Bowie cover of the week: Lion’s Share covers “Life on Mars”
There were a few good options to choose from for “cover of the week” this week. I’m going with this angry-sounding cover of one of Bowie’s most iconic songs, “Life on Mars.” It’s a real video by a real band that makes its own contribution to this oft-covered song. Actually, while the there are many covers of “Life on Mars,” it actually doesn’t show up frequently in my weekly searches of new covers. Most of the covers come from established, professional singers. I think that has something to do with the musical complexity of the song— an area I can acknowledge but don’t have the background to really explain.
As I mentioned, this cover sounds angry. I haven’t heard “Life on Mars” as angry before, but it works, and it fits. The song is about a girl who tries to escape from her tedious life through the movies. In this rendition, the narrator is angry at— her? Her situation? That it has come to this? What enters my mind is that what the song is describing is a wasted life. That’s not so much what I get from Bowie’s original version, so I definitely give Lions Share credit for doing something innovative.
Lions Share appears to be an established Swedish band. Click here for the band’s web site.
Some of the other good covers this week included Joao Peneda’s acoustic cover of “Rebel Rebel”— a very good rendition using Bowie’s later career arrangement of the song, Pablo and Pablo’s cover of “Modern Love,” which was performed well but lost points for the simplistic video (its just a fixed camera recording them performing) as well as Peter Goodwin and Leah Lane covering “Absolute Beginners”— which sounded good but might have been “performed” in the sense that it was an AI creation — not sure, and that wouldn’t be disqualifying anyway. But I liked Lion’s Share’s cover the best.
By the way, Lion Share’s webpage is www.lionsshare.org. Note the two s’s in the middle. If you type in www.Lion share.org with one s, that takes you to a religious website. Very different.