July is becoming a big month for free anniversary full-album tributes. Last week SPIN gave us their tribute to Nirvana, and today Stereogum surprises us with Stroked, a collection of covers from the Strokes’ game-changing debut Is This It. Eleven indie icons and upstarts cover every song on the album, just as they did with Radiohead’s OK Computer. Continue reading »
Staten Island, New York children’s chorus PS22 Chorus has done it again. After covering artists like MGMT (when they, appropriately enough, covered the band’s hit “Kids”) and Phoenix (with their gorgeous, down tempo cover of “Lisztomania”), the fifth-graders continue amping up their indie cred with a cover of Toronto “It” band Austra‘s “Energy”. Continue reading »
Though many people take on the great songs of Joni Mitchell (see covers by Counting Crows, James Blake, and even Phish), few capture the mixture of beauty and pain that characterizes Mitchell’s voice. Toronto indie trio Austra comes close though with their newly released cover of Mitchell’s 1969 classic “Woodstock.” The story behind the track is that Mitchell wasn’t able to attend Woodstock due to her manager telling her that it would be better for her career to appear on a TV show that day; she wrote the song based on her outside view of what happened at the festival that day, and it soon became one of her most well-known tracks and a testament to the monumental event that occurred. Continue reading »