Yup, two categories / one cup post. I just received Driving Mrs Satan’s album through from their promo company and instantly wanted to tell everyone about it. So here we go:
It’s eleven cover tracks and I would expect any decent metal fan to know at least eight of them, hopefully the whole damn lot. Featured are songs by Iron Maiden (three of them), Slayer, Anthrax, Helloween, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Faith No More, Motorhead and Metallica. So no real niche bands, then.
So far so “heard covers of these before”. Let me tell you about Driving Mrs Satan. They’re a trio from London/Naples, are female-fronted and play all their songs as acoustic indie pop.
Many are the metal bands who’ve covered pop tracks. But few are the pop bands who’ve reversed the trend. Fewer still who’ve not sounded like shit doing it. Driving Mrs Satan have worked wonders with some genuine classic tracks, and turned them completely on their heads.
As I’ve stated on this page before my appreciate of a good cover track begins when it’s obvious that the cover isn’t just a near re-recording of the original. It’s when a band takes that original and really twists it into a new version. I don’t think you could do much more to these tracks than DMS have done and still class them as spawns of their dark source.
Original riffs are vaguely present, but often it will take until the lyrics kick in before you realise that you’re listening to a song that you already know backwards. Not that anyone listens to metal backwards. That’s a myth made up by excessively religious nutjobs and lawyers. But you get my point.
Apparently Helloween’s “I Want Out” was the first song they worked on and musicians Ernesto and Giacomo didn’t let their singer Claudia hear the original track first. Whether they used the same “tactics” for the rest of the songs, I don’t know!
The album, Popscotch, is out on May 19th in the UK and you can check out the band’s video for “Battery” below. Even this is done in the style of the cover version. There’s no attempt to hybridise the video at all – it’s as if it was always a slow, sensual piece of upright-bass led pop.
The whole thing simply messes with your head. And it’s utterly brilliant.