It’s a Hit

by the Hold Steady
(War Child Music)

The Brooklyn quintet finally just step up and do it—not simply
covering their most obvious inspiration, Bruce Springsteen, at his
behest for charity (it’s on the War Child: Heroes album), but
doing it with an arrangement that sounds precisely like the E Street
Band in their mid-’70s prime. Not a facsimile thereof or a fond
borrowing: a damn-near carbon copy, although Craig Finn will never sing
as pretty as even the gnarled old Boss. If anything is surprising about
this, it’s that Springsteen himself hasn’t officially released a
version like this before—the one on Live in New York City,
with the E Street Band, is more like an amplified version of the hissy
demo of the song that first saw light on Nebraska (1982), while
the Sessions Band version on Live in Dublin resembles a
hard-charging jig. This, then, is something of a fan’s dream—the
fan in question, of course, being Craig Finn.

by Antony and Bryce Dessner
(4AD)

Another charity comp, Dark Was the Night (the Red Hot
Organization’s KEXP-indie benefit) features this inspired cover of a
traditional prodigal-son folk song (Bob Dylan’s version, recorded in
1961, is on the No Direction Home soundtrack). Antony is a
graceful enough singer working under his own name, but hearing him over
Bryce Dessner’s delicately fingerpicked guitar here is a revelation:
Not only is thehint of unresolved pain underscoring every-thing he
sings matched perfectly with the song’s subject, the arrangement makes
it all the easier to hear how much Odetta is in his voice.

by School of Seven Bells
(Ghostly International)

by Wavves
(Young Turks)

Weirdly, “The Lake,” a 2004 Antony and the Johnsons single, entered
the UK Independent Label Singles chart on February 22 at number 7. Two
other top-10 entries from that week are a little more timely. The
Brooklyn dream-pop trio School of Seven Bells (number 3) wear for me
over the course of their debut full-length, Alpinisms, but on
its own, the album’s lead track is startlingly calm, like some kind of
weird Scandinavian soul music from the early ’70s—rhythms placid,
but with an oddly urgent emotional pull from the way the voices sing
the run-on title phrase. Similarly, Wavves (number 6) put their
hookiest foot forward, and if that hook happens to be buried in
gurgling static, even better: Isn’t making you work for it a little
half the point of indie rock?