For Record Store Day 2011, awesome Brooklyn-based imprint Captured Tracks recruited two of their more notable bands —jangle-pop twin-spirits Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing— to cover a pair of songs by twee-ish post-punk cult act The Wake, a Scottish act from the '80s whose legacy has yet to match the goodness of their records.This year came the sequel, with sweet sentimentalists Craft Spells (who've just released the glorious Gallery EP, one of the year's best mid-length platters) and washed-out dream-pop dreamers Blouse halving the split-seven-inch tribute.
The highpoints of Blouse's impressive self-titled debut came when the pop-hooks, big melodies, and decaying '80s-revivalist synths suggested greater retrofuturist/digimodernist themes (see: "Time Travel," "Videotapes," "Fountain In Rewind"). Their take on "Pale Spectre" doesn't hit those same conceptual/melodic/meaningful heights, instead fashioning a sonically-complex cover-version that, more than anything, has a tired, melancholy prettiness to it.
The cover seems to suit the ghostly, terror-etched lyrics better than the original, which barreled along with new-wave synths and a cute Carolyn Allen vocal that proved plenty incongruous to its text's tales of a tortured wraith "tearing its flesh with demented glee." Here, when Blouse's Charlie Hilton sings "sha-la-la-la," it sounds, suitably enough, etched with ironic doom.
Blouse, "Pale Spectre"
No comments:
Post a Comment