Labels: Bad Afro
Review by: Alex Deller
Cover songs are a dangerous game. Most likely you’ll fuck it up, regardless of how savvy your choices are and how arch your references. The life will be sucked from your heroes and render their works pallid, faceless blots that clog up your albums and fail to amuse your friends at parties. Once in a while you’ll make a fair stab of things that prompt the listener to dust off the originals and smile off some fond memories. And, in an infinitesimally small number of cases, you might actually cobble something together that rivals the original tune. But these cases are rarer than finding an original copy of Rats Revenge, and considering the Cramps couldn’t dust the original Primitive and Minor Threat play second fiddle to the Standells, no one really expects such feats on a regular basis.
Baby Woodrose try their hand at a whole album of the buggers and just about scrape the second tier. Their choices are sound, and their maulings of bands like the Saints and the 13th Floor Elevators are rarely savage enough to make me want to hunt them for sport. Exceptions, obviously, do occur: their Stooges and Sonics covers are abominable, and their lobotomised rendition of the Savages’ excellent The World Ain’t Round, It’s Square is fucked so ignobly that it hurts the brain to even think about it. However, at risk of damning Baby Woodrose with the faintest of praise, things could undeniably have been a lot worse. Rather than banishing them from my kingdom I’d still be reasonably interested in hearing what their own songs were like, or at the very least pass out at a party they throw and puke down the back of their sofa while they take turns to man the stereo.