Boy, my boy, do I have an EP for you. Only four songs, all covers, all killers of immense proportions by the gone and greatly lamented The Civil Wars. Now that we can no longer be Civil War friends, etc, we are left with thismindboggling great four slices of folk AOR heaven. Joy Williams and John Paul White who, astoundingly enough, I didn’t fall in love with till they went on “indefinite hiatus”, have left (if they ahve indeed left) us with this astounding farewell gift.
Portishead
Elliott Smith
Michael Jackson
The Romantics
Are you kidding me, this is a rock critic playlist not a folk bands hootenanny! And all four covers just kill, kill, no favorites except… Portishead but they would be, wouldn’t they?
MJ and the Romantics are arrangement chuckles, digging into the songs, the paranoia of “Billie Jean” and the intense “Talking In Your sleep”, where they replace the eagerness of secrets with insomnia and drowse.”Between The Bars” revisits their indie roots with a very credible Elliott Smith take and best of all “Sour Times”, gone is the heavy throb and dub of the original and replaced by folk arrangement which is so haunting, it seems to be making a statement about how easy it is to get this intensity and miss the root cause. It takes nothing away from the original to admit that the Civil Wars caustic, ghostly wailing take soars higher and higher.
“Sour Times” is like a haunting song, it seems to be afraid of the love, the desire is glacial.
But really, yeah, a personal fave, but all four of these songs work entirely and completely. It is only four songs but every one is exactly what it should be; all four songs work in every way they are meant: the arrangements are exact, the singing pristine but not polished and the songs a wonderful crossection. A tremendous EP, I wish they’d reform and tour behind it.
Grade: A
