One of the highlights of the ongoing Claypool Gold tour has been seeing Les Claypool‘s various groups come together on stage to perform together at several times during the evening. The tour features performances by The Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, The Claypool Lennon Delirium, (which Claypool co-fronts with Sean Lennon) and, of course, Primus. Continue reading »
Dominic Fike has won the title of shortest-ever cover on Triple J’s ‘Like a Version.’ The song in question is Primus’ theme song to South Park and lasted a whopping 26 seconds. The cover remained true to the original, with Fike even putting on a voice for the character of Kenny’s lines in the third verse of the song. The Florida-born singer-songwriter told Triple J he always admired the adventurous aspect of South Park. “It feels optimistic when the episode starts,” Fike said. “And it’s funny throughout, which is how I prefer life, and then it ends abruptly, and Primus starts.” Continue reading »
“The Pressman” is one of the heavier tracks from Primus’ third album, Pork Soda, but it is not one of their most popular songs. It ranks in the 60s in terms of live performances and streams and Second Hang Songs records no official covers of it prior to the present. So I guess it’s a deep cut though given how niche Primus are, most of their songs are deep cuts to non-fans. They are not the kind of band that gets a lot of covers. Continue reading »
Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.
What a great year 2024 was for The Police!
No, they didn’t reform. And no, we’re not talking about yet another cover of “Every Breath You Take,” to add to the 358 already made by the likes of Andy Williams, Sacha Distel, Shirley Bassey, and Dolly Parton. We’re not even talking about the 137th cover of “Roxanne,” to complement those by George Michael, Aswad, and terrible a cappella group The Flying Pickets. Instead, we’re talking about all three ex-members of the mighty new-wave band having been out on the road and performing live sets sprinkled with revitalized versions of Police tracks, to remind us of the remarkable range of their iconic catalog.
That man Sting? The ex singer, bassist, and chief songwriter of the group, who went on to occasional–shall we say?–po-faced solo stardom in his liking for lutes, madrigals, and live albums from his Italian villa? He performed Police songs, at places like the Wiltern in LA, with just one killer guitarist (Dominic Miller) and one killer drummer (Chris Maas), and sounded more urgent and more rock than he had in ages. He tore into era-defining favorites like “Can’t Stand Losing You” and “Message in a Bottle,” but also “Driven to Tears” and “Reggatta de Blanc”!
Guitarist Andy Summers? He performed intimate solo gigs at venues like Le Poisson Rouge in New York, armed with “Roxanne” and “Spirits in the Material World,” but also “Tea in the Sahara” and “Bring on the Night.” And drummer Stewart Copeland? He put on “Police Deranged for Orchestra” shows at such opera houses as Teatro degli Arcimboli in Milan, with renditions of “Walking on the Moon” and “King of Pain,” but also “Murder by Numbers” and “Walking in Your Footsteps.”
So, no, we’re not here today to discuss a country legend putting her spin on a song about sexual possessiveness and stalking, which is seemingly up there with “Happy Birthday to You” in terms of social ubiquity and popularity (as fun as that may be). We’re here, instead, to reflect Sting and co.’s own dusting down of some lesser known–yet still essential–Police tunes by concentrating on the acts that have dug deep into their catalog to bring us compelling covers of tracks from “O My God” to “Once Upon a Daydream” and “Behind My Camel.” We’re all about the artists who’ve reinterpreted the instrumentals, the early songs, the deep cuts, and the B-sides, in celebration of the punk- and reggae-inspired power-trio brilliance of the band in their blond-haired 1977-83 pomp.
Come, then, on an alternative journey though Policedom that takes in Seattle rock legends, a German dub act, ex-thrash-metal heads, ex-Lemonheads, and, actually, an a cappella group. A good one!
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Follow all our Best of 2014 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.
Back when we redesigned the site in 2010, we created basic star icons to represent the ratings we’d give an album when we reviewed it. 2 stars, 3.5 stars, etc. When we posted an album review, we’d find the corresponding icon where we last uploaded it. However, earlier this year we couldn’t find one of the icons we were looking for. Why? It turns out we’d never used it. We’d never before given an album a perfect five stars.
This year, for the first time, we did. Which should suffice to say it’s been an excellent year for cover albums. True, a few of the marquee tributes we most eagerly anticipated fell flat, either too formulaic (The Art of McCartney) or too out-there (that Flaming Lips’ Sgt. Peppers tribute we’ll never speak of again). But in the cracks and under the radar, cover and tribute albums thrived.
In our list of the twenty best, we’ve got everything from big names on major labels to DIY projects thrown up on Bandcamp. We’ve got New Orleans jazz, Parisian dub reggae, and songs that were popular when your great-great-great-great grandfather was calling town dances. Something for everyone, I guess. Something for all our fwends (sorry, that was the last time, promise).
Start the countdown on Page 2…
Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
In 1988, Rolling Stone named “Stayin’ Alive” one of the 100 top singles of the last 25 years, and they asked the Bee Gees to comment; how did they feel about the song? The terse response: “We’d like to dress it up in a white suit and gold chains and set it on fire.” It’s an understandable reaction – for all the wealth and fame the song brought them, it also swept aside their estimable back catalog and pigeonholed them as Disco with a capital Dis, so much so that when the genre died, the Bee Gees’ commercial success in the U.S. died with it.
But for all the venom directed “Stayin’ Alive”‘s way, for all its use as a punchline from Airplane! to Ted, people can’t get away from how good a song it is. “Look at great huge Maurice Gibb, singing like Donald Duck on ‘Stayin’ Alive,'” Roger Daltrey of the Who carped in 1978, then instantly added, “And that’s a great song. Bruce Springsteen could sing that lyric.”
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