![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seedarklyxeroWelcome to SeeDarkly Sunday DisCOVERies:
a weekly exploration of goth, industrial, & dark alternative cover songs!
First time here? Click here for details from first entry.
Last week, we were a day too early for April Fool's, so I've decided to devote the entire month to ABSURDITIES, wildly ridiculous covers in concept, style, or just the artists involved. Trying to keep it all light-hearted and fun, despite the 'dark' nature of most of my content. Interestingly every song this month has degree of connection to our favorite prankster/absurdist musician, Weird Al Yankovic! (But you can decipher those connections on your own.)
Today's cover, which I was super excited about when it was released earlier this year, presents a combination of artists previously featured on this blog. (One of them was in fact the very first. click that link above.)
By way of this team-up, the song itself (an eighties German one-hit wonder,) and the style being so outside their general industrial norms, we kick off April Absurdities with a 'golden shower' that may just rock you!:
Front Line Assembly w/ Jimmy Urine – Rock Me Amadeus (Falco)
Neue Deutsche Welle artist Falco (aka Johann "Hans" Hölzel) released Rock Me Amadeus in 1985 several months before his third studio album, Falco 3 (which was his only self-titled LP.) It was a huge international success for Falco, notable also for being the first German language song to have topped all the American pop charts of the time. That fact is also interesting considering the U.S. release was edited to exclude most of the German lyrics, replaced with a narration of a historical timeline of the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom the song is obviously about. Falco's inspiration for the tribute to Mozart-as-Rockstar is said to have come less directly from the works of the fellow Austrian himself and more from the 1984 Miloš Forman film Amadeus, which itself was based on the Tony Award-winning play of the same name by Peter Shaffer.
During the promotion of the track, Falco once did an interview with himself on MTV as both an American sport-bro interviewer and as Amadeus himself, who of course he stars as in the video.
There are over twenty covers of the song, though most are done by obscure artists, and many in heavy metal styles. The Gothsicles certainly offer a notably absurd version, if a little grating in its approach.
In February 2019, Front Line Assembly released their seventeenth studio album, Wake Up The Coma, which features their cover of Rock Me Amadeus with Jimmy (Euringer) Urine of Mindless Self Indulgence providing vocals for the track. In one interview, Rhys Fulber said that the cover was something bandmate Bill Leeb "had been talking about for a little while, maybe to reflect on his Viennese roots, and also just for fun." He continued, "We are not particularly dour people in person so we thought it would be nice to loosen it up a bit and have fun with something." The track went through a variety of iterations before they brought Urine in. Fulber says this was also Leeb's idea as they had already worked with him on a number of other projects, including Urine's recent self titled album Euringer (which itself has two covers: What A Fool Believes by Kenny Loggins and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.) Urine, featured in the track's video as a Max Headroom doppelganger, effortlessly sings the original German lyrics while adding his own sense of perverse-punk style.
While this track is so very unlike pretty much everything in Front Line Assembly's discography, Fulber says, "you can’t always worry about what people will think when you want to try new things, and it's liberating to do so. We knew it might confuse a few people, but that was also part of the appeal."
It may not be regarded as the work of a genius like Mozart, but it definitely rocks!:
The Cover:
The Original:
Next week:
Our April assemblage of absurdities returns with Second Sunday Slowly to offer a downtempo revision of an eighties diva disco-pop hit done in the moody dark folk style of a master of romantic despair, who likely would never have done such a cover himself, though it's bewildering how appropriate it might have been.
Feel free to tell me what you think about today's cover! Comments, suggestions, discussions, etc... welcome! You do NOT need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but all comments are screened for spam prevention.
(And if, after 206 weekly entries, you find this blog of any value, please click over to my profile and find out how you can leave us a tip if you like...)
Thanks for reading and keep exploring the darkness,
-Xero
Previous DisCOVERies
Mar 31 - Dicepeople – Strangelove (Depeche Mode)
Mar 24 - Cylab – Heart-Shaped Box (Nirvana)
Mar 17 - Strawberry Switchblade – Jolene (Dolly Parton)
Mar 10 - Kaleida – A Forest (The Cure)
Mar 03 - Collide – Haunted When The Minutes Drag (Love & Rockets)
. Directory of All Previous DisCOVERies .
a weekly exploration of goth, industrial, & dark alternative cover songs!
