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A couple of months ago Beck started Record Club. Basically, he gets a bunch of friends together and they pick an ALBUM to cover in ONE day, and without any prior rehearsal. For the first edition Beck, along with Nigel Godrich and others, covered the Velvet Underground and Nico. Once a week (every Thursday) a video of a track would be posted on Beck.com for our listening pleasure. I gotta say, for the most part, Beck's covers were awesome.

Record club part 2 is covering Songs of Leonard Cohen!
The second edition of record club features Beck, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, and a member of Wolfmother, as well as others.
The first track went up on http://www.beck.com thursday and it was obviously the album opener Suzanne! I can't say I liked the cover very much, basically because the singer from MGMT was singing it and it sounded like he was tone-def. However, I look forward to checking every thursday for a new track to be posted. Hopefully Beck or devendra banhart will sing more of the songs because they can actually sing better!
Enjoy!

Also, go check out the covers of the Velvet Underground and nico here: http://beck.com/record_club

Hi, thanks for posting this! Its cool. Like you I'm not sure about the vocals but the backing beat is cool. Thanks again for posting!

Master Song is the second song to get the Beck treatment - a faux rap version. I usually like covers but they seem to be just mucking around and it just doesn't sound that good.

I liked what Beck did with the Velvet Underground covers, but these Leonard Cohen covers have been very questionable. Turning his finely crafted songs into punky grunge is just not suitable for the material.

Just came across the Master Song cover by Beck. Not happy - this is one of my favourite Cohen tracks, and though the production is pretty good, it's just taken all the magic out of the song and turned it into a generic rap track:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZvDr0d72dQ

Not sure I want to hear what he does with the rest of the album!

[quote="somewhat_nifty"]Just came across the Master Song cover by Beck. Not happy - this is one of my favourite Cohen tracks, and though the production is pretty good, it's just taken all the magic out of the song and turned it into a generic rap track:
quote]

oohh ick...its not nice...

Winter Lady was uploaded today. I think it will make all you happy who thought he wasn't taking the songs seriously. And beck is front and center on this cover!
http://www.beck.com/record_club

By the way, I gotta admit, I really liked Master Song. I thought it was a lot of fun. Kinda gave the somg a different life.

I enjoyed this one. Binki Shapiro's vocals are the highlight. It is such a beautiful melodic song.

BM

This may have been on the net somewhere else but just spotted it on You Tube its a cover of 'Stories of the Street'. Not sure what I think of it, its gone from 6 beats in a bar to 4, I prefer 6!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvzFapYMAxA

All of the tracks from the Record Club are streaming on hypem.com: http://hypem.com/#/list/10871 and downloadable here: http://musicalpairings.blogspot.com/200 ... onard.html

Excerpt from "You’re a Loser, Baby: How Beck Ruined a Perfectly Great Leonard Cohen Song with His Smug Attitude" by Jeff Gordinier
http://www.details.com/blogs/daily-deta ... itude.html

We really like Leonard Cohen. And we like Beck, for that matter. Mostly. But this cover of "Suzanne" is an atrocity. It's worse than bad—it's such an insult to the legend of Leonard Cohen that we feel like introducing the aging Canadian ladies' man to a lawyer so that he can sue these lazy hipsters to get his dignity back. Listen to the Beck Record Club's version of "Suzanne" and you will encounter a perfect example of what might be called "smugism": singing in a self-consciously droopy and tuneless chorus that suggests nothing so much as a collective yawn, Beck and his bohemian buds give off the impression that they couldn't be bothered to crawl out of bed for this song, let alone put any genuine feeling into it. It's not a remake; it's a pose.

Thanks for the download link! I think there was more good than bad in this set of covers.

Why do people think LC would object to other musicians covering his songs? Isn't it a lovely compliment?

BM