LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO DARK SIDE!

Get a load of this mind-boggling video of Leningrad Cowboys performing GOLDFINGER! This song is from their ZOMBIES PARADISE album. This Finnish band is best known around the world as the ones from the movie, Leningrad Cowboye Go America and the ones who staged the masive concert in Helsinki with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus and Orchestra when the Soviet Union disolved. Like all of their earlier releases, this one is loaded with great covers of American music. Unlike their previous releases, there is no Red Army Chorus (except on the bonus track, an update of Happy Together, a tune also covered by Frank Zappa when three of the former Turtles were in his band) and all of the arrangements are unrelentingly heavy and dark, sometimes menacing. Every cut is rich with compelling, musicality. Virtuosity assumed, the texture, cross mellody and symphonic scope is astonishing and exhilerating.

Love ditties like YOU'RE MY HEART, YOU'RE MY SOUL and WHAT IS LOVE are hair-raisingly intense, without being really scary, as in PJ Harvey's RID OF ME. The Music is on steroids, but the words are not changed.

Speaking of the words. I never had listened to the words to MY SHARONA when it drifted by on the airwaves back in the day. But now, it's clearly "Never give it up. Never stop. Such a dirty mind. I always get it up for the touch of the younger kind." And I want to run and lock up my daughers!

Another high point is PLAY THAT FUNKY MUSIC (WHITE BOY), in which the words "till you DIE!" take on added meaning. One of my many favorite cuts on this album, this one gives me a new reason to enjoy a song I always thought of as merely disco.

PUTTIN' ON THE RITZ is a great take on that song combined with a new rap and a turn-around on the theme of the original.

The only songs they do not really improve upon are Johnny Cash's RING OF FIRE and the already frantic FIRE by Arthur Brown. Nobody's prefect.

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