The album opens, rather unexpectedly, with a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” featuring a characteristically impassioned vocal performance by Tori Amos. The arrangement and production, however, are so sanitized, so slick and gussied up with melodramatic strings and synths, that the point of the song—its central irony and message about the dangers of generational alcoholism—is swallowed whole.
Horn imbues the album’s 11 songs with a grandiosity that quickly becomes flatulent, with big orchestral swells and heart-tugging keyboards. By the halfway point, the material all starts to blur together, as the majority of the songs feature similar midtempo electronic beats with so much reverb mixed in that they become washed out.
Perhaps the worst offenders in that regard are Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the Cars’s “Drive.” The former is so over the top—particularly Jack Lukeman’s vocal performance—that it sounds like parody, as Nirvana’s abrasive call to arms is reduced to pap. And Steve Hogarth’s creaky voice on the latter fails to match the youthful energy and passion of the Cars’s 1984 hit.
Elsewhere, Seal extracts a sense of pathos and introspection from Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out,” while Rick Astley gives a slick performance that dovetails with the cool yet desperate energy of Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” The latter track’s production is a bit cluttered, but its subdued beat provides a welcome contrast from the rest of the songs.
But the clash between singer and song is more often jarring. Soft Cell’s Marc Almond takes the reins on a cover of Pat Benetar’s “Love Is a Battlefield,” but the fire from that iconic ’80s song is missing; in its stead is a simpering performance and a backing track that suggests a commercial for antidepressants. While Echoes allows Horn to situate the hits that he and his contemporaries (and Kendrick Lamar) produced within a modern context, or even to memorialize them, in doing so he renders them so pristine that they lose all sense of identity.
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