Twin Limb Capture Can’s ‘Yoo Doo Right’

Covers are tough. There's a fine line between capturing the original's essence and making sure you're doing your own thing. When you're covering a band like Can, whose catalog is wide and weird, the stakes are high. But Twin Limb pull it off masterfully with a cover of "Yoo Doo Right." They condense Can's 20-minute odyssey to an edible length of under six minutes, using their wavy instruments and hazy sounds to bring new textures to the original. It takes on a new life with a female voice, Lacey Guthrie hitting lows along with the beats of the guitar. It's that perfect balance that most covers lack, something for both fans of the original and Twin Limb.

Of the song, TL's "miscellaneous sonic sorcerer" Kevin Ratterman says:

When I was building my recording studio, La La Land, Can was one of the constant soundtracks blazing through the speakers day in and out. The meditative, flowing, ever-changing rhythms and melodies were a perfect backdrop for [not only] the monotony of construction, but the excitement of building something where so much creativity was about to be captured. When Twin Limb was a duo before I joined the band, they came in to La La Land to record an album not long after construction was finished. Through working on their record, I most excitedly joined the band and I immediately heard similarities between Maryliz [Bender]'s tribal drum style and the song 'Yoo Doo Right' once we started working on their album. I had a fantasy of us doing a cover of that song, and was so excited to hear both their voices together singing it; Michael Karoli's guitar playing has always been an influence on me, and [I] was so excited to play those anthemic guitar hooks. It's scary to cover a song by a band that carries so much integrity among some of the most influential experimental musicians of our time, but the first time we played that song, it was so apparent it was going to be so free and fun to play live, especially in a small room packed to the gills of sweaty human creature people.

Check out the live version of the cover below, and pick up Twin Limb's new record, Haplo, out today. You can also pick up their cover of "Yoo Doo Right" on their EP, Anything Is Possible and Nothing Makes Sense.