First time here? Click here for details from first entry.
Last week, we were a day too early for April Fool's, so I've decided to devote the entire month to ABSURDITIES, wildly ridiculous covers in concept, style, or just the artists involved. Trying to keep it all light-hearted and fun, despite the 'dark' nature of most of my content. Interestingly every song this month has degree of connection to our favorite prankster/absurdist musician, Weird Al Yankovic! (But you can decipher those connections on your own.)
Today's cover, which I was super excited about when it was released earlier this year, presents a combination of artists previously featured on this blog. (One of them was in fact the very first. click that link above.)
By way of this team-up, the song itself (an eighties German one-hit wonder,) and the style being so outside their general industrial norms, we kick off April Absurdities with a 'golden shower' that may just rock you!:
Front Line Assembly w/ Jimmy Urine – Rock Me Amadeus (Falco)
Neue Deutsche Welle artist Falco (aka Johann "Hans" Hölzel) released Rock Me Amadeus in 1985 several months before his third studio album, Falco 3 (which was his only self-titled LP.) It was a huge international success for Falco, notable also for being the first German language song to have topped all the American pop charts of the time. That fact is also interesting considering the U.S. release was edited to exclude most of the German lyrics, replaced with a narration of a historical timeline of the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom the song is obviously about. Falco's inspiration for the tribute to Mozart-as-Rockstar is said to have come less directly from the works of the fellow Austrian himself and more from the 1984 Miloš Forman film Amadeus, which itself was based on the Tony Award-winning play of the same name by Peter Shaffer.
During the promotion of the track, Falco once did an interview with himself on MTV as both an American sport-bro interviewer and as Amadeus himself, who of course he stars as in the video.
There are over twenty covers of the song, though most are done by obscure artists, and many in heavy metal styles. The Gothsicles certainly offer a notably absurd version, if a little grating in its approach.
In February 2019, Front Line Assembly released their seventeenth studio album, Wake Up The Coma, which features their cover of Rock Me Amadeus with Jimmy (Euringer) Urine of Mindless Self Indulgence providing vocals for the track. In one interview, Rhys Fulber said that the cover was something bandmate Bill Leeb "had been talking about for a little while, maybe to reflect on his Viennese roots, and also just for fun." He continued, "We are not particularly dour people in person so we thought it would be nice to loosen it up a bit and have fun with something." The track went through a variety of iterations before they brought Urine in. Fulber says this was also Leeb's idea as they had already worked with him on a number of other projects, including Urine's recent self titled album Euringer (which itself has two covers: What A Fool Believes by Kenny Loggins and Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.) Urine, featured in the track's video as a Max Headroom doppelganger, effortlessly sings the original German lyrics while adding his own sense of perverse-punk style.
While this track is so very unlike pretty much everything in Front Line Assembly's discography, Fulber says, "you can’t always worry about what people will think when you want to try new things, and it's liberating to do so. We knew it might confuse a few people, but that was also part of the appeal."
It may not be regarded as the work of a genius like Mozart, but it definitely rocks!:
The Cover:
The Original:
Next week:
Our April assemblage of absurdities returns with Second Sunday Slowly to offer a downtempo revision of an eighties diva disco-pop hit done in the moody dark folk style of a master of romantic despair, who likely would never have done such a cover himself, though it's bewildering how appropriate it might have been.
Feel free to tell me what you think about today's cover! Comments, suggestions, discussions, etc... welcome! You do NOT need a Dreamwidth account to comment, but all comments are screened for spam prevention.
(And if, after 206 weekly entries, you find this blog of any value, please click over to my profile and find out how you can leave us a tip if you like...)
Thanks for reading and keep exploring the darkness,
-Xero
Previous DisCOVERies
Mar 31 - Dicepeople – Strangelove (Depeche Mode)
Mar 24 - Cylab – Heart-Shaped Box (Nirvana)
Mar 17 - Strawberry Switchblade – Jolene (Dolly Parton)
Mar 10 - Kaleida – A Forest (The Cure)
Mar 03 - Collide – Haunted When The Minutes Drag (Love & Rockets)
. Directory of All Previous DisCOVERies .