Classic setup: Parents are out of town, so it's time for a party. Things get out of hand, too many people show up, too much booze gets consumed, and the lead character is left frantically picking up the mess. Obviously, The Talking Heads have got this one covered with "Burning Down the House."

John Hughes was apparently obsessed with Robert Smith's songwriting. It's easy to see why—The Cure's earnest, simple pop melodies with an edge of youthful frustration and alienation are hard to forget. They sound right at home in a teen drama. Try "Friday I'm In Love" for that scene where the guy sees the girl opening her locker... you know the one.

D.C.'s own The State Department reach for the same New Wave-inspired melodies and nostalgia that you'd hope to find in a John Hughes flick. Here's a performance of "Engender Me," which you can see them play live at the Black Cat this Friday.

Then, shortly thereafter, there were no aisles left to dance in. VHS made the concert film less of a public event and more of an at-home-with-a-bag-of-Cheetos experience. By the time Radiohead made its stuffy tour film, Meeting People is Easy, in the late '90s, the wonder and mystique were pretty much extinguished. Then YouTube came along and the screen got smaller still. These days, the large-scale concert film genre is basically a graveyard—home to the dead (Michael Jackson, This Is It) and the undead (The Rolling Stones, Shine a Light), with the JoBros the only remaining trace of once abundant youthful vigor.

Perhaps those eerie vibes are what has drawn D.C. expats Dead Meadow to the scene. Or maybe the trio, who play bluesy psych-rock, had been spending a lot of time with Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same. Whatever the rationale, in March the band will release Three Kings, a film that's one part concert footage, one part stoner-ghosts walking around in robes, and one part bassist Steve Kille firing an Uzi at a light bulb. At least, that's what this preview suggests.

A video for the song "That Old Temple," excerpted from the film, is up after the jump

Dead Meadow "That Old Temple" from Artificial Army on Vimeo.

Because I wrote about Title Tracks' versions of songs by The Flamin' Groovies and The Merseybeats earlier this week, and because Bob Dylan's truly atrocious new disc of Christmas standards leaked yesterday, I've been thinking a lot about covers.

Let's put aside the illustrious history of ill-advised tributes (read: the entire Me First and the Gimme Gimmes oeuvre). A good cover can both satisfy a simple, dorky impulse—to hear one artist you admire spin another in an interesting way—and prove rather instructional. For example, it can tell you that Title Tracks frontman John Davis is probably a sucker for semi-obscure gems (he is), as well as a student of infectious, pop-classicist hooks. With that in mind, I've collected some recent covers by local artists.

My short list, after the jump, is fairly folk- and indie-centric, and by no means complete. Tell me what I missed in the comments.

These United States and Vandaveer—the folky side project of  TUS's bassist, Mark Heidinger—contributed cuts to Dylan Mania, a French tribute compilation that slipped under the radar when it dropped in May. Vandaveer's take on "The Man In Me" is fairly straightforward, if not nearly as creepy and self-satisfied as the 1970 original. These United States' version of "To Ramona," meanwhile, is more animated and unhinged, benefiting greatly from a galloping rhythm and some thickly applied pedal steel. You can hear both songs on the groups' respective MySpace pages.

Ugly Purple Sweater has a cover of the Woody Guthrie-penned folk standard "This Land Is Your Land" up on its MySpace page. No surprises here, really—except that the duo has tweaked the title a bit, and decorated the song with a fairly silly falsetto. Which, strangely, is pretty awesome.

Last Tide—whom I wrote about in this week's One Track Mind—includes a swirling, eerie cover of Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" in its live set. Cover Me—a blog that, yes, covers covers—has an mp3 of the song from the band's recent appearance on WMUC’s Third Rail Radio program. Also, Last Tide frontman Nate Frey's other band, Detox Retox, does an, um, interesting cover of Joy Division's "Transmission":

The gloomy art-punk outfit Screen Vinyl Image taps one of its sonic forebears in this live cover of an early Slowdive B-side. Bonus! The woozy video quality and seizure-inducing lights are straight out of any shoegaze music vid circa 1989:

Ted Leo doesn't make music in the District anymore, but I like his tense, crescendoing cover of Robert Pollard's "The Numbered Head"—from the recent Score! 20 Years Of Merge Records: The Covers! comp—enough to include it here. You can stream the song at the Merge Records online store. It's got nothing, though, on the all-adrenaline cover of "Suspect Device" that Leo played at Fort Reno a few years ago.

Yo La Tengo hails from Hoboken, N.J, but the group played a pair of (kinda) D.C.-related covers at its 9:30 Club show recently: "Firecracker, Firecracker," by Half Japanese, and "Nervous Breakdown," which L.A.'s Black Flag wrote about three years before the District-born Henry Rollins joined the group. Rollins' provenance was a shaky excuse for Yo La Tengo to play the song, but the crowd was happy to forgive the trio. You can stream the entire set at NPR.

