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Marianne Faithfull was once some kind of good girl chanteuse. My, how things changed by the time she released Broken English. No longer was she the lightly voiced blonde beauty of “As Tears Go By,” now she possessed a voice that sounded like every drug she did, every cigarette she smoked and every drink she ever drank. She sounded beaten up and dark. She became the heir apparent to Nico’s narcotic Weimar-esque musicality. Strange Weather is the sound of Faithfull finally making a Weimar Republic cabaret album. It’s not better or worse than Broken English, still her best album, but it is a great companion to that album. And the one that comes closest to topping that album from the top.
While there are a few new songs written specifically for the album, it is mostly covers from various eras. A few are from the Weimar era, but there’s also a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” an old-time spiritual, some blues songs and a re-recording of “As Tears Go By.” Her Dylan cover and the re-recorded “Tears” are particularly effective and evocative. She turns “I’ll Keep It With Mine” into a Nico-styled drone-rock piece for her ravaged vocals to wrap around and dissect. “Tears” gets redone a full octave lower and gets turned into a guttural-howl of a torch ballad. She was incapable of doing this when she first recorded it, and has marked that it is a song that one should sing only when they’re in their forties and not when they’re seventeen, as she had done. Her interpretive skills throughout are sharp and intelligent. She might have recorded quite a bit of material as a bright-eyed ingénue, but it wasn’t until she became a jaded-but-reformed bad girl that she got really interesting. Strange Weather is one of those rare and strange covers-albums that succeeds. Mostly thanks to Faithfull’s narcotic-laced vocals and hauntingly troubled persona. DOWNLOAD: “As Tears Go By”
