Sunday Music

Time for some more Sunday music. Just the three songs today, but I think they pack in enough quality to make up for the lack of quantity.

Let's start with a cover. First, a bit of Velvet Underground history. The band were signed with Verve and released their first two albums (The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat). They then moved to MGM, Verve's parent company, and released a third album (The Velvet Underground) in 1969. MGM were going through some financial troubles and released The Velvet Underground from their contracts. (This would be much easier to follow without all the eponymous records, I'm sorry). The band then signed with Atlantic and released Loaded. However between the release of the album The Velvet Underground and the band's release from their contract with MGM they had recorded 19 tracks, the so called Lost Album. Verve eventually (in 1985) released most of these tracks on what was essentially another eponymous album, VU. One of the tracks on VU is Temptation Inside Your Heart. The song is recorded in a much more light hearted, traditional rock and roll style than is common for The Velvet Underground. This cover bu the Crystal Stilts sounds much more like a Velvet Underground song. A band reimagining a covered song and making it sound more like the sound of the original band than it was at the start is unusual enough for me to include it here. And of course, it's really good.

A few recent conversations with a good friend have led to me re-listening to a lot of Tricky lately. It's not that I'd forgotten that his music was good, more that I'd forgotten just how good it is and how much of it he's released. Expect to see a lot of Tricky showing up on the blog in forthcoming posts as I go through his discography. For today here are a couple of live performances from his debut album Maxinquaye. If you do not have this album in your collection you are missing out and you should remedy that as soon as possible. First up, Hell Is Round The Corner from Glastonbury's jazz stage in 1995:

This is Overcome. Tricky co-wrote Karmacoma with Massive Attack, Overcome is his own version of the song: