Good Cover Version: Guiding Light Does Leonard Cohen

Pulp gave the world the song "Bad Cover Version." But seeing as I'm a sonic optimist, I'm of the belief that there's more likely than not more good cover versions floating around than bad ones. Good Cover Version celebrates the good, and leaves all that bad and ugly stuff alone.

"I've seen the future baby/it is murder."

Leonard Cohen's The Future was released in 1992, when the world felt like a much different place, yet like so much of his work, it feels perhaps even more important today.

The good people of Guiding Light brought the album's title track, "The Future," into the menacing, contagious insanity that is the present, swapping Cohen's cast-from-heaven rasp for feminine ferocity courtesy Chuck Davis. There's a reverent tenderness to the recording, and the song's tormented frustration finds new life in the duo's phantasmagorical treatment, though the message remains loud and clear: "Love's the only engine of survival."

Guiding Light is readying for the release of their second album, Weird Pains, out in 2020. Watch this space.     





[posted 10.27.19]

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