OK let’s get my one niggle out of the way first. I have long held the belief that Ann Wilson has the best female voice in rock but somehow she’s managed to suck most of the life out of her cover of Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’ not with her vocal performance of course, but by doing a little too much. Reworking the tempo becomes more comfortable after a few listens but by discarding the wonderful opening and replacing the best saxophone solo in Rock with a jangly, rolling Jefferson Airplane-style guitar solo she’s gone a step too far. There I’ve said it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, after all that is the final track of ten on Ann’s new solo album ‘Immortal’.
Ten tracks, all of them covers with no original material in sight might delight some and sit less comfortably with others – after all I could probably name only a handful of covers that overshadow their illustrious antecedents.
Opener ‘You Don’t Own Me’ which features some wonderful guitar from Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes smoulders with dark heat, it’s a slower tempo than the 60’s original by Lesley Gore and whilst it’s a different kind of animal it retains the hook and the thrust of that template. Where Ann comes into her own is on ‘I Am the Highway’ that Audioslave standout track that is treated acoustically here and which largely keeps to the original’s tempo (on of the few songs that ups the tempo slightly). Its beautiful just like the original was.
Warren Haynes is back to weep some blues all over the satisfyingly smokey Tom Petty cover ‘Luna’ before Ann set’s her sights of Bowie, but not the sort of song you hoped she’d tackle but the rather a song from his Electronic/Dance era and the ‘Showgirls’ soundtrack album – ‘I’m Afraid of Americans.’ Not one of my favourite Bowie songs or eras, and Ann does a decent job bringing some ‘Rock’ to the surface, as songs go I’m still rather nonplussed.
Cream’s ‘Politician’ is more the sort of song you’d like to hear covered and it’s from this point tat the album seems to click – ‘Politician’ is treated with reverence and a sufficient amount of grunt and Ann sounds great as it crawls along (here the change of pace works) and Leonard Cohen’s supper cub ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’ sounds great, and so does her take on The Eagles ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ even if I could live without the less than organic synth that underlies the opening.
Amy Winehouse as an artist I can take or leave, I honestly believe she’s been rather over-evaluated simply because she came in at a time when there was a rather uninspired period for the music industry, and big hair, bad habits and a few well chosen covers as well as a cracking voice made her standout far more than she might have in more inspired decades. That said Wilson knocks ‘Back to Black’ out of the part and it’s probably only one of a couple of tracks here where I feel she has really nailed it.
As popular artists go I find few as uninspiring as George Michael and of Anne’s cover of his 1986 hit… all I can say it’s a little less cloying and pompously ‘breathy’ than the pompous original. And that leaves us with the final word – arguably the most famous song here – Gerry Rafferty’s ‘Baker Street’ which takes us back to the start of the review.
Much as I love, and always will love Wilson, I have to say this is a mixed bag, brilliant at times, hampered by song choice or arrangement at others, this is an album that features predominately slower tempoed takes on the originals: but otherwise it’s inspired and vocally flawless. I guess as a grumpy old rocker I’d loved to have heard more ‘Rock’ on here especially when the Warren Haynes assisted tracks stand out so prominently but I guess there’s more to life than Rock and Roll right? (Yes I am joking)…
