Album Review

Fearless Records – Punk Goes…Pop 4

• 15th Dec 2011

The fourth edition of the Punk Goes…Pop series does not fail to impress once again. Well, that is if you are a self-confessed pop fan that isn’t ashamed to stand up and admit that you enjoyed the majority of these songs before you heard your favourite whiney American bands covering them.
No, this won’t be a critical analysis of the songs and the way they are written and produced, that’ll be saved for the original artists. Once again Fearless Records have split audiences with this, some saying that it has lost its credibility and others loving each and every song. Let us not forget that this is the yearly chance for Fearless to showcase their ever growing, finger on the pulse roster, and cleverly get their bands attention by covering successful pop songs. This to me, is a dream, I love pop, I love the new bands on Fearless, and hey, let’s face it, anything is better than the enjoyable yet entirely cringe-worthy Punk Goes…Crunk.

The difficulty with albums like this is that it proves that the gap between Pop and Pop-punk is ever closing, and that gives one of my favourite genres a tough time trying to prove that they aren’t boybands that couldn’t make it mainstream so added a few guitars. The minimal change from the originals on this album doesn’t help to give them credit. Pierce The Veil’s Just the way you are amongst others just sound like an overproduced gang vocal version of the original, but it’s not necessarily a totally bad thing.
Woe, Is Me try too hard to make Katy Perry’s Last Friday Night different and it all becomes a bit too much like a try-hard fail of screeches and shouts. BUT, and there is a but, Little Lion Man, an excellent song to easily ruin was re-made in a less-folk-more-rock way, and the feminine vocals really add a different dimension to the song. Cee-Lo Green’s massive hit has been done over by Sleeping With Sirens, and although pretty similar there was some edge of punk angst for the teenagers to relate to. The most outstanding track of the album however, was not the Adele cover, nor the Ke$ha cover, nor the Whiz Khalifa cover, but the Kanye West Runaway 8minute spectacular. Silverstein manage to pull off a great feat in making it their own and creating a cover that is an epic stand-alone track.

It is all done with tongue-in-cheek readiness, but you can’t help but feel that most of it is for financial gain as well as the exposure of raw talent and band’s influences that the Punk Goes…series was created for. Fearless are doing well, and it is a fun album, that I’m sure will be finding its way on to many a teenage iPod this Christmas, but maybe something spectacular needs to come out of the next one. How about Punk Goes…Reggae?

Full stream on Soundcloud here: [link]