:: Micah P. Hinson - All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers

Micah P. Hinson

There are few things that scare people away faster than the mention of a cover album. Especially when some smarta**e contemporary musician thinks he can do a better job than the original artist and ends causing chaos, which is exactly what Micah P Hinson has done on his cover album All Dressed Up and Smelling of Strangers. It really doesn‘t matter what Hinson wanted to do with these songs. If you love the originals, you are not going to like his cover versions. In fact, you're probably going to want to pen a very nasty letter to him. And you'll have good reason to. Hinson's covers are all incredibly dry, stiff and, to be honest, enough to make you want to slit your wrists. It's hard to know how he could have massacred such classics as George Harrison's 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ or Roy Orbison‘s 'Running Scared’ but he has. Actually, scratch that, it‘s not hard. What Hinson has done is taken these stalwart rock classics and decided they all needed to be sung in a gravely voice that sounds like Johnny Cash after a really bad bender. It doesn't matter whether he's singing Bob Dylan's 'The Times Are A-Changin’ or The Beatles‘ 'Listen To Me’, Hinson never changes his voice. Everything is delivered in his distinctive Texan burr, which so bad it should be made illegal. A conviction that‘s only made more attractive when Hinson attacks Frank Sinatra's 'My Way’. An Australian Idol wannabe couldn‘t have delivered a worse rendition. In fact, not even one of them would've been stupid enough to turn this beautiful ballad into a country ditty so out of tune it would get the dogs a wailing. All Dressed Up and Smelling of Strangers is the musical embodiment of the saying, 'If it ain't broke don't fix it’. It is impossible to review any of these tracks as separate songs. They don't just sound the same, they do something much worse, they all fuse together into a two-disc blur. It's almost as if Hinson only had one note on his guitar- flat and boring - and decided to use it for every single song regardless of its original genre or tune. There have been few times in this reviewer's life where listening to an album has been such a painful experience. There aren't enough words in the English language to describe how horrible Micah P. Hinson's cover album All Dressed Up and Smelling of Strangers is. It would have been a terrible album if it had been made up of his own songs, but the fact that he's butchering classics makes it sacrilege.