Playlouder - Music is the Network

Albums of covers seem to be all the rage at the moment, Cat Power having lead the charge, and the likes of Scarlett Johanssen and fey folkers Vetiver recently following suit. Check out the back of leading folk-tronica (it sounds like you think it does) exponent Adem’s latest, Takes, and it reads like a mixtape. A particularly good mixtape, one I’d be happy to receive and would actually listen to often, covering as it does the fertile musical decade that was the 90s, formative years for myself and the compiler. 

The difference being of course, that Adem has actually covered all the songs himself using his multi-instrumentalist skills to re-build them from the ground up. Perhaps he really needed to impress a girl, and the usual thematics and artwork tricks wouldn’t have cut it. This is a dangerous game however, for while the songs by the likes of PJ Harvey, Yo La Tengo, and Tortoise may not have had the cultural resonance of, say The Beatles’ oeuvre, for those of us of a particular musical persuasion who grew up through this era, a duff or cynical cover of these classic tracks that indeed may have appeared on a cassette handed to you by an eye-linered friend over a bottle of cheap cider, biro scrawled soundtrack and all, would have a far more negative impact than yet another rehashing of the classic rock canon. Generally Adem pulls it off, but then he picks some great tracks

It becomes clear the album works best when he picks the songs that play to his strengths, and also when he keeps it pretty simple and doesn’t try to over-embellish or compete with the original. The cover of dEUS’s Hotel Lounge pays due homage but creates something new and very Adem, acoustic and light but with a meaningful punch. Same with the Smashing Pumpkins cover Starla, a guitar strum that builds to a glockenspiel crescendo, managing to keep the wide-eyed Billy Corgan vocals and feel intact without, mercifully, attempting to imitate the genius control freak's trademark nasal whine. On the other hand, a cover of PJ Harvey’s strident Oh My Lover doesn’t quite find Adem’s plaintive vocal style up to the task, and the Aphex Twin re-working seems more like an exercise in “check out my free-wheeling musical inventiveness!”, than a particuarly good song. The stripped-down version of Low's Laser Beam at the end is equally ill advised, feeling tacked-on and too similar and therefore inferior to the shimmering original to resonate.

A release like this begs the question- would it be more enjoyable to just make a compilation of the original tracks and listen to that? The first couple of listens through I thought so, finding Adem’s style too weak, dangerously coffee-table. Tracks like Loro by Pinback and the Bedhead best-of were too similar to the (admittedly awesome) orginals, adding nothing but a kind of organic, free-range, acoustic guitar folksy Nice-ness. "These are some of my favourite bands you are tampering with in your smug organic style, Adem!" I didn't exclaim, shaking my fist at the speakers. But once the critical faculty and the inevitable instinct to compare have been sated, the nice-ness does its terrible mellow work and I feel the album as a whole flowing by enjoyably well, an updated blast from the past that gives you that familiar nostalgia but also room to hang new memories upon.