Maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s winter, maybe it’s a little bit of everything slowly creeping in and stripping away what is left of our sanity, but we’ve been having a lot of fun with musical alchemy lately. In recent weeks we’ve hyped Bill McClintock’s mashup of Metallica and Huey Lewis, and celebrated a few genre-bending covers, like Years & Years stripping down a Pet Shop Boys banger for maximum emotion, and Voyager amplifying The Presets with heavy riffage.
But things really go off the rails this afternoon (February 3), as we discover, with an assist from Vanyaland Senior Writer Michael Christopher, this cover that takes Depeche Mode’s classic alternative belter “Personal Jesus” and reinvents it in the style of Motörhead.
As if we need to type any more words into this damn clicky clicky machine to get the reader to hit play.
But there are some details worth mentioning in digital print: The cover is the work of Denis Pauna, a brilliant Croatian musician who’s built a nice following with a string of YouTube videos under a similar premise (“What if Type O Negative wrote ‘Master of Puppets'”… “What if Alice in Chains wrote ‘Symphony of Destruction'”).
Here, he takes Depeche Mode’s underground dancefloor banger and cranks up the riffage, summoning the spirit of Lemmy and injecting some “Born To Raise Hell” and “Built For Speed” fury into the track.
Let’s just coin a new band right now: Möderhead.