PJ Harvey - Man-Size

 

#PJ Harvey #Polly Jean Harvey #alternative rock #art rock #indie rock #hard rock #punk blues #folk rock #avant-rock #lo-fi #singer-songwriter #1990s #music video

PJ Harvey, the acclaimed British musician, has built her career on thought-provoking and emotionally charged songs. Released in 1993 as part of her album “Rid of Me,” the track “Man-Size” stands out for its raw intensity and powerful lyrical content. This essay aims to delve into the meaning behind “Man-Size,” deciphering its themes, metaphors, and artistic nuances.

1. Unveiling the Lyrics and Overall Message
“Man-Size” presents itself as an exploration of gender roles and expectations, challenging societal norms and drawing attention to women’s struggles for autonomy and identity. Harvey’s lyrics navigate the complexities of modern femininity and the constant pressure to conform. The song tackles themes such as objectification, power dynamics, and the emotional toll of societal demands.

2. Dissecting the Symbolism
Harvey’s lyrics often carry symbolic elements, adding layers of meaning to her songs. In “Man-Size,” the repeated mention of “man-size” can be seen as a metaphor for both physical and metaphorical strength. It emphasizes the societal expectation for women to fit into a predetermined mold of masculinity and highlights the pressure to conform to masculine traits to gain recognition and respect.

3. Analyzing the Chorus
The chorus of “Man-Size” is particularly gripping, with Harvey passionately proclaiming, “I’m coming up man-size / I’ll rip the whole thing down.” This fiercely defiant statement signifies a resolve to break free from societal constraints and embrace one’s own identity without compromise. It resonates powerfully, echoing the struggles faced by individuals attempting to defy gender norms.

4. The Role of Raw Emotion
PJ Harvey is known for her emotionally charged performances and vulnerability in her music. In “Man-Size,” her raw vocals and intense delivery evoke a sense of urgency, amplifying the song’s themes. By allowing her emotions to shine through, Harvey emotionally connects with her audience, enhancing the impact of her message.

5. Socio-Political Commentary
Throughout her career, PJ Harvey has been highly regarded for incorporating socio-political commentary into her songs. “Man-Size” is no exception, as it addresses the feminist movement and stirs dialogue about the challenges women face in a patriarchal society. The song serves as a rallying cry for women struggling to find their place and assert their independence.

6. The Music’s Impact on the Message
The musical arrangement in “Man-Size” adds depth and intensity to the song’s meaning. The heavy guitar riffs and distorted soundscapes reflect the frustration and anger woven into the lyrics. This sonic backdrop serves as a driving force, mirroring the internal struggles addressed in the song and further amplifying its impact on the listener.

7. Historical Context
Considered within the context of its release, “Man-Size” emerged during the grunge and alternative music era of the early 1990s. It was a time of cultural exploration and challenging norms, making it the perfect stage for PJ Harvey’s provocative and thought-provoking music. The song’s themes resonated strongly with the evolving feminist movement and contributed to ongoing discussions surrounding gender equality.

8. Interpretations and Personal Experiences
As with any piece of art, the interpretation of “Man-Size” may vary from person to person. Listeners often project their personal experiences onto the lyrics, finding solace or inspiration within them. The song’s powerful themes can speak to a wide range of individuals, evoking conversations about gender roles and society’s expectations.

9. Critical Reception and Impact
Upon its release, “Man-Size” received critical acclaim for its boldness and socio-political commentary. Rolling Stone magazine hailed PJ Harvey’s work, stating, “Harvey’s fierce voice is fearlessness itself, her wrenching, instigatory rock & roll scrapes the soul to its core.” The song’s impact extends beyond its initial release, as it remains relevant and resonant, inspiring artists and listeners alike.

10. The Significance in PJ Harvey’s Discography
Within PJ Harvey’s extensive discography, “Man-Size” holds a significant place. It represents her dedication to addressing important societal issues through her music and showcases her growth as an artist. The song’s thematic complexity solidifies Harvey’s reputation as a thoughtful and evocative songwriter, furthering her artistic legacy.

11. Cover Versions and Collaborations
Over the years, “Man-Size” has been covered by various artists, showcasing its enduring relevance and impact within the music industry. The song’s powerful message has inspired collaborations as well, amplifying its reach and demonstrating its ability to transcend time and genre boundaries.

12. Global Impact and Social Awareness
The lasting significance of “Man-Size” lies in its ability to provoke conversations about gender roles and societal expectations on a global scale. Harvey’s fearless approach has contributed to raising social awareness, enabling individuals to critically examine their own perspectives and challenge the prevailing gender narratives.

From: https://oldtimemusic.com/the-meaning-behind-the-song-man-size-by-pj-harvey/

Electric Würms - Heart of the Sunrise

 #Electric Würms #Flaming Lips #psychedelic rock #progressive rock #neo-psychedelia #experimental #Yes cover

