Deadbeat & Camara - Trinity Thirty

Sometimes there's a fine line between musical homage and subtle lampooning. Just the other day I was floating between the aisles of the local supermarket, the insidious piped music more annoying than usual. The central musical phrase of Soft Cell’s ‘Tainted Love’ interlaced with some workaday pop song, lifting its ordinariness into something palatable. That’s an example of lampooning, albeit perhaps unintentional. On the other hand, there are artists who bring fresh perspectives to the music they love, but who nonetheless would never seek to cheapen the legacy by exploiting its popularity. That, by covering it, they’re introducing it to a new audience.

That’s what Deadbeat and Camara are trying to do with Cowboy Junkies album, The Trinity Sessions, released in 1988. They do so, not by literal conveyance of gentle country rock into something too similar in kinship. Their take on it is more gothic hymnal.

For instance, ‘Blue Moon Revisited’ is more torpid anguish than lonely reflection; the Jane of ‘Sweet Jane’ a more groggy, befuddled Jane, the lumbering pace of the song more commensurate with the slow drawdown of a heroin kick. Lou Reed liked the Cowboy Junkies version a lot, already slowed down to a vapid crawl. Well, this one is a high that takes even longer to come on.

One of the more successful covers is ‘Working on a Building’ with a hint of back-porch character – distant steel strings, and do I hear the incipient tones of harmonica cut drastically short before a virtual A Capella offering? Not sure, but the sound is disembodied, carried away like some poorly stored memory. Interesting.

More of the android kind comes with the cover of ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ sounding like an alternate western universe, a nightmarish landscape removed of grandeur. A whole wasteland of tears. The personal state of desperation and anguish emphasised with a hollowed-out melody.

The funereal pace of ‘To Love Is to Bury’ with its quavering notes and subtle distortion more of that gothic hymnal I mentioned before, emotionally aloof with the melodies not allowed to breathe as they were when Margot Timmins sang them.

Deadbeat and Camara’s Trinity Thirty is more downbeat than the original, but amidst the oppressive tone lies some very smart re-evaluation of the source material.