Soundtracks: Through the Wilderness: A Tribute to Madonna

Madonna + guitar = boring. I'm talking about all that coffeehouse strumming on American Life, and the time I saw her on the Drowned World tour and she pulled her axe out and started attacking it in this angry, messy way that I guess was supposed to be pretend-punk or something but was actually just kind of dumb.

But it turns out that if you give Madonna songs to people who aren't Madonna and have them do lots of their weird guitar stuff, it can be quite transcendent. That's the deal with my favorite tracks off of Through the Wilderness: A Tribute to Madonna, a record released yesterday by Manimal Vinyl (with 25 percent of proceeds going toward Raising Malawi). The opener is Jonathan Wilson's gorgeous version of "La Isla Bonita," a song that Mother Jones reviewer Nicole McClelland insists "was not meant to sound long-form jam-band style with tambourines." But of course it was! Jonathan even slightly rips off "War Pigs" at one point, and his turning the "all of nature, wild and free" lyric into some tripped-out coda will make you want to do that hand-twisting hippie dance all over the place. Golden Animals' rendition of "Beautiful Stranger" (which you can download at My Old Kentucky Blog) reminds me of "Maggie's Farm" by Bob Dylan, while Lavender Diamond's "Like a Prayer" is sweetly true to the original (but with lots more innocence). And "Live to Tell" (covered here by Winter Flowers, a band I've accidentally seen live about a thousand times and might finally appreciate) has this bluesy guitar refrain that makes it even more haunting than Madonna's performance (or at least more haunting than Sean Penn and Christopher Walken's hair in the video).

The less guitar-centric songs don't do it for me as much. Jeremy Jay's "Into the Groove" sounds too much like Sonic Youth's version without being nearly so fun and fucked-up, and I basically hate how Ariel Pink's "Everybody" turns one of the most perfect dance songs of all time into grating lo-fi dreck.

It also creases me that an album titled Through the Wilderness doesn't include a cover of "Like a Virgin." On the weirdo Madonna tribute of my dreams, Devendra Banhart's taken on that one, but in reality he only appears here as a member of Mountain Party. Their track is "Material Girl," this spacey/scary electro thing with white-hot vocals provided by Argentinean ex-pop-star Erica Garcia. When Erica sings "I am a material...unicorn" at the chorus I'm halfway between being like, "Oh, knock it off!" and wishing the $50 tank-top I bought at the Drowned World concert six years ago were printed with those lyrics instead of the original's.

Posted by Liz in Soundtracks
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