Flaming Lips fandom in the 21st-century requires agreeing to the terms of this transaction: in exchange for receiving a non-stop stream of new, consistently adventurous music from your favorite band, you have to put up with Wayne Coyne’s Instagram skeeziness, and all the #freaks hashtags, exclamation-point abuse, and Miley Cyrus tongue-wagging selfies that go with it. Seems like a fair enough trade-off, but even those fans who are most tolerant of Wayne’s social-media madcappery had to be thinking “really, dude?” last spring when some especially ill-advised photos led to accusations of racism, and the extremely acrimonious ousting of long-time Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock (the fallout from which continues to spread).
In light of this, the debut of the Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms couldn’t have come at a better time. By promoting redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reducing Coyne to background noisemaker (with Nashville psych-rock outfit Linear Downfall playing the role of an absent Michael Ivins), the new project effectively doubles as a form of damage control, redirecting our attention back to the ongoing evolution of what has been a remarkably productive and intriguingly unpredictable phase for the band. Even that Teutonic album title—which apparently translates as “music that’s hard to twerk to”—offers the guarantee of a Miley-free zone. Given that Drozd has long been the de facto musical director of the Flaming Lips, the Würms unsurprisingly stick to the post-Embryonic playbook, to the point where the new band name is practically immaterial, and Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk could just as easily be the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror. And when you consider how much Coyne’s voice was fused into the textural mist on that album, Drozd’s soft, childlike coo doesn’t have much opportunity to distinguish itself amid the shock-treatment synths, radio-static guitar fuzz, and stellar-drift drums. Oddly, for an album that cheekily presents itself as a long-lost ’70s prog cut-out bin artifact, Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk’s most notable characteristic may be its 29-minute brevity, offering a tasting-menu sampler of the various modes the Lips have been exploring for the past five years. It’s almost as if the Lips have formed a cover-band-medley version of themselves.
So in lieu of prog’s multi-sectional intricacy, each of the six tracks here lock into discrete themes, from the mirage-like space-age bachelor-pad smear of “Futuristic Hallucination” to the Live-Evil-era Miles (by way of Yoko Ono’s Fly) psych-funk shriek of “Transform!!!” However, these four-minute spurts are too free-ranging to establish a melodic logic, yet too steady in execution to achieve maximal freak-out potential; with its creeping rhythm, quavering vocal, and steampiped-synth exhaust, “The Bat” is very much sonically of a piece with The Terror, but feels insubstantial outside a similarly elaborate context. Ironically, focus arrives in the form of a cover of Yes’ hyrda-headed dinosaur-rock colossus “Heart of the Sunrise,” which simply lops off Vincent Gallo’s favorite build-up and the arpeggiated closing act and condenses it into a pure and simple four-minute star-gazing ballad, with Drozd doing an eerily spot-on Jon Anderson. (That said, the attempt at writing a modern-day Yes song—“I Could Only See Clouds”—is less satisfying, with a placid central melody that never fully adheres to the intrusive Howe/Squire-worthy contorto-riff.) But it’s not surprising that the Würms find their greatest success the further they venture from the Lips mothership and the longer they stay the course. With the Neu! hypno-rock pulse of “Living,” the band turn in both their headiest jam and most dramatic song, with Drozd’s ghostly voice sounding like a final transmission to mission control before he and Coyne thrust themselves into the coldest, darkest reaches of outer space—or, at the very least, somewhere with no smartphone reception.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19598-electric-wurms-musik-die-schwer-zu-twerk/

The Grip Weeds - Porpoise Song

 #The Grip Weeds #power pop #psychedelic rock #psychedelic pop rock #garage rock #indie rock #folk-pop #Monkees cover

The Grip Weeds are one of the foremost modern practitioners of the psychedelic rock, garage rock, and power pop genres. The music of this well-respected New Jersey band is strongly influenced by the mid to late 1960s sounds of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Buffalo Springfield. Since the band formed back in 1998, they’ve been captivating their fans with fantastic live performances and excellent discs such as 1994’s House of Vibes and 2015’s How I Won The War. The current lineup of the band features Kurt Reil on vocals, guitar, drums, and keyboards, Kristen Pinell Reil on guitars, percussion and vocals, Rick Reil on vocals, guitar and keyboards, and Dave DeSantis on bass. The Grip Weeds have just released their latest album, DiG, on JEM Records. It’s an outstanding disc, celebrating the garage rock and psychedelic era music that inspired the band. DiG includes classic songs from The Zombies, The Byrds, and The Monkees, but the album is also chock full of lesser-known (and equally memorable) tunes from bands such as Mouse and the Traps, The Gants, and The Nightcrawlers. The liner notes for the album are provided by Lenny Kaye, whose groundbreaking 1972 compilation Nuggets was one of the first retrospectives of the music of the garage rock and psychedelic era. I recently had an in-depth chat with founding member and producer Kurt Reil about the making of DiG.

Q: What was the genesis of DiG? Given the fact that your sound is deeply entrenched in the music of the 1960s, encompassing genres such as rock, pop, psychedelia, and garage rock, the songs on the album feel like a perfect fit for the band.

A: DiG is partly a discovery or re-discovery of our roots, and partly a way to get through a very difficult time during the pandemic. The album was something we found we could do as a band, and in some cases, work long distance because of the circumstances. We were planning to start a new record of original material, and we worked on a few things, but it quickly became apparent that we were actually having more fun playing the cover tunes we were messing around with, so we just shifted gears. It was just something we just found ourselves gravitating towards at the time.

Q: One of the things I love about the album is that you didn’t just pick familiar songs to cover. The selection of tunes is wonderfully eclectic. Even though there are some well-known songs like “Journey to the Center of the Mind” from The Amboy Dukes and “Lady Friend” by The Byrds, there are a number of tunes from less familiar garage rock bands such as “Lie, Beg Borrow and Steal” by Mouse and the Traps, and “I Wonder” by The Gants. Before the advent of CDs and internet radio shows like Little Steven’s Underground Garage, the only way to hear these records was on a vinyl compilation like Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets, or to search them out in places like used record stores.

A: We went pretty deep on DiG. When we started out as a band, we were excited by the songs that we hadn’t heard or that hadn’t been played to death. They were hard to find, and when we discovered them, we were saying “Wow! I can’t believe this record.” It was very exciting. Part of the DiG concept is the musical excavation of these nuggets or buried treasures. That’s what it was like for us in our early days when we would track down these records at flea markets or garage sales. When we started out in the late 1980s, these records were just gone. They had been forgotten by the industry because they’d had their run. They were really hard to come by, and CD re-issues of this kind of music hadn’t kicked in yet. What spurred on these garage bands to make music in the first place, was dreaming about becoming stars, because of The Beatles. We started out that way, too. That was the dream that The Beatles made possible. These groups, particularly the ones featured on Nuggets, were often teenagers, and in a lot of cases, they didn’t have much money. The bands would make a record in a local studio, they’d have some success, and their songs would take off for a while. Then they went on with their lives, and that was it. Those records are like time capsules of that era.

Q: One of the other cool things about the music of that era is that the “garage rock” bands actually wrote and recorded songs that encompassed a number of genres, including rock, pop, and soul. It wasn’t just one type of music, and that’s reflected by the songs on DiG.

