Covers for Sunday

And this brings us up to date.

Oh My God by Lily Allen and Mark Ronson (originally by Kaiser Chiefs). I came across this earlier today on Hype machine. Lily Allen's vocals are good, even if I don't normally enjoy listening to her singing, and Mark Ronson's omnipresent horns are as good as usual. Everything a cover should be, even if I'm not quite sure if I like it or not.

Personal Jesus by Lisa Hannigan (originally by Depeche Mode). This is just phenomenal. I'd have never thought this song would work with the dulcimer as the main instrument, shows how little I know.

All My Friends by Franz Ferdinand (originally by LCD Soundsystem). This came up on shuffle on my mp3 player on the way to Mass. I took the bus this week so I could have an extra 10 minutes in bed. I think I have more covers of all my friends than any other song. If I remember I'll post them all next week.

Take On Me by A.C. Newman (originally by A-Ha). Just a lovely cover, well worth listening to regardless of your feelings about the original.

Jigsaw Falling Into Place by Stingray Music (originally by Radiohead). When I was really young Stingray was my favourite Gerry Anderson series, but then as I started secondary school and they started rerunning Captain Scarlet I grew to like that more. I mention this because there's no point me describing the cover of Radiohead. You're either going to download it or not, and nothing I say will change your mind. I don't know why its like this with Radiohead, but it is.

Hotel Yorba by The Pistol Whippin' Party Penguins. A bluegrass cover by possibly the best named band ever.

Enjoy the music.

Uncovered on Sunday

I'm late with this post for no good reason at all. There's no good reason at all why I haven't posted anything this week either. No increasingly heavy workload or shortness of time. There's not even a lack of anything to post about, I've had something in mind to blog about all week. That'll have to wait until next week when hopefully I'll be free of reasonless procrastination.

Push & Pull by Nikka Costa. She's got a really good voice, but this isn't the sort of song that holds my attention.

For Real by Okkervil River. I chose this particular track because my daughter says 'for real' to me all the time if she's not sure if I'm joking or not.

Still A World Away by The Popguns

There Are No Goodbyes by Sophia

Modern Way by Kaiser Chiefs. This reminds me of beating Leeds United 3-0 at Elland Road on a night when Graham Kavanagh ran the game. Happy days/evenings indeed.

Sam and Mona (the preacher and the teacher) stream by David Potts-Dupre. You can stream this and all the tracks from the album The Preacher and The Teacher here and download the full album/individual tracks here. There are links on the website to a couple of other places you can buy the cd from, or you can download it from Itunes.

Covers for Sunday will be up sometime later today as well.

Covers for Sunday

For no real reason this week we're having Beatles covers for Sunday. That's six covers of Beatles songs, not six covers by The Beatles.

There are lots and lots of Beatles covers and narrowing them down has been difficult. I've had to leave some of my favourite covers out and I'm sure these won't be the six covers you would choose either. I've tried to choose a mix of less well known covers instead of the ones everyone has heard before. Except for Hey Jude, I couldn't help myself, I had to post that. It has one of the best guitar solos, courtesy of Duane Allman. I hope you enjoy them.

For No One by Peter Mulvey feat. Anita Suhanin

Hey Jude by Wilson Pickett feat. Duane Allman

I'll Be Back by Elliott Smith

You've Got To Hide Your Love Away by Eddie Vedder

Come Together by Kirsty Rock

Eleanor Rigby by Butch Ross

Uncovered on Friday

1972 Bronze Medalist by The Bad Plus. I like to think this song is about Vladimir Dzurilla, although I'm certain it isn't. Apparantly his day job was fridge repairman. Between Thought and Expression, your source for pointless Cold War ere hockey player trivia.
This song was composed by Dave King who has his first solo album out soon. You can listen to a stream of one of the tracks here.

Gimme Sympathy (acoustic version) by Metric. Easily the best band to be named after a system of measurement.

Written In Reverse (live) by Spoon. I'd love it if Spoon would just record a full album of Kinks covers. Actually, a double album. Not that there own albums are in anyway bad.

Johnny Guitar by Grant Lee Phillips. From the album Strangelet. A strangelet is a group of different types of quarks. There are six types of quarks. up, down, strange and I can't remember the others. These types are called flavours. All of which confirms, physicists are terrible at anming things.

