Today is Columbus Day across our land, and on everyone’s minds this morning is the notion of taking something that isn’t yours and making it your own. So what better way to commemorate that sentiment than a covers EP?
There’s certainly no savagery going on here on Wakes‘ latest release, a collection of covers that includes indigenous cuts by Grimes, Bruce Springsteen, Waxahatchee, and Angel Olsen, but there is a good deal of personal assertion over already-established sounds.
The Massachusetts-based Wakes takes a variety of songs and filters them into the Tim Oxton project’s now-distinct lo-fi, bedroom surf-pop lens. Oxton is certainly fantastic at writing originals — see June’s Feral Youth LP off the UK’s Shape Records — but he also has a true knack for interpreting others’ work and reclaiming that emotion as his own. The songs are all recognizable from their previous lives, but all sound distinctively Wakes-ian.
“Thanks to the people who wrote the songs so I could play them differently,” Oxton writes.
Check out the covers EP via Bandcamp below, and download it for the nice-price of free, if so inclined.
