It's Friday and we're all looking for a deal. As such, bush-beating and jokes will be kept to a minimum in this intro. I'll cut to the affordable chase: for the low, low price of clicking play in the above playlist, you can hear three brand new additions to MFT's growing IN Covers series from Poor Islero, Popular Ego, and Grass SM6. This is a verifiable big deal and it's verifiably free so stop looking at me like I'm weird. 

First on the list is Poor Islero's take on Dust from 1000 Years' "Wrecking Ball." The cover's pretty homologous to the original, building up at roughly the same rate, letting the gently looping melody simmer a while before it boils all the way over. Dust from 1000 Years stay grounded though, while Islero launch off into the dreamspace of reverb. The original's got a smidge more grit on it, in that lovely low-fi "a drum is a drum is a drum" kind of way, while Poor Islero leap a little bit farther, get a little bit bigger. It'd be bad form to play favorites, but I don't even think I even could; these two are all about the subtle shifts between them.

Next up is Popular Ego skittering across a classic track from Bloomington's The Dancing Cigarettes. Through their tenure in Bloomington in the early 80s, The Dancing Cigarettes mostly scratched out jazzy post-punk that aligned more tightly with "no" than "new" as far as waves went, so when first I imagined Popular Ego's farfisa-inflected stylings draping over something by the band, I wasn't sure where it was headed. Turns out I should've had faith: the band tackles one of The Dancing Cigarettes' self-professed "pop songs" and in so doing wrings out a timeless, springy energy that's fully infectious.

And stomp, stomp, stomp, in with cover number three from IN Covers idea-buster herself Miss Sharlene Birdsong as Grass SM6. No archive-based recordings of the Dirtbike original with which to compare it, but take its noisecave wallop at face-value if you know what's good. I'm sitting in a coffee-shop in Michigan as I write this and briefly I played the song from my laptop and for the brief moments that rattle of the drums came out in the space--tinny as these speakers may be--every single patron stood up in unison and stared at me as if beset by some Cthulu cult-like conviction. It was scary, but it's cool, because I muted the speakers and decided to use the anecdote as a review of the track. Killing the game.