Manson covers Elfman
Ain’t It Cool News has a piece about the new 2-disc rerelease of the soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas (coinciding with the release of the movie in 3-D, which as far as I can see isn’t playing in my area, dammit). It sounds like it might be worth picking up:
Marilyn Manson, along with several other artists, recorded covers of Elfman’s tunes from the film which will be released on a new 2-disc special edition soundtrack CD later this week. I’m not going to lie. I’m not a fan of Marilyn Manson and when I heard he was doing a cover of “This is Halloween” my eyes rolled in apathy. Upon listening to the song however, I found it to be pretty good. It’s inherently characteristic of the cover artist with the spirit of the original well preserved; criteria I find essential in a good cover song. The same could also be said about Fiona Apple’s rendition of “Sally’s Song,” however, I’ll still take the originals every day of the week.
The release includes the original soundtrack (remastered, apparently) in addition to the four covers and some Danny Elfman demos. The AICN post has some links to a video interview of Elfman by Manson, along downloads of three of the covers. I haven’t checked them out yet, because they are on Myspace, which is blocked by my company firewall.