Rhino’s Got You Covered: The All-Radiohead Edition

It’s Wednesday, so it must be time to take another dip into the Rhino catalog and trot out a new quartet of cover songs that you may or may not have heard before. This week, we’re offering five – count ‘em – five cover songs, but when we saw the opportunity to spotlight a song from each of Radiohead’s first five albums, it was hard to resist. So we didn’t!

Let’s get started, shall we?
    
•    The Pretenders, “Creep” (1995): Originally released as one of the B-sides to the band’s live version of “Kid,” this track – which, yes, is also live – can now be readily found in a couple of places, including the expanded version of their ISLE OF VIEW album and their career-spanning box set, PIRATE RADIO.

•    Scala & Kolacny Brothers, “Fake Plastic Trees” (2007): It’s already a rather creepy song to begin with, but take Thom Yorke’s lyrics and listen to them being delivered by a Belgian women’s choir, and you’ve got something damned near otherworldly.

•    Brad Mehldau, “Paranoid Android” (2002): Some would call Mehldau a jazz pianist, but that’s pigeonholing him in a way that Radiohead certainly wouldn’t approve of, so let’s just say that he’s a man who knows his way around a lot of different types of music, including both jazz and Radiohead. Better you should hear it for yourself than have us try and fail to describe it properly.

•    Punch Brothers, “Kid A” (2012): The idea of a bluegrass band taking on a Radiohead cover, particularly the title track to the album where Radiohead basically said “f*** this” to feigning interest in mainstream success, is pretty incongruous, but damned if it doesn’t work.

•    The Flaming Lips, “Knives Out” (2003): The truth of the matter is that there’s virtually nothing that Wayne Coyne wouldn’t consider covering, and by the time they’re done, they’re managed to make it their own. They did it with Kylie Minogue, they did it with Pink Floyd’s DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, and by God, they’ve done it to Radiohead, too.