Savages
“Paranoid”
Matador Records
If you’re going to attempt to cover and rearrange a song like “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, you better do it in the brooding, slinky and vicious way that Savages does in their newest release.
This is far from new music from Savages, but it’s new to us. A decade ago this week, they released their second and final album “Adore Life” on Matador Records. (Label head Chris Lombardi describes it as a “giant fist of a record.”)
To celebrate the occasion, Savages released music from that era of the band, including this semi-stripped down cover of “Paranoid” with a video to go with it (see above). I love the heartfelt statement the band issued for the occasion.
“We’re sharing with you two unreleased songs that never made it onto the albums. We left them exactly as they were – no retakes, no remixing. What you’ll hear is precisely how they were first recorded. To us, they feel like snapshots of a moment in time, and while we’ve never been ones to dwell too much on nostalgia we felt these songs offered a fresh perspective on the band, or at the very least – a gentle reminder of its magic.”
This cover gets better after a couple of listens. At first, there’s something off-putting about turning a song so well known like “Paranoid” into this dark ballad. But on the second listen, I’m hooked and immersed, hearing the influence of Nick Cave and Elmore Leonard and Patti Smith.
No word on Savages getting the band back together, but maybe this memento dump of music is a sign of new music to come.
