At the risk of repeating myself, if you’re going to cover someone else’s song, then you need to bring something new to the table. Those who opt for faithful renditions of beloved songs are either deluded into thinking that they can improve on something already iconic, or they are merely riding the original artist’s coattails. Neither is a good look!
Cowboy Mouth certainly brings something new to the art of transforming a cover song, sitting somewhere between the country twang of Hayseed Dixie and the punk growl of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, they can go from rural hoedown to urban riot in ten songs, which is exactly what they do here. Which, for my money, is an excellent place thing to be able to do.
The recent singles lay out their sonic stall perfectly. Firstly, their take on The Replacements “Can’t Hardly Wait” sits perfectly between Minneapolis finest’s own raw live rendition and the later remastered brass and strings-driven version. And “Fat Bottomed Girls” relocates Queen’s sound from the inner city streets of West London to a rural porch jam session way south of the Mason-Dixon line.
There are some inspired transformations here, not least “Gipsys, Tramps and Thieves,” which retains the hallmarks of Cher’s beguiling and darkly emotive tale but pushes it into some grungier, more abrasive alt-rock territory. Although “My Way” seems to be a stalwart of many’s back catalog, there is something brilliantly endearing about the country-punk of the CW version, ebbing and flowing between shuffling acoustic and searing, fist-in-the-air, foot-on-the-monitor, heads-down, no-nonsense boogie anthems.
If, as I said at the outset, the art of doing covers is to bring something new to the table, in the case of Cowboy Mouth, to reappropriate and misquote a famous movie line…I think we’re gonna need a bigger table!
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