'Punk Goes Pop 4' is the twelfth release in Fearless Records' ongoing Punk Goes... series. After covering metal, classic rock and even rap Pop Goes Punk 4 once again returns to pop music and brings together several newer pop-punk/screamo/metalcore bands and has them covering tracks from the charts.
The punk cover has been a long-standing tradition, ranging from finishing off a gig with a cover just for fun to bands such as Me First and the Gimme Gimmes who have made their entire careers off cover songs. Doing a punk cover is easy; you think of a song, you learn the chords, you play the song and what comes out is nowhere near as polished but is a lot more fun than the original. Although this idea seems to have got lost somewhere along the way. The tracks on this CD are quite the opposite of a trashy punk cover played in a garage. These songs are just as polished, if not more so, than the originals.
This takes away from the 'punk' feel of the earlier CDs, but even then the word punk was used pretty lightly. Although the older Punk Goes... CDs did have the odd gem or two on them, such as AFI, Yellowcard and Rise Against, all of whom managed to produce a much more raw sounding cover version than any of the bands on here. This isn't to say that all of the songs are bad, Tonight Alive's cover Little Lion Man has some very warming vocals and a nice build up (unfortunately to a big pop song chorus though) and was probably the first track to stand out on the album. Although I'm not sure how Mumford & Sons would feel about being called pop...
A few tracks, namely 'Roll Up' by The Ready Set, 'Yeah 3X' by Allstar Weekend and 'I See Stars' by Til The World Ends are literally indistinguishable from the so-called pop music that they claim to be covering and ideally infusing with something new. There's synth, electric drums, samples and tweaked vocals and the only difference between them and real pop stars seems to be just how many 13-year-old girls are following them on Twitter.
Some of the bands here have very much added their own touch to the songs, such as Woe is Me's version of Katy Perry's 'Last Friday Night', which was released as a single. Although unfortunately these additions are mostly limited to screamo vocals and breakdowns. Nothing too imaginative but hey, at least it's something.
Most of the other tracks are uninteresting, melt-into-one-another pop-punk tracks that neither capture nor remould the essence of the originals, resulting in a CD of mostly (although not entirely) average songs that may as well have not been cover versions at all. The album isn't a completely bad mix, but Fearless Records need to think more carefully before throwing the word punk around meaninglessly like this.
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