Adam Miller was the founder and only constant member of Chromatics, the Portland-by-way-of-Seattle electronic music group that broke up in 2021. Since then, he was released one solo album of ambient music. Now he’s returned with a cover of The Byrds “Everybody’s Been Burned.”
“Everybody’s Been Burned” is a Byrds deep cut from their album Younger Than Yesterday. Written by David Crosby before the band even existed, the chord progression and lead guitarist Roger (then Jim) McGuinn‘s understated, vaguely jazzy guitar solo made most listeners think the song was brand new, part of the Byrds’ psychedelic innovations. It’s often regarded one of David Crosby’s best songs while he was still in the group.Continue reading »
The second single from Rihanna‘s seventh album Unapologetic, “Stay” is a somewhat atypical piano ballad featuring minimal instrumentation. Cowritten by her duet partner Mikky Ekko, it’s a song that relies mostly on the power of their voices to succeed. And it did succeed, becoming Rihanna’s twenty-fourth top ten hit.
Rum Jungle are an Australian rock band from Newcastle, NSW who have been releasing music for about six years. Their new cover of “Stay” marks their first appearance on legendary Australian radio network Triple J’s cover series Like a Version.Continue reading »
The rarely covered Rush deep-cut “Jacob’s Ladder” is the climax from side one of Rush’s seventh album, 1980’s Permanent Waves. It’s the album where they began to, tentatively, incorporate other forms other popular music into their prog metal sound. “Jacob’s Ladder” combines these competing tendencies, with some of the heaviest music of their career to date with a synthesizer interlude that sounds like it could have been written by Vangelis.
It makes sense that metal bands would be drawn to the track and it’s repetitive pummel, and the first ever cover appears to have been by metal singer Sebastian Bach. American experimental metal band Imperial Triumphant have really been jumping on the cover wagon lately. Their latest is a predictably heavy cover of “Jacob’s Ladder.”
For the heavy parts, Imperial Triumphant play it pretty straight, albeit way more metal, though Geddy Lee’s wail is replaced by lead singer’s Zachary Ilya Ezrin’s deep growl. They keep the knotty prog lead and bass guitar parts and lean into the bolero aspect. (Though they can still pull off the swingier parts, too.)
It’s basically more metal Rush until we get to the synthesizer-heavy bridge. Imperial Triumphant doesn’t really do synthesizers, at least in the ’80s sense. They add them to the track when you’d expect, but then they drop away pretty quickly in favour of abstract guitar textures and sound effects. Exrin’s voice is slowed and possibly flipped and then there is a big buildup that gets increasingly loud and knotty until it returns to the climax of the song.
“Lithium” is the third single from Nirvana’s Nevermind. Though less of a hit than the two previous singles, it is the band’s fourth-most streamed song to date, and is one of their most covered. The one-word chorus probably helps with that.
Lavalove are a California self-styled indie pop band that just released their debut album this spring. But their cover of “Lithium” is not what you think of when you think of “indie pop.”
They begin the song pretty close to the original, but with a faster pace. The biggest difference at first is lead singer Tealarose Coy’s voice, which is bratty and a little affected in a way that doesn’t really fit the otherwise faithful grunge sound of the verse. (Coy’s professional name does justice to her delivery.) In the chorus, she is joined by backing vocals that, along with a double beat, give the song a bit of a pop-punk feel.
But the real departure, and the reason the cover is really fun, is what they do in the bridges. For the first iteration of the bridge, the distortion drops out the band vamps. Coy drops the “I’m not gonna crack” refrain from this section, just singing the first part of each line. She and the guitar drop out at the end, before the return to the verse. For the second bridge, there’s utter cacophony from distorted voices, one bringing back in the “I’m not gonna crack” refrain, and one that is indecipherable (and sounds like an atonal saxophone). It’s almost like a tribute to the noisier side of Nirvana.
It’s a far cry from “indie pop” – a cover that starts out sounding fairly faithful but then going off in some weird, abrasive directions in the bridge.
One of those bands is, um, ’90s rock group Third Eye Blind, best known for their 1997 US Top 5 hit “Semi-Charmed Life.” Singer-songwriter Stephan Jenkins is also an infamous jerk, which makes the tribute and song choice more incongruous. The song is “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Sinead’s follow-up single to “Nothing Compares 2 U.” A personal song about O’Connor’s experience with fame and pregnancy at the same time, it might seem like an odd choice for Jenkins. But, then again, given the song’s refrain, maybe not.Continue reading »
There are few more iconic openings to country songs than Johnny Cash saying “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” at the beginning of “Folsom Prison Blues” opening his live album At Folsom Prison and the prisoners just erupting. Any cover version of this song has to reckon with that moment, and probably the best thing to do is to utterly ignore it: either cover the original 1955 recording, years before the live album, or to be inspired by the energy in either prison version but omit the intro.
The String Revolution, who we last saw covering “Crazy Train,” solve this problem by recording an instrumental cover. For it, they’re joined by legendary Australian acoustic guitarist Tommy Emmanuel. And their solution to that intro is to create an all new instrumental intro that sounds utterly unlike “Folsom Prison Blues” or any other Johnny Cash song.Continue reading »