A: These groups were looking at the charts and listening to the radio, and there were a lot of different kinds of music being played on “pop radio” back then. The garage bands were mirroring what they heard, so if what they heard was The Rolling Stones, they did a blues kind of thing, if it was The Beatles, they went for a pop or rock sound, and sometimes their inspiration came from other things, like Motown or vocal groups. We tried to accentuate that on DiG. One example is the song “Little Black Egg” which is included on the deluxe edition. The band used to play it in our early days, during our acoustic shows at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey. We wanted this version to have a really playful tone, so we pulled out a banjo and temple blocks to help give it that child-like vibe. One of our friends suggested Kristen should sing the lead because she has such an innocent-sounding voice. “Little Black Egg” was really fun to work on. Each song on the album has a particular significance and a story behind it.

From: https://www.culturesonar.com/the-grip-weeds-dig-some-cool-covers/

Fairport Convention - Suzanne

 #Fairport Convention #Sandy Denny #Ian Matthews #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #psychedelic folk rock #1960s #Leonard Cohen cover

Fairport Convention has long been British folk-rock with the emphasis on British and folk, but listeners most familiar with their revved-up interpretation of traditional English ballads (and like-minded originals) often forget that the band started out as the U.K.'s response to Jefferson Airplane. Heyday collects 12 performances (ten of them covers) recorded for the BBC during the early period when Sandy Denny and Ian Matthews were both singing for the group (and a bus accident had not yet taken the life of original drummer Martin Lamble). While most of the songs were written by noted American folk-rockers of the day, the Fairports put a very individual stamp on every selection here; if you don't think you ever need to hear another version of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" or Bob Dylan's "Percy's Song," you might well change your mind after hearing Fairport work their magic with them, and their takes on Joni Mitchell's "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and Gene Clark's "Tried So Hard" actually improve on the very worthy originals. Fairport Convention approaches these songs with taste, skill, and subtle but potent fire, and Richard Thompson was already growing into one of the most remarkable guitarists in British rock (and if you're of the opinion that he doesn't know how to be funny, check out his goofy double entendre duet with Sandy, "If It Feels Good, You Know It Can't Be Wrong"). While Fairport Convention would create their most lasting work with Liege and Leif and Full House, Heyday offers delightful proof that this band's talents (and influences) took many different directions, and it captures one of the band's better lineups in superb form.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/heyday-bbc-radio-sessions-1968-1969-mw0000201000

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that she will trust you
For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And then you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She's wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And then you know that you can trust her
For she's touched your perfect body with her mind

Baskery - With Every Heartbeat

 #Baskery #folk rock #Americana #contemporary folk #alt-country #banjo punk #music video #Robyn cover #Swedish

No matter where they go in the world, people tell the sisters that they’ve never heard or seen anything like it, that their sound is completely unique and that they perform with what seems to be an inexhaustible energy. That’s Baskery’s aim, to never stop surprising. The music is not to be confused with country or bluegrass just because the instrumentation involves a double bass, a six string banjo and acoustic guitar. They use their instruments in an unconventional way to create their very own genres: banjo punk, rock-hop and Nordicana.
The three sisters can’t recall when or why they started playing, the music’s always just been there. “Performing live has become the most natural thing to us”. That’s where the high energy level on stage hails from, a pure and reckless love for the art of performing music. In their late teens the sisters joined forces with their dad, who for decades was a one man band playing old blues and country tunes for a living. “Playing with dad was the best education we could have wished for. Performing in rowdy pubs and bars gave us the backbone that carries us through every imaginable situation one may come across in the music biz. It’s doesn’t get much more real than that.” This foundation of classic roots music and Americana settled in their hearts, but also awoke the urge of breaking the rules of traditional music. Baskery is a band built on what three people can do together and it’s all about turning the music on its head, blending the straightforwardness of punk with the subtlety of singer/songwriting.
Their first album, “Fall Among Thieves” (2008) was recorded in Stockholm, co-produced by Lasse Martén (Pink, Peter, Bjorn and John, Kelly Clarkson). “New Friends” (2011) the follow up, the band refer to as the “gypsy album” since it was mainly tracked on the road in various hotel rooms and band apartments, then mixed in Berlin by Blackpete (Depeche Mode, Joe Jackson, Peter Fox). As a contrast to the first two albums which took several months to make, the third one “Little Wild Life” was recorded during ten days in an old dance studio converted to a recording studio in former east Berlin, co-produced by Matt Wignall (Cold War Kids, J. Roddy Walston). All three albums received great acclaim in the press and were released in numerous countries. The releases in combination with relentless touring have given the band a reputation as one of the music scene’s most noticeable live acts.
From: https://ridefestival.com/artists/baskery/

Garbage - Thirteen

 #Garbage #alternative rock #electronic rock #industrial rock #trip-hop #industrial power pop #Alex Chilton cover

The name of the album was #1 Record, which was bitterly ironic, as it ended up selling under 10,000 copies upon its initial release in 1972. The name of the band, Big Star, also proved to be an unfortunate misnomer, because outside of critics and other musicians, they remained virtually anonymous during their brief time together. Despite all these negatives and contradictions, Big Star included on #1 Record one of the best ballads of the rock-and-roll era, the hauntingly yearning “Thirteen.” The title comes from the age of the narrator, and the song is one of the most accurate depictions of an era in life when the first pangs of romance arrive to simultaneously enthrall and torture.
On #1 Record, their debut album, Big Star wielded an impressive duo of singer-songwriters in the Memphis-raised pair Alex Chilton and Chris Bell. Chilton had already achieved chart success as a teenager with The Box Tops, displaying gritty vocals that were soulful beyond his years on a string of rhythm and blues-influenced singles. But when he joined up with Bell, a proponent of a combination of Byrdsy jangle and Beatles-y catchiness that would come to be known as power pop, Chilton changed his game. Bell and Chilton wanted to emulate the Lennon/McCartney formula as much as they could, so they shared credit on many of the songs on #1 Record even though there was in fact little writing collaboration between the two. “Thirteen,” for example, was entirely Chilton’s creation, and he also delivers the aching vocal that vacillates between hope and heartache and that many cover versions have tried to emulate but never quite matched.
“Thirteen” focuses on an age that is somewhat underrepresented in pop and rock music. Many have written songs about childhood, and, since rock and roll was born out of teenage rebellion, high school ages and upward are of course the focus of many a ditty. But Chilton finds that bittersweet spot in between when innocence still lingers but more complicated emotions start to work their way into the picture. Over tender acoustic guitars, Chilton begins with a question that thirteen-year-old boys have been asking thirteen-year-old girls for generations: “Won’t you let me walk you home from school?” “Won’ t you let me meet you at the pool?” he follows, again treading lightly so as not to scare her away. He eventually suggests a date at the dance on Friday; “And I’ll take you,” Chilton delicately sings, as if anything more forceful than a gentle plea will destroy his chances.
In the second verse, the narrator for the first time reveals an obstacle blocking the path to this girl for whom he is clearly falling hard, his modest queries notwithstanding. “Won’ t you tell your Dad get off my back?” he asks her. His response to the doubting father is brilliant: “Tell him what we said about ‘Paint It Black.’” By drawing a parallel between his own musical tastes and that of the father, he’s hoping to show that he’ s not just some punk kid with bad intentions, although doing that by name-dropping a song by The Rolling Stones, one of the most lascivious bands, might be defeating the purpose. And his next exhortation (“Come inside now, it’s okay/ And I’ll shake you”) shows that his intentions aren’t all that pure after all, the sexual hinting a gutty and honest move by Chilton.
The final verse finds him struggling as she remains both rigidly unknowable (“Won’t you tell me what you’re thinking of?”) and frustratingly proper (“Would you bean outlaw for my love?”) His concluding lines redeem him in terms of his integrity and honor, even as they suggest that he’s losing his opportunity with her in the process: “If it’s no then I can go / I won’t make you.” The final “Ooo-hoo” that Chilton utters is a real killer, tinged as it is with the sting of implied refusal.
From: https://americansongwriter.com/behind-the-song-thirteen-by-big-star/

