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 can be underwhelming and lazily executed, but mediocrity is not inherent to the form.
On the smugly titled Songs We Should Have Written, ever-clever NYC ensemble Firewater sponge brilliant songs from brilliant songwriters (Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black", Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues", Tom Waits' "Diamonds and Gold", The Beatles' "Hey Bulldog"), and crib other cuts originally written specifically for non-songwriters (the mostly spoken "Is That All There Is?", immortalized by Peggy Lee, or "Some Velvet Morning", long owned by Nancy Sinatra). The band's approach is classic admiration-marred-by-envy: most of these versions are instantly recognizable, despite being slowed down, sped up, or re-arranged, and Firewater's renditions are faithful, if a little caustic-- re-imagined but not always more convincing.
As a band, Firewater consists of musicians who, generally, are better known for their previous projects: former Cop Shoot Cop bassist Tod Ashley leads the collective, which has, at various points, also featured Jesus Lizard guitarist Duane Denison, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion multi-instrumentalist Kurt Hoffman, and Elysian Fields vocalist Jennifer Charles. Given the members' own echoing reputations, Firewater's decision to release a record featuring exclusively cover songs is sorta funny. Still, Songs We Should Have Written is an interesting hop forward for the band, whose last full-length, 2003's The Man on the Burning Tightrope, was mucked up by its calliope-riddled burlesque theatrics, a throbbing, Waits-ian stew of accordion-heavy Mexploitation excess.
Here, the broth is thinned out: "Folsom Prison Blues" opens with a clip of Cash bellowing "Hello!" and slips into warbling organ and honking guitars, Ashley's wildman holler keeping Cash's spirit afloat. "Paint It Black" is laboriously decelerated (a trick the Stones themselves occasionally employed) and haunted by sitar, with Ashley's low, loping chant eventually becoming starkly menacing. "The Beat Goes On" maintains playful Sonny & Cher flirtation, with Ashley and Charles trading off on vocals, whispering and cooing at each other over a thick foundation of keyboard and drums. Indeed, no matter how you finally decide to quantify the artistic merit of performing a cover, Songs We Should Have Written proves Firewater perfectly adept at the game of masquerade.