The Dark of the Matinée (live) by Franz Ferdinand. I listened to this album a lot in 2004 when I was recovering from really bad pneumonia. It has lovely memories for me, just listening to it and slowly getting better, it always cheers me up.

Angel Interceptor by Ash. I've never been a huge fan, but this and Oh Yeah were huge songs when I was at college. Probably the best song with a Captain Scarlet reference.

Kid 17

You've probably all heard about this, even if you haven't heard it. In case you haven't Kid 17 is all the tracks from Kid A. Each track is played twice, the second one with a 17 second delay. It sounds awful, but in general it works pretty well.

I'm not going to go into huge detail here about the backstory, if you're interested enough and don't already know about it there's plenty available via Google.

Radiohead's music is pretty subjective, lots of people love them but people who dislike them tend to really dislike them, I haven't met many music fans with no real opinion on them. Obviously something like Kid 17 is even more subjective. The tracks that some people like are disliked by others. So listen for yourself and see what you like.

And lastly, if you're wondering why I'm offering something that has been around for a while and is fairly well known its because I've seen very few places offer the full album. So here it is, track by track or with a full album download at the end.


Everything In Its Right Place There's a really long silent pause at the end of this track for some reason.

Kid A

The National Anthem Personally I think this is the best track on the album by far. The 17 second version works so well, especially the jazz playing instrumental section towards the end which is exquisite. The first time I heard this was like the first time I saw any of Paul Rooney's art (Flat 23 if you're interested).

How To Disappear Completely Another very good mix.

Treefingers This syncs probably better than any other track, it is seamless.

Optimistic This is to my ears the worst song, the vocals clash and jar instead of complementing like the other tracks.

In Limbo

Idioteque Another one of the best mixes here.

Morning Bell

Motion Picture Soundtrack

Full album zip file.

Covers for Sunday

It appears I may have somewhat hastily promised all those who read this post wit. Ah well, I hope you won't be too disappointed. After all, there's always the music.

Home I'll Never Be by The Low Anthem (originally by Tom Waits). Oh My God, Charlie Darwin is one of my favourite album titles of the last couple of years. The music is pretty good as well.

Bluish by Sondre Lercher (originally by Animal Collective). Bluish is my favourite track from Merriweather Post Pavilion which is also one of my favourite albums from 2009. Some time towards the end of this month, start of next month, I may post a best of 2009 list. We'll have to see. Anyway, this cover is very different from the original and, of course, isn't anywhere near as good. However that's mainly due to how good the original is, this is still a good recording and well worth a listen.

Proud Mary by Bruce Lash (originally by Creedence Clearwater Revival). From the album Prozak for Lovers, which I think pretty much sums up the laid back nature of this cover. This is the third time a CCR song has been covered in this blog, the others were by the Foo Fighters and M Ward.

Let's Dance by M Ward (originally by David Bowie). See what I did there?

Take Me Out by Guillemots (originally by Franz Ferdinand). An almost schizophrenic cover, very different from the original and very good. They're a good band, it's a shame they've never really broken through into commercial success the way it looked like they would in 2007. Hopefully they'll release a third album this year and gain some. It's also a shame they persist of spelling there name gUiLLeMoTs.

Run To You by Malcolm Middleton & The Hold Steady. This song came on my mp3 player on my way back from Mass today, the first time I'd ever heard it. Of course it had to go in todays Covers post. I'm glad I don't do Covers for Wednesday, because I'd have forgotten all about it by then, and it is far too good a song to forget.

That's it for this week, enjoy your covers.

Uncovered on Saturday

It's technically Sunday morning here so this is a short post. You'll just have to come back tomorrow/later today for Covers for Sunday to read the full flow of my wit.


Sleep Alone by Bats For Lashes

Red Sails by Custom Kings

Mari Mac by Great Big Sea. Technically this isn't an original. It's based on a Scottish folk song, but I think it's different enough, and more importantly good enough, to be included here.

Long Road To Ruin by Foo Fighters. This nearly was chosen for my post Some family music but lost out to The Pretender, so it was the natural choice to put here.

You and Me and The Ten Thousand Things by Peter Mulvey. It's been a while since I posted anything by Peter Mulvey. If you don't own anything by him yet you must do fix that, you are doing yourself and your music collection a huge disservice.