Unveiling the new model of a machine that made its debut three years prior, alternative rock outfit Garbage polished the raw grind of their hazy first album with the sparkling digital sheen of 1998 sophomore effort Version 2.0. Emerging from the eerie trip-hop and bleak grunge of the critically acclaimed, multi-platinum Garbage, the quartet expanded their vision, going into overdrive with a futuristic sound that blended their inspirations both classic (the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Pretenders) and contemporary (Björk, Portishead, and the Prodigy). While Garbage retained the sleaze and effortless cool of their debut -- hinted on early tracks "As Heaven Is Wide" and "A Stroke of Luck" -- they infused Version 2.0 with deeper electronic layering, improved hooks, and an intimate lyrical focus courtesy of iconic vocalist Shirley Manson, who seized her place as the face and voice of the band with authority and confidence. On the propulsive "When I Grow Up" and the bittersweet "Special," Garbage took cues from '60s girl groups with "sha-la-la"s and stacked vocal harmonies, grounding them with a delivery inspired by Chrissie Hynde. Elsewhere, the hard techno edges of Curve and Björk cut through the frustrated "Dumb" and the lusty "Sleep Together," while Depeche Mode's Wild West years received tribute on the stomping "Wicked Ways." Beyond the blistering hit singles "I Think I'm Paranoid" and "Push It," Version 2.0 is also home to Garbage's most tender and heartbreaking moments, from the pensive "Medication" to the trip-hop-indebted "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing" and "You Look So Fine." Balanced and taut, Version 2.0 is a greatest-hits collection packaged as a regular album, not only a peak in Garbage's catalog, but one of the definitive releases of the late '90s.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/version-20-mw0000032128

Fairport Convention - Time Will Show The Wiser

 #Fairport Convention #Ian Matthews #Ashley Hutchings #Richard Thompson #folk rock #British folk rock #electric folk #British folk #psychedelic folk rock #1960s #music video

Fairport Convention’s wonderful performance from the French TV Show "Bouton Rouge" was broadcast live on 27 April 1968 and features the original Fairport Line up of Judy Dyble, Iain Matthews, Simon Nicol, Tyger Hutchings, Richard Thompson, and the late Martin Lamble playing Morning Glory, Time Will Show The Wiser and a simply awe-inspiring mind-melting performance of Reno, Nevada. At this time Fairport had just released their first album and were very influenced by American folk rock and psychedelic groups like Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan and The Byrds. The sound, look and name of the band led many to think that either they were an American band or at best just a British version of Jefferson Airplane. The star of the show is definitely Richard Thompson who is seen here in mega guitar hero role. After a fairly muscular solo in Morning Glory he delivers an astonishing perfectly paced 4 and a half minute six string marathon in Reno Nevada - so full of power, invention, imagination that the solo seems to run away with itself. Is Richard playing the guitar or is the guitar playing Richard? For the duration of this nearly 5 minute solo they are no longer the British Jefferson Airplane copying their heroes but arguably go beyond anything the Airplane, Grateful Dead or other San Francisco bands were doing in early '68 (although it must be said that the Dead would start to achieve similar high levels of  jazz inspired improv syncopation before the year was out but that is another story and post). And to top it all the band just look so damned cool. As the solo finishes Judy Dyble slowly gets up and wanders back to the microphone and the whole band just have a look of “Hey, this is nothing special. We are this shit hot every night.” After this performance they signed with Island Records, Judy Dyble left the band to be replaced by Sandy Denny and they went off to reinvent British folk rock.  From: http://strangerthanknown.blogspot.com/2013/01/fairport-convention-bouton-rouge.html

First Aid Kit - War Pigs

 #First Aid Kit #indie folk #Americana #country folk #folk rock #folk pop #singer-songwriter #Swedish #Black Sabbath cover #music video

