Beck and some of his more illustrious musician friends have come up with an ambitious plan to choose a record from their collection, and cover it in its entirety in a single day, releasing the results one track at a time.
The first album chosen in The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico'
So with all the pieces assembled, Beck and his merry band faced a fork in the road: straightforward covers, or complete reworkings? Perhaps unsatisfyingly, they choose neither: "Sunday Morning" suggests faithfulness will be the move, with a sleepy cello-enhanced arrangement that is a passable forgery of the original. Here, and elsewhere, Beck's Codeine head-cold voice is a passable replacement for Lou Reed, nailing the opiate haze if not quite reaching the snide pathos underneath.
"Waiting For the Man" is where the Record Club starts to diverge from the source material, and here it's not for the best. Rather than being the taut, paranoid shuffle a song about waiting for your drug dealer really should be, Beck & co. make it a ramshackle hootenanny, the approach being "everybody grab the nearest instrument and vamp." Unfortunately, that seemed to be the instructions for most of VU & Nico's epic drones, "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin", and "European Son" all losing their edge in overly busy arrangements and carrying a noticeable John Cale-shaped hole. "Heroin", in particular, is a trainwreck, with Brian Lebarton forgetting the words and screaming his way through the peaks, completely missing the seething calm that is so disarming about Reed's addict on the original (his little chuckle gets me every time).
But not all the makeovers are a downgrade. In the middle of the record, "Run Run Run" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" get electro-pop treatments that shouldn't work on paper, but do. The original "Run Run Run" always struck me as a jammy toss-off anyhow, and it's much improved by a simple drum loop and video-game rubber bass. The legendary "All Tomorrow's Parties" might be a harder sell, but with Magnusdottir doing Nico's ESL thing and space-y details that are pocket-Godrich, it's a gorgeous re-imagining.
The project's other score is maybe its humblest, a simple, delicate "I'll Be Your Mirror" that is as reverent as it is pitch-perfect. For all the Velvets' rep as the big scary black leather bondage and hard drugs band, it's a nice reminder that Reed could write an adorable pop song when he wanted, even if the "reflect what you are" backing vocals on the outro always creeped me. Less subversive creepiness here, but I maybe even (gasp) prefer the cover.
