"Goodbye Horses" (Q Lazzarus cover)

Arriving a few weeks after the release of Jon Hopkins' excellent, agitated new album, Immunity, it might seem as if the London-based producer is stepping back into the shadows on this cover of Q Lazzarus' 1988 single, "Goodbye Horses", a collaboration with his Domino labelmate, Wild Beasts' Hayden Thorpe. But the spellbinding magic of their version (the B-side to a reissue of the original) comes from the intimacy between the two performers; Hopkins smatters a chilling, barely-there palette of tinkling piano and delicately implied bass that shines a sort of celestial light on Thorpe's tragic, sage voice. Here he sounds at once a spiritual successor to Antony, and very much his upstanding English self, countering someone's dismissal of a heavenly realm with the formal, but sincerely felt, "Oh no, sir..." Their version feels as though it's going to blow up, like the original, but the climax is all in the control.