EP REVIEW: So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way – The Xcerts

The idea of an artist performing a cover is a little bit like buying a jar of Marmite. You’re either going to love it or hate it, there’s no inbetween and there never will be. On one hand, a cover can be a rite of passage for hometown heroes looking to break out of being a local band, stoking the fire in the bellies of new faces in the crowd at an open mic. Alternatively, they can be a cure for those mid-career moments stuck at a creative crossroads, breathing life back into a classic in a completely new way, much like EMMA RUTH RUNDLE and THOU have done recently with THE CRANBERRIES’ Hollywood. On the other hand, they can often feel like you’re plugging up a hole in the wall – it’s all filler, no killer. 

With a global pandemic imprisoning the masses to their living rooms rather than the backrooms of bars, bands are beginning to find their flow in other ways, flexing their creative freedom in a sense they’ve never needed to seek out. Joining a never ending story of artists trading in their electric guitars for acoustics, Aberdeen alt-rockers THE XCERTS reinterpret the soundtrack to their lives on their lockdown-friendly titled covers EP So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way. 

Whilst they’ve given THE REMBRANDTS sitcom-soundtracking classic a miss on this collection, it perfectly sums up the sentiment of the songs they’ve covered in this collection. Typically, you’d associate songs like STARSHIP’s party anthem We Built This City and THE RAMONES-penned punk staple I Wanna Be Sedated with feel-good festival vibes. Here, THE XCERTS strip these songs right down to the bone, basking in a realm of atmospheric acoustic balladry, allowing them to morph into more hauntingly reflective interpretations. Where we once celebrated the thought of building a city on rock and roll, THE XCERTS make it feel like a nostalgic look back at what was, at the world we once had and may never quite get back as it was. 

As far as forays into fully-fledged covers records go, so far so good. It’s the latter half of So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way’s four tracks that things begin to falter, falling into the dizzying depths of cover song destruction. Their take on AVRIL LAVIGNE’s teen-angst torpedo It’s Complicated morphs into a dreamy albeit dready duet with lo-fi alt-popper HEIGHTS (not to be confused with a former post-hardcore act of the same name) which drifts and drags more than a high-speed chase in a Fast & Furious film, saved solely by the honey-soaked harmonies HEIGHTS drizzles across the track. Still, so far so good. 

It’s the finale where things truly topple like a high-stakes game of Jenga on Christmas Eve with your grandparents. There are some songs you just shouldn’t cover, in fact, there are simply just some bands you shouldn’t cover. THE CURE, as THE XCERTS prove on their cover of Inbetween Days, are one such artist. In an EP that’s entirely acoustic, drawing on nothing but the atmospheric anxiety and animosity of a post-pandemic world, it’s baffling why they’ve picked up the electrics at the end of it all to rip through an alt-rock anthem adding little to the original. If you’d ever wondered what it would be like to hear an artist you like play Guitar Hero, this dear readers, would be it. 

So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way is for the most part an exception to the rule of cover records, stripping back songs as we know them and creating entirely new interpretations of them primed for a world imprisoned in their own four walls. It almost feels as if THE XCERTS found themselves having so much fun they forgot themselves for a second and let the wheels fall off a bit right at the end of the road. Nonetheless, if we’re gearing up for a year of records in a similar vein, this is a pretty decent place to start.

Rating: 6/10

So No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way is out now via Raygun Records. 

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