If you'd ever wondered how Sound and Vision, lifted from the seminal Low may sound were it splattered with aqueous synths and rustled up with a side order of simulated Salt'n'Peppa drum machine thumps, delivered in jovial Spanish by Devendra Banhart's Fab Moretti-featuring Megapuss then the answer ought to be a resplendently resounding yes. Tinny, retrospective Shoreditch sheen comes in the form of Warpaint's 80s-indebted, nonchalant take on Ashes To Ashes, as well as Vivian Girls, whose ramshackle harmonies disguise John, I'm Only Dancing joyously. Suffragette City, once dolled up to the nines by Jake Shears' Scissor Sisters gets a dingy, gloomy makeover courtesy of Oliver Ackermann's grungy New York City boys A Place To Bury Strangers, quirky industrial doom transpires as We Are The World ransack Afraid Of Americans, and Las Vegas duo Afghan Raiders unceremoniously inundate Fashion with a noxious amount of cowbell. And that's just disc one...
Disc two emerges amidst a smog of lo-fi feedback tendency, as Voicesvoices rework Heroes in unerring fashion, reminiscent of School Of Seven Bells ascending to heaven following an incident with a transistor radio and a bathtub, before a typically sultry Carla Bruni croons crookedly on Absolute Beginners, her cracked vox sounding forever more established, swathed in more regal grandeur than the Loire Valley. The symbiotic monotone of Keren Ann on an orchestral Life On Mars? is beguilingly terrene, whilst the jazz pizzazz of Lewis & Clarke's Changes is perhaps the most rejuvenated impression here, akin to Fleet Foxes swooning through Ella Fitzgerald covers at the Jazz Café. Cult figureheads Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros round off proceedings in ecclesiastical approach, as warbling organs whirr around Sharpe's best androgyny-imbued Bowie impression on a tumbledown take of Memory Of A Free Festival. A fitting tribute to glam rock's forever-fittest icon, We Were So Turned On distinguishes the inherent impact that David Robert Jones has had and presumably always will have on every last one of these 'Pretty Things.