You wouldn’t imagine that the mellow folky tones of First Aid Kit would pair well with the frenzied howling maelstrom of Black Sabbath. Sometimes defying convention is a thrill and music proves that time and time again. In fact, defying convention is something that First Aid Kit have had to do in their own usual field anyway. "We had a lot to prove, especially being in a genre that’s dominated by a certain type of man – you know, nerdy, bearded men listening to folk,” Klara Söderberg told The Telegraph. “We felt we had to prove we were serious about music and we weren’t just doing this because we thought it was trendy.” Her sister Johanna adds: “I felt there was a lot of sexism in that as well.” Thankfully, they persevered and have been offering up blissful music ever since, not least last year’s cracking album Palomino. Throughout their musical journey so far, they have remained defiant enough to venture into a range of genres and let their individualism and undoubted talent shine through.
That’s just as well when it comes to covering Black Sabbath because very few songs have the raw, mystic power that the anti-war juggernaut of ‘War Pigs’ contains. It is, in essence, an outcry. “Britain was on the verge of being brought into the Vietnam War,” Geezer Butler recalls, “there was protests in the street, all kinds of anti-Vietnam things going on. War is the real Satanism. Politicians are the real Satanists. That’s what I was trying to say.” The anthem remains one of the great opening tracks, blasting Paranoid off like the gunshot at the start of a race. Everything about the band was rough, tumble, and raw. Even their debut album was pieced together in a day, as Tony Iommi recalls, “We thought we have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing. So we played live. Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. We never had a second run of most of the stuff.” While Ozzy Osbourne’s thunderous screech is hard to match, the duo bring their own sense of power to it. As Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys once correctly identified, there is just something special about siblings harmonizing.  From: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/first-aid-kits-cover-black-sabbath-war-pigs/

The Dixie Chicks - Truth No. 2

 #The Dixie Chicks #country #bluegrass #country pop #contemporary country #country rock #Patty Griffin cover

As the summer of 2001 drew to a close, Natalie Maines invited her bandmates—the sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer—to play some bluegrass in her living room in Austin, Texas. They’d been off the road for a few years, and their plan was to hang out, catch up, and remember how good it feels to hear their voices blend in harmony, for no audience but each other. Earlier that year, they’d sued their label for withholding royalties from their first two blockbuster albums. In the years after, they’d find themselves in a righteous battle against the industry, leaving their future as a band uncertain. But for now, they were enjoying the most relaxed, unburdened creative experience of their lives.
It was Maguire on fiddle, Strayer on banjo and dobro, and Maines with a voice like a gut-punch. No amplifiers. No drums. One song Maines suggested they try was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” a classic rock staple that Stevie Nicks wrote at the age of 27. Maines, who had just turned 27 herself, found new resonance in its words after the birth of her first child and she thought she could hear her bandmates’ voices in its bittersweet sunshower of a melody. Also on the setlist were two songs written by the folk artist Patty Griffin. One was about speaking your mind in the face of public dissent; the other was about winding up on your deathbed with a long list of regrets.
They weren’t planning on making an album. And even if they were, because of the lawsuit, they figured they couldn’t release it anyway. As the music started coming together and Maines enlisted her father, behind-the-scenes steel guitar legend Lloyd Maines, to produce the sessions, they brainstormed a couple of strategies. After the surprise success of the bluegrass soundtrack to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they thought maybe these songs would be served best in a film. They contemplated going indie. They considered breaking the mold and sharing the music directly on their website for free, a way to thank the loyal audience they’d amassed as a major breakthrough act in the late ’90s.
The two songs written by Patty Griffin, one of the band’s formative influences, serve as the heart of the album. In “Truth No. 2,” Maines belts in her powerful soprano how “you don’t like the sound of the truth coming from my mouth.” Without the direct narrative of their previous anthems, they meditate instead on the moral of these stories. Maines would become well-known for making enemies by speaking her mind; “Truth No. 2” would become the centerpiece of their songbook. The other Griffin composition, “Top of the World,” finds Maines narrating from a haze between life and death, lamenting “a whole lot of singing that’s never gonna be heard.” The arrangement is the album’s most elaborate. Its orchestral swell is punctuated with dramatic pauses that stretch it out past the six-minute mark, as if the song itself is fading in and out of consciousness. It threatens a long, eerie quiet, an afterlife to be avoided at all costs.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dixie-chicks-home/

Halestorm - I Want You (She's So Heavy)

 #Halestorm #hard rock #heavy metal #alternative metal #post-grunge #Beatles cover

Lzzy Hale’s voice is immense. There is no other way to put it, she really does set the bar high and then vaults it with every performance. Halestorm are a fantastic live band, and great on record. They released their self-titled debut album around 18 months ago and it is well worth a look, however this review is about something more recent. After a live CD/DVD late last year, Halestorm have released ReAniMate: The Covers EP.  Six tracks which I can only assume are songs the band loved over the years, and surprisingly it’s six tracks which are very diverse and Halestorm make their own.
The final track on this EP is by The Beatles. Like other tracks here, it’s a lesser known cut by the band and it’s a very clever choice. Halestorm have taken Abbey Road’s ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ and, like the standard set by Motley Crue’s cover of ‘Helter Skelter’, they have very much made it their own. What the band have done here is show us just how ingenious The Beatles were; how ahead of their time and how cross-genre their songwriting was. This is a really strong, heavy and frankly ubiquitous rock song. Lzzy Hale’s vocal is shown off at it’s absolutely best here, reminiscent of the powerhouse live experience. The support from the band is stellar (as in fairness it is throughout the EP) and should make them proud. A future live-staple if ever there deserved to be one.  From: https://www.musicscramble.co.uk/2011/03/24/halestorm-reanimate-the-covers-ep-2011/ 

 Lyric writing was one of The Beatles' greatest strengths. John and Paul, especially, developed a knack for conveying a story that the average listener could easily relate to, many times within only a three minute framework. Witness “Yesterday” in which Paul simplistically expresses the immense heartbreak of abandonment, something almost everyone on the planet has experienced at one time or another. In “Help!,” John vividly relates the need for emotional support because of the uncertainty of life that we experience as we age. Even “I Am The Walrus” achieves greatness in its use of absurd wordplay purposely woven to confound listeners who look for deep meaning in their lyrics, these lyrics being sung convincingly as if there were indeed a mystery here to unravel when there really wasn't any.
Then, in 1969, John experiments with writing lyrics that convey deep emotion using hardly any words at all. Could this be done? In “I Want You (She's So Heavy),” a track that approaches eight minutes in length and is the longest song in the entire Beatles catalog (“Revolution 9” is nearly half a minute longer, but can arguably be viewed as more of a “sound collage” than an actual song), John tells a desperate story of his deep emotional feelings for his new love Yoko Ono using a total of only fifteen words!
To Rolling Stone magazine, John stated: “Simplicity is evident in 'She's So Heavy.' In fact a reviewer wrote: 'He seems to have lost his talent for lyrics; it's so simple and boring.' When it gets down to it, when you're drowning, you don't say, 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,' you just scream! In 'She's So Heavy,' I just sang, 'I want you, I want you so bad, she's so heavy, I want you,' like that” He has even stated his wish to compose a “perfect song” using only one word, not unlike Yoko's published poem of 1964 which consisted of only one word: 'Water.'
From: http://www.beatlesebooks.com/i-want-you

