Pitchfork

And I suppose your band would cover it by playing a broken acoustic through a belt-clip amplifier while someone blew a jug onstage and it would all be really, really poignant. There's no other way to remake Guided By Voices' "Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory" but earnestly. I'm stunned that anyone thought the original was anything but. Enter Trail of Dead, they of the unwieldy name and the most outsized ambitions of any indie-rock band to throw down the strings and the piano and the multi-layered harmonies and the mega-schmaltz. Sacrilege, I hear your cry, but this is perfect on paper at least: paying tribute to lo-fi mystique by making it as grandiose as possible. I take issue with Trail of Dead's emetic taste in production, and those farty-sounding keyboards in the beginning belong in the background of PBS children's programming. But those are minor gripes. The cover succeeds not because the band avoids embarrassing themselves, but because they embarrass themselves to a perfect, completely relatable degree.