The Beaches — I Ran (So Far Away) (A Flock Of Seagulls cover)
The Beaches released one of the best albums of last year with No Hard Feelings. Now they’ve followed up with a Flock of Seagulls cover. Why? Why not! They don’t veer too far away from the original arrangement, but add an extra dose of indie-rock crunch. Halfway through it gets a little more shoegazy and expansive, with a huge build.
The Damned — Making Time (The Creation cover)
This deeper cut is a high point of the Damned’s new covers record, which, per our review, “takes the song into near heavy metal territory, if leavened by the catchy choral chorus, which, especially with the bass and drums, comes over like the Who in their prime.”Continue reading »
The Portland-based Dandy Warhols have just announced a compilation record, pulling together some of the covers that in the past have ended up as b-sides, tribute albums and soundtracks. To accompany the announcement, the band released a newly-recorded cover of the Violent Femmes‘ classic “Kiss Off.”Continue reading »
Winona Fighter is a Nashville-based, woman-fronted group that burst into the music scene in 2022 with their debut album My Apologies to the Chef. Led by multi-instrumentalist Coco Kinnon (Dan Fusion- guitar, Austin Luther-bass&production), the band now offers an acoustic take on the Violent Femmes classic “Blister in the Sun.” It is stripped-down instrumentally, and the performance matches the original tune’s infectious, raw energy.
The general vibe of the song keeps its happy-go-lucky yet gritty folk-pop spirit alive and light on its feet. Kinnon adds a delicious up-the-octave section to the chorus, while her touches of vocal distortion and vocal fry at the ends of phrases give it a personalized edge that truly makes the track feel like a perfect fit for the band.
“The inspiration for doing a cover of ‘Blister in the Sun’ came when we were talking about doing an acoustic variant of our record,” Kinnon continued “We love to honor those who have paved the way in everything we do, so it was only natural for us to pay homage to the folk-punk legends themselves, Violent Femmes. We are really stoked about this cover, and getting a nod of approval from the band themselves made us all the more proud and excited.”
Said approval came directly from Violent Femmes bassist Brian Ritchie, who shared this: “I am thrilled to hear Winona Fighter’s reinterpretation of our eternal standard, ‘Blister in the Sun.’ We are always proud when our music seeps into subsequent generations of musicians and listeners. Winona’s pithy approach keeps much of the original energy, while adding several novel details. Coco’s lead vocal seems true to Gordon’s blueprint until she substitutes attention-getting high harmonies for the melody. The song was always androgynous and non-gendered. This is amplified in Winona Fighter’s take. I also love it when, after a relaxed pace for the bulk of the song, the band sends the song into the stratosphere like a rocket ship at the very end by kicking ass and turning up the volume. Nice touch.”
On September 5, Winona Fighter will release their deluxe edition of My Apologies to the Chef, featuring this cover along with their rendition of “Sabotage.”
“Downtown Train.” “Ol ’55.” “Jersey Girl.” These are just three of the Tom Waits songs better known for their covers (respectively: Rod, Eagles, Bruce) than for Waits’ own performances.
It probably doesn’t need saying that Tom’s recordings are, in the best way possible, idiosyncratic. So it makes sense that, like Dylan, like Cohen, his songs often become more popular when more “traditional” voices sing them. Many of the best covers, though, keep some of that strangeness. No, they don’t do “the Tom Waits voice” – most people wouldn’t be able to talk for a week after attempting that. But they don’t sand off the strangeness.
Tom’s debut album Closing Time came out 50 years ago this month; he’s doing a reissue to celebrate. It, and its successor The Heart of Saturday Night, are in some ways his least representative albums, though. The songwriting is already strong on these, but it comes in – if you can believe it – a fairly conventional package. His voice hasn’t revealed its true character (to pick one among many memorable descriptions: “a voice like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car”), and he hadn’t discovered that hitting a dumpster with a two-by-four makes great percussion.
Some of those very early songs get covered in our list below. But his later, weirder, songs abound, too. Tom’s wife Kathleen Brennan, his musical co-conspirator for decades now, said her husband has two types of songs: “Grim Reapers” and “Grand Weepers”. On his Orphans box set, Tom divided them up another way: Brawlers, Ballers, and Bastards. You’ll find some of all flavors below. (And, if you want more new writing on Tom Waits music, subscribe to a newsletter called Every Tom Waits Song that – full disclosure – I also run).
– Ray Padgett
PS. Find Spotify and Apple Music playlists of this list, and all our other monthly Best Covers Ever lists, at Patreon.
As regular readers know, every year, at the end of the year, we do a big year-end covers list. This tradition started in 2007 and will continue in a couple months with the best covers of 2021.
But there are so many years before 2007 where we weren’t doing year-end covers lists (and, as far as I’m aware, no one else was either). So once a year, we do a big anniversary post tackling the best covers of a year before Cover Me was born. So far we’ve done 1969, 1978, 1987, 1996, and, last year, 2000.
And for 2021, we look back thirty years, to the heady days of 1991. The days of grunge and acid house, of parachute pants and ripped denim, of The Gulf War and Home Alone. Country music and hip-hop increased their cultural dominance (or really just making their existing dominance known; 1991 is also the year Soundscan made the Billboard charts more authoritative). In a single day, Nirvana released Nevermind, Red Hot Chili Peppers released Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and A Tribe Called Quest released The Low End Theory. Think that’s a fluke? The week before saw massive albums from Mariah Carey, Hole, and Guns ‘n’ Roses (two albums, no less). The week before that came Garth Brooks, Talk Talk, and Saint Etienne.
All of those trends are reflected in the list below. Many of these covers scream “1991!” LL Cool J raps Disney. Courtney Love shrieks Joni. Aretha Franklin tries to new jack swing. A spate of early tribute albums (in fact, last year I wrote a 33 1/3 book about a 1991 tribute album). Other covers are more timeless, from veteran artists doing great work several decades into their careers, or way-underground artists who never even approached the mainstream. The only criteria was quality. Thirty years later, these 50 covers Hole-d up the best.
Check out the list starting on Page 2, and stay tuned for the best covers of this year coming in December.
We’re not generally in the practice of publishing reader mail at Cover Me (doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate getting it!). There’s no Letters to the Editor page like you’d see in an old magazine. The comments section and social media serve that function well enough. But today, we’re making an exception.
Last summer, a German reader named Karsten Schroeder wrote in offering to share some cool covers he liked by German bands. We said sure – we’re always looking to discover new stuff, after all. We didn’t hear much after that and, to be honest, forgot about it. Then, a full ten months later, he emailed an exhaustive look at the covers scene in Germany. Across 123 songs, Karsten explored covers spanning punk – his favorite genre – to hip-hop, folk to pop to a few genres that are Germany-specific (“Fun-Punk,” “Deutschrock”). It was so rich and detailed, full of amazing covers that we – and, I expect, you – had never heard before that we asked him if we could publish it.Continue reading »
