Various Artists - Standing On the Outside: The Songs of Cold Chisel (2007)

Tribute albums are very hit or miss affairs, and unfortunately more often than not and despite the best intentions of the bands playing tribute on them, they tend to miss.

Luckily this collection "hits" more than it "misses." Some of the covers are too close to the originals leaving the listener to wonder why the band even bothered recording a cover in the first place. And others are so far removed from the original the listener is left scratching his/her head wondering if the band performing the cover had ever actually listened to the original version.

The highlights on this collection include Paul Kelly's folky melancholic Khe Sanh. Where the piss, vinegar, and swagger was with the original-- Kelly has replaced it with a somber disillusionment. I never thought the banjo could be made to sound like a sad instrument but it gives Khe Sanh a certain lost yearning. The Waifs give a similar interpretation on Four Walls. The Living End give a nouveau rockabilly (a la Brian Setzer) feel to Rising Sun that makes the listener want to get up and dance. Sarah Blasko's Flame Trees, and Shane Nicholson's Cheap Wine are all quite enjoyable as well.

This album also serves as an excellent introduction to some of the better bands that Australia has been keeping secret from the world. If you can find the special 2 disc collection which features a 2nd disc with the original Cold Chisel versions of all the songs thare are on disc 1 I highly recommend picking it up as it's an excellent introduction to one of the most seminal (yet rarely heard of beyond their borders) Australian bands ever.

Related Links
Standing On the Outside (Wikipedia entry)
Standing On the Outside (Amazon.com)
Cold Chisel Chisel: The Best of Cold Chisel (review)
Standing On the Outside: The Songs of Cold Chisel promo video:

Return to Index of Articles

Def Leppard - Yeah! (2006)

Sometimes you want music that makes you think—that makes you re-evaluate certain long held opinions you may have. Other times you just want music that’s just plain fun—pure mental vacation. This is the music that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s not music for the sake of music, it’s not music for the sake of the almighty dollar, it’s music purely for fun.

Def Leppard is fun, they always have been, their new album Yeah! is no exception. Generally cover albums are “stop-gaps” to buy time for the band to finish working on original material without the band falling out of the public spotlight. Generally they’re hit or miss, and many fans consider them “cop-outs”—after all we fans have heard the same old song before. We want something new!

What makes Yeah! work where other cover albums have failed is Def Leppard’s song selection. These are all songs by bands that influenced the various members of Def Leppard in their youth. With many of the groups/musicians they chose to cover—they didn’t go with the obvious—with T-Rex a lesser band would have covered Bang a Gong (Get It On), Def Leppard chose 20th Century Boy; for Sweet one might expect Ballroom Blitz or possibly Fox on the Run, but they chose Hell Raiser; for Free just about anyone would expect All Right Now, but instead they went with Little Bit of Love, with ELO the obvious would have been Don’t Bring Me Down (or possibly Do Ya?), but Def Leppard instead went with 10538 Overture.

Some of these songs Def Leppard is exactly the band you’d expect to cover them—Hell Raiser is probably the most obvious. On their Retro-Active CD the Lep chose to cover Sweet’s Action to great effect. Perhaps because Sweet was to the seventies what Def Leppard was to the eighties. Pure glam-rock fun, not at all pretentious, just good old fashioned rock and roll fun (with a bit of hairspray thrown into the mix for good measure).

Other songs are less obvious, although still (in some cases surprisingly so) quite respectable covers—The Kinks Waterloo Sunset, ELO’s 10538 Overture, David Essex’s Rock On, and Roxy Music’s Street Life all fall within that category.

After 2002’s X, which bored me to tears after only a couple of spins in my CD player, I was a bit apprehensive, but the price was right and I figured after High ‘n’ Dry, Pyromania, and Hysteria Def Leppard had more than earned a second chance. These guys may not be the band to make you think about the ills of the world, their music isn’t what one might hear in a Starbucks, and it certainly will never be considered high art—but there’s already plenty of that kind of music out there. Def Leppard is fun, that’s what people listen to them for and Yeah! is just the kind of album that can re-establish their reputation with a new generation of fans.