Wild Beasts – “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” (Leonard Cohen Cover)
British art-rock greats Wild Beasts drop their new album dark, tingling Present Tense today and further prove that they’re the closest thing to Talk Talk that we have right now. We’ve posted their songs “Wanderlust” and “Sweet Spot,” but not everything the group has recorded recently made it onto the album. In a new DJ mix they put together for FACT’s FACT Mix podcast, the group selected a fascinating pile of songs, drawing from across the musical landscape: Talk Talk, the Cocteau Twins, Oneohtrix Point Never, Burzum, the Books, Haddaway’s “What Is Love,” a Lil B instrumental, a Marvin Gaye cover that Kate Bush recorded over the phone. And they also included a song of their own, a spacious, eerie take on Leonard Cohen’s eternal classic “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” which originally appeared on his 1967 debut Songs Of Leonard Cohen. Frontman Hayden Thorpe writes, “The Leonard Cohen cover was something we did for a competition winner, it exists only on our hard drive and on the winning prize, a cassette tape. For any Leonard Cohen fan doing a version of one of his songs is a right of passage.” The cover starts around the one-minute mark of the mix below; check it out.
Present Tense is out now on Domino.