Ok, yeah, this post is pretty stupid: but recently I was listening to Psychocandy at work and it was a little, well, “psycho,” for a lack of a better term — those sheaths and sheaths of unnecessary noise pollution in which they cloaked their still commendable songwriting can come off as just ridiculous, given not the right soundsystem. And sure, someday I’m going to run out of this “covers” material detritus I seem to be just milking like a dead cow (I almost immediately got postpartum depression after I put together that “Dolby’s Top 50 Cover Versions of All Time”… like… WANT MORE!)
It’s extra-appropriate too in a way because My Morning Jacket has a history of being a great cover band, not just by virtue of Jim James’ two covers albums but also for the fact that “Gideon” is basically just a cover of U2’s “One Tree Hill,” which yes I know I say a lot on this blog, but it can never be said enough.
By the way, I bet some day they’ll develop a computer program where you can like simulate what say My Morning Jacket would sound like covering Psychocandy in its entirety. Yeah, I can just see some nerdy dude explaining with astonishing emotional detachment how exactly to work that out via computer software. It’s almost a depressing development, but a development nonetheless.
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10 Talk Show
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Haha yeah… guess what decade I grew up in! I’ll give you a wild stab in the dark. Eh, “Peeling an Orange” still reminds me of the spring thaw after the first and only time I did acid, and the SOUND, being more important for this list, is there big time, Dave Coutts sounding gloriously Indian and “brown and red,” like being damaged is the only thing he’ll ever know. For the record, these guys had a little side project called the Stone Temple Pilots.
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9 R.E.M.
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Ok, we go from obscure to just slightly ubiquitous here, obviously, but given how the Southern boys did on Iggy Pop’s “Funtime” and The Troggs’ “Love is All around,” I’m sure they could handle some good ol’ simplistic Britpop, especially in all of its androgyny, as it were.
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8 The Dandy Warhols
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Speaking of androgyny, here are the kings, or queens, of it, depending on how you look at it… eh, I really wasn’t a huge fan of their recent “Femme Fatale” rendition in New York, but for this JMC project they just should keep it with Courtney Taylor-Taylor on vocals and see what happens. He’s got a great bohemian croon (obviously) and is the owner of many cool, railroad-strutting rockers under his belt already.
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7 Liz Phair
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Phair’s got one of those voices that, while so regular and tomboy-ish, has a way of kicking into gear and hitting those pitches with a fruit-juicy perfection just when it needs to, which is really called for here, what with all the melodic exactness. If anything, I’d worry about her sounding TOO genuine when she sang something like “Cut Dead.” Maybe each of these bands could just tackle one song at a time, or something.
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6 Wilco/Jeff Tweedy
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Oh God, we’re at the point in this list now where pretty much all of these bands would push midtempo jaunts like “The Hardest Walk” way up into transcendence and make it way better than even the JMC versions were. But then, Jeff Tweedy could sing the phone book and it would have that heartbreaking romantic tinge to it.
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5 My Morning Jacket
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The way I derived this exact band as owning to a spot on this list was basically just thinking, like, who is LIKE the Fleet Foxes, what vocalist just sounds like a maniacally gifted golden boy whose birthmark moles on his back probably spell out “Paste magazine”?
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4 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
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Now, of all these vocalists on this list, B.R.M.C.’s Peter Hayes probably SOUNDS most like Jim Reid, which should speed things along nicely, you would think. I came up with The Dandy Warhols ‘cause eh they were kind of like these guys, real bohemian, chic garage rock and cool… these guys? I just found ‘em on Craig’s List, actually.
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3 Dire Straits
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Would XTC make it big on this list of big boyz? I was thinking about it… I think Andy Partridge’s voice is just a little too WEIRD to cover other people’s tunes (I’ve never heard or heard OF them covering anything, although their own songs more than hold up)… but then in the way of British guitar arsenals of the late ‘70s, you could certainly do worse than these slinging pyrotechnics here. I could see them really jamming out “The Living End.”
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2 Surfer Blood
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“Taste of Cindy.” That’s all there is to it. These guys would knock it out of the park. I heard about Surfer Blood on cokemachineglow.com in about 2010 and have been in love with Astro Coast and its crisp indie-pop ever since.
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1 Fleet Foxes
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The Fleet Foxes, you would think, are certainly due to put out a covers album, the way Jim James, Yo La Tengo and Cat Power already have (all American indie mainstays), and like I said before, I was like, whoa Psychocandy, SIMMER DO’N NO’! Is The Jesus and Mary Chain better than The Stone Roses? It’s a valid question. I think I played them both back to back at work one day and to be honest NEITHER ONE really paid off — I think they both benefit from intimate listening scenarios like headphones, or vinyl, or both. The Stone Roses hewed out sublime, Beatles-influenced pop with celestial background vocals and they didn’t need that din of guitar feedback to give their music a fake machismo (which can strangely sort of hit the spot sometimes, like in car rides after work, say), but then, they arguably only made one great album, albeit one with some bona fide b-sides too like “Elephant Stone” and “Going down.”