There’s two roads to make a covers record stand out from the rest: first, choosing songs from other musical genres, changing the original composition in a major way, and secondly, choosing stuff from your own influences, but that are largely unknown to the public. Monster Magnet emphatically chose the second path, and as I was going through the tracklist for the first time, I could count the songs I already knew on one hand. Night and day compared to most covers albums, for example Saxon’s ‘Inspirations’ to pick a recent one.
On ‘A Better Dystopia’, therefore, you won’t find ‘Iron Man’, but rather a series of underrated early 70s proto-metal god-forsaken little nuggets. Thus, the almighty space lord himself, his excellence Mr. Dave Wyndorf, has managed to create a pure 100% Monster Magnet experience: It is so easy for him to make the songs his own, so apparent that this album stems from personal, engraved, teenage moments, that, if you’d so desire, you could forget, so to speak, that these tunes were written by other people and approach this… dystopia as the new Monster Magnet record. Here I am daydreaming about how good ‘Be Forewarned’ or ‘When the Wolf Sits’ would sound live.
