Cover albums are seldom considered to be serious works. More often than not, they’re rightly viewed as stopgaps, or at worst, pointless vanity projects. Occasionally, though, they serve as defining moments in an artist’s career, boldly charting a path forward by way of carefully chosen footnotes from years past.
When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV is one such album. While it’s far from the first offering by Toronto doom-gazer duo Nadja, which has been regularly dishing out discs since 2003, this eight-song paean to the group’s songwriting heroes is so poised for acceptance that it will probably serve as their entrance music for a legion of new fans.
RATING: 8/10
HIGHLIGHT TRACK: “Only Shallow” (My Bloody Valentine)
SUBPAR TRACK: “Faith” (The Cure)
Like other classic covers records, such as Nick Cave’s Kicking Against the Pricks, or The Afghan Whigs’ soul-infused Uptown Avondale EP, When I See runs a painstakingly curated collection of songs through a unique filter, letting loose an altogether different sort of vision and shedding light on something strange and new in the process.
The set opens brazenly enough with a reading of My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow,” a statement in and of itself. That iconic drum intro, which at this point is probably a ’90s alternative “Be My Baby” in terms of cultural relevance, is familiar as ever — but on the other end of the Nadja sieve, it creeps out slower, deeper, and scarier, like your Loveless cassette might sound if you were listening to it on your car stereo, and your car was at the bottom of the ocean. The jet-engine guitar wail that follows is no exception. This is a cover for the ages, giving new, bottom-dwelling life to a legendary song that had never known frequencies quite so low in its original incarnation.
What follows is a crash course in taste and aural dynamics. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Aidan Baker and singer/bassist Leah Buckareff obliterate canonical favourites by Swans, The Cure, and Codeine, dropping them in seamlessly alongside choices by less likely artists, such as Slayer, Kids in the Hall (!), and Elliott Smith.
In fact, it’s Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” — a heroin fantasy if ever there was one — that provides the emotional heart of this collection, drowning the late singer/songwriter’s desperate words in a wash of melodic noise and rendering it all but unrecognizable. As with everything else here, it’s as personal a reinterpretation as you could hope to find, simultaneously offering a brief look backwards while droning on into the beginning of a new dawn.
