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Album Review: Various Artists - Resistance Radio: The Man in the High Castle Album

The concept is risky.

Put a bunch of indie-rock artists in the studio, toss in an outlier in the form of Norah Jones, seat Danger Mouse and Sam Cohen in the producers’ chairs and re-record a bunch of pre-rock standards from the early 1960s.

But the result - Resistance Radio: The Man in the High Castle Album - is utterly successful, as Mouse and Cohen wrap the songs in authentic-sounding production and instrumentation awash in strings, choruses of background vocalists and a vintage, lo-fi sound - which works particularly well on a couple of blues-soaked tracks - coaxed from old-school equipment and a vinyl pressing that makes the new album sound positively retro.

In fact, listeners who weren’t privy to the track list would be hard-pressed to figure out Resistance Radio was recorded and released in the second decade of the 21st century.

Inspired by the Amazon Studios show “The Man in the High Castle,” this album - even when streamed - sounds like a record. But Karen O doesn’t sound like Karen O when she sings “Living in a Trance.” Beck doesn’t sound like Beck when he sings “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” And Jones doesn’t sound like Jones when she sings “Unchained Melody.”

And that’s the beauty of The Man in the High Castle Album.

Seventeen artists (Cohen sings both “Get Happy” and “The House of the Rising Sun”) artfully remaking 18 songs that are older than the performers themselves. And while they don’t necessarily sound like the artists who did the best-known renditions of these songs, Sharon Van Etten (“The End of the World”), Benjamin Booker (“Spoonful”), The Shins (“A Taste of Honey”), Grandaddy (“Love Hurts”) and Kevin Morby (“I Only Have Eyes for You”), are convincing in their attempts to make these old songs show their age and disguise the brand-new renditions as long-lost rarities.

Waterstrider, Andrew VanWyngarden, Angel Olsen, Kelis, Curtis Harding, Michael Kiwanuka, Big Search and Maybird also make appearances.

Irony drips from these performances. But they never sound anything less than earnest and sincere as performers and producers work together to recapture a bygone era and … dare we say it … make American music great again.

Grade card: Various Artists - Resistance Radio: The Man in the High Castle Album - A-

4/11/17