Pick your interpretation: view cover bands as shaky, budding novelists, tugging Hemingway tomes down from library shelves and re-copying whole paragraphs in their own wobbly hands, desperate to make the prose seem more accessible, more indigenous, more possible. Or see them as liberators, granting dusty, half-functional songs a contemporary glow, revising and updating and bestowing precious relevance, digging through the past for muddy, uncut gems. Or understand them as stubbornly embryonic garage trios that just didn't feel like writing anymore of their own stuff last weekend, proudly rolling out Zeppelin tracks and Radiohead B-sides and sixteen stupid, confounded versions of "All Along The Watchtower". But, however you choose to interpret these bands, do not deride the cover song: yes, they be underwhelming and lazily executed, but mediocrity is not inherent to the form.