Covers albums. Let’s be honest, they’re generally pretty poor. For every Pin Ups, there’s a Garage Inc. or Spaghetti Incident waiting in the wings and you’re all-too-often left wondering why bands would devote time to an entire album of covers when such things are more often (and better) the preserve of the B Side. Nevertheless, as David Bowie so ably demonstrated, if you are to engage with an album of covers, you’d best be sure that you’re going to make the songs your own, not simply turn up the volume. Enter Monster Magnet. Surely, if any group of musical misfits are qualified to undertake a tour of the darker side of psychedelia, it’s Dave Wyndorf and his merry men. And so it transpires for here for, making their debut on the awesome Ripple Music, Monster Magnet once again lift their platform heels over the heads of the crowd and arrive at the front of the pack.
The album opens (as any good album should), with the sound of an almighty gong, wolves howling and Dave gabbling the sort of free-form poetry more commonly associated with Denis Leary. It’s a two-minute preamble paving the way (and clearing the mind’s eye) for Born To Go (Hawkwind), on which Monster Magnet aim to give the listener a contact high with a hyperactive take on a much-loved classic. Played with muscular energy, Born To Go could easily fit on any of the post-leather Monster Magnet albums, with its nitro-riffing and swirly sound effects, and any disparaging thoughts you might have had about a covers album are banished firmly from the mind. Not that it’s all familiar ground. Epitaph For A Head is an obscure J. D. Blackfoot b side, hauled from its slumber and beaten with surf guitars and Iggy-punk vigour. Angular and brutal, it’s a tougher offering than Hawkwind’s more measured madness, whilst Solid Gold Hell (Scientists) is so heavily drowned in fuzz, it threatens to tear chunks out of your speaker cones. Next up, a significantly shortened take on Pentegram’s Be Forewarned proves itself to be perfectly suited to Monster Magnet’s mountainous psych-doom noise, the track rendered as the spiritual forebear to Monster Magnet’s own Bummer, with its slithery vocals and scuzzily nimble guitars. The side closes with Mr Destroyer, a track from psych legends Poobah (whose Let Me In was re-released via Ripple) and it says much of the quality of the original that Monster Magnet’s version, as good as it is, fails to leave it gasping in the dust. Filled with nuclear-terror and echoing voices, Mr Destroyer simply rules and you can’t help but feel that the song was written for Dave, such is the commitment of his performance.
Continuing their tour of the unusual, Side two opens on with the pummelling hard rock of When The Wolf Sits (Jerusalem), a crunchy track with some seriously sweet leads and a vibe that harks back to Monolithic Baby. The first track to slow the pace is the monosyllabically titled Death (Pretty Things), which is rendered faithfully, aside from an octave shift in the vocal to accommodate Dave’s somewhat more gravelly tones. Crashing waves of percussion announce the arrival of Situation, a track that sees the distortion pedals largely left off to allow for a greater sense of space around the haunting harmonica and sanguine bass. Another track that features some mind-melting lead work Situation truly feels like it was beamed in from another decade, and its pace is so relentless that it belies its meagre running time of two minutes. It’s followed by the garage rock nightmare of It’s Trash, the title pretty much screamed by a reverb-wreathed Dave as the band rage behind him. Speaking of which, Motorcycle (Straight To Hell) (Table Scraps) is delivered with such a gutter sneer that you can practically smell the effluent as snap-back echo washes across the mix. The band wrongfoot the listener on Learning To Die (Dust), deftly shifting rhythm to offer up a storming hard rock beast complete with some of the most Animal-esque drumming you’ll hear this side of the Muppets. Even here, however, the band keep the audience guessing, edging the track into Doors’ territory, albeit with moments of drama leaping from the speakers to keep everything from spinning off into a psychedelic haze. It leaves a rousing take on Welcome To The Void (Morgen) to see things to an end. Emerging from a haze of Eastern instrumentation, the track explodes amidst a storm of percussion and crashing power chords to bring this most intense of trips to a suitably hedonistic close.
Covers albums are rarely something worthy of more than a footnote in a band’s catalogue but, on those rare occasions where a band truly does take their influences and weave them into something entirely new, the results can be surprisingly original. Given that a band like Monster Magnet have always felt out of time, their choice of tracks, combined with a fiercely committed performance, marks A Better Dystopia out as one of the few covers albums that is quietly essential. With head spinning artwork and a production job that feels gloriously analogue, A Better Dystopia feels like some freshly unearthed gem from a bygone era, and is something of a must for hard rock fans everywhere. 9/10
