Friday, June 23, 2017

Forgotten Fridays: SKAndalous: I've Gotcha Covered

Forgotten Fridays is an occasional feature here at If It’s Too Loud... where we go back and find the lost records of our glory days. We played these on our college radio shows, put them on countless mix tapes, and then forgot they existed. Once a week we go back and remind you, and help decide if they were any good.

1996 was the height of the 90s ska resurgence. It was also the height of the 90s covers compilation craze. Since ska and covers went together beautifully, you got roughly a million albums of ska bands doing wacky covers. 

SKAndalous: I've Gotcha Covered is one of the wackier ones. There's not really any consistent theme. Sure, there are a bunch of tv and cartoon theme songs covered (Perfect Thyroid cover "Sanford and Son," The Jinkies cover "Scooby Doo" because you couldn't do anything in the mid 90s without including Scooby Doo somehow) but there are just as many legitimate songs from the 60s covered (Magadog do "Brown Eyed Girl," Bim Skala Bim cover "Sunshine of Your Love" in virtually unrecognizable fashion). But then Ruder Than You do Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," which blows out any ongoing theme they might have had.

The strangest part of SKAndalous: I've Gotcha Covered is how much fun it is. Sure it's as dated as it could possibly be, and covering "The Flintstones" as a ska song is cheesy as hell, but it's a weird little slice of nostalgia. I know the 90s wave of ska is widely considered to be a national embarrassment barely even worth an eye roll of recognition, but it's still far better than hair metal, Bush, nu metal, and anything else that can be appreciated for the nostalgia factor nowadays.


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