Blank Control – Sappy
At the heart of it, Kurt Cobain was really a pop-songwriter with a few eccentric ideas that he wasn’t fully committed to pushing on to his audience. He was the art-teacher that liked to talk about Star Wars and throw in a Marcel Duchamp reference once in a while for the minority of smarter students that might care for those kinds of things.
We tend to look about the posthumous work of Mr Cobain, mostly journals and half-baked demise, with the same reverence that Orthodox Christians have for the mortal remains of people believed to have achieved sainthood. We sniff and kiss them, and generally praise their holiness.
Once such vestige of the Nirvana frontman’s writing abilities is Sappy, a semi-demo that the notoriously ambition-shy Cobain never got around to finishing. Since the band and the singer’s demise, the song has been stuck on to compilations and documentaries like stench onto a 3-day unwashed body.
It’s a song worth a bit of a kicking as it still displays Cobain’s once in a generation talent. Blank Control covers the song and produces something menacing and unhinged. I suspect that the grunge figurehead would’ve liked the band. For one thing, you can barely make out what they’re playing and singing, and we know he dug that.
Production woes aside, this is a lovely cover, brutal in every respect, and so very much their own that I hesitate to believe that this is indeed a Nirvana song and that these band of misfits hasn’t played a trick on me all along.
We Faith – Call You
We Faith are a highly ambitious young band post-punk, post-rock, post-post-modern rock outsiders getting ready to release their debut album. As the “post” label might suggest, they belong to a school of thought that believes that more is more, editors deserve the slow punishment of a torturous death and going through Infinite Jest at least once in your life is akin to visiting Mecca.
They’ve got heads the size of giant mushrooms and they’ve got plenty of ideas that they’re wishing to share with the public. What’s more, they are taking the long route to doing so, interjecting their songs with numerous complex arrangements, moody sound structures, and hushed vocals.
Call You is one of their more straightforward songs. They may draw inspiration from the likes of Deftones and Radiohead. But, enjoyment of We Faith is like that of playing a boardgame in a foreign language. It takes a lot of preparation before you can get going.
With that being said, their plans are sound and their passion is earnest. If you’re looking for a bit of chorus, Call You is the closest you get to that from these folks, but the entire album is also recommended.