Last week Austin, Texas-based game company Dr. Fun Fun released Hi, How Are You, an iPhone game based on Johnston's work. It's pretty weird.

It's also habit-forming: In terms of rock-nerd esoterica, Hi, How Are You beats the pants off of Brian Eno's snoozy iPhone-based ambient music generator, Bloom.

Maybe some other outsider/folk artists, or their estates, should consider getting in on this as well. A couple of  recommendations:

Francis E. Dec: While suffering from schizophrenia, Dec published reams of racist/anti-Semitic/anti-government screeds populated by bizarre entities such as "Frankenstein Earphone Radio" and "Eyesight Television."

Possible iPhone App: Given the current tenor of political discourse in the United States, Dec's rants no longer seem all that ranty. In fact, Dec's language, once considered the hysterical (albeit kind of hip-sounding) words of a total loon, don't seem all that far afield from the diatribes of today's talk radio. A Francis E. Dec iPhone app could supply snippets from the author's writings—"eternal Frankenstein living death slavery" or "inevitability of gradualness conspiracy," for example—with which to pepper policy arguments should the Glenn Becks of the world suddenly find themselves short on words.

Henry Darger: A reclusive artist and painter who published a 15,145 page manuscript called In The Realms of the Unreal, which includes The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several watercolor illustrations.

Possible iPhone App: Storybook imagery and brutality? Darger's work clearly has some unexploited crossover appeal for the goth demographic. An iPhone app could render the artist's epic story as a manga-style comic book, with bratty looking caricatures of the Vivian Girls. A streaming-audio soundtrack could be provided by Gravediggaz.

Howard Finster: A Baptist reverend from Summerville, Georgia who turned to painting at God's bequest, eventually completing roughly 46,000 pieces of art.

Possible iPhone App: Among Finster's most widely recognized works were the record covers he created for R.E.M.'s Reckoning and Talking Heads' Little Creatures. The latter was even named "Album Cover of the Year" by Rolling Stone. So, perhaps an art-school album-art generator can be created that would match scripture verses to images—as was Finster's calling card—after being supplied certain basic information. For instance: folk-inflected art rock vs. art-inflected folk rock, or, which art school did you graduate from/grow disenchanted with and drop out of?

Inspired by Imelda Marcos, the high heels-happy wife of ex-dictator of the Phillipines Ferdinand Marcos, Byrne penned the album with Fatboy Slim. Together they're recruiting different vocalists for each track. So far, Santigold is on board as well. Byrne told BBC's 6 Music:

There is a different singer on every song including Sharon Jones from Amy Winehouse's backing band The Dap Tones, Alice Russell and Tori Amos. There's a lot of singers, it goes on and on.

"On and on"? How many tracks are on this album? Here's hoping Byrne doesn't jump the shark with this one.

What is David Byrne interested in as a musician? What does he like, and what makes him cranky? There's probably no multiplatinum-selling rock frontman who's more deliberately Sphinx-like—he's usually had some complaint or other to make about consumerism, but he's more likely to soak those messages in abstraction ("Heaven") or irony ("[Nothing But] Flowers") than in anything resembling outrage. Saying that he's a tough guy to figure out, though, is not the same thing as saying he's disinterested. For an hour and 45 minutes at the Warner Theatre last night, he played an energetic set that was drawn largely from his collaborations with Brian Eno, from their new album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today back to their work with "other musicians," as he said at the start of the show. Maybe saying the words "Talking Heads" is what makes him cranky.

To be sure, the man likes to keep things stage-managed. Byrne, along with his four-piece backing band, trio of backup singers, and trio of dancers, were all dressed head-to-toe in white and choreographed for songs that ended with blackouts more often than not. The dancers in particular were meticulously arranged, moving across the stage in well-bleached outfits and disarming pasted-on smiles—as if this show was a detour from their main gig performing in a Broadway musical version of Todd Haynes' Safe. The setlist had a calculated push-and-pull as well, shifting from the polyrhythmic "I Zimbra" to the drowsier, acoustic "One Fine Day," and from there into a powerfully reconceived "Help Me Somebody," a track from 1981's Byrne-Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. There, Byrne replaced the Pentecostal fervor of the original's samples with his own hectoring vocals, and between his shouts and insistent guitar vamping, it was one of the rare moments he seemed to genuinely revel in.

Which is to say, at that moment he looked the way other, more emotionally expressive musicians do when they're having a blast. Byrne's having a good time too, but he clues you into that not by engaging in audience patter or even by breaking much of a sweat—he does it by projecting the supreme confidence of a guy who knows he has a bulletproof back catalog to work with. So in a way, Byrne's chill persona is what made a track like "Crosseyed & Painless" so rousing. With the band toiling busily around him and getting the crowd dancing, he can sink into the tune's curiously gnomic lyric. A great David Byrne show involves a host of musical ideas embedded in some art-school fuckery. But it mainly involves playing half of Remain in Light.

Photo by Flickr user miamabanta.

Download it here (free and legal!), or watch the, er, video below.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is available for digital download on August 18.