Bowie cover of the week: releveleR performs “No Control”

I listen to several Bowie covers this week. I chose this one as the cover of the week because the band adds something new to the song, which is a fairly obscure song from one of my favorite albums, 1. Outside. ReleveleR is a real band with several albums, and this track is off the album, Silhouettes 3, which was released last month. Here is a link to the band’s website.

Most covers either sound like a different voice singing a familiar song, or like the singer is trying to sound like Bowie. In this case, the music of the song is familiar enough (if you know the song in the first place), but the voices sound closer to being computer generated than actual human voices (I suspect they are real human voices that have been deeply distorted). I can easily imagine someone stumbling across the song and not recognizing it to be a Bowie cover at all.

The other thing I like about this choice of song is that while it is from an album I like very much, I haven’t especially thought of “No Control” as one of its standouts. Isolated from the rest of the album, this version makes me appreciate the song more than when it’s flanked by “Hallo Spaceboy” and “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson.”

So I like it.

I listened to some genuinly bad covers this week including one that I think wasn’t a cover at all, but a guy lip syncing and pretend-playing along to the album version of “Golden Years” (forgive me if its actually a perfect imitation). As usual, many covers of “Heroes” were posted over the past week. On the other end of the spectrum was a terrific cover of “This Is Not America” with a visually more interesting video by a band called The Thorns with David Brighton as well as a very well done cover of “Survive” by Zeno. In my mind, though, “No Control” edged those two out because good though the others were, they were so similar to Bowie’s original versions that they didn’t make the most of the material.

By the way, this video for “No Control” is not static. I’m not sure how entertaining it is to watch, but various special effects play out against the image throughout the song.