Richard Cheese - Aperitif for Destruction CD Review

I remember watching through the remake of Dawn of the Dead a year or so ago noticing that during one particular zombie fighting portion of the movie a lounge version of Disturbed’s “Down with the Sickness” was playing in the background. It was an unbelievably surreal combination where zombies, crappy nu-metal, lounge music, and wholesome, bloody fun meshed together onto a movie screen. Even in my drug-free state, I still enjoyed the utter oddity of the combination. When the scene was over, I wasn’t so much thinking about how I just saw a pretty gory zombie beatdown, but instead I pondered the background music that accompanied the scene. A lounge band covered a nu-metal song… over the sounds of zombie destruction? That’s something you don’t hear every day.

There’s a reason you don’t hear that type of thing every day—you’d get sick of it pretty damn fast. There’s a fun novelty to hearing some off the wall songs covered by a lounge band, but it’s definitely not something you’d listen to every day, or every week or month for that matter. It’s something you can only take in doses. With that said, Richard Cheese’s latest disc is another fun disc full of lounge covers consisting of a variety of popular songs. From Alanis Morrissette’s “You Oughta Know” to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” over to 2 Live Crew’s “Me so Horny” and Slipknot’s “People Equal Shit” you have just about every musical base covered.

What’s going to make this cd either an addition to your vast collection of undeniably quirky releases or a disc to avoid like a rabid howler monkey on crack is how much you can tolerate a cd full of lounge covers. Seriously, there’s not a whole lot else to say about this disc—it’s a band covering popular songs… lounge style. There are a couple of fun moments that break out of this mold, but for the most part every song blends together leading this cd to act best as nothing more than a novelty item.

Truth be told, though, this is a fun disc for the few times you’ll probably listen to it. Hearing Richard impersonate Stephen Hawking on “The Girl is Mine” is comical… for a little bit. U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” done as a mambo is seriously a lot of fun. Bel Biv Devo’s “Do Me”, on the other hand, is easily the worst track on the cd since most of it is the voice of the producer telling Richard that “do me” is two separate words instead of one, at which point he decides to go into a 30 second cursing rant. As for the rest of the songs, they all follow basically the same pattern of slow, laid back lounge.

Richard Cheese. Lounge covers. Either you like the quirkiness of his efforts or you don’t. I’m pretty sure the four paragraphs above won’t convince someone who hates lounge to buy this disc or vice versa, so enjoy it if you want to or leave it on the shelf if you choose—you’re making the decision, not me.