Pitchfork

David "Junior" Kimbrough played his guitar as a form of hypnosis. That statement may sound overly romantic, but it's rooted in practical truth: like dance music, his sexed-up blues worked on the principle that the repitition of a complex rhythm will induce a trancelike state in listeners as their minds surrender to their dancing bodies.

Kimbrough's music was an utterly unique form of boogie blues, created and developed at his juke joint in Chulahoma, Miss., where he played for decades before being "discovered," which is like saying the New World was discovered by Columbus and not by the millions of Native Americans already inhabiting the continent. In that venue-- which burned to the ground in 2000, two years after his death-- his music must have elicited a visceral thrill, one lost in the translation to digital media. Even muted on disk, however, his riffs still sound somehow inhuman supernatural, as if he can only channel their infinite wavelength for a few minutes at a time.

More than the lyrics or the melodies, it's Kimbrough's riffs that the 15 artists are covering on Fat Possum's tribute Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough. Each artist has a slightly different approach producing wildly varying results, commensurate with the wide range of styles they represent. Some use the blues rhythms as jumping-off points, placing only secondary emphasis on the words. The chugging guitar pattern on Spiritualized's rendering of "Sad Days Lonely Nights" sounds like a perpetual-motion machine: self-propelled and apparently accelerating. That riff quickly becomes the backdrop for a sustained freak-out similar to the band's own "Cop Shoot Cop", although, mercifully, not as long.

Other artists cover their songs holistically, giving each element equal weight. Thee Shams' "Release Me" resets Kimbrough's song in a museum-quality re-creation of 60s swamp pop, and the Black Keys' elegant "My Mind Is Ramblin'" simmers mysteriously, with Dan Auerbach using a guitar/amp set-up identical to Kimbrough's. And while the name Pete Yorn usually doesn't inspire consumer confidence, he transforms "I Feel Good Again" into a shamelessly catchy pop song.

Not every interpretation pulls so much from its source material. The Ponys, Outrageous Cherry, and Whitey Kirst all submit uninspired blues-rock exercises, which weigh down the second half of the album. The vocals by Entrance's Guy Blakeslee on "Do the Romp" sound arch and self-conscious, especially compared to Cat Power's soulful performance. And "Done Got Old" gets two treatments-- from Jim White and the Heartless Bastards-- both of which sound lightweight, as if neither artist has the age or experience to grasp Kimbrough's mortal resignation.

Sunday Nights begins and ends with Iggy and the Stooges, who toured with Kimbrough before his death, performing "You Better Run". The first version is a sped-up blues-rock number that perfectly translates Kimbrough's riff to the Stooges' guitar-drenched frenzy; the second is slowed-down and, with Mike Watt's bass bouncing steadily, much more faithful to the original. Both versions feature deranged vocals from Pop. In the song, a woman approaches the singer and asks for a ride home, saying there's a man with a knife who wants to rape her. Halfway home, Pop snarls, "you might still get raped, baby," to which she replies, "oh, you don't have to rape me, Mr. Pop. 'Cause I love you." Compared to Kimbrough's original, which underplayed the sexual predation hauntingly, Pop and the Stooges play the song as a lark, making an unsettling singalong out of "Rape you, baby."

However, Pop's seemingly cavalier take reveals a subtle table-turning: in the end the song implies that the threatened woman has been in control all along, launching a sly, manipulative seduction of the narrator. She is the story's true predator, and he is both her prize and her dupe. While they still raise some very uncomfortable questions, these two versions of "You Better Run" prove to be brave, audacious reimaginings that expose the dark heart of the song as well as the intricacies of meaning in all of Kimbrough's work. Of the Sunday Nights contributors, Iggy and the Stooges seem to have the most intuitive grasp of the man and his music. Without stooping to romanticize Kimbrough, they reveal his songs to be more than simply the sum of their riffs, melodies, and lyrics; in their hands-- as in Kimbrough's-- they're dark and mystifying forces.