Album Review: Macy Gray Covered

1 May 2012 | 7:31 pm | Helen Lear

There are a handful of tracks in the collection that do play to Gray’s voice and style, including a mash up of The Toyes/Sublime’s Smoke Two Joints and Sail by Awolnation, both of which embrace a more complete and suitable sound.

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Covered is a strange choice for Macy Gray. Someone with such a distinctive voice isn't the obvious fit for a covers collection combining a mixture of My Chemical Romance, Eurythmics and Metallica, none of which do her style any justice. In fact the overall sound on the album is bizarre, sounding worryingly like someone singing over terrible karaoke tracks where any hope of melody is drowned out by an overkill of synths. Maybe her backing band The Sex Fiends had something to do with this, but it doesn't work.

First track, Eurythmics' Here Comes The Rain, is a prime example of this; a strange, electro sounding version that is suffocated by synths and sound effects and does nothing but an injustice to the original. Radiohead's Creep gets similar treatment with a Daft Punk/Air sound that resembles a German trance DJ doing a bad remix. What makes this album even more confusing is that the songs are interspersed with theatrical-style skits, which just come across as self-indulgent and should have been kept for another project, if at all. One entitled I Try Is Cool And All, But… even ropes in the talents of The Pussycat Doll's Nicole Scherzinger to sing little pieces of I Try in the voices of Britney Spears, Alanis Morissette and Shakira. The impressions are good, but what is it doing on this album?

There are a handful of tracks in the collection that do play to Gray's voice and style, including a mash up of The Toyes/Sublime's Smoke Two Joints and Sail by Awolnation, both of which embrace a more complete and suitable sound. It's hard to know what Gray was trying to do with this album, but whatever it was it doesn't quite work. Shame.