Two Minutes To Late Night - David Bowie's Station to Station Cover

 #Two Minutes To Late Night #bedroom covers #heavy metal #David Bowie cover #music video

During the past year, the virtual jam — wherein a group of artists each claim their own corner of a 16:9 YouTube screen to rock out in isolation, together — has become as ubiquitous as Zoom conference calls, online schooling, and any other pandemic-era activity. Pearl Jam did it for Covid relief. The Rolling Stones did it for Global Citizen. Metallica did it very quietly. But few virtual jams have been as relentlessly creative and consistently surprising — not to mention flat-out awesome — as the ones featured in metal-themed talk show Two Minutes to Late Night’s long-running Bedroom Covers series.
Want to see Primus bass master Les Claypool, Tool drummer Danny Carey, Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher, and Coheed and Cambria vocalist Claudio Sanchez, all avowed Rush fanatics, take on the beloved Canadian power trio’s 1975 classic, “Anthem”? Or Sleigh Bells vocalist Alexis Krauss lead a motley crew of artists through a metal-ized medley of Nineties Eurodance hits like Vengaboys’ “We Like to Party!” and Haddaway’s “What Is Love”? How about septuagenarian E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg slamming the skins on a furious cover of the Misfits’ hardcore punk rager “Earth A.D.,” alongside members of My Chemical Romance, Hatebreed, and Dillinger Escape Plan? Two Minutes to Late Night’s YouTube channel is the one and only place where these twisted musical fever dreams regularly become reality. As for the corpse-painted, suit-and-tie–wearing dude rocking out on guitar in his Brooklyn shoebox of an apartment in one corner of most of the clips? That’s Two Minutes to Late Night host Jordan Olds, a.k.a. “Gwarsenio Hall,” who’s also the co-creator, along with Drew Kaufman, of the whole endeavor. “We didn’t invent the cover song, or even the isolated performance,” Olds acknowledges to Rolling Stone. “But the way we do our covers and performances, I don’t think anybody else could do it quite the same.”
To be sure, Two Minutes to Late Night, which, true to its Iron Maiden–referencing name, first launched as a sort of mock headbanger-friendly version of Late Night With Conan O’Brien (“the most irreverent and the silliest of all the late night shows,” Olds says), is unlike anything else in the digital universe. Taping on the stage at Brooklyn heavy-music haven Saint Vitus Bar during the venue’s off hours, Olds and Kaufman, with the former hosting and the latter heading up cameras and production, released one eight-episode season that combined well-worn late-night tropes (Olds interviewing guests from behind a desk; a house band comprised of proggy power trio Mutoid Man) with some good old metal-style irreverence. The pilot episode alone featured a short in which Dillinger Escape Plan shredder Ben Weinman auditioned for the guitar slot in a female R&B act; a Name That Tune–esque game titled Squeal of Fortune; and on-the-scene reporting from outside Glenn Danzig’s house (“I’ve been standing here for six hours and I haven’t seen Danzig once — he may be on tour; he may be using the back door… we’ll never know”).
Season One of Two Minutes to Late Night wrapped in 2019, and not too long after — pre-pandemic, mind you — Olds and Kaufman came up with the idea of producing branded virtual jams. “The best part of the show to me was always the finale, where the guests would perform a cover song with us,” Olds says. “And so we finished the first season, but to be honest, it was hard to get a lot of guests in that format, because, for example, Chelsea Wolfe had wanted to be on the show for years, but to make that happen, it was like, ‘Well, are you free on this Tuesday and from 7 to 11 and in New York and not playing your own show?’ ” Doing virtual jams, he continues, “was a way to make some of these covers happen without having to figure out all the scheduling.”
The first Bedroom Cover, which filmed in January 2020 but premiered two months later, as schools and workplaces around the country were starting to go remote, saw Olds joined by members of Mutoid Man, Khemmis, and Thou for a thrashy version of “Dare to Be Stupid,” from the patron saint of music parodists, “Weird Al” Yankovic. “We thought it would be really funny for the first one out of the gate to be a really aggressive cover of a Weird Al song, given that he is, of course, one of our biggest inspirations,” Olds says. From there, things only got weirder: a sludge-metal version of Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years”; a stoner-goth take on Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” with Dillinger Escape Plan, Mutoid Man, and, on vocals (finally!) Chelsea Wolfe; and a ripping run-through of AC/DC’s “Riff Raff” with members of Clutch, Cave In, and Converge superimposed on plenty of ridiculous Australian imagery (an Outback Steakhouse; koala bears; Crocodile Dundee).
The Bedroom Covers initially served two purposes: to provide an outlet for Olds and Kaufman to continue producing new original content even as the world went into lockdown, and also to offer a bit of financial assistance to artists who, virtually overnight, watched their income dissipate as gigs were canceled and entire tours scrapped. “We still had our Patreon going, which was helping to fund regular Two Minutes content,” Olds says. “But then we started seeing our friends in bands and crews posting about how sad and distressed they were — they were coming off the road and they weren’t sure what they were going to do for money, and in some cases they had upcoming medical surgeries that they weren’t sure how they were going to pay for because they don’t have regular health insurance. Their entire way of life had been taken away. So we immediately shifted the Patreon from funding the Two Minutes to Late Night show to funding the Bedroom Covers, and we split the money from each video between the musicians and the audio mixers and everyone involved.”
From: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/two-minutes-to-late-night-bedroom-covers-interview-max-weinberg-1164120/

Fotheringay - Too Much Of Nothing

 #Fotheringay #Sandy Denny #Trevor Lucas #folk rock #British folk rock #singer-songwriter #ex-Fairport Convention #Bob Dylan cover #1970s #Beat-Club

