Posts we did right
I only have a limited selection of music on my netbook, usually relying on thesixtyone or last.fm for playing online music, but I'm away from home and the internet has been on the fritz today, so this afternoon I've been rocking Tetrastar's album Songs We Didn't Write. I love covers and I love chiptunes. Superpowerless is a master of the latter and together with Jaylyn Coffin as Tetrastar they're the masters of both.
I usually like covers roughly in proportion to the original, but without a predefined priority. That is, I usually like both the cover and the original but sometimes the cover makes me like the original and sometimes I like the cover because I like the original. I hadn't heard the originals of all of these, but those that I have are by and large faithful translations rather than interesting rearrangements. I like both kinds of covers.
Tetrastar's version of "Through the Fire and the Flame" is a faithful translation of the power metal original to the chiptune genre. I'm not overly familiar with "Such Great Heights" or "Float On", but they both also seem quite faithful to the arrangement of the originals. "Chop Suey", "Handlebars", "Numa Numa" and "Hallelujah" all also fall under the faithful category, while "Skullcrusher Mountain" is a rocked up version of the JoCo classic, a direction many covers of JoCo seem to take. Dio's "Rainbow in the Dark", the video of which I posted back in May, is perhaps the most interesting rearrangement, but even that is quite faithful to its source material. I haven't heard the originals of "Crank That (Soulja Boy)", "This Town Is Too Small" or "Mountains", so I can't speak to those.
"4 Chords" lies somewhere between cover and original composition. As the short skit that precedes it indicates, it is a tribute to Axis of Awesome's "Four Chord Song based on the idea (also utilised by other artists) that all pop songs can be reduced down to a basic chord structure. The Tetrastar implementation of this concept treads some of the same ground as that of Axis of Awesome, but mostly uses different songs, including many that are more contemporary and many that are more specific to the geek rock genre.
The album sits perfectly at the intersection of several of my musical tastes including geek rock and covers and accordingly I rate it quite highly. I'm sure that once I integrate it with my collection, I will not experience it as an album very frequently.
The track which features in this video isn't from the album, but it's in the same vein:
299
I usually like covers roughly in proportion to the original, but without a predefined priority. That is, I usually like both the cover and the original but sometimes the cover makes me like the original and sometimes I like the cover because I like the original. I hadn't heard the originals of all of these, but those that I have are by and large faithful translations rather than interesting rearrangements. I like both kinds of covers.
Tetrastar's version of "Through the Fire and the Flame" is a faithful translation of the power metal original to the chiptune genre. I'm not overly familiar with "Such Great Heights" or "Float On", but they both also seem quite faithful to the arrangement of the originals. "Chop Suey", "Handlebars", "Numa Numa" and "Hallelujah" all also fall under the faithful category, while "Skullcrusher Mountain" is a rocked up version of the JoCo classic, a direction many covers of JoCo seem to take. Dio's "Rainbow in the Dark", the video of which I posted back in May, is perhaps the most interesting rearrangement, but even that is quite faithful to its source material. I haven't heard the originals of "Crank That (Soulja Boy)", "This Town Is Too Small" or "Mountains", so I can't speak to those.
"4 Chords" lies somewhere between cover and original composition. As the short skit that precedes it indicates, it is a tribute to Axis of Awesome's "Four Chord Song based on the idea (also utilised by other artists) that all pop songs can be reduced down to a basic chord structure. The Tetrastar implementation of this concept treads some of the same ground as that of Axis of Awesome, but mostly uses different songs, including many that are more contemporary and many that are more specific to the geek rock genre.
The album sits perfectly at the intersection of several of my musical tastes including geek rock and covers and accordingly I rate it quite highly. I'm sure that once I integrate it with my collection, I will not experience it as an album very frequently.
The track which features in this video isn't from the album, but it's in the same vein:
Click to view299