Scott Walker "covers" Britney Spears and will.i.am's "Scream & Shout."

A good cover song takes what's essential about a track and transforms it into something fresh. A bad cover song simply rehashes all the necessary parts note for note and passes it off as something new. Then there's the type of cover that invites an evil troll into your kitchen to shoot laser beams at horse-shaped shadows and summons a swarm of pestilent locusts to have a conversation about post-modernism over tea. This version of will.i.am and Britney Spears' "Scream & Shout" by British comedian Adam Buxton, sung in the style of '60s pop icon-turned-avant-garde experimentalist Scott Walker, is even weirder than that sounds.

Listen to Adam Buxton's "Scream & Shout" after the jump.

For a bit of context, check out one of Walker's most recent songs plunges into the abyss, "SDSS14+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)," which is somehow even more unsettling than the already-out-there title suggests. We're talking "I don't want to get out of bed today/ever again" weird. When you apply that spooky, halted baritone to a modern club banger, hilarity/emotional scarring ensues.

"You are now rocking with will.i.am and Britney, bitch, oh yeah. Bring the action, rock and roll, everybody let's lose control," Buxton-as -Walker croons, sounding more like a cartoon version of a somebody's grandpa vampire trying to impress the kids who stopped by for trick-or-treating so he can lure them to their doom.

"I wish this night would last forever," he sings, and it sounds more like a threat of eternal damnation than an invitation to party.

+ Listen to Adam Buxton's "Scream and Shout."

Photo credit: Adam Buxton