Every year there’s an all-ages free punk festival in Italy every summer called Punk Rock Raduno. (Raduno is “gathering” in Italian.) For this year’s edition, they recorded a single in celebration. They recruited Merel Schaap from Dutch punks Lone Wolf and Italian punk musician Andrea Manges to record a new pop punk cover of Mama Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Kind of Music,” a song with a fitting message for the festival.
But though Meral & Andrea’s cover starts out like your classic pop-punk cover, with crunchy guitars and feedback, this is not your typical pop-punk cover. First, there’s a sample of a women’s voice, possibly from Alice in Wonderland. But the real surprise is the breakbeats straight out of ’90s big beat, and extremely unusual in a pop punk cover.
The rest of the cover is pretty typical for the genre. Merel and Andrea take turns singing the verses and they have the pop punk whine down, albeit with Dutch and Italian accents instead of Californian. The performance is high energy but it feels like a different kind of energy given the electronic percussion underneath the guitars.
