With Sails Ahead is a punk/rock/dance band that combines the thrill of metal with the tasty earworm melodies of pop. Or rather, as they say on their official website, their sound “melds the genre with dueling, metallic leads and soaring, distorted vocals, all through a pop lens”. As Pride Month was coming to a close, this pop-punk outfit had decided to dedicate their emotional version of Evanescence’s “Call Me When You’re Sober” to a meaningful cause. As stated on the group’s Bandcamp:
“As Pride Month concludes, we wanted to put up this track that we made a long time ago, exclusively available on Bandcamp. All proceeds from purchases of this cover will go towards our bandmates’ future gender-affirming surgeries.”Continue reading »
As regular readers know, here at Cover Me we put together a Best Covers Ever list every month for a celebrated artist. We’ve recently done the Pet Shop Boys and Sheryl Crow. And before them we did the biggie – The Beatles – and before them, Bob Dylan! But every now and again, there’s a particular genre that’s crying out for the Best Covers Ever treatment – and this month it’s the Dark Genre. It’s goth!
So why now, you ask? Are goth covers really a thing? And why don’t Alien Sex Fiend or Fields of the Nephilim have their own Best Covers Ever features?
Fair questions, all. First off, goth music is everywhere right now. It may have emerged out of the UK post-punk scene and enjoyed its most innovative period from 1980 to 1982, but it’s now the reason we have Whitby Goth Weekends in April and November (well, that and Count Dracula), World Goth Day on May 22, and goth nights down the Hatchet Inn in Bristol most nights, particularly Thursday. It’s also why we have heaps of goth books on the market right now, from John Robb’s The Art of Darkness to Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch, all trying to explain goth’s lasting influence as a musical subculture: the fixation with death, the dark theatricality, the Victorian melodrama, the leather, the thick black eyeliner, the fishnet tights, the deviance, the sex, the deviant sex, and, of course, spiders.Continue reading »
Evanescence’s piano-laden ballad “My Immortal” took the world by storm in 2003, and the band Dayseeker has just flipped it on its head.
Dayseeker, a 4-piece post-hardcore/rock band from Orange County, California, is known for its quintessential dreamy, heavy sound: melodic, but not without that grit us alt-lovers crave. And recently the band created a compelling cover that began (surprisingly) with the piano line on an acoustic guitar. As the tune goes on, it’s like a slow burn, a lily budding- that then opened. Rory Rodriguez was the real star in this cover, which was practically a vocal showcase. From raw lows to clear falsetto jumps, “My Immortal” is a vocal challenge that he aced. Continue reading »
Tenacious D is widely known for rocking your socks off, sometimes with the help of Dave Grohl on drums (or as a demon). However, many of the songs from their debut album had first drafts that fell within the rare subgenre of acoustic-metal. “Kyle Quit the Band” is one of those songs, where the studio version has added plenty of electric guitars and frantic drumming but the original version was just Jack and Kyle and their acoustic guitars. Recently, Amy Lee (previously of Evanescence) decided to take this lesser-known track back to its acoustic roots.Continue reading »
Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
Since Bananarama first released “Cruel Summer” in June 1983, the sunny season has become substantially crueller, certainly if the raft of recent covers of the song are considered. The post-punk British girl group originated a song to stand alongside such classics as “Sealed with a Kiss” and “The Boys of Summer” when they sang of loneliness, separation, and heartache in relation to the vacation period, but they did so in a way that incorporated a strong element of, well, fun. Good, bouncy, innocent fun. Current artists seem unable to approach it in quite the same manner.
