Japanese Breakfast Covering the Cranberries Is Pretty Perfect

Michelle Zauner’s work in Japanese Breakfast is unique in that it audibly contains the DNA from a billion other bands and also totally sounds like its own thing. Among those strains is early 90s dream-pop like the Cranberries, whose singer Dolores O’Riordan died this past January at the age of 46. For an edition of Spotify’s singles series, Japanese Breakfast covered the Cranberries’ classic single “Dreams.”

The recording is ultra-faithful, getting every drop of reverb and jangling guitar part down-pat. Zauner also nails O’Riordan’s wordless, exulting choruses, sounding for all the world like she summoned her spirit from beyond the grave. That would be pretty weird, though. In any case, this cover is an example of showing us why a good thing was already good. If you’re looking for more great versions of “Dreams,” Faye Wong also did a pretty incredible Cantonese-language cover that was featured in the 1994 arthouse classic Chungking Express. Listen to the Japanese Breakfast version below, along with a new version of the band original “Road Head.”

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