This Bird Has Flown: A Tribute to the Beatles' Rubber Soul
on Razor & Tie
Grade: FThe Beatles are an exceptionally hard band to cover. We're all familiar with their songs, and 35 years after their breakup, the band still garners a massive following.

It's no surprise, then, that in honor of the 40th anniversary of the album Rubber Soul, a group of indie musicians has compiled This Bird Has Flown, a tribute to the groundbreaking, direction-shifting, widely admired album. It's a 16-song collection of covers running through Rubber Soul in its original order. It's a sweet idea; unfortunately, it fails on every level.

The OK

There are several songs that rest in this limbo, hovering above "bad" but falling short of "good." The Donnas kick off the album with a solid version of "Drive My Car," which maintains the delicious opening guitar lick, but loses the song's charm after that. The girls sound like they're on their 140th take: bored, uninspired and ready for it to be over. Lennon and McCartney's harmonies remain fairly intact, but the "beep-beep/beep-beep/yeah!"s are too clipped and perfunctory.

In "You Won't See Me," Dar Williams pointlessly eliminates the harmonies and counter-melodies for which Lennon and McCartney were famous. Lennon's responses to McCartney's self-pitying bridge ("No I wouldn't/no I wouldn't!") are barely audible, as are McCartney's harmonies for the bridge itself, originally a product of double-tracking his vocals. Williams' vocals are faithful to the original, but lacking in McCartney's urgency.

The Bad

The Beatles were fans of country music, so getting bands with a country inflection to perform here isn't an awful idea. You'd think, though, that they'd be given remotely workable material. Yonder Mountain String Band adds an entirely unnecessary banjo on "Think For Yourself," entirely eliminates the fuzz bass, removes the anger from Harrison's lyrics, and makes the entire song sound awful. Rhett Miller does the same thing with "Girl," but with less banjo and slightly better results.

Ted Leo goes for punk with "I'm Looking Through You" and fails as well. He keeps the descending guitar arpeggios from the original (though they're fuzzed up), but replaces McCartney's fast-paced, folk-inspired strumming with chunk-a-chunk muted guitar. He also ends the song in such an abrupt, obviously inept manner that it borders on offensive. Nellie McKay re-envisions "If I Needed Someone" with a lounge-jazz mood and succeeds only in being irritating. The three-part harmony-easily the song's most admirable and enjoyable feature - is thrown out the window, and replaced with bongs and finger snaps.

The Reinterpretations

It's always a bad decision to do a radical reinterpretation of a song by a band as recognizable as the Beatles. Unfortunately, This Bird Has Flown is full of such offenses.

It's hard to choose where to start. I suppose Sufjan Stevens offers the best of the worst, since his cover of "What Goes On" offends through length instead of sound. It's a decent cover of a decent-at-best song, but it's over five minutes long. No song on the original album even hits three minutes. There is no good reason to almost double that length.

But the dubious honor of worst song-and possibly worst Beatles cover ever-belongs to The Fiery Furnaces. Given the honor of covering the album's title song, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)," they hog-tie it, gut it, pull out its entrails and proceed to dance on the bloody mess. The Furnaces strip the song of all its melody and rhythm, slow the pacing down to an erratic heartbeat and shout-stutter the lyrics like a demented seven-year-old. There is no music to speak of. It's a horrible, nails-on-chalkboard experience.

Rubber Soul is indeed an important and amazing album, which should be celebrated, appreciated and enjoyed. Put it on your record player, your stereo, your iPod, listen and love. But throw This Bird Has Flown into the trash. That's the only place it belongs.