Make ausculture.com your own. Post your content.
Register at http://www.ausculture.com/register

August 9, 2004

Chanel Cole singing “Glory Box”

Chanel Cole gives her rendition of Glory Box and I give my opinion on that - and perhaps a few other things.

[This was originally going to be a comment to the previous post, but I felt that it took a few too many sidetracks.]

Yes, I’m a huge fan of Beth Gibbons and her quietly devastating vocal lines.

Obviously, with singing a song on idol, there’s a required balance between on the one hand giving the judges a vocal show on and on the other a need (as an artist) to accurately convey the emotional range of a song - without simply apeing the style of the original artist and adding a few flourishes here and there.

I’ve never been a fan of covers. With the exception of Jeff Buckley singing Cohen’s Hallelujah I can’t think of any examples of a cover that, for me, really adds dimension to a song.

I’m going to say that Chanel Cole did not do to Gibbons’/Portishead’s Glory Box what Buckley did to Cohen’s Hallelujah. She neither approached the same achievement with Glory Box nor took the song on any part of a journey of that type.

Does that mean that I, with my obvious infallibility, didn’t like Chanel Cole’s take on Glory Box? No, I quite liked it.

I think Gibbons has already expressed the quiddity of Glory Box well enough - leaving Chanel with some dangerous pitfalls when approaching the song:

1. Be a complete wanker and butcher the song with endless pointless vocal flourishes
2. Try to take the song in a completely different direction, tripping over her own feet in the process
3. Give a pale impersonation of Gibbons

To me, Chanel managed to avoid all three.

Most importantly, Chanel managed to challenge me as a listener to actually take some time to look at her interpretation of Glory Box. I have to admit that really, Chanel’s version makes me somewhat uncomfortable, she doesn’t seem to do certain things the way I think they should be done. That is, however, the point.

I’m personally not crazy about Chanel’s rendition of Glory Box but for what it’s worth I think it was a vocal success.

Additionally, Chanel could have avoided any analyses such as this one by taking a safer option and singing something that has been done a million times before on Idol shows alone. She opted for the more difficult option, which was brave and could have been a real public execution had she floundered, which she didn’t