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TUXICITY
If you haven't heard the lounge version of DISTURBED's "Down With the Sickness", or PUDDLE OF MUDD's "She Hates Me" then you have not heard pure genius. Genius embodied by Mr. Richard Cheese and LOUNGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, the lounge act that gobbles up rap, rock, pop, and hip-hop music, then spits it back out at you on a piano, upright bass, jazz drumming, and smooth vocals courtesy of Richard Cheese.
On thier latest disc, Tuxicity, Cheese tackles "Baby Got Back" by SIR MIX-A-LOT, "Relax" by FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, "One Step Closer" by LINKIN PARK, "Chop Suey" from SYSTEM OF A DOWN, and many more in there unique smooth style.
What's great about these versions of these particular song, is that you see how very trivial song lyrics can be when you remove, or in this case, rearrange the music that was intended for them. You'd be surprised at how non-imposing "More Human Than Human" sounds when it's being sung by Richard Cheese, and not by WHITE ZOMBIE.
Mr. Cheese doesn't necessarily always stick to the lyrics either; during "One Step Closer", when he hits the line, "Shut up when I'm talking to you", he actually laces into his drummer for not stopping (and if you've ever been in a band, you know how hard that can be sometimes). Also, he takes some liberties with "Crazy", the Britney Spears song. Without getting too graphic (yeah, like that's EVER a problem here), he tells us every other line how much he wants to bang her...as most of us do as well.
These are extremely competent musicians who have deviated from the genre slightly. Richard Cheese is more comfortable in a leopard skin leisure jacket than a tuxedo, and LOUNGE AGAINST THE MACHINE is more at home cranking out smooth versions of VAN HALEN and GUNS N' ROSES than anything Tony Bennet ever had a hand in.
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