4 out of 5
Label: Permanent Vacation
Produced by: Ed DMX
For label Permanent Vacation’s 20th anniversary, DMX Krew delivers two covers: Police’s Voices Inside My Head, and Chris Rea’s On The Beach. The media copy describes these tracks as “Balearic classics,” which is definitely true of Rea’s song – wiki cites it as having been inspired by the Spanish island Formentera – though I’m not sure how it applies to Voices, except for the album from which the original is taken (Zenyattà Mondatta) having some reggae influence, but I’m neither an Ibiza or Police historian, so who knows.
Anyhow, there are two ways to assess these: as standalone tunes (and how they play together as a single) and as covers. As to the former, these definitely do the job of transforming both tracks into Ibizan-vibed tunes, which links them tonally, and also is fitting to Permanent Vacation’s overall old school style beats. But Voices is very much the standout, with its more emotive vocal lines (vocals on each track performed by Ed) and analog beat giving the song a lot of life and breadth. In comparison, Beach is pretty standard: it’s linear; it’s beat well produced but exchangeable with a handful of similar tunes, and further personality lost in the vocoder-ed vocals. That sounds overly negative, but I more just mean to frame it as a good-not-great DMX track, whereas Voices is truly memorable.
As covers, these are really interesting. Mileage may vary, of course, but I find the decisions Ed made super interesting, even if ultimately the split, by my opinion – Voices is better – remains the same. On the Police cover, Ed gives the whole thing a very strong production cleanup, emphasizing the vocals and beat over the original’s bass and synths, and kind of streamlines the whole thing, translating the looseness of the source version’s coda (one of its highlights) into some playful drops in beat. Both songs have their own flavor, making Ed’s take a true tribute and adaptation.
The Chris Rea cover is weird. I get not even wanting to find something comparable to Rea’s gravelly voice, hence going with the digitized path, but, as mentioned, it minuses out some of the original’s depth. It’s also a more linear song in general, and besides Chris’ notable vocals, gains weight through the organicness of its instrumentation, paired against the “tropical” beat. Ed washes most of that away, and makes it a fun bop. Which I’ve now both described as weird and interesting.
My favorite covers give me reason to revisit the originals, and that’s very much the case here, while also providing a double dose of DMX body groovin’ goodness, albeit with one side arguably stronger than the other.
