Tired Lion Deliver Up A Grungey Serving Of 'Fuck It'

The eternal minefield of doing a cover version of a well-known song remains how much do you want to be to yours, and how much do you want it still to be the original artist? It’s a spectrum that can leave you just copying the source material, however respectfully, through to making something totally yours, and losing all trace of what was there to begin. And that can work too.

Then there’s the issue of how much tongue you’ve got in your cheek while doing it. The Swedes, lovely people certainly, but not exactly famous for their ironic sense humour. With that in mind, Amason are a supergroup of sorts. But that descriptor is perhaps reliant on how familiar you are with names like Dungen, Little Majorette, and Idiot Wind or Hajen. The last two are bandonyms for Amanda Bergman, whose voice fronts this take on Foreigner’s eternally pompous power ballad, I Want To Know What Love Is (Ingrid). They choose to play it fairly straight, allowing for the video storyline of Yeti bonding, adding a certain Scandinavian moodiness to it. Can something be delicate and yet a little creepy?

There’s a certain added bravery to taking on something that’s as much as an artifice to begin with as a Lana Del Rey song. Local alt.country duo of some darkness Jep and Dep take on Honeymoon (Independent) with a certain intimate restraint as opposed to Lana’s technicolour-drenched lipstick stains on the mirror. The result comes through a slight David Lynch foggy haze, and ends up haunting in that manner that made them fit quite nicely as opening act for Low a few weeks back.  

Rather than the straight-out cover, many choose – some deliberately, some accidentally – to invoke a certain style or era. The Creases accept their Britpop influences, but probably aren’t destined to be the Blur to DMA'S' Oasis. There’s even some Stone Roses baggy wobble in Impact (Liberation), but there’s some ‘60s pop in there as well along with the full kitchen sink of strings and dirty blurt of brass toward the end to make it almost feel like they’ve purpose-written the little anthem designed to end their live set with big finish. It’ll very likely work as that.

Augustines have a certain affiliation to that era as well, going as far as being Noel Gallagher’s chosen support band for a bunch of European dates recently. But their music perhaps references a slightly earlier time. When Things Fall Apart (Caroline) probably owes more to big 80s drum programming somewhere between Depeche Mode and New Order – if Bernard could have sang better back in the day, as the ‘Tines Billy McCarthy has the big voice that would have seen him wearing a fashionably baggy suit on Countdown when they did the obligatory promotional tour. But that’s probably not the fashion in their native Brooklyn now. 

Sometimes it just needs that point of difference to take something somewhere else. Dro Carey knows the mechanics, and the mechanicals of making machine based music aimed roughly at a dancefloor. Queensberry Rules (Soothsayer) hears the bell (obscure related boxing reference!) and comes out like clockwork, but then changes gear smoothly and introduces Kucka’s idiosyncratic vocals as featured artist to the construction to add some necessary humanity. Might have a touch of Bjork among other things in there now. But, at the least, it does invoke some curiosity.

Tired Lion have a little of the ‘fuck you’, and/or ‘fuck it’ as they dismiss many as Not My Friends (Dew Process). The Perth band happily play on the old grunge tradition of it going from the very soft to the very loud as necessary, but it’s Sophie Hope’s vocal having the dynamic to go with that sometimes sudden lurch from one to the other and that’s what makes it better, and frees it from its influences to make something of their own. Good, and good at it. 

Also working on a balance, Mount Zamia describe themselves as ‘psych pop’ but in Lazamia (Independent) they wobble along a line of just being that little bit wonky enough to still feel they’re still somewhere in the D.I.Y. column to be indie enough, while knowing how to have some  melodic sense to get themselves wider notice. Whether they can wave their arms enough to draw attention to themselves is probably their next challenge.