The concept is simple enough: take two women with sweet, warm voices, match them with arrangements that are spare but elegant and evocative, and have them perform a handful of familiar tunes. But there's a spanner in the works. Look beneath the dreamlike surfaces and you realize the songs in question are all classic punk, new wave, and garage rock numbers. That's the idea behind
Take It, It's Yours, a collaborative album from
Katy Goodman (of
La Sera and the
Vivian Girls) and
Greta Morgan (of
Springtime Carnivore and
Hush Sound) in which they take a bunch of songs riddled with bitterness and angst and convert them into one big, fluffy cloud of beautiful sadness. In terms of the quality of the execution, it's all but impossible to fault
Goodman and
Morgan; the lead vocals from both performers are lovely, the harmonies are splendid, and the arrangements, with a cool, retro sound reinforced by judicious use of echo, honor the melodies of the originals while casting them in a very different light. (A notable exception is
the Bad Brains' "Pay to Come," whose breakneck thrash is smoothed out into a dreamlike, organ-dominated mood piece all but unrecognizable from the original.) Several of these reworkings are effective, especially the young-adult confusion of
the Replacements' "Bastards of Young,"
the Buzzcocks' heartbroken "Ever Fallen in Love," and the pure pop reverie of
Blondie's "Dreaming."
Katy Goodman and
Greta Morgan have made an album that's often beautiful and marvelously crafted with
Take It, It's Yours, regardless of how you feel about classic punk. ~ Mark Deming