Ooh, I like this a lot. It's a bit rough in places, but what do you expect? You're not supposed to perform 'Babooshka' as a duo of a bass guitarist and an electric guitarist, swapping lead vocals between a male and a female singer, and with both singers having a French accent. But that's what I like about it. It's spirited, raw and different. And you can't go wrong with a beard like that. You just can't.
I'm not 100% sure about the date, but it seems that Cherhal and Nataf were touring as a duo in 2005 and 2006, so that's a good guess.
Yesterday, I wrote that I was probably going to break down and do the famous covers that people had probably been expecting from the start of this series more than a month ago. But there are just so many covers available, and the range of performing styles is so great, I'm just having too much fun finding new versions. I'll be quite happy if I can delay Placebo, the Futureheads, Maxwell and so on till past the fiftieth episode of this series.
After two gnarly covers of Kate Bush songs, it's time to go back to something more conventional, and because I've just had those two gnarly covers, I could muster the patience to listen to this from beginning to end.
I still don't like it much. The singing is mannered and the piano player has no idea what they're doing. On the plus side, Church's heart appears to be in it, and the melody and lyrics are pretty indestructable anyway, but it doesn't have much to recommend it. The reason it's still Kate Bush Cover of the Day is that I want to showcase the range of artists that have covered songs by Kate Bush over the years.
In the next few days I'll probably give myself a break from actively seeking out new cover versions, and just post the famous versions from Placebo, Futureheads, etc. It's gonna be a busy weekend and I could use a few evenings without any YouTube surfing.
While we're on the subject of fucked up covers, this industrial version of 'Experiment IV' by Seven Graylands actually sounds like the sound that could kill someone from a distance. The barking/growling, a-melodious vocals appear to be cut and pasted together and all the instrumental sounds are harsh and edgy. A huge change from Kate's more rounded, understated original.
Compared to yesterday's entry, it's pretty tame, but on the Kate Bush cover spectrum, this is still pretty out there. Background information can be found here, where it confirms that the vocals are indeed cut and pasted together from five or six tracks of takes.
The Kate Bush covers keep on coming! I was going to feature Charlotte Church's version of "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" but when I listened to it the other day, I found it very uninteresting. Not so with this version of 'Cloudbusting'! It's not pretty - in fact it's one of the weirdest pieces of sonic degeneracy I've heard in a long time (probably not since Ram Samudrala's Twisted Helices album. The Fader, where I found this, calls it "a sea of melted tape and LFO" and adds that "You really hope the sun does come out, because things sound kind of fucked up now." I don't have anything to add to that. It's not going to be for everyone, but it sure is different.
Edited to add: looks like the stream is not available or limited to people visiting from The Fader. Just go there to hear the song, and if you want, you can download it too from the webpage or the Soundcloud widget. It's worth it just to hear it once.
Now this is a lot more interesting! The intro of Danni Green's version of 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes' suggests that it is about to explode into a light techno version, perhaps similar to Opus III's cover of King Crimson's 'I Talk To The Wind' (which I haven't heard in ages, by the way, so the comparison may be completely off) but it instead develops into a pure pop version, mixing electronics, including a moderate level of Autotune, with the original symphonic arrangement. Along the way, it manages to surprise pretty much constantly.
On YouTube, about 1/3 of the people who bothered to rate this, didn't like this at all, probably because the vocals are clearly Autotuned, so you can't tell if Danni Green can actually sing or not. I'm not bothered by this at all - the unashamedly plastic pop approach sets this apart from the pack, and it works as what it is.
It's "Army Dreamers" again! This is what, the fourth version that I've featured? Plus at least one artist who was featured previously has done this song as well. I'm really surprised by that.
From an EP released in 2010, Mary Dillon puts in an outstanding vocal performance, with what is otherwise another straight reading of the song, without major changes to the arrangement. I don't think there's that much you can do with this song, which is what makes it so surprising that so many people are covering it.
I would like to thank my two years younger self for writing such clear instructions on how to install PNGOut on a Mac. My command-line skills, such as they were, have become extremely rusty, but when I needed to install PNGout again, I went from downloading the program to getting the first output written to disk in five minutes. The post also contained my command for batch operations, which I shall quote here again for future reference:
for s in *.png;do pngout "$s" pngout/$s;done
This will work if you have a subfolder named "pngout" already, and will keep your input files separated from your output.
I thought I had already featured this version of "Running Up That Hill" by American Darkwave/Gothic duo Faith and The Muse, because the name rang a bell. But apparently not. I like the drum parts on this one; other than that it's not that distinctive.
An industrial/Darkwave cover by German band Tilt. From 1990, making this one of the earliest covers so far. Interesting, though perhaps a little too long.
Our first song from The Red Shoes is a techno version of "And So Is Love" by Dutch group (not actually an individual as is implied by the "Mr. A Balladeer" designation on YouTube) A Balladeer. I was actually familiar with them; I have exactly one song from a Plato sampler collection on my iPod. Perhaps it's time to check them out some more, as I rather like this one.
With the techno beat, electronic instruments and the change from female to male lead vocals (there are some female backing vocals by Charlie Dée), A Balladeer have definitely put their own stamp on it, but strangely, nothing feels like a radical change. It's close to the original tempo, just subdivided differently, and more importantly, the original's atonal chord progression is preserved. As a result, this is a highly individual version that does not stomp all over the feel of the song as originally intended.
This cover version was released as a single just two months before the release of The Director's Cut, which also contains a new version of this song. For the purpose of this blog series, covers of songs that appear on The Director's Cut will be tagged as covers of songs from The Sensual World or The Red Shoes if they came out before the release of The Director's Cut on May 16. If they came out after The Director's Cut, they will still be tagged as coming from those earlier albums unless they are clearly influenced by the Director's Cut versions. I have now heard previews of several songs and some of them are reinterpreted drastically enough to have the difference reflected in any cover versions - and good enough to have covers made of them! Which is a relief, to be honest.
Reinder Dijkhuis is a translator and cartoonist living in Hoogezand, the Netherlands. He is married, with two stepkids, a dog and cat, and a bevvy of sporadic co-bloggers.
