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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Mr Little Jeans covers Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

If you've ever listened to Guy Garvey's Finest Hour, you'll know that he has a segment called, "It was moider" which essentially involves him exposing the criminal act of bad musical covers. Every week he provides an example of a beautiful original song that has been criminally abused by a band trying to cover it. As the offending song starts to play, Guy always growls in his worst Brooklyn cop accent, "IT WAS MOIDER!" The worst offenders always tend to involve boy bands covering old soul numbers and it's usually at this point that I find myself wondering why we don't yet have a statutory death penalty provision that is applicable to all current and former boy bands members.

Anyway, if there were an opposite version of that segment, maybe this song would feature on it. Every now and then a band puts out an album that you think pretty much nails perfection. For me, Arcade Fire's The Suburbs was that album. So trying to cover perfection is, in my opinion, pretty ballsy! But the mellifluous strings and underwater sub give this song an extra sense of regret/sadness/nostalgia.

Every time I hear this song, I want to be back in my apartment in Paris, the lights down and the volume up, with a glass of red in my hand, as I watch the moon bounce off the sea of silvery-grey roofs from my sixth floor window.

Turn up the bass.

3 comments:

Mark said...

"Anyway, if there were an opposite version of that segment, maybe this song would feature on it."...it does exist and it's called 'Like A Version' and can be found here:
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/live/lav/
Cheers!

Mark said...

...oops! Looks like you're in Oz anyway and will probably know about 'Like A Version'.

James Pender said...

Do know like a version, Mark. Great stuff. Do you know if that is how this song made it onto triple j? Or was did it just start getting general airplay?