If you live somewhere other than the United States or Canada, you’ve probably already listened to the Headless Heroes.  However, for our North American readers, May 19 is a day to circle, as that’s when you can grab a copy of Silence of Love, a top-drawer collection of covers featuring the piercingly lovely voice of Citizen Dick favorite Alela Diane.  The band is a collection of musicians assembled by Eddie Bezalel expressly to record a collection of covers of his choosing.  Interestingly, the album doesn’t sound a lot like Diane’s solo work.  While she works, largely, in the folk idiom, producing acoustic driven nuggets of song-writing gold, this album features a more expansive sound.  It’s not wildly divergent from her solo work (there aren’t any high energy dance tracks here), but it does incorporate a broader aural pallate.  It’s a testament to Diane’s talent that she can perform at a high level with both her own folkier material and with a bunch of covers that feature a bigger sound.  This kind of artistic flexibility implies good things for her future (and ours, as listeners).

The album, strangely, doesn’t play like a covers album either.  The songs are, for the most part, intimidatingly obscure and/or manipulated and re-interpreted to a degree that they sound like originals.  To the first point, you’re some kind of super-duper music snob if you even want to pretend that you’ve got any Vashti Bunyan albums on your shelf, so hearing Headless Heroes cover her (amazing) song “Here Before” isn’t going to be an experience that has a lot of sonic touchstones; this is probably going to be the case for songs from I am Kloot and Gentle Soul as well.  Headless Heroes are likely to be the only band you’ve ever heard sing these songs and, because of this and the level of intelligence and talent they bring, they own them.   To the second point, nobody has the brass or the lack of foresight to try and make “Just Like Honey” sound like the Jesus and Mary Chain.  Why bother?  That’s three minutes of perfection that’s impossible to top.  When Headless Heroes cover that track, the fuzz is gone, replaced by a killer slide guitar and the brooding vocals are gone, replaced by Diane’s crystalline pipes.  It’s still a cover, but it is distinctly unique from the original; rather than tackle a classic head on, Headless Heroes subvert the song enough that a non-attentive listener might not pick it out immediately as a re-imagined canonical track. (The video, below, has creepy peacocks, so if you’ve got some sort of bird phobia, tread carefully.  Also, for those of you with the Jesus and Mary Chain original on the brain, the gender inversion of the vocals at the end is killer and may well be the best thing about the cover.  Last item in this parenthetical, I promise:  Full disclosure, this is the song on the album that’s stuck on repeat for me, so if I’ve spent too much time gushing over it, you’ll just have to deal with it.)

That reworking motif works for a majority of the album, possibly because many of the songs aren’t immediately recognizable.  The one spot where this approach falters a bit is on the cover of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End.”  (I’m not certain that “falters” is the right word here, but it comes closest to hitting my feelings.   I don’t want to sound pejorative; the song’s still a delight, but its tone strikes me as misplaced.) The original version of that song never played as hopefully to me as the Headless Heroes’ version  does.  When Johnston sang it, it sounded like the clarion call of defeat, his warbling voice in front of a spare and oddly, almost indefinably off acoustic guitar.  His faltering delivery always focused on “the catch” not on the optimism, for me.  That song makes me want to cry every time I hear it.  It’s powerful and affecting.  The Headless Heroes version is more technically astute and Diane crushes the vocals, but it sounds really sunshiny to me.  Diane, as a vocalist, implies that you can step out into the light, where I’m not sure Johnston did.  All this to say that it sounds weird to me.  In a vacuum, you’d love the Headless Heroes version unconditionally, the shimmering guitar solo in the middle and the beauty of Diane’s voice guarantee that, but with the context of the original, it’s tough.  Headless Heroes’ cover is below and the original is (or should be) in your ipod.  You make the call.  (We’d welcome some discussion on this issue in the comments.  I’m willing to admit that I might be over-analyzing this.)

It’s been a big year already for cover albums.  Phosphorescent’s To Willie, Condo Fucks’ Fuck Book and this Headless Heroes album all take others’ material and attempt to do something unique with it.  I’d argue that this project is the most ambitioius and succesful.  The To Wilie thing, while intriguing, never really gained a lot of traction here at Citizen Dick and the Condo Fucks album, while amazing and endearing (and catchy as hell), is a bit one-dimensional when placed next to The Silence of Love.  Given the prowess of Diane, the quality of the covers chosen and the high degree of uniqueness of the covers themselves, this is clearly an album worth tracking down.

“True Love Will Find You In The End” – Headless Heroes