Every once in awhile
as The Flaming Lips have
done now a couple times,
a musician or a band
decides to do a song by song
cover of one of their favorite
albums. I’ve had fantasies of
doing it myself, a fantasy that
will likely go unrealized. Dare
I confess? I’d like to do a song
by song cover of my favorite
album by the Monkees. I’ll
extend the fantasy, pretend
I am famous, and the company
Turntable Kitchen will ask me
to do it, better yet, will pay me to
do it, like they must have asked
and paid Ben Gibbard from Death Cab
for Cutie to cover one of his
favorite albums. What did he
choose? Not the Monkees, sadly,
but the 90’s Scottish power pop
sensation, Teenage Fanclub.
In his long career with Death Cab,
Benjamin Gibbard has stepped
away infrequently, maybe most
famously for his collaboration
with producer Jimmy Tamborello
for a thing called The Postal Service,
and then a few other times for
some solo ep’s and two albums,
the second of which was this
album, from 2017, a cover of the
album Bandwagonesque, a record
released originally in 1991 when
Ben Gibbard was 15 years old,
and I was 26. I bought that
Teenage Fanclub CD, liked it
because of the sweet melodies,
but didn’t care for the album’s
sonics–it was noisy with too much
guitar, the drums were kind of lo-fi,
the band was not really that great,
although (what do I know?) this album
stands out for a lot of people as a
masterpiece of its era, a highly
influential record. Obviously, Ben
Gibbard was influenced by it.
I debate about whether
to listen to Gibbard’s cover album
cold, or to listen to the original first.
I decide to give Teenage Fanclub
a spin. Not an unpleasant experience,
but it’s exactly how I remember it.
Good tunes. Kinda sleepy. Sloppy recording.
Grunge from across the pond.
They sound like they’re from Seattle,
but they’re from Scotland, remember.
Amazing, long before the internet was a thing
in everybody’s palm, how fast an esthetic
could spread. Did they get it from us,
or did we get it from them, or did it
spring up organically on both continents
simultaneously? In the end, even though
we pretended it was, grunge was not
really a new thing at all. It was really
just repackaged guitar rock with flannel,
a kind of pop, metal, hard rock hybrid.
Let’s see what Ben’s version
sounds like. Frankly, Mr. Shankly,
I like it better by a long shot.
There are keyboards. The guitars
jangle, don’t sound like buzz saws.
And Ben’s Kermit-like voice really
brings these melodies to the fore
where they belong. He’s pretty
faithful to the arrangements, even
that six and a half minute opener,
which he’s actually lengthened,
but sonically, this is clean and
goes down easy. “Satan” is still
pretty much “Satan,” but Ben cuts
at least 30 seconds off of Teenage
Fanclub’s one minute-thirty.
The poppiest songs on Bandwagonesque
sound like songs Ben could have
written for Death Cab for Cutie.
All in all, it’s a good match, and
this record, even though it’s a pretty
faithful rendering, and even though
it’s probably sacrilege to say,
is an improvement.
Notes on the vinyl edition: Benjamin Gibbard, Bandwagonesque, Turntable Kitchen Records, 2017, black vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing at least one, sometimes two or three long skinny poem-like-things in response for each artist, and on a few occasions, writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response to more than one artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 