Fotheringay was a short-lived British folk rock group, formed in 1970 by vocalist Sandy Denny on her departure from Fairport Convention. The band drew its name from Denny's 1968 composition "Fotheringay" about Fotheringhay Castle, in which Mary, Queen of Scots, had been imprisoned. The song originally appeared on the 1969 Fairport Convention album, What We Did on Our Holidays, Denny's first album with that group. The band expressed Denny's vision of the potential of folk rock to express complex meaning and deep personal emotion, using traditional ballad forms, but with the power of a rock band. Their self-titled first album was one of only two albums, as they broke up a year later, in January 1971, while working on their second (recently released). The rhythm section was formed by Gerry Conway and Pat Donaldson, lauded by Denny as the best in the business. In the absence of Richard Thompson - who was prepared to tour with her, and act as session musician, but wanted to follow his own career - lead guitar was taken by Jerry Donahue, whose transatlantic country roots and softer personality brought a different, less edgy feel to the music. However he was a skilled technician, with great feel, as he showed on their album, and later Fairport Convention records. The group was completed by rhythm guitarist and second lead vocalist Australian Trevor Lucas, whom Denny was to marry, and who also later accompanied her back into Fairport.  From: https://www.last.fm/music/Fotheringay/+wiki

Lisa Loeb - Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves

 #Lisa Loeb #alternative rock #pop rock #folk rock #singer-songwriter #1990s #Cher cover

Q: You’ve had some interesting covers, such as Cher’s hit, “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves.” Did you record the song because you like it or did someone bring it to you?

Lisa Loeb: That was one of my favorite songs from when I was growing up. There was a guy named Bob Kulich who puts together a lot of cover albums and he usually calls on heavy metal guitar players to do them.  A long time ago when I was dating Dweezil Zappa, he asked Dweezil to be a part of an Ozzy Osbourne covers album.  We both suggested that I sing “Goodbye To Romance,” which is an Ozzy Osbourne song. After a little bit of a fight Bob thought it was a good idea and I did this song with all these other great musicians playing on the track.  It was a really interesting experience and added variety to the album.  So Bob called on me to do some other covers.  When the Cher covers album came up, “Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves” was always one of my favorites.  It’s so mysterious sounding and dramatic, definitely not something I wouldn’t do myself, I don’t think.  I was so excited to have the opportunity to sing that song.

From: https://news.pollstar.com/2014/04/18/a-few-minutes-with-lisa-loeb/

Transylvania Stud - Burn the Witch

 #Transylvania Stud #Andrew Godfrey #stoner metal #stoner rock #doom metal #desert rock #one man band #The By Gods #Queens of the Stone Age cover

Originally a side-project, Andrew Godfrey has made Transylvania Stud his primary outlet for all things rock n’ roll. With the renaissance of classic heavy metal coming to a boil, there isn’t much room for hooks or pop sensibilities. But this is where Transylvania Stud blows the competitions’ doors in.  On this surprise release, Godfrey has teamed up with Nashville’s finest, The By Gods, for a blistering cover of the 2006 would-be classic from Queens Of The Stone Age, “Burn The Witch.” While the original had it’s roots firmly planted in gnarly blues-rock thanks to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, Godfrey and co. kick it up a notch, with an overall emphasis on groove and tension.  The music video for “Burn The Witch” is like a 1960s psychedelic reel of avant-garde horror imagery including (but not limited to) cemeteries, snake handlers, ominous cloaked figures, exorcisms, and of course, a witch!  From: https://www.50thirdand3rd.com/transylvania-stud-burn-the-witch-music-video/ 

 

Cellar Darling - The Prophet's Song

 #Cellar Darling #progressive metal #folk metal #folk rock #doom metal #Swiss #Queen cover

Cellar Darling are a three-piece Swiss progressive metal band from Winterthur and Lucerne, founded in 2016. The group was formed by Anna Murphy (vocals, hurdy-gurdy, flute), Merlin Sutter (drums) and Ivo Henzi (guitars and bass). Cellar Darling incorporates heavy metal, folk, classical, and progressive influences. Notably, the band uses a hurdy-gurdy and a transverse flute. The trio were previously part of the Swiss metal band Eluveitie.   From: https://musicbrainz.org/artist/8291df18-f05a-46ea-93dd-64f55d976ff2 

We want to unleash feelings and experiences by telling stories and drawing symbols, in the way mankind has done since its existence: through legends, folk tales, theatre, drama, spirituality - and through songs. We reinvent folk tales for our age as the very essence of what they once were: stories of everyday life. We may sing about the future, we may sing about the past - for essentially, they are the same. If you come to experience our show, you will not know what to expect. If days are bright, our performance shall be bright. If they are dark, it will be dark. In any case, we will tell you stories: those you’ve missed in a world where no bed time stories are told anymore, or those which have never been told before.

Cellar Darling was formed by Anna Murphy (vocals, hurdy-gurdy), Merlin Sutter (drums) and Ivo Henzi (guitars & bass) in the summer of 2016. The trio has previously been part of the core of Switzerland's most successful metal band to date, Eluveitie, touring the world in 45+ countries on 6 continents for over a decade, and forming a bond that could overcome any adversity.
Anna, Ivo & Merlin have turned the departure from their old band into a new beginning, and have moved on to make their own music, while continuing the spirit of musical innovation they have become known for. Cellar Darling’s music is an epic, theatric combination of Ivo’s grand, heavy riffs, Merlin’s energetic drumming, and Anna’s unique, both powerful and fragile voice. Their sound is shaped by the hurdy-gurdy, with its signature folky, earthy tones, and their lyrics tell stories and tales both old and new, true to the band's stated mission: the reinvention of folk tales for our modern age as the very essence of what they once were.   

