At Home with John and Debbie

I’m very fond of some of Richard Cheese’s work — his versions of “Only Happy When it Rains” and “Stairway to Heaven” verge on genius, and the better tracks contain jokes over and above the top layer joke that is performing rock and punk hits in a lounge jazz style.

Lounge Against the Machine is the best album for my money. Subsequent albums cover some songs where I’m not familiar with the original; songs better known in the USA. In the later albums there is a tendecy to just cover the song, without those great extra jokes.

Anyhow.

While Richard Cheese is a moderately talented singer and a good comedian, who performs with a three-piece band, Paul Anka is a proper crooner who performs with a full swing orchestra.

I’m intrigued by his album Rock Swings.

There are no jokes here, unless you count the central concept. He performs songs like Black Hole Sun, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Jump and Wonderwall, and from what I heard, they sound pretty good.

You can read more and listen with RealAudio at NPR.

This doesn’t seem to be a massacre in the mould of Jamie Cullum’s atrocious ruination of Radiohead’s “High and Dry”, or while we’re talking about Radiohead, Brad Mehldau’s precise, emotionless jazz piano version of “Exit Music (From a Film)”. Mehldau has also covered “Paranoid Android”, but I won’t comment on that until I’ve heard it.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2005 at 15:04 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.