No Man's Woman

I’m not sure if a CD that has me singing The Veronicas’ songs is good thing. It may be testimony to the quality of this particular album, but it certainly doesn’t do much for my credibility. For those who aren’t aware of what this album is, it’s basically Australian men covering female artists. All the artists, on both sides of equation, are quite high profile and it’s pretty impressive for Dew Process to have assembled such a line up and made this CD happen. I must admit, I wasn’t very optimistic going into this CD. To me it seemed like a bit of gimmick; an intriguing gimmick, but not much more that. However, after listening through it a number of times, I’ve actually found myself impressed on a number of fronts. For starters, most of the songs being covered (and their respective artists) are ones that I’m not particularly familiar with. So in that sense, I’ve found it enjoyable purely on the basis of it being a nice mix of music. But it actually offers much more than that. It’s great to hear some of my favourite Australian artists, one after another, applying their signature sounds to these songs. Even artists I’m not particularly fond of, such as End of Fashion and Gyroscope have managed to impress me. In fact, there’s only really one track that I don’t thoroughly enjoy. This album provides a great snapshot of Australia’s varied music scene and does so whilst celebrating some music's most prolific female artists. It certainly is much more than just a gimmick.

Tracklist
1. Angus Stone – River (Joni Mitchell)
2. Powderfinger – Glorybox (Portishead)
3. The Vines – 4Eva (The Veronicas)
4. Expatriate – Missing (Everything But The Girl)
5. Lior – Landslide (Fleetwood Mac)
6. Bob Evans – Cars Wheels On A Gravel Road (Lucinda Williams)
7. End Of Fashion – Hanging On The Telephone (Blondie)
8. Dan Kelly – Nothing Compares To You (Sinead O'connor)
9. Whitely – Hyperballad (Bjork)
10. Josh Pyke – Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush)
11. Paul Kelly – To Bring You My Love (Pj Harvey)
12. Gyropscope – Cannonball (The Breeders)
13. Grinspoon – Boys In Town (Divinyls)
14. Tex Perkins – I Am Woman (Helen Reddy)

The CD is out now and comes with a bonus disc containing nine of the tracks by their original artists. You can also catch some of the artists performing these songs as part of the Legs 11 concert. Click here for details

Released: 20/10/07 | Myspace

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i've never been disappointed by a vines cover and i've been playing that veronicas song non stop even though it's very worrying that i somehow know the words.

the veronicas came into my shop a few weeks back and bought their own single. worried about sales perhaps?

Peter said...

haha their record label gave them such a bad deal that they didn't even get a copy for themselves..