You know the drill, looking forward to another month of reading your texts and experiences!
When you’re young and you hear In A Gadda Da Vida performed by Slayer, you think it’s a Slayer song. Then years later when you hear the original Iron Butterfly version, you realize that maybe the Slayer one wasn’t the original at all.
The concept of cover songs was hard to fathom as a kid. I could easily list here tens of songs that I knew better by their cover versions and only later realized that they really weren’t originally by the bands performing them.
In the 90s there was a huge trend of releasing tribute albums to artists and bands. Take 15 well known 90s bands and let each of them pick one song from Black Sabbath, Depeche Mode, The Clash or Willie Nelson. Wrap it up as an album and release it. Watch money pour in.
I’m a huge fan of those 90s tribute albums. I just counted and I have 47 different tribute cds in my shelf. If I count the ones I have on vinyl, I’m sure the amount surpasses 50. Smashing Pumpkins playing Depeche Mode, Saint Etienne covering Gary Numan, Overkill doing a version of Twisted Sister - lovely stuff.
But the album that somewhat changed my outlook on music and life goes basically the other way around.
The Replicants, a name inspired by Blade Runner and the fact that they played only cover versions was a four piece including members of alternative rock band Failure and the former bass player from Tool. They only made one self titled album in 1995 and I will cherish it til I die.
I had never heard of late 70s early 80s powerpop band The Cars until The Replicants started their album with Just What I Needed. What a song! After hearing The Replicants play it, I knew I had to get all the early The Cars albums. Ric Ocasek to this day is one of my favourite songwriters and producers and I found his work through The Replicants.
The next track is Silly Love Songs by Paul McCartney but this version has Maynard James Keenan of Tool on lead vocals and it’s a slow rolling heavy as f**k blast. I would’ve never gotten to know this song if it wasn’t for The Replicants. After those The Replicants do their own 90’s heavy alternative versions of Syd Barrett, Neil Young, David Bowie, Steely Dan and Pink Floyd tracks and most of them aren’t the obvious hits. They choose The Bewlay Brothers from Bowie and How Do You Sleep from John Lennon. Deep cuts that 21 year old me had never heard before but fell in love with immediately.
The Replicants educated me on the history of good music by selecting great somewhat obscure tracks from the past and playing them in a style that made sense to a young man in the 90s. Often there is talk about which cover versions are better than the originals. For me all the tracks on The Replicants sole album are better than the originals. These are the versions I grew up with. These are the versions that speak to me. I’ve grown to love the originals, but at this point for me they feel like the cover versions.
Replicants taught me all about cover versions and also taught me to love them. I still search for interesting cover versions every time I go through a pile of 7” singles on a flea market. Especially I love finnish language cover versions of old disco and synth hits but collecting those on vinyl has become quite expensive in the last 15 years.
The (mostly) same Replicants -guys also had another band called Lusk, which is also highly recommended for fans of Tool, Failure, Jellyfish, Helmet etc. It’s like a scifi inspired fairy tale prog rock version of Monster Magnet or something.
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It’s 1997, I am completely into rock (Radiohead in particular), dub and funk. And absolutely hermetic to hip-hop, that I think of as people talking about a dead simple beat.
I have been smoking weed with friends for a couple years while listening to music, and comes a time when someone putt his record on.
The violence in the lyrics doesn’t change my mind…
Then there is this song about loneliness, being an outcast, and suicide. It trigs something.
I take the CD booklet, read the words. Isn’t this some fucking poetry??? It hits me hard, somehow everything comes into place, the funk in the background, the groove of the beat together with the flow, the words, the despair, and the fun as well…
I figured I’ve slept on a whole genre of music, and suddenly feel the urge to hear more.
Then come the Beastie Boys. And Cypress Hill (they’ve been in Rennes two weeks earlier, I’m so pissed).
Abstract hip-hop, acid jazz…
This is the album that opened me to hip-hop.
Not flawless, and it certainly owes a lot to 2pac and the US, but it definitely has its style.
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Incroyable! de voir le Nikoumouk cité ici.
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Boards of Canada — Campfire Headphase
Well gang, we’re living in the thrill of another BoC album launch! I suspect they’ll show up a lot this month, so I’ll keep it short.
