Doo-doo-ron-ron-ron, doo-doo Ronson
Just been listening to the Mark Ronson album ‘Version’, which is basically a bunch of covers done in Ronson’s own funk/hip-hop style. If you’ve heard his excellent reworking of Radiohead’s ‘Just’, then you’ll have an inkling what you’re in for. Unfortunately, most of what’s here it isn’t as good as that track.
It starts strongly, with the Dap-Tone Horns’ instrumental take on Coldplay’s execrable “God Put A Smile…”. The brass arrangements are excellent and it sets up nicely for the following track - Lily Allen’s version of the Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘Oh My God’, which works a lot better than I thought it would. However, it suffers from the problem that plagues the majority of the album - the song itself just isn’t deserving of getting the re-worked treatment.
‘Just’ worked because it’s one of the strongest songs off a pretty classic album which has properly stood the test of time. Kaiser Chiefs, Zutons, Maximo Park could hardly be described as having had the chance to cement themselves in the annals of popular culture as yet, and as a result the versions of these songs seem pretty pointless.
When there is a bona-fide classic in there (as in the case of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before and The Only One I Know), Ronson and his cohorts seem to miss the mark somewhat. Robbie Williams’s take on the Charlatans best-known song is at best redundant, shrouding Robbie’s vocals in reverb to make them virtually indistinguishable from Tim Burgess’s original performance, and lead single ‘Stop Me’ is just…weird (especially with its interpolation of ‘Keep Me Hanging On’ near the end).
An interesting idea for a project that suffers mainly from a poor choice of songs, and the fact that the best track on the album came out months ago as part of a separate project.
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