Black Light Burns - Cover Your Heart
I Am: Wolfpack (8/5/08)
Rock / Alternative / Industrial rock

It was just over a year ago when the first Horseman of the Apocalypse arrived amid the waning days of spring, and I officially recommended (strongly recommended, in fact) something involving Wes Borland. I would then go on to let it be known that Fred Durst could still suck my f*cking balls, but the point was that with Black Light Burns, Borland had finally become involved with something really good. He may have owed a deal of that to Misters Lohner and Freese, but Cruel Melody was still leaps and bounds above anything else he’d previously recorded.

As the band (now sans the aforementioned Lohner and Freese, alarmingly) plans to release a new album early next year, they’ve released Cover Your Heart (with a special edition including the Anvil Pants Odyssey DVD) as an interim piece, of covers and instrumentals from the Cruel Melody sessions. As Borland puts it, “The musicians we covered are people we all listen to pretty religiously. … They’ll all bands that I’m a huge fan of and and [about which] I wanted to tell the world. It’s a shortlist of everyone I love that people may or may not have heard of or may not have thought that I would be into. They’re my desert island songs.”

Lard’s “Forkboy” is a decent, energetic track with which to kick off the set; it originally appeared on the band’s 1990 release, The Last Temptation of Lard, and appeared a few years later on the soundtrack for Natural Born Killers. While Borland really doesn’t hold even a vanilla-scented Yankee Candle to the original vocals by one Jello Biafra, taken as a separate piece, if you’ve never heard the original, it’s perfectly acceptable.

The same erratic tempo is carried over into the next track, a cover of Love and Rockets’ “So Alive”, as the tone of the original track gets turned it on its ear in a punkified assault. While this one is similar to “Forkboy”, it gets extra points for creativity, as the respective originals of these two tracks could not be more different. Gone is the sultry grove of the Daniel Ash-masterminded original (including the backing female vocals), and what we’re left with is complete chaos. The same can be said for the cover of PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me”, which gets a much-needed industrial-metal kick in the pants. It’s arguably the best reinterpretation on the album.

“Hungry Like the Wolf” cannot be taken as anything other than a joke. Seriously. The production isn’t bad, per se, but after hearing Borland screech his way through two relatively good punk covers, this one just makes the set taper off. Even if it hadn’t been a particularly punk-ish track, there should have been some sort of dark tone involved here. The band brings in some good piano elements that just scream Danny Lohner, but otherwise this was a shameless, overly campy song choice. Yes, “The Chauffeur” has already been covered by the Deftones, but that was over a decade ago, and I would be remiss not to point out that this band would be able to do some great things with it. I understand that “The Chauffeur” may not necessarily be one of your “desert island songs”, Wes, but come on; just take one for the team, here.

The cover of “Lucretia My Reflection”, by one of my favorite bands EVAR, is really damn good, and while it stays very true to the original, Borland is able to punk it up just enough to get the foot tapping while the back of the gloved hand meets the forehead.

When recorded by Borland & Co., The Jesus Lizard’s “The Art of Self-Defense”, omits the stoner-rock nebulousness of the original. This may be a bad thing to those of you who swear by said Lizard’s particular genre, but unless we’re talking about punk rock from ‘77 (since the murkiness of the music was part of its appeal and rebellious message), the polished stuff is almost always better. Interesting to note that this track was the first cover that the band recorded, and after being so pleased with how it turned out, Borland decided to go forward with an entire set of covers.

Two more aggro-punk covers of tracks by Fiona Apple and Swans, respectively, lead into Borland covering Borland, with a rework of “Blood Red Head on Fire”, by Borland’s first project post-Shit Bizkit, Big Dumb Face. This one actually serves as the converse to “The Art of Self-Defense”, as Borland murks this one up from the original.

The block of covers is closed out by a perfectly acceptable version of “Search and Destroy”, before we then get into an EP’s worth of instrumentals that are truer to the tone of the band’s debut, Cruel Melody. “Drowning Together, Dying Alone” and “Failing” are reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails’ more downtempo instrumental material (see, e.g., “La Mer”, from The Fragile. “Ribbons” and “Zlitchufdux” pay homage to early industrial (think Throbbing Gristle-era industrial), while “Zargon Morfoauf” will get your attention, at least the first time you hear it.

Since this is intended, according to Borland, as an interim piece between Cruel Melody and Black Light Burns’ next album (scheduled for release in 2009), the fact that it seems like two separate EPs thrown together really shouldn’t be something for which we fault the band. It’s got some great tracks, but the two halves would probably be better as separate pieces since they have such different tones. For those of you who really enjoyed Cruel Melody, this will be something that you’ll likely want to pick up, but otherwise, listen to and download the stronger tracks from iTunes.

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