There are very few people I’d trust to cover a classic song. Most either try to do something totally new with it, which levels accusations by existing fans of thinking you can improve on the original, or they stay so faithful to it that you would be justified in asking them why they bothered. The art is to bring something new to the table without alienating existing fans. It’s a challenging task, and you’ll never be able to keep everyone happy. But then, that isn’t why we make music, or at least it shouldn’t be.
And if there’s one sacred cow in the canon, for me at least, it’s Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights”. A song so singular, so original, you’d need to walk an fine line between those camps. As her alter ego Marzanna, Marianne Nowottny takes the song, vocally at least, into a more avant-garde place, pulling it into a dark, Germanic register reminiscent of the one and only Nico, essentially the opposite end of the vocal spectrum from Our Beloved Kate (a title that suits her position in music royalty.) It makes for an intriguing journey.
But one song does not an album make, and of course, such things are as much about the songs you select as what you do with them.
Not many people would rework Klaus Nomi’s take on Henry Purcell’s “The Cold Song,” but somehow the mad (in a good way), staccato beats and operatic vocals feel a perfect for her to play. “Michelle” reinvents The Beatles as a baroque ‘n’ roll band, (geddit?) “Stella Maris” becomes a brooding, gothic sea shanty, and perhaps only Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” feels, to some degree, recognisable.
But recognizable isn’t Marzanna’s style. This is an album of artistic reinvention. It is an album that reminds us that songs, even iconic ones, are just one small part of a bigger story, and it is the duty of other artists to breathe new life into them and take them places that their writer never intended for them to go. Isn’t that how music moves on?
It’s a challenging record, for sure, and again, I mean that in a good way. Not everyone will get it; some of the music here does indeed take a few spins to warm to. And if you are too precious about your favourite songs, you will miss just how adventurous, how rewarding, how forward-thinking, these reimaginations are. As young David Bowie once told us, “ turn and face the strange,”, and who is going to argue with such a musical diety? Not I.
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