It’s rare that I like a cover version of a song more than the original, but here we fucking are. The Eurythmics’ ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ dropped in 1984—a golden year for pop music when Prince was doing ‘Purple Rain,’ Madonna was everywhere, and the charts were absolutely stacked. Annie Lennox’s voice cut through everything with this raw vulnerability that gave you chills while Dave Stewart built arrangements that somehow felt enormous and intimate in the same breath. I grew up hearing this track in my mom’s car, at grocery stores, at that one cousin’s wedding where everyone got drunk and ugly-cried during the slow songs. It’s embedded in the goddamn cultural DNA. So when Pure Obsessions & Red Nights dragged this beloved standard into their darkwave universe and made me forget the original even exists for a minute? Yeah, that’s saying something.
They stripped away all the 80s polish and rebuilt it with industrial textures and analog grit. The fragility is still fucking there, they just loaded it with grit and distortion until it feels obsessive. Dangerous even. They didn’t try to replicate Annie Lennox – smart move, because that would’ve been a fucking disaster. Instead, they reshaped the vocal lines to fit their darker approach, and the result sounds haunted. Where Eurythmics made longing feel bittersweet, Pure Obsessions & Red Nights made it feel like drowning.
The production does serious work here. Old-school analog gives the track this organic weight that digital processing just can’t touch, and every layer feels deliberate as hell. The atmosphere builds slowly, creating space for the vocals to actually land instead of getting buried. And those grinding guitars that drop in right when the vocals hit ‘so baby talk to me like lovers do’? Fuck, that’s the moment the whole thing goes from moody to absolutely punishing. You feel it in your chest.
Philippe Deschemin has been doing this shit independently for over two decades, and Pure Obsessions & Red Nights has shared stages with Christian Death, Front Line Assembly, OOMPH!, Murderdolls, CKY. Been remixed by Sidewalks & Skeletons, Combichrist, Priest, The Anix, Stabbing Westward. That’s a hell of a resume, and this cover proves they’ve earned every damn bit of it.
