Pitchfork

Jared Louche is your average punky-yet-sensitive, crude-yet-cultured gentleman outlaw. In fact, he could be the result of some twisted cross-breeding of Harry Connick, Jr., Crocodile Dundee and Trent Reznor. On the album's cover, Louche leers at the camera holding a martini, flaunting a snakeskin cowboy hat and irreverently sucking a cigarette. His image suggests, at once, a certain Bohemian chic, subtle refinement, rock-n-roll swagger, and cheesy "Mad Max" futurism. Not surprisingly, the same traits are found in Louche's music, and the stylish manner in which he chooses to mangle this diverse cross-section of other people's songs. It's an interesting new direction for this former member of Chemlab-turned-Wall Street stockbroker.

Considering the mass profusion of awful covers being beaten into the ground (anyone still interested in another take on "Sweet Child o' Mine?"), the selections on Covergirl certainly betray a more far-reaching vision than most cover tunes I've heard lately. I guess Louche figures that if you're going to release an album comprised strictly of cover songs, you can at least cull them from as broad a musical palette as possible. Lumping the French disco-nouveau of Air's "Sexy Boy" next to Iggy Pop's "Sister Midnight" next to Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" could be called ambitious, I suppose. And at least Louche does show a facility for distilling all this musical miscellany into his own garbled, noisy form of industrial disco-punk.

Although he doesn't exactly channel Bryan Ferry on the trip-hop-enhanced re-working of Roxy Music's "In Every Dreamhome a Heartache," he does bring a not-so-offensive personal style to it-- the song climaxes in a throbbing Tangerine Dream-like vortex of synth-noise before resolving into a more strident beat during the outro. Later, our snakeskin-clad wildman manages to conjure a more mystical, psychedelic side for Arthur Lee's "7 and 7." But much of the time, Louche comes off like Trent Reznor's suave, smooth talking cousin-- too hip and cool to be a self-parodying angry bitch.

Just after he mauls Public Image Limited's "Poptones," we get an anti-climactic kick in the balls with what amounts to feeble punk-rock Karaoke on Iggy and the Stooges' "Search and Destroy." This rusty razor of a classic is subjected to an extremely over-the-top technocentric overhaul, which unfortunately brings back much the same nausea I felt when I heard the disco remix of the Ventures' "Walk Don't Run." "Look out honey, 'cause we're usin' technolo-gee!" I suppose Louche thought it'd be a cool irony to fulfill the prophecy of Pop's immortal words and massacre the song by employing an arsenal of rabid synthesizers.

Soon, the inevitable martini 'n' olive section of the album kicks in. You'd never imagine it, but Sinatra's "Summer Wind" actually doesn't sound too awkward presented as jaunty synth-pop (although it probably would've given the man himself a brain tumor). Here, Louche's voice truly seems in its element. Maybe he should explore his suave Harry Connick, Jr. side more often. Louche caps it all off with a mondo-synth reprise to Air's "Sexy Boy" (an outro "suture" as Louche refers to it) that treads all over itself for what seems a lifetime, though it only amounts to five or so grueling minutes of pulsing synth-wash and stiff robo-dance rhythms.

Of course, the important question here is: what have these songs gained from Louche's distinct touches? Probably not much, other than mildly interesting and "modernized" facelifts. Luckily, the individual nuggets covered here seem timeless enough to survive this kind of tinkering. So, no, Louche hasn't exactly cured cancer with his interpretative gestures on Covergirl, but he does occasionally integrate some valid original thought into this semi-worthwhile endeavor.

Although Covergirl is ultimately a meaningless slice of rock-n-roll ephemera, it does inspire me to do some of my own creative reinterpreting. Check for my upcoming cover-book, tentatively titled "Cover My Ass," in which I reinterpret and reshape classic essays by such critical giants as Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and Richard Goldstein. I'll give you a short preview of my creative variations on these original texts: for example, I inject my own original sensibility into the work by adding an original phrase here and there, such as, "Shiver me timbers and devour me skivvies," "Y'know dat's right, homie," and the ever-popular, "Oy, where's my leg?!"