One day I was at Future Shop (which was basically a Canadian Best Buy, until Best Buy bought and rebranded it), and the album cover caught my eye. I vaguely knew about Warp Records because one of my friends listened to Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy EP obsessively, and I thought I had maybe heard something about BoC being good, so I decided to take a chance.
I can’t say the album CHANGED anything for me. I was in the twelfth grade, had already absorbed a wide range of music both as a listener and as a player, and had even started to get into solo music production on a Tascam 788. But Campfire Headphase FOCUSED everything for me, and inspired me to think about “simple contentment” and “joyful solitude” as valid musical themes.
BoC basically teaches a master-class in tape echo, not only driving an incredible sense of momentum in “Dayvan Cowboy,” but also adding tension and release to songs like “Satellite Anthem Icarus” and “Oscar See Through Red Eye.” And their sound design is perfectly on point throughout. I remember people questioning whether the guitar belonged in electronic music, which seems quaint in retrospect. They treated every instrument with a similar level of care, and honestly, their warbly noodling sounds almost perfectly modern today.
Finally, while Boards of Canada are famously not Canadian, I was thrilled to learn that they briefly lived in Calgary and that the cover photo for Music Has the Right to Children was taken in Banff. At the time, it felt like every Canadian artist worth celebrating was coming out of, or at least moving to, Toronto or Montreal. I left Calgary more than ten years ago and I don’t see myself moving back, but when we were visiting in early 2022 I finally dragged my family to the MHTRTC lookout for a photo:
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I love that you picked this one! It’s my favorite BoC album and I always feel weird about that, since it seems to be the least loved one. Probably because of that guitar presence. That photo is also lovely, what a cool thing to do as a family!
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Terje Rypdal / Miroslav Vitous / Jack DeJohnette
The first time I heard this album was an absolute revelation. One of those “where has this been my whole life?” moments. It transports me to another place and makes me feel like nothing else can.
It is a jazz trio (electric guitar, acoustic bass, and drums), but that description doesn’t capture it. The guitar will often go in an ambient direction, the bass is often bowed, the drumming is so sensitive (and the cymbals sound fantastic!). There is organ and electric piano at times, often droning away.
This album led me down a deep dive into ECM Records, but I was always chasing the sound/feel of this.
One of my most prized records.
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V.A. Chicano Power! - Latin Rock in the USA 1968-1976 (Soul Jazz Records)
I cannot overstate the significance of Stuart Baker’s Soul Jazz Records label for shaping my musical interests. I could have picked at least a dozen compilation albums in as many genres that opened my ears to styles I probably wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole, had it not been for Soul Jazz Records. To comply with the rules here, I picked just one and tried to steer clear of the potentially more obvious ones, such as the London Jazz Classics series. Similarly to my affection for Mo’ Wax, I used to buy Soul Jazz compilations on sight, because I knew whatever the style, I was going to be in for a treat and they never disappointed, most of them coming with extensive liner notes or even comprehensive booklets providing background.
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I didn’t try salsa dancing until I was in my 40s but I got bit by the bug pretty hard for a few years. I was about 40 years too late and about 5000 km too far east to be part of its heyday but the rhythms, the arrangements, the fact that a lot of the music played at salsa socials in the UK revolves around 70s and 80s records and I’m a child of the 70s and 80s - it all just felt right.
And after I’d lost the bug for the dancing I kept the bug for the rhythm and that’s what drove me in the direction of looking into timeline patterns, trying to write interesting interlocking rhythmical parts, and that led to the urge to program drum machines and that led me … here.
There’s all sorts of albums I could pick as “my favourite” - tbh I don’t really have one. But I need to choose one so I’ll choose Willie Colón & Ruben Blades - Siembra
It’s as good an introduction as you’re likely to get to the wide-wide made-up “genre” of salsa music.
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+1 for Willie Colón. I became aware of him through his balearic anthem “Set fire to me” and found out he was a frequent collaborator of Héctor Lavoe’s, who was Louie Vega’s uncle. Sadly enough, Willie Colón passed away in February.
Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, Rubén Blades, Roberto Roena, Ismael Rivera, Celia Cruz, Richie Ray, Bobby Cruz, Eddie Palmieri, the list goes on!
I really like the Roberto Roena y su Apollo Sound series of albums and Palmieri’s Vamonos pa’l monte is one of the best riffy tunes I can think of, Hawkwind notwithstanding.