echogirl

They were going for haunted. Tasteful is what turned up. Doing a radio session cover of a song that already had five recordings carrying it on television is a strange hill to choose, and the Blind Boys settled the whole question back in 2001 with a take that sounds like people who believed the words. This is a nice band in a nice room performing SPOOKY as a texture, with lovely reverb standing in where the menace should be. Those Saturday Sessions comps live or die on the covers and this is the one I skip. Lads, you have your own songs that do this better.

They clearly wanted a comeback single that opens a door, and for about two minutes they've got one. Mandagi asking is anyone there over and over should be unbearable and it's the only stretch of it that doesn't sound rehearsed. Then the swell arrives right on schedule, eight years off and the big finish still lands exactly where you'd draw it on a napkin. Everything before the crescendo is BETTER than the crescendo. Lads, you came back with a song that admits you don't know how it ends, and then you went and underlined it.

Twenty years since the last live one anybody defends, and the pitch here is obvious: retire 2005, put this in its place. Job done. The fan-voted tracklist should have been a disaster and instead somebody's picked the take where the guitar goes properly UGLY over the pretty part, which is not what a poll normally hands you. Vocal sits low and lets the noise do the reaching, and I'm not about to grade a Mars Volta singer. Two pieces welded into one and neither outstays. You've been gone twenty years and you get to keep them, now go and do the rest of the tour like this.

Nikki said it in every interview, they wanted something that sounded like the year it came out, and they got there. Everyone's complaint is that it isn't Too Fast for Love, which is a complaint about a calendar. Overworked, obviously. A song called Sex has no business being buffed this hard and normally that's the one thing I can't forgive anybody. Here it's the joke. The chorus lands and that was the whole job. Not grading the vocal, nobody in this band was ever hired for that. DAFT on purpose, which is the only kind I trust. Stay down there, the serious songs were always the embarrassing one

Olga plays the Sabre Dance straight through at punk tempo with no wink in it anywhere, which is STUPID in exactly the way you want. Same trick as the Chuck Berry cover, take a thing everybody's mum can hum and run it into a wall. The one about Lester and the tax man is the one about Lester and the tax man. There was never going to be a second half to that gag. By 1989 the music hall business had stopped being a bit and just become what they were, and by rights another record of it should be unbearable. It isn't, quite. Olga, you got away with it again and you knew you would before the tape was