It's a serious roll of the dice when metal bands decide to cover non-metal songs. More often than not, the end results come across as forgettable novelties or mainstream-courting pivots rather than anything actually inspired. But every now and then, a heavy group manages to adopt a cheesy pop song or a vintage rock tune, strip it for parts, and build it back up into a worthwhile creation of their own.
We wanted to know what our readers consider to be the best of the best in the metal-band-covering-non-metal-song pantheon. These are the top five vote-getters, ranked accordingly below.
5. Fear Factory - "Cars"
There's an art to covering a pop song in metal form. Rendering the tune completely unrecognizable with sheets of distortion and garbled vocals feels like a cop-out. Actually retaining the integrity of the initial track while adding tasteful metal attributes is much more impressive, and that's what Fear Factory did on their surprisingly effective take on Gary Numan's "Cars." The New Wave hit is inherently goofy and definitely sounded hokey by 1999, and Fear Factory gave it an industrialized nu-metal touch-up without letting their tongues fully leave their cheeks. Well done.
4. Faith No More - "Easy"
Faith No More's "Easy" is the outlier on this list because it's really not a metal cover, but that's what makes it so subversive and fun. In 1992, FNM were among the biggest faces in the budding alt-metal scene, redefining heavy music by throwing together funk, metal and art-rock like someone trying on every shirt in their closet and still pulling off a stylish look. So naturally, fans were scratching their heads when they unleashed a smooth, sultry and strikingly faithful cover of the Commodores' 1977 soul staple — then dropped their jaws once again when they realized how joyously replayable it is.
3. Judas Priest - "Green Manalishi"
Fleetwood Mac wrote the original in the early Seventies, but by the time Judas Priest put their metallic spin on it in 1979, Mick Fleetwood and Co. were well into their disco-y "Dreams" era, so "Green Manalishi" effectively became Priest's. Their version is better, anyway, with ballsier guitar dueling by K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, a necessary increase in rip-roaring speed, and Rob Halford's inimitable shriek sending it into the heavens. There's a reason Priest's cover is the first result when you Google search "Green Manalishi."
2. Alien Ant Farm - "Smooth Criminal"
Alien Ant Farm's spin on "Smooth Criminal" was so omnipresent in the early 2000s that, to many who were born after the Eighties, this is the definitive version. (Indeed, earlier this year, when Lindz McLeod on Twitter asked if anyone would recognize the lyrics, "Annie are you okay, are you okay, Annie?" without looking them up, a shocking number of people identified Alien Ant Farm as the source.) AAF's take on "Smooth Criminal" is just as catchy, but with nu-metal chugs and a slightly more menacing vocal delivery that repackaged this timeless pop song for the Headbangers Ball crowd.
1. Type O Negative - "Summer Breeze"
Type O Negative covered a lot of songs in their day, but their version of "Summer Breeze" is so masterfully done that it's able to reside in the middle of their defintive album (1993's Bloody Kisses) and not stick out like a frivolous gimmick. As the story goes, Peter Steele initially re-wrote the lazy-dazy Seals and Crofts classic into a sexually charged number called "Summer Girl," but his perverted rendition was shut down by the Seventies duo's publishing team, so "Summer Breeze" it remained. Of course, Type O still completely transformed the soft-rock track into a towering spectacle of psychedelic goth-metal that clearly still resonates today.
