When artists take on a cover, one can truly never know what to expect. The temperaments of musicians and their strongly-held notions of what is classic and what is terrible can be like the precisely correct atoms in a chemical reaction – get something just slightly out of balance and the whole thing will explode and kill everyone.
Luckily, the teamup of Cursive and Cymbals Eat Guitars to perform the Gin Blossoms hit “Hey Jealousy” (under the moniker Cursive Eats Guitars) at the AV Club is only explosive in a good way. In the early, pre-cover conversation, we see a hint of discord between Cursive’s Tim Kasher and Cymbals Eat Guitars’s Joseph D’Agostino over the song’s merits, but they quickly launch into some grungy, dreamlike ambience to underly the early vocals.
It’s when the song finds its structure that it finds its sarcasm. Each distorted chord is a jab from Kasher and a nudge and a wink from D’Agostino, of the kind where the Gin Blossoms can only wonder whether they’re being included in a joke or whether they’re it. The answer seems to be both. Whether this treatment is deserved or not is a contentious subject, but the fact remains that Cursive Eats Guitars executes it magnificently. Whether you’re singing along with the Blossoms or laughing along at them, it’s hard to deny the fun of the track’s gritty irreverence. Enjoy.
Cursive Eats Guitars – Hey Jealousy (Gin Blossoms Cover) via AV Club
Check out more from Cymbals Eat Guitars on Myspace and more from Cursive at their website.
This is pretty dreadful. I can’t quite figure out if they’re taking it too seriously or not taking it seriously enough. It seems to waiver in this in-between of bad arrangement and ‘let’s just get this overwith’. The whole “we’re so bad we’re good” thing went out when I stopped listening to Pavement.