Saint Saviour – Love Will Tear Us Apart

Championed Bermondseyite songstress Saint Saviour would seem to have ticked most of the boxes for a slippery slide into the indie pop mould. She's beloved of and NME and Radio 1, is possessed of a voice that's just melancholy enough without endangering any veins and has a backing band that frequently brandishes electronic boxes and keytars. It's rather a shame then, that there was such a misstep at the laboratory just before Becky took the plunge with her first big cover, Love Will Tear Us Apart. The fact that New Order have failed to convincingly reprise the 1979 anti-ballad should be pause for thought enough; those that have tried tend to separate either into the painfully ill-judged (The Cure, Paul Young) or the memorably absurd (Mark Owen). Even the gustatorially-deficient U2 blushed a little after the emergence of their joint effort at a remake with Arcade Fire. Admittedly Saint Saviour does achieve some damage limitation by giving the track a fairly minimal, acoustic rendering with touches of strings, an approach that benefits Fall Out Boy's interpretation. While there's no doubting the quality of the vocals, their unmistakeably Tori Amos / Regina Spektor lilt doesn't lend itself particularly well to Curtis' most famous laments. Like most previous outings (and this will nonetheless go down as one of the better ones) this version can't capture the taut anxiety that gives the original such a haunting pull. Instead the vocals feel rather exaggerated against the dark minimalism of the lyrics. The prevalence of the vocals also puts into sharp relief what was so engaging about Curtis as a frontman – his reluctance and difficulty in imposing himself and his unwillingness to use the unhappiness and tragedy of his work as an excuse to be a brooding presence on record or on stage. That's of course what makes his works so difficult to reproduce, even for Peter Hook et al. Fans of Saint Saviour's distinctive enunciations will probably enjoy this, but Stockport was surely never meant to sound this sugary.

Cover versions:

Mark Owen

The Cure

Paul Young

U2 & Arcade Fire

Jose Gonzalez

Fall Out Boy

Nouvelle Vague

Alabama 3

Words: Rodrigo Davies

Written by:
charlie

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