At the risk of repeating ourselves, we’ll say it again: The A.V Club’s Undercover series is one of the best things going right now. The premise is simple: a band comes into their Chicago studio and selects a song off a list to cover, and after that song is performed it gets scratched off the list. By year’s end, there’s some weird and bizarre pairings, and it usually ends up awesome (like Gwar covering Billy Ocean last year).
Anyway, we’re still in the early stages of the 2014 series (only through 8 of the 28 songs planned), but this year’s Undercover has already yielded some real quality shit, like the Coathangers taking on the Go Go’s and Eagulls doing their best Stone Roses impression. Now comes perhaps the best of all — Phoenix folk-punk band Andrew Jackson Jihad covering Stone Temple Pilots’ 1992 alt-rock hit “Plush.”
“For me it that song was a… it permeated my entire childhood,” says singer/guitarist Sean Bonnette. “I remember being a kid in California when that song came out, and you know it’s kinda embedded in me.”
Adds A.V. Club Undercover: “Andrew Jackson Jihad is never one to tackle things straight-on. The band’s history is full of skewed takes on songs about love and the human condition, with many of them featuring lines that would surely stop first time listeners in their tracks. It’s only fitting that the band would take on Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush” — from its 1992 debut Core — and twist it into something uniquely Andrew Jackson Jihad.”
Check out the video below; and head’s up, these songs still remain on the Undercover list: Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls,” Pulp’s “Babies,” and the Jam’s “Town Called Malice.” Pretty much guaranteed we’ll write about those, no matter who performs them.