But there’s little common ground between an aggressive electronic “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and a tender folk “I Want You.” The record is more a bunch of great cover-song fodder for mixes and playlists than a truly great and unified album. For example, we ranked MOJO Magazine’s Blonde on Blonde tribute pretty high this year because we liked just about every one of the Bob Dylan covers on offer. So we ranked the record – spoiler alert – at #20, sort of an honorable-mention position.Įven various-artist tributes comprised of uniformly good covers typically don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Many others were dreck, filler, or superfluous. Some of these Grateful Dead covers were so good they’ll appear on next week’s Best Cover Songs of 2016 list. Take the National-curated Day of the Dead, certainly this year’s highest-profile tribute album. Whereas even the best mixed-artist tribute records usually have one or two dud tracks. It is naturally easier for one artist, if he/she/they are good enough, to maintain consistent quality control over 10 or 15 tracks. This single-artist streak is no coincidence. But in all those lists, our number-one pick has been, without fail, a single-artist album (for those keeping score at home, we’ve awarded The Lemonheads, Peter Gabriel, Baaba Kulka, Neil Young and Crazyhorse, Xiu Xiu, Andrew Bird, and Bob Dylan – who didn’t turn up to accept our prize either).
That list usually ends up being a reasonably even mix of various-artist tributes and single-artist records.
We’ve done a Best Cover Albums list every year since 2009. Of course, it is dated, but, by imagining myself back all those 27 years, I find myself heartily disagreeing with those snarky scribes from Q.Ĭontinue reading » Cover Classics, Feature, In Defense Tagged with: Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Elvis Costello, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, Iggy Pop, Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Neil Young, Public Enemy, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Sly and the Family Stone, The Doors, The Temptations, The Velvet Underground Money well spent? Well, you know, actually, yes, it isn’t half as bad as I had been led to believe, and some of the tracks are really rather good.
Ordinary world metal cover plus#
So I got me a copy sent through, all of £3 plus p&p, which currently equates to about $3. I fully confess I had never listened to Thank You until researching this piece.
Today we’re thinking it about time this much derided potpourri of styles and statements had a good seeing to, via the retrospectroscope. At the time Rolling Stone described many of the selections as “stunningly wrong headed.” Ouch. The critics gave Thank You a fairly uniform hammering, with the legacy casting a long shadow over the rest of their career: Q magazine, in 2006, called it the worst record of all time, having had 11 years to make that considered opinion. The singles did less well, failing to make any stateside impression and only one of them bruising, just, their homeland top 20. To be fair, it didn’t actually fare that badly in the charts, reaching the top 20 in both the UK and the US. With Duran Duran about to be indicted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, what better time to re-examine Thank You, their eighth full-length offering, released in 1995 to a blaze of apathy.
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