Wednesday, June 18, 2014

This Is Your Song For....June 18th, 2014: Karma Police

From their closet, they mess with you...
Today on This Is Your Song--a ominous cover of an already ominous song.

Like a lot of people, I first became aware of Flunk when I stumbled on the band’s version of ‘Blue Monday.’  Kinda fuzzy and low-fi with a compelling female vocal by Anya Oyen Vistar, the song maked the quartet as a band to watch.

This is a cover from 2009‘s This Is What You Get (I am fascinated by how this album, like their first, is named after a line from a song they cover), and it takes full advantage of the creepy vibe of the original.  By submerging the vocal in a sludgy guitar arrangement enhanced by electronic bleeps and blurbs, you do get the sense that there’s something really, really wrong with both the culprits and the speaker.  This is a person who has not crashed a party; this is a person who has infiltrated it for some sort of nefarious person--which makes the statement ‘This is what you get when you mess with us’ an actual threat.  And the way it slowly slows, degrading as if the song’s components are coming apart, makes for a somber coda.

I enjoy the chilly, vaguely scary cool of Flunk.  All evidence points to the band still being in existence, as they released Lost Causes last year.

Here is the song: