Posted on May 26th, 2006 by Scott
23 Comments
Those intersecting riffs are hard to resist. Watch Carrabba & Co.’s version of “In A Big Country” at Sessions @ AOL. Not bad my emo friends. RIP Stuart Adamson.
Big Country – “In A Big Country” (MP3 Link Expired)
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Oh, Scott — I don’t htink I can forgive you for subjecting me to this. This song is really not in Carrabba’s range, and he sounded pretty horrid.
FACE TO FACE did a much better version of this classic a few years ago.
>> Oh, Scott — I don’t htink I can forgive
>> you for subjecting me to this
Ha … maybe I just have a soft spot for this song. Who else has covered it?
I also much prefer the Face to Face cover of the song.
Mos def one of my favorite songs of the 80s… although I have to agree that the cover is sort of blasphemous, his voice sounds awful!
They did it on some radio show recently as well. I don’t think it was terrible, but I can see Chris trying to take DC into where he left off with Further Seems Forever now rather than playing on his acoustic so much.
You may also want to check out [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5018910.stm]this Desmond Dekker news[/url]. RIP
Yeah, the original is so much better. It’s got like Scottish charm too and that makes it extra special.
is dashboard confessional still relevant?
never really cared for this dude, but I gotta admit – his band is pretty good, the drummer is tight, prolly not the easiest guitar melody to play, but the les paul guy does a decent job…but it just felt really ….. meh. he missed as many notes as he hit, and if you watch his face, he’s gotta be getting the lyrics from a teleprompter or something. other than the angsty high notes cc hits occasionally, there is no spirit – this may as well be one of the national anthems of Scotland, so why is some tattooed emo dude from florida covering it in such a boring way? again, the music was pretty good, but cc’s lifeless performance does it a disservice. there are only so many 80’s anthems left un-covered. ditch the trend already.
I think my favorite part is having read Rolling Stone in the fall, after DC scrapped what material they had in favor of starting over. Chris said something to the effect of, “the new material didn’t challenge anything — all the people that like Dashboard before would love this album because nothing has changed.”
Yet those three performances just sound like plugged-in, over-dramatized versions of half the material on Mark/Mission. Sort of how “Hands Down,” on Mark/Mission was a plugged-in, over-dramatized version of the original off that older EP.
But I have always liked “Vindicated”…
>Ha … maybe I just have a soft spot for this song. >Who else has covered it?
Oh! No! You misunderstand. I love this song, adore it, drop it in DJ sets often; the sight of Carrabba butchering it was too much for me to bear.
This is more like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udMGCJF0fXs
I’m not aware of any other covers outside of the Face to Face one, but geez, Dogs Die In Hot Cars (ha! remember them?) pretty much sound EXACTLY like Big Country, so there’s that.
you can’t polish a turd.
i can’t believe i interrupted listening to danielson for this….
I couldn’t take it any more… to keep the world balanced I posted the Face to Face cover for anyone who isn’t familiar with it:
http://the15minutehipster.blogspot.com/2006/05/better-big-country-cover.html
or just click on my initials
woah, the face to face version does fucking rock – almost identical
Give Carrabba credit for good taste. I’ve always wondered why this song hasn’t been covered more – it’s one of the great anthems of the ’80s. It’s bittersweet today to hear Stuart Adamson’s exhoration to “stay alive.”
Now who’s gonna cover The Alarm’s “68 Guns”? Anyone?
The band moe. also covered this a few years back. And again, like all the others, it was tight and competent and it added nothing at all to the original. Which just makes it all sort of pointless.
The irony here is that Big Country recorded a ton of covers over the years, too, and while a couple of them were brilliant?their version of Roxy Music’s “Prairie Rose” is, for me, right up there with Jimi doing “All Along The Watchtower”?a lot of them were just meh, for the same reasons given above. It’s note-for-note bar-band stuff, even with the added kick in the vocals. Sadly, the idea of Big Country doing “Don’t Fear The Reaper” or “Oh Well” is about a million times more interesting than the end result.
I’ve always thought Ted Leo could make a good hash of this song. Chris Carrabba… less so.
“is dashboard confessional still relevant?”
answer: no.
I can’t be bothered to download it. Does he sing the “Shah!!” parts in between verses, like in the original?
The original Big Country extended 12″ mix is IT! Produced by Steve Lillywhite who was working with some other band named U2 at the time. It’s one of the best “sounding” mixes ever, and is still used by many high-end equipment manufacturers for testing.
[[ Does he sing the "Shah!!" parts in between verses, like in the original? ]]
Yes.
Yes, he does.
And it’s even worse than you’re imagining right now.
So, I have to ask… does anyone know how to get the ‘bagpipe’ guitar tone? It seems to be the one great mystery that the internet has not yet solved.
Face to Face was a great band, and caused me to buy the import version of Standards and Practices because Big Country was not on the domestic version.
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