Covered By the Tough Alliance

You've all caught on by now, I'm sure: I'm a huge, huge, huge fan of the Tough Alliance (MySpace) and their record label, Sincerely Yours. I've an insatiable thirst for more music from these guys who are, in my humble opinion, revitalizing and freshening pop music as we know it. Yeah, TTA has what some might call a sort of cheesy 80s sound, washed up by layer upon layer of synths, reverb-y, dubby vocals, and old school club night orchestral lines. But ... there's something terribly genuine and sincere about these guys, something I can't place, but something that I feel in my gut is only remedial for pop music. This stuff is light, beach-y, dance-y, and hooky, for sure, but by no means do any of the tracks rely on some notion of what structure a pop song's supposed to follow or what sort of content you're supposed to be singing about or how often you release music and how and ...

I could go on for days.

Well, I just got my hands on a couple of fantastic covers that TTA did. The "big" cover they did was Embassy's "Now That's What I Call Indulgence," a song that's been available for some time now, but the really exciting new ones (for me, at least) are a cover of 50 Cent's "Many Men" and Primal Scream's "Velocity Girl" (although TTA changed it a bit and calls it "Velocity Boy").

"Many Men" cannot be missed ... to hear these two Swedish hipsters doing their take on the biggest G around is priceless. And, of course, Primal Scream wrote and recorded some classic tunes before Bobby Gillespie went soft in the head (or maybe just took too many drugs?) ... and "Velocity Boy" is no exception. So check out the tunes and be sure to pick up TTA's New Waves EP from Summer Lovers Unlimited as well as their latest LP, A New Chance (when it finally comes out).

the Tough Alliance - Many Men (50 Cent Cover)
the Tough Alliance - Velocity Boy (Primal Scream Cover)
the Tough Alliance - Now That's What I Call Indulgence (Embassy Cover)