Macha Loved Bedhead - "Believe"

There is real artistic vision at work when a musician hears Cher's "Believe" and thinks to himself rightly "I could do a great cover of that." Macha and Bedhead had the thought and executed the cover almost perfectly (maybe it could have been half the length).

The original is something like what would result if an automated phone service and a soulless record producer met at a seedy downtown bar, drank four old fashioned's each, made out and procreated.

The cover keeps the phone/electronics focus of the original but slows it way down, moves it from the gross oversaturated green night club scene, to a creaky sunbright bedroom. The vocoder is kept, but instead of sounding like a computer it sounds like an ancient quarter-inch tape recording left out in the rain and then played on a reel-to-reel with a precarious power supply.

Go here to make your own cover. I can't stop.

***

Smog - "Hit The Ground Running"

So, this is a weird one. Here's how it starts:

Pizzicato strings and a child staring straight at you singing exactly what's being plucked, "bum, bum, bum." There's something vaguely psychopathic about it. Then another kid steps out from behind the first. And a third kid from behind him. Hey, it's a grade three class unfolding from a single-file line, all singing the "bum, bums." Where's it going? You don't know. You don't even know how you got here in the first place. Then Bill Calahan (aka Smog) starts in. What does the bizarre man behind this circus have to say? "I had to leave the country, though there was some a nice folk there."

Mostly it's a straightforward 4/4 rock song, but sometimes it has a string section and sometimes a choir of children.

Don't be upset when he sings "I was born in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes/I was raised on cake." There's no reason to be upset by what is good.