“Always Crashing in the Same Car” is one of Bowie’s less covered songs but is one of many examples of a song that might be thought of as one of his best but for so many other of great songs (if you’re following me). To me, it is a song about making the same mistakes over and over, knowingly repeating doomed behaviors. Bowie puts voice to a familiar feeling that it’s the subject of few other songs (I’m not counting, “Oops! I Did it Again”).

Hammo Mat Music does a good enough job with this straightforward cover. Interestingly, the song was originally on the tech-heavy album Low, but Hammo is simply accompanied by his acoustic guitar. The song still works.

This video has something of a “guy in his basement” quality, but Hammo Mat Music is apparently an accomplished professional musician with solo albums as well as albums with bands called Eurivox and Living Daylytes. He’s British, but interestingly he has an album called Buffal-over (probably has nothing to do with Buffalo, NY, but who knows). He has a twice-weekly Twitch show on Wednesday and Friday.

I like this song and like the cover, but following a week of many good covers, this week had fewer contenders for “cover of the week.” A band called Beasts of Bourbon covered, “Sorrow,” and covered it well. They touted it as a Bowie cover, but Bowie himself covered the song (originally by The McCoys) on his cover album, Pin Ups, so I didn’t think it should count. Many of the other covers posted over the past week were either apparent bootlegs from live performances with poor sound quality, very amateurish performances, and, of course, the obligatory “Heroes” covers (which at this point have to be really good for me to select as a cover of the week). None of this takes away from this week’s actual selection, which I very much enjoyed.