I have been a fan of Nada Surf for a long ass time. I remember buying high/low way back when that came out, remember seeing them live for the first time on their tour for The Proximity Effect, and countless times since then as well. I have always felt that their more recent material didn’t quite match up to the level I thought they attained with Let Go as well as their first two releases, but I have still enjoyed bits and pieces of all of them. But I have to admit that while I love this band, I am not quite sold on this cover album idea. I think Nada Surf has some great songs left to write, they still can put together great shows and still rock out, so I am kind of baffled as to their releasing a covers album at this point in their career. I really enjoy their original material, but they are not a band I would necessarily say I have ever had a hankering to hear covering a bunch of songs.

Now, I do remember their covers of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” and OMD’s “If You Leave” (both are not on this album), both of which were great, great covers. The first was a pretty straightforward cover and the second was a great, spacey reimagining of the original. Even considering that though, one off covers are a whole different story than doing a whole album of them.

Aside from my confusion about them doing a covers album, I feel like they have some good covers in here, but nothing really knocks my socks off, and ultimately they really have taken the majority of these songs and made them sound like Nada Surf songs. I don’t feel as much interaction with the material here as I would like, and sometimes it can feel a bit like a round peg in a square hole. Once the novelty of hearing their version of “Enjoy The Silence” wears off, I’m not sure that it really works. Sure it sounds good, it sounds like a Nada Surf song, but nothing much of the original song and original band seems to make the leap into the cover to make it more of a reimagining of the song rather than a rearranging of it. It is missing a ton of the mood and passion of the original song. This holds true for much of the album.

The strength and weakness of the album undoubtably is that they have managed to take their source material and make it their own and pretty much make all these songs sound like Nada Surf songs. They are clearly putting their artist lens on the songs, but by the same token they aren’t really trying to do much aside from making them all into Nada Surf songs.

Some of the songs have a good energy and a great vibe to them (Kate Bush’s “Love & Anger” and Bill Fox’s “Electrocution” are standout tracks here), but the majority of the songs don’t quite get off the ground for me. Aside from not quite grasping what compelled them to do a covers album now, there isn’t enough compelling in the album itself to really make it a great covers album. All in all, they took some songs they didn’t write and made them sound like Nada Surf songs. Personally, I still like the material Nada Surf has been writing lately, so I would have loved much more to see them do an album of original material, and there isn’t much here to really suggest that there was a grand vision in not doing an original record and in creating this covers album. The songs sound good, the producing is top notch, and as a band they sound tight and great on the record, but the songs just don’t get there for me overall.

Nada Surf – Electrocution (Bill Fox) From If I Had A Hi-Fi (CD, Vinyl, MP3, iTunes)