It’s time for the return of Version Control, the occasional gathering of music as interpreted by someone other than the artists that wrote the song or made it famous. You know, covers. After the notorious Cover Drought of 2023, we have a full episode of covers ranging from the obscure to the revolutionary.
All hail new royalty King Hannah and their studious and efficient delivery.
Mestizo Beat is cooking with lots of spices and high heat.
Some of us are lucky. Some of us get to sit in a comfortable broadcasting studio and play Orville Peck, while others are hacking their way through a couple of gloomstalkers with nothing but the barely-magical weaponry a fifth-level figher can afford.
It doesn’t get more mid-century Goth than The Raveonettes picking up on the Velvet Underground’s “Venus In Furs”. Besides that, the tenor of the night tended to lean towards the acoustic, with a handful of sets exploring the pluckier side of things.
Behold, a special collection of songs about individual states in the United States of America!
I can’t say if this is the first time I’ve had a radio show on Independence Day, but it is the first time I’ve prepared something special for the occasion. Presenting Affairs of State, a one-hour set of music dedicated to the States part of “United States of America.” As it turns out, there is a wide representation among the 50 states (51 if you count New Model Army) in the Lacking Library, but I have selected the best 16 examples for this evening.
Exploding out of upstate New York, The Bobby Lees have returned with a their third outing, titled Bellevue, and it delivers more of that biting, can’t-you-see-I’m-in-the-middle-of-an-episode post-rock blues energy. Tonight’s Mixtape closes out with Escape Mechanism’s “Being,” sampling William S. Burrough’s unmistakable reedy voice into an existential mantra.
I always thought Kurt Vile was a play on the name of the German composer that gave us “Mack The Knife,” but that seems to be his given name (bonus: middle name is Samuel). Sonically, he’s more in line with Lou Reed than Weill, topping his awkward nouveau folk with a voice that may not be the most musical but is actually the perfect medium to express this particular malarkey.
If the name didn’t give it away, this is suitable for slow-dancing cowboys, at least as they exist in our imagination. The crooning voice floats lithely over western swing and doo-wop influences to make you either start or stop howling at the moon.
lacking.org