Influences firmly on sleeve
The Wildhearts return with an album of cover versions where they basically take a bunch of songs they like and make them sound like they wrote them! The Wildhearts themselves have a pretty distinctive sound and songs like the Icicle Works ‘Understanding Jane’ lend themselves perfectly to their style.
What’s good about this album is that they haven’t gone for really obvious covers in most cases, even members of the band hadn’t heard some of the songs before they recorded them! In some instances this will probably encourage you to go out and find the original (‘AC Rocket’ by Foil being a perfect example), others perhaps not. As an album in it’s own right it’s a bit patchy, purely because of the different styles on offer, it doesn’t really flow and feels like they haven’t put a huge amount of effort into it. There are some fine moments but it doesn’t all work and from the sleeve notes they clearly knew that tackling such an iconic song as Fugazi’s ‘Waiting Room’ was a tall order. They don’t do it badly by any means but it sounds the way you’d expect it to sound if pretty much anyone else attempted to cover it.
By way of comparison The Distillers ‘The World Comes Tumblin’ is great, they manage to capture the energy of the original and it works well with Ginger’s voice substituting for Brody Dalle. The whole band get the chance to provide vocals and whilst this makes it interesting it also contributes to it feeling like a collection of individual songs rather than an album (which I suppose it is!). Drummer Ritch gets his chance on one of the surprise inclusions, The Super Furry Animals ‘Ice Hockey Hair’ and does a fine job. Again they manage to retain the feel of the original whilst putting their own stamp on it. Other highlights come with The Descendents ‘Pep Talk’, Warren Zevon’s ‘Carmelita’ and ‘Rearrange You’, originally by Baby Chaos. By and large this feels like a rehearsal, just a good old thrash through other peoples songs before you get down to the real business in hand.
This isn’t essential Wildhearts listening but it’s good fun and there are enough highlights on it to make it worthwhile whilst we wait for the next ‘proper’ album.