Geeks in Cyberspace

The obligatory new Emilie Autumn track - her cover of Bohemian Rhapsody - is now up on her myspace page for the good people to listen to. Now, this is the part where your expecting me to either (a) praise it as a return to form after the other crappy cover or (b) crap all over it and complain about how absolutely unlistenable it is. But, in fact, I am going to do neither. Because it is not good, and it’s not terrible - it’s just completely average. Some parts are good, only one section is really bad - and the whole thing is pretty listenable, if not spectacular. The problem (for me anyways) is not that Emilie doesn’t do justice to Queen, that was kind of a given, but that she doesn’t in any way do justice to herself. She can be better than that, much better than that - and as soon as the myspace player moves on to another track - you should notice a dramatic improvement. It’s not just an issue of wrong direction (though there’s a bit of that going on), but the - much like Girls Just Wanna [sic] Have Fun - it sounds lazy. She obviously wasn’t really putting her heart into making this track go together, it’s just completely sloppy work. This was forgivable in the case of All My Loving, since that was just a release on a compilation which she admitted to not being a professional quality recording (and, honestly - at that - it still fared better than this). Put into a darker tone with much more serious effort made towards both the accompaniment and the vocals, this cover could have been great. As it stands it’s just good enough, and nothing more. And “just good enough” has never been the EA style - it just doesn’t cut it, for any artist, but especially one with this much creative potential. While I haven’t heard the rest of the EP, after hearing the two star attractions - I can think of no reason for anyone but a collector to buy it, even if it was priced sanely which - being a Trisol release - it, of course, isn’t.