My mate James brings CDs of covers version to poker night. Once a week he conjures up an eclectic selection. The versions can swing from the sublime (Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower) via the odd (anything by Nouvelle Vague) to outright blasphemy (Tina Turner murdering Unfinished Sympathy). Here Mr Philips serves up eleven differing takes on the strange art of the cover.

I was intrigued to discover how Mr Phillips would translate the diverse material he had gathered here. From the primal scream of the Pixies' Wave Of Mutilation to the crystal melodies of Echo & The Bunnymen's Killing Moon to the flimsy early electronica of New Order's Age Of Consent. The artists and songs encompass a broad church of noise. The originals would make a great soundtrack, but would the covers flow together or just sound lumpen and disjointed?

I shouldn't have worried. One look at the track listing shows that Grant-Lee Phillips has a love and understanding for these songs. He hasn't gone for obvious choices; the majority are songs that are buried on LPs, and are not the hit singles that a casual fan my have picked. It's not This Charming Man or Love Will Tear Us Apart on show here.

The fragile nature of the cover version is shown in stark relief by the opening two tracks. I thought that the Pixies' Wave Of Mutilation would be a perfect fit for Grant-Lee's towering vocals and dusty Americana. Yet the result is something of a low slung dirge. It highlights the shortcomings of the Pixies range more than a failure on the part of Grant-Lee. The thrill of the Pixies sound resides in those screaming guitars, poppy baselines and Black Francis' bug-eyed vocals. In a stripped down form there appears to be little left to play with.

I winced when I saw that New Order's Age Of Consent was one of the featured tracks. The song is tied so tightly to Peter Hook's bassline I thought it would be like cutting off Samson's hair, that it would lose its power when torn away from its moorings. Astonishingly, it works - the bassline replaced by acoustic guitars and a finger picked melody. The pithy lyric of disgust and anger sounds wounded, Grant-Lee's voice taking on some of Barney Sumners' delicate papery grace.

The remaining songs are all successes. The Cure's Boys Don't Cry has a slowed down, brittle heartfelt edge; REM's So Central Rain is wreathed in sweet southern air; Joy Division's Eternal is a lesson in restrained atmospherics, the vocals teasing out hidden counter melodies in Ian Curtis' most haunted lyric, a bluesy harmonica, mournful piano notes and subtle organ tones replacing the icy synths of the original.

Morrissey's infamous piano intro is cut from the cover of The Smiths' Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me, but the ache, the longing, the weary heartbreak is retained; the song slowly envelops you like the onset of sleep. On the version of The Church's Under The Milky Way, bright acoustic guitars float elegantly above the dark menace of reverberating electronics.

Often the cover version can often been viewed as an attempt to escape writer's block. Grant-Lee Phillips has never struck me as someone short of his own material, and you can hear the esteem in which he holds the songs on this record. The personal attachment to the material shines through. He seems to have climbed inside their very DNA. They feel personal, lived in and cherished. This record deserves to be more than simply the soundtrack to my next night of poker.

  share with:  Facebook | Digg | other sites