All songs not suited for ska: 99 Songs Of A Revolution Reviewed

99 Songs Of A Revolution
Streetlight Manifesto
Victory Records
Rating: 1 star (out of 5 stars)

The most important question to ask oneself upon encountering a covers album is, “Why?” What is gained by an artistic changing of hands? When Johnny Cash covers Nine Inch Nails, he’s commenting on what it’s like to be old, famous and still miserable. When a faceless orchestra covers a Radiohead album, it’s for the sake of pointless fun. Streetlight Manifesto’s latest album is an 11-track collection that falls squarely on the novelty side of the song-covering spectrum.

This isn’t Streetlight Manifesto bringing their own sound and spin to these songs. The album plays more like a rote genre exercise than a cohesive artistic statement.
And the trumpet playing on this album is most certainly of note. The band manages to invent genres right off the bat — on the album opener “Birds Fly Away” (a Mason Jennings cover), they create mariachi-punk. But what begins as the album’s biggest strength soon becomes its most glaring weakness. The band manages to take distinct personas — Ben Gibbard’s wistfulness, Thom Yorke’s paranoia — and by giving them the ska treatment, make them sound exactly the same — goofy, indistinct and cartoonish.

The band actually manages to do something interesting with their instrumentation, they can’t sustain it for more than 30 seconds. Its take on The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” (definitively covered by Iron and Wine) subs those now-iconic opening blips for dueling, squeaky trumpets, and the results are fascinating — that is, until the song begins in earnest and the band returns to its comfort zone.

Front man Tomas Kalnoky’s voice remains bracingly involved throughout. Streetlight Manifesto might be phoning in the compositions, but Kalnoky sings these covers with a neck-bulging intensity. (See their propulsive cover of The Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl.”)

But when the frantic instrumentation lets up and Kalnoky’s endearingly tone-deaf voice is left to compete only with an acoustic guitar, the results can be cringe-inducing.

The album is supposedly the first in a series of eight scheduled cover albums, two of which will be performed by Streetlight Manifesto. Better luck next time, I suppose.

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1 comments

Anonymous

Tue Mar 16 2010 10:04

Covers are generally exciting (good covers anyway) because it taking a known song and making it a completely different flavor. Its like taking a Shakespearean tragedy and turning it into a comedy.

There are plenty of bad covers out there, but even with the Radiohead-orchestra, it gives other people who were influenced by that music a chance to make it their own, while paying respect to the original musician.

But all covers are interesting...Its like cooking: people spend alot of time trying to emulate something that is significant to them.

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