From: https://www.heavymetal.ch/artists/3676/cellar-darling

Nina Hagen - Ziggy Stardust

 #Nina Hagen #new wave #Deutschrock #post-punk #synthpop #David Bowie cover #music video

Also known as the Godmother of Punk, Nina Hagen is a German singer and actress famous for her eccentric singing style and appearance. She has experimented with a vast number of different styles and genres throughout her career including reggae, punk, gospel, big band, swing and even Hindu devotional music.  From: https://www.sputnikmusic.com/bands/Nina-Hagen/44592/

‘I never said I am doing punk music. I never said I am a punk. They said that. I wanted to do rock music since I was 12 years old. It touched my heart to hear Tina Turner, the Beatles. And they were all my singing teachers because I made cassettes. And I sang along. And I wanted to make music like that.’ Born and raised in Berlin, East Germany, CBS Records signed Hagen in 1976 when she was 21. They knew she could sing ‘like a walking volcano,’ as she says, but they wanted her to learn live performance. So they gave her a lot of time and some money to go to London. ‘I saw all the punk bands and when I came back to Berlin I cut my hair short and made black lipstick’, Hagen says. ‘And then they said I’m a punk. I am an entertainer. I sing political cabaret and spiritual cabaret and I write songs about anything concerning life. So it’s just maybe one aspect of my art, punk art.’  From: https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/music/neo-classical-and-contemporary/nina-hagen/

Genitorturers - Touch Myself

 #Genitorturers #industrial metal #industrial rock #hardcore #electronic #hard rock #heavy metal #Divinyls cover

Led by outrageous frontwoman Gen, the Genitorturers are one of those bands far more well-known for their live shows and alternative lifestyles than for their music. Apparently the Genitorturer's live experience can include S&M, elaborate body piercings, sexual escapades, and who knows what else. As such, it's easy to focus on that aspect of the band and dismiss the music, and it might not be surprising if the music wasn't all that great, if that were the case. But on the contrary, the music is actually quite good, a catchy techno/electronic metal hybrid (a rough stab at their sound might be a cross between Rammstein and Marilyn Manson with female vocals) that is quite entertaining and effective. This is an odd band for a death metal bassist to end up in, but this is the precisely the case with David Vincent, formerly of Morbid Angel (though it makes somewhat more sense when one realizes that he is married to Gen). Quite the interesting band.  From: https://www.bnrmetal.com/v5/band/band/Geni

Susanna Hoffs - Feel Like Makin' Love

 #Susanna Hoffs #ex-Bangles #singer-songwriter #alternative rock #folk rock #pop rock #jangle pop #power pop #paisley pop #Bad Company cover #live music video

The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs will release a covers album, ‘Bright Lights’, on November 12, 2021 via Baroque Folk Records. On it she covers songs by Nick Drake, Syd Barrett, The Velvet Underground, Chris Bell, Prince (who wrote The Bangles' hit "Manic Monday"), The Monkees, and more. “The artists on Bright Lights approached songwriting from a deeply emotional place and with a profound sensitivity to the world around them,” says Hoffs. “Sadly, many of them died too young. I didn’t actually see the big picture of that until I looked at the whole tracklist. It was subconscious. Yet I’ve always been drawn to songs that were intensely emotional.” The first single from the album is a cover of Badfinger's "Name of the Game," which is a duet with Aimee Mann. ‘Bright Lights’ recalls the 1984 covers album credited to Rainy Day that was led by the late David Roback (of Rain Parade, Opal, and later Mazzy Star), and featured members of L.A.'s "Paisley Underground" scene, including Hoffs and members of The Three O'Clock, The Dream Syndicate and more, with their versions of songs by The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Big Star and more.  From: https://www.brooklynvegan.com/the-bangles-susanna-hoffs-preps-covers-lp-shares-badfinger-cover-ft-aimee-mann/

Black Sabbitch - War Pigs

 #Black Sabbitch #Black Sabbath tribute band #heavy metal #ex-Betty Blowtorch #music video

It’s not often that a band is born out of a name, but that was the case with Black Sabbitch. “We were just goofing around one night and someone said the name ‘Black Sabbitch,’ and we just thought, Maybe we should do that,” Black Sabbitch drummer Angie Scarpa explained. “I’m a freak for Sabbath - a complete and utter lunatic about Black Sabbath. So I said if you guys want to do this, why don’t we get together and play?” The band’s initial core was Scarpa and Betty Blowtorch guitarist Blare N. Bitch. They soon recruited Scarpa’s Art of Safecracking bandmate Melanie Makaiwi to play bass, and eventually found a vocalist in an actual Ozzfest vet - Aimee Echo from the Human Waste Project. This “all-female Black Sabbath” (don’t call them a tribute!) prides itself on the players’ roots in original bands. They don’t get together once or twice a year, practice a 45-minute set and play it the next week. Scarpa’s goal was to nail the experience to the extent that she felt like a member of Sabbath. “For me, since I am such a huge fan of the band, I didn’t want to do it unless it was going to be spot-on, but not in a boring ‘We sound like their record way.’ More in a ‘This is what it would have been like to see Black Sabbath in 1972. I really wanted to be able to have that experience for myself,” Scarpa said. Evidence of their quality lies in the fact that Ozzy asked the band to open a show for him last year.  From: https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2016/nov/23/blurt-dont-call-black-sabbitch-tribute/

Vanilla Fudge - You Keep Me Hangin' On

 #Vanilla Fudge #psychedelic rock #heavy psych #acid rock #hard rock #proto-metal #Supremes cover #1960s

It's fair to say nobody had heard anything quite like Vanilla Fudge when the band burst onto the scene in August 1967 with their cover of The Supremes’ hit You Keep Me Hangin’ On. In contrast to The Supremes’ sparkling, syncopated rhythms propelling the song at a gallop, the Fudge version begins with a single organ note that appears to be struggling to hold its pitch against unseen forces. Gradually, the note is joined by other notes – it would be stretching things to call it a chord - which are also being buffeted by the elements. Just as you’re beginning to wonder whether it may be some musical code trying to tell you something - a bit like that sequence in Close Encounters - what sounds like the noise of a drumstick splintering against a hi-hat jolts your senses, and suddenly you’re engulfed in a clattering musical cacophony that finally erupts into the classic You Keep Me Hangin’ On riff. Except that it’s played at a quarter of the speed and with a fearsome, heavyweight, pile-driving intensity. The vocals come in at the same crawling tempo, and the singer is clearly desperate to keep hangin’ on. Indeed when he gets to that throwaway line in the original "And there ain’t nothing I can do about it", he sounds like he’s in the throes of a full-scale nervous breakdown. After he’s finished pleading for release - “Set me free why don’t you babe" - the instrumental introduction is repeated, except this time the riff gets a bludgeoning quality that threatens grievous aural harm, before a sweeping organ cadence brings sudden, and merciful, relief.  From: https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5067836177008380097/612365453995572163