Mar 052024
 
enhyphen what makes you beautiful

Fans went wild when the 7-piece K-Pop band Enhyphen recently released a cover of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.” The original was upbeat and had clear, belted harmonies and a forward-moving rhythm, and this version is spot-on.

The members of Enhyphen have voices that combine to have a certain synergy to them- comparative to that of Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik. The group even posed similarly to 1D in some promotional photos. Continue reading »

Jan 242020
 

‘The Best Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

best boy band covers

2020 marks a number of twenty-year anniversaries in music, but perhaps nothing as much as the extremely turn-of-the-millenium phenomenon of the boy band. At the start of the year, NSYNC set a first-week sales record with No Strings Attached. At the end of it, Backstreet Boys set their own sales record with Black & Blue. No one before or since sold CDs like boy bands sold CDs. Even the year’s other huge artists seemed defined in reaction to boy bands; Eminem dissed boy bands in seemingly half of his songs, while Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst was constantly starting feuds with them. It was that kind of year.

Because boy bands had their detractors. Boy oh boy, did they have their detractors. I was a 13-year old in 2000, and I remember the arguments dominating middle school hallways. But whether you were a fanatic or a skeptic, it’s hard to argue that, stripped of the love-it-or-hate-it presentation, the songs were rock solid (melodically, if not always lyrically). I imagine every one of us has gotten some of these stuck in our head – even if we didn’t want them there.

So rather than picking just one artist, we decided to pay tribute to the entire genre. We didn’t limit it to songs from the year 2000, but we did limit it to the phenomenon that 2000 represents. Though you can make a fair argument that The Beatles and Jackson 5 were boy bands, including groups like that would render this list pretty meaningless. Every artist here fits a pretty strict definition of a boy band, even if they came just before the genre’s cultural peak (New Edition) or after it (One Direction).

So everybody, rock your body with the 25 best boy band covers ever.

– Ray Padgett

The list starts on Page 2.

Jul 102018
 
zayn malik elvis cover

Three hours after we posted our Best Beyoncé Covers Ever countdown last month, Zayn Malik released a terrific version of “Me, Myself, and I” (it came at least in time for our Best of June list). Luckily, his new Elvis cover arrives before any best-Elvis-covers ranking – because it would surely rank high.

Zayn’s former One Direction bandmate Harry Styles has made notable rock moves since the boy band’s hiatus, having a genuine hit with a song that sounds like ’70s rock radio. So Harry covering Elvis would not surprise (frankly, judging by the number of “Styles Channels Elvis with…” headlines in the past year, it’s shocking he hasn’t). But Zayn Malik displays less overt affinity for rock and roll, which makes his new “Can’t Help Falling in Love” cover more surprising – and also, probably, better. Continue reading »

Jan 252017
 
protest cover songs

Well, it has been quite a week in politics. President Trump got sworn in Friday, then on Saturday hundreds of thousands of protesters marched across the country. We don’t need to go into the many (many) controversies and debates the first few days of the Trump administration have already brought us. You know them, and that’s not really our beat anyway.

What is our beat is cover songs, and a whole lot of politically-minded covers came out in the past week. Some are explicitly covers of songs with political lyrics, like Neko Case, kd lang, and Laura Veirs covering Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power” and OK Go covering Morrissey’s “Interesting Drug” (opening lines: “There are some bad people on the rise / They’re saving their own skins by ruining other people’s lives”).

Other covers are only political in the sense that they were released to raise money for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union or Planned Parenthood. Barsuk Records put out a covers comp featuring Nada Surf, David Bazan, Mates of State, The Long Winters (wonderfully titled Sad!). Members of the Philadelphia punk scene came together for a 35-song set of covers by the likes of Laura Stevenson and Jeff Rosenstock, which range from the covers of political artists like Against Me! and Bikini Kill to a cover of the Beatles’ “I’m Only Sleeping,” which would be difficult to find a political take on. Continue reading »

Apr 182016
 
radiochaser-selena-gomez-hands-to-myself-demix-cover-2016

Ghostly vocals and dreamy acoustic guitar strums melt together to form raw and emotional covers – such is the style of mysterious New York musician Radiochaser, who drew us effortlessly in with his chilling covers of Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Selena Gomez earlier this year. Continue reading »

Feb 122016
 
2015Weaves_26_RK_230615.hero

Take my word for it – this track will make you dance. Shortly before going bankrupt and shutting down, streaming service RDIO put the Toronto foursome up to the challenge of covering a contemporary pop tune, to which the pscyh-rock group responded to by taking on the massively successful boy band One Direction. This is that cover, and it is one of the liveliest covers we’ve heard all week. Continue reading »