy Divison (24th best cover of 2010), the Cure, and Radiohead in the past and now the Ukranian composer and American poet deliver another spooky spoken-word gem on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” You’ve heard it covered a million times, but you’ve never heard it covered like this.
Hop-hop-loving duo Karmin have become one of the year’s biggest cover breakout stars. We’ve heard them cover Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, and Adele. Now we hear our first cover of one of their originals though, by Boston R&B singer J Barber as part of a Berklee School of Music contest.
Back in April, we dug up a folk-rock cover of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” for this series. Now we’ve got a version that’s even folksier and dreamier. This gem of a cover from Melbourne trio Havana Lake sounds like trying to remember a dream just as it slips away.
The title there may say “The Cyclist Cover,” but that’s wrong. This here is a Can cover, of the krautrock favorite “Vitamin C” (previously covered by Nicole Atkins). It incorporates sonic elements of the Cyclist’s song “Can” though, creating a danceable cover/remix hybrid reminiscent of Telephoned.
In our recent Downward Spiral tribute, we spotlight a barnyard-country version of Nine Inch Nails’ filthy “Closer.” This experimental electronic version leans marginally closer to the original, creepy boneyard percussion propelling Morningdeer’s disarmingly sweet voice.
Check out previous installments here.
