This Week on Bandcamp: Dance Movie, Charlie Schafer, Lyttle King, Sir Cox’s Downbeat, Luke Yeaman

This Week on Bandcamp rounds up our favorite covers to hit the site in the past seven days.

Our second Bandcamp set of the new year takes on two songs from the ‘60s, one from the ‘70s, and two from the last few years. We’ve got ambient electropop, twee ballads, and dub reggae. So, yeah, as all over the place as usual.

Last year we heard a few covers by Wild Flag, the indie mashup of Sleater-Kinney/Helium/The Minders, but this is the first cover of the supergroup. Halifax indie-pop band Dance Movie slows “Future Crimes” way down, drawing out a dramatic ballad with just a hint of twee.

As Charlie Schafer himself notes, he’s “a little late on covering this song.” Kings of Leon covers have died down since their peak, though, so maybe it’s been long enough to enjoy this song again. This harmony-rich ballad should help ease the transition.

Bee Gees songs sound, as a rule, horribly dated. As Lyttle King proves on “To Love Somebody,” it only takes some space-age electronics to update them for the 21st century. Ambient production and a thudding drum beat reinvent the classic like something that might be on a Trent Reznor/Brian Eno collab.

The reggae/dub/ska-flecked Beatles cover swaps Jamaican horns and backbeat for the original’s pop melodies. It’s hardly the first reggae version of a Beatles song the world has seen, but this careful construction reminds us why they keep popping up.

Luke Yeaman and Rachael Jones put together this Grease cover for a class that asked them to “take a song and convert it into a contrasting genre whilst retaining some distinctive idiosyncratic elements.” Now that’s our kind of homework!

Check out previous installments here.