It’s wrong, Pete Du Pon!
Yes, before you ask this is indeed a cover of Green Day’s Punk anthem ‘Basket Case’. Excited? Please don’t be. Canadian born singer Pete Du Pon is a good singer, and when you read anything about him you get the names of singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Damien Rice, and David Gray being bounded around, and this, therefore is exactly what this sounds like. ‘Basket Case’ has been watered down and mellowed in the same way that a prisoner of war may well be psychologically broken into being totally submissive. We have no thumping drumbeats, there are no chugging guitar riffs, no pounding basslines, and no angst-ridden vocals, however what we do get it a beautiful acoustic guitar, a tempo that is almost flatlining and Perfect Pete’s honey-drizzled smooth easy-listening vocals, that whilst will have your nan smiling, glasping her wrinkled liver-spotted hands together and suggesting, “What a nice lad…” he is, I am going through the motions of dry heaving up my previous meal…
The unspoken rule of a cover track is either a) Copy the original completely, or b) Do it completely different and better. Naturally this song fails to be either. From a personal point of view I like it when bands take slow songs and/or pop songs and speed them up, however I don’t think that it works in the reverse. A fast paced song sung slowly sounds excruciatingly slow, and let’s face it if you know the original I can’t see why you’d even want to play this song all the way through, let alone more than once. Apparently Camp-Blogging-Twit Perez Hilton was truly taken by it enough to put it on his homepage, and I would rather skinny-dip with piranhas, than grace his pages…
I’ll be kind though, Pete Du Pon can hold a good tune, and if this was an original song, then it would be one of those Housewives favourites like Michael Ball and Russell ‘The Voice’ Watson…The defence rests, your honor.