Weekly Music Roundup: Beverly Glenn-Copeland Meets Kelsey Lu, Elvis Costello Meets Juanes, and Joan As Police Woman

Week of July 19: This week, new takes on old songs by Derek & The Dominoes, folk singer Shirley Collins, Elvis Costello, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland.

Juanes Sings Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” In Spanish

Elvis Costello’s 1978 LP This Year’s Model included some of his most enduring hits. On September 10, you’ll be able to hear them all again, as you’ve never heard them before, when Costello and a team of Latin rock and pop stars release Spanish Model. Costello and producer Sebastian Krys have taken most of Elvis’s original vocal tracks out, leaving behind the familiar sounds of his band The Attractions, and in their place, they’ve put in Spanish translations sung by Luis Fonsi, Jorge Drexler, La Marisoul, and lots of others. For the moment, they’ve released the single, “Pump It Up,” with Colombian superstar Juanes singing the verses. Elvis Costello’s original English chorus is still there. Not sure who does the “hey!” in the bridge – Juanes does such an uncanny Costello that it’s difficult to tell them apart, and the two voices come together at the end. Speaking of the end, the original track fades out, but this one actually reaches a conclusion. It’s one of several surprises in the mixes of the original band tracks that this album will contain. 

The video is a cheeky version of the song’s original one – rotoscoped and with Juanes’s head superimposed on all four band members. Totally in keeping with the project’s sense of fun and wit. 

Beverly Glenn-Copeland Welcomes Kelsey Lu To His Fantasy World

Canadian-American singer, keyboardist and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland waited for decades for his music to be discovered. Now that it has, we’re starting to hear its impact on other musicians. Just this week, in rapid succession, two covers of his song “Ever New,” from his New Age/spiritual jazz album Keyboard Fantasies (1986), came out. One is by Tom Fleming, formerly of Wild Beasts and now recording under the name One True Pairing. The other is by Kelsey Lu, the cellist, songwriter, and sound artist. Interestingly, Fleming plays it as a fairly straightforward song, singing and playing guitar; while Kelsey Lu focuses instead on the ways in which Glenn-Copeland subverted the song form – stretching it out and setting it in an expansive, almost cosmic electronic soundscape. Using his original tracks, she adds layers of cello and electronics, as if to really underline the “fantasies” part of the album title. 

“Ever New (Kelsey Lu’s Transportation)” is the first single from Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined, which will include multiple artists re-creating that 1986 album in its entirety.  That’s due on December 10. 

Tedeschi Trucks Band and Trey Anastasio Release Layla Revisited

In a week that’s seen an unusual amount of old material being reinvented or otherwise covered, a fair amount of attention will go to this one-off live recording made in August 2019, when the Tedeschi Trucks Band with special guest Trey Anastasio (of Phish) surprised the audience at the LOCKN’ Festival by playing – in its entirety – the epochal 1970 album Layla by Derek and the Dominoes. Walking in the footsteps of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman when they were at the peak of their games might seem a fool’s errand, but if anyone could pull it off, it’d be Derek Trucks (who was, after all, named after Derek and the Dominoes) and company. Much of the focus will inevitably be on the title track and its cascading series of guitar solos, but the track that stands out for me is “Little Wing,” the Jimi Hendrix song that Derek and the Dominoes made their own, in the same way that Hendrix had done with Bob Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower.” Like most of the record, the TTB is pretty faithful to the 1970 original, but when the unison guitars all trace that beautiful falling phrase near the end of the song, well, that’s pretty damn special.  

Folk Legend Shirley Collins Gets The Ambient Electronic Treatment

Shirley Collins established herself on the British folk scene in the early 60s with groundbreaking albums wherein she collaborated with musicians drawing on Eastern music or medieval European music. She sang in an almost unnaturally high voice. But she disappeared from the scene in the late 70s and was gone for almost 40 years before returning, with a startlingly lower, duskier voice, but with her unerring musicality intact. Last year she released a brilliant album called Heart’s Ease, and now she is releasing a new EP called Crowlink. It’s named for a favorite spot on England’s Sussex coast (“Crowlink” is also the name of the last song on that 2020 record). The EP is out on July 30 but the song “My Sailor Boy” is available now, with a Sussex-based video that will satisfy anyone who feels a day without seeing a cute cat on the internet is a day wasted. 

Although Collins’ name is on the release, this is actually the work of producer Matthew Shaw. He has taken some of Collins’ voice tracks from Heart’s Ease (“My Sailor Boy” uses her track from “Tell Me True” on the LP), and set them in an ambient soundscape made up of field recordings from the Sussex cliffs and electronics. In effect, they are remixes, and I’d normally be a little pissed off that they’re being presented as if they’re all new. But it’s just so good to have Collins back, and the arrangements really play up the haunting quality that makes so many of these old songs so memorable.  

JG Thirlwell Offers Twisted Electronica As Xordox

You may wonder how many stage names one guy needs. In the case of JG Thirlwell, the Australian composer who’s been an almost ubiquitous presence on the New York music scene for a couple of decades, the answer is… growing. After making noisy rock as Foetus, cinematic exotica as Steroid Maximus, and avant-garde classical as Manorexia (not a complete list), Thirlwell has turned his attention to electronic music and adopted the name Xordox. The one thing that unites all of his musical exploits is a tendency to take familiar forms and subtly alter or undermine them, and that is evident in this track from his new Xordox record called Omniverse. Opening track “Endeavor” has the rapidly sequenced sound of vintage Tangerine Dream, or a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack, although there is something vaguely unsettling about the metallic-sounding line that shadows the melody’s rising phrase. About two-thirds in, when EDM (electronic dance music) fans know to expect the bass drop, the texture does indeed clear out. But the big moment when the main melody is supposed to return doesn’t happen, at least not until the piece has wandered about a bit. When it does come back, it doesn’t seem to signify the usual arms-in-the-air euphoria, but something like relief.  

Joan As Police Woman’s Starry New Single Is A Response To The Pandemic

Singer/songwriter Joan Wasser, who records under the name Joan As Police Woman, has just released the first single from her upcoming album The Solution Is Restless. “Take Me To Your Leader” was written, she says, while “watching Jacinda Ardern, PM of New Zealand, navigate 2020. In my dream world, the US asks to meet her in order to learn how to better run the country.” The song features a small but high-powered cast: Dave Okumu, the Anglo-Kenyan frontman of the Mercury Prize-winning band The Invisible, and the great Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, recorded shortly before his death in April of 2020. Wasser’s cool vocals and Allen’s restless and inventive drumming are surprisingly effective partners.