Mirrorkicks : Bleeding Love

Don't know much about Mirrorkicks, except they are from Britain (I think) and they have a website and a myspace page and a facebook page and a youtube channel and all the accoutrements of a new millennium band trying to make it these days. What they don't have is an album in the stores. I think they've released a single, but that's not this.

This is a cover of "Bleeding Love" by Leona Lewis. It's from CokeMachineGlow's Fantasy Covers of 2008. Apparently this site rounds up a bunch of up-and-coming indie bands and gets them to cover popular songs from that year. Somehow Mirrorkick ended up with this one.

The song itself is interesting to parse. At first it sounds like a paean to the self-sacrifice sometimes necessary for true love: I'm so in love, it just bleeds out of me, I can't even help it. But on further reads, you notice the singer's friends are trying to pull these two lovers apart, and you realize that maybe the cuts and bleeding might not be metaphorical. There's definitely a "He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)" vibe going on here.

Did I mention it was co-written by Jesse McCartney? Weird.

Madam Leona's version is somewhat plaintive. It's got a nice modern soul vibe to it, but it's wrapped in a swath of modern production and it ends up being a little glisteny, a bitter pill, but sugar-coated.

Mirrorkicks grabs hold of the song though and bruises it up, dragging it back into the real-life grimy world we all live in. Their track is heavy, loaded down with thick guitar and a loping, tom-heavy 6/8 drum beat. The singer nails the vocal: ragged, raw, pleading, but hopeful. They do such an amazing job, they actually made me like the original more. Give it a listen.

It's not available on any album that I know of, but you can grab it from the CokeMachineGlow website, along with some other great covers. There's a good cover of MIA's "Paper Planes" up there too.

---