Valentine’s Day. It’s enough to make you vomit. It is an angst ridden day that can be viewed as a joyous celebration of new love, a sickening reminder that you’re still in that relationship or a day that brings your crushingly depressing loneliness to the forefront of your mind.
So, in amongst the sea of soon to be dead flowers and cards that read either ‘You Are My World and Have Been For The Last Three Weeks,’ ‘I Probably Still Love You Somewhere, In Some Way,’ or ‘WHYDON’TYOULOVEME?!’, why not show your loved one how much you care by giving them the gift of massively inferior cover songs by Corinne Bailey Rae.
Released on the glorious day itself this digital EP manages to encompass Prince, Belly, Bob Marley, Paul McCartney and Doris Day. It all melds together as well as that list suggests it would. Fragmented isn’t a strong enough word, but it’s only a digital EP right? The fact that the EP skips around like a paranoid grasshopper would be fine if Bailey Rae’s take on the songs were genuinely innovative or different, but for the most part they are just straight takes with the original nuances glossed over.
Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” has all of the funk taken out of it and sounds like it was performed by a Japanese girl band, whilst her take on “Low Red Moon” by Belly brightens everything up and avoids the original’s murky and oppressive mood. “My Love,” Paul McCartney’s attempt at a soul record is given space to breathe by being performed on nothing but acoustic guitar, but unfortunately the song wasn’t that good to begin with and just comes across as pretty, but ultimately dull.
The last track, “Que Sera Sera” is a live take from Bailey Rae’s recent tour and is modelled after Sly & The Family Stone’s cover from 1973. It’s largely the same only slightly more improvisational and with a jazz bent. It’s fine and actually vaguely interesting but loses any novelty it had after the five minute mark. Luckily it’s over thirteen minutes long.
So far, so pointless but it isn’t all bad news! Bailey Rae’s voice is characteristically phenomenal, as it was on 2010’s brilliant The Sea, and you can’t help but swoon to her lyrical phrasing. Plus her cover of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love” is genuinely brilliant, shifting the timing into 6/8 and slowing it down into an unrecognizable smoky jazz number. It’s the only cover that’s legitimately inventive and dares to do something different with the source material, making you wonder what happened to the rest of the EP and that if Valentine’s Day didn’t exist perhaps nobody would have bothered releasing it? Anyway, enjoy the day! I’m going to dig a hole and jump into it.
Conclusion: Pointless rehashing of subpar songs with which to woo the deaf.
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