Loveskills: Pure EP

When you think of a dance-oriented artist covering the Smashing Pumpkins (and, let face it, most of us don’t equate dance music with the Smashing Pumpkins necessarily), you might think the logical choice for a cover would be, oh, “1979”. Or “Tonight, Tonight”. Or something along those lines. Brooklyn-based producer Loveskills, however, has gone for a really illogical choice: “Luna”. You know, the deep album cut that comes at the very end of 1993’s superb Siamese Dream album. A ballad. Perhaps even a throwaway. Well, Loveskills has definitely put his own spin on “Luna” which is shorter than the album version by the Pumpkins, and actually starts off fairly incongruously: the sound is staticy and fuzzed out, a tip of the hat perhaps to the alt-rock group’s Black Sabbath-inspired brand of songwriting (at least, around the Siamese Dream period). While I’ll say that the Loveskills version isn’t an improvement over the original, it is, at the very least, interesting. It’s a bold move, considering that those other hits in the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘90s catalogue would seem better suited to this treatment.

As for the rest of the EP, Pure, it’s actually pretty darn tootin’ good. Blending elements of hip-hop with trap, there are some really appealing songs here. “Chanel” is the one song that I zeroed in on when I first heard this, with a hooky chorus that resembles an earworm spinning fine silky strands in your head. However, don’t count out “Fine Lines” with its punchy beat and klaxon sirens. In the context of these original songs, “Luna” seems superfluous at best. Why cover a rock band, and a rock band’s fairly obscure song at that, when you do dancey electronica so well? And why lead off the EP with the cover? The cynical may think that this is a grab at attention, and, yes, it worked – would have anyone paid as much attention to this disc if us reviewers, many of whom came of age during the ‘90s, had something to hang our hats on? I don’t want to say “probably not”, but Loveskills would have likely had a much harder job of fighting through the din of new music in an attempt to be heard. In any event, if Loveskills did have to cover a Smashing Pumpkins song, he at least has the sense to make it a fairly oddball one and not one of their biggest hits. So props to that. Buy this EP if you’re fondly nostalgic for ‘90s alt-rock done dance-style, and stick around for some highly entertaining and engaging electronic songs that stand up in their own right.