Australian hard rock syndicate Sick Puppies are dishing out some of the biggest and meanest grooves of the fall in their latest single, a cover of Paul Oakenfold’s “Ready, Steady, Go,” in turn a collaboration with ESPN ahead of hockey season, which (justifiably) has critics from one side of the Pacific to the other abuzz at the moment. While it’s a riff-oriented rock cover, “Ready, Steady, Go” isn’t about celebrating the chest-beating swagger of its genre exclusively – here, Sick Puppies act as poetic storytellers with a lot to say about where we’ve been going lately and, more pressingly, what we’re supposed to do about it as fans of great sports. Put simply, this is real rock with a passion that has been mostly restricted to the arena for the better part of the last few years.
The bassline is as much of a beast as the guitars are in “Ready, Steady, Go,” but I think that it’s important to point out just how well-defined it is in the master mix. Unlike many of the metal-influenced singles that have been making headlines this October, this track doesn’t have any sort of muddiness in its multilayered attack – actually, it’s one of the crisper cuts that I’ve heard out of any rock group in 2022. Sick Puppies don’t have to assault us with noise to make us feel the intensity of their wallop, and they were wise to avoid such excesses here.
Even though all of the different components within “Ready, Steady, Go” have their own moment in the spotlight, you could make the argument that everything in this song – from the percussive pattern to the structure of the riffs and right on down to the very cadence of the bass and drum interplay – is constructed as to keep the lead vocal track at the center of our attention from beginning to end. Even from an angular perspective, it’s quite difficult to focus on anything else when our singer is lashing away at his backing band with one crushing verse after another. He’s on fire here and setting his fellow players ablaze with every word he belts out.
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As far as rock covers go, this one just might be the most cinematic that I’ve listened to in a long time, and it’s not only because of the ESPN element in the music. The premise is minimalist in spirit, but the colors, the audio, and the way that it was ultimately strung all together are truly larger than life. Sick Puppies have struck gold yet again in this latest slab of indie metal might, and even if you’re not the biggest fan of hard-edged rock n’ roll, “Ready, Steady, Go” is a cover (and a music video) that I would recommend taking a peek at just the same. It isn’t often that I come across a song of its style that has as meaningful a narrative as this one’s got, but at this point, I’ve come to expect the unexpected from one of the post-grunge generation’s most criminally underrated bands. Taking a cover and making it feel original can be next to impossible, and by the time this year is over, my gut tells me that a lot more people are going to be talking about the majestic music of Sick Puppies thanks to this recent evolution.
Chadwick Easton