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"The world don’t need any more songs. They’ve got way too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it."
-Bob Dylan from a 1991 interview
Songs slip by us everyday. The back catalog of “popular music” alone in the last 30 years is staggering yet people still complain about the lack of “good songs.” The truth is there are “good songs” everywhere from every generation, it just seems at times a tough task to track them down. Sometimes you need to dig through dusty old record bins, or rely on recommendations from friends to discover gems, and sometimes bands can do it for you.
Mary Ramirez and Rachel Nagy of The Detroit Cobras specialize in mining the rich vaults of the American Song, swinging their pickaxes digging for sonic gold, to help us along on our journey to find worthy jams. The duo’s newest album, Baby offers reinvented cuts culled from some of the classiest songwriters this country has to offer ranging from Allen Toussaint’s “Mean Man” to Isaac Hayes’s “Weak Spot.” Odds are good you haven’t heard many, if any, of the original versions, and that’s why the Cobras are here, to educate and invigorate.
However these aren’t your straightforward reenactments, the opener “Slipping Around” manages to boogie-woogie with the refulgence of dawn’s first rays. The chicks got soul. Covers presented here never run too fast into the realm of punk rock or slip into mocking show tunes, they are stripped down and burn with a sultry smolder. Guitars and drums rattle and swing like empty paint cans falling down an aluminum ladder, but never lose the bump and sway of a grooving burlesque brass band. “Hotdog,” the Cobras lone original, written with guitarist/producer Greg Cartwright, smirks with innuendo, and rocks straight from ’59, hinting at a future of solid originals if the Cobras choose to take this route. Rachel Nagy’s voice is pure Motor City, young Stevie’s passionate soul with Iggy aggression around the edges. On “Real Thing” she wants to marry you ASAP and do something else even sooner.
Baby runs short and swift, bringing back a simpler sound from a simpler era, yet the rollicking good times on “Everybody’s Going Wild” can’t be ignored. The Cobras want to swing their favorite songs around and around like long flapper pearls, while they keep the bar open past last call. There is nothing new or earth shattering contained on Baby. It’s a throwback in every sense, and as usual Dylan was right, there’s no suffering for it, as a matter of fact, quite the opposite.
