Squeeze-bot is a Louisville area band that I've not yet seen live, but after reading about them and listening to their debut CD on CD Baby (and then again at ear X-tacy) I've become something of fan, mostly because it falls into my love of the eclectic. This debut album is almost entirely covers and generally I'm rarely excited by cover bands, but both the wide variety of covers and eclectic nature of the band serve to make something wilder and weirder than "just a cover band". On the album you find covers of everything from jazz/blues to rock, by a band consisting of drums, tuba, banjo and accordian. Most of the songs manage to leap a bit further from the realm of "just rock covers by a bizarre polka band" into something subtler and more profound, at times flirting with the same sort of creative reinvention seen in the jazz works of rock-influenced trios like The Bad Plus and Esbjörn Svensson Trio.
I also found Nightmare Revisited a fun Halloween-themed album. Just as a I'm rarely excited by cover bands, I find most "Inspired By" albums not all that inspired, but this collection of works based upon The Nightmare Before Christmas exhibits some awesome works that show both an appreciation for the source material and some fun "stunt casting". Particularly noteworthy stand outs for me are DeVotchKa's wild "old world" Overture, The Polyphonic Spree's "if Nightmare were a rock opera" Town Meeting Scene, and Korn's Kidnap the Sandy Claws which always seems to elicit grins, as it is completely faithful to the original song and yet invariably a Korn song (as if the original may have been written with Korn in mind).