Not only was Chris Martin a guest at Beyonce & Jay-Z’s wedding, but he’s been covered by Beyonce’s little sis Solange. The Knowles who released the better album last year tackles Coldplay’s #1 smash, and the result isn’t the train wreck it looks like on paper. However, keep your pants on. What it really amounts to is Solange singing karaoke to the Coldplay song. The band just recreates the original arrangement. The best covers have twists and turns in order to deviate from the original. This could be any chick with a moderately good voice in a karaoke bar. In this case, I wonder what’s worse, it sucking or it just being kind of “eh”.
I want to like Beyonce. Really I do. She’s fantastic looking. She has a fantastic voice. However, over the course of four Destiny’s Child albums and now three solo albums, she’s mostly struck me as the musical equivalent of a ton of pretty wrapping paper with no gift inside. All style and no substance. As a songwriter, she’s not especially insightful, and it doesn’t really seem like she inhabits the songs she sings the same way some less talented but more believable vocalists do. So, to make a long story short, just about every album Beyonce has been a part of has been a case of unfulfilled promise and ultimately a frustrating listening experience.
The cover of "Sol-Angel & the Hadley Street Dreams", the sophomore effort from Solange Knowles.
The musical landscape is littered with them: artists trading on the talent and fame of their more talented, more famous sibling. Most music fans are smart enough to know that whenever “the brother or sister-or son or daughter- of chart-topping singer XXX” arrives on the scene, they should run for cover. My pals at Popdose recently dedicated an entire article to the phenomenon, bringing back some famously awful examples of a few artists who assumed that sharing a bloodline with someone meant sharing their talent as well.
So you have every right to be frightened by the sophomore effort from Solange Knowles. Yep, Solange is the little sister of world-famous diva singer/actress Beyonce Knowles, sister-in-law of Jay-Z. She’s occasionally stepped in as a fourth member of Destiny’s Child, co-written songs for her sister and her sister’s bandmate Kelly Rowland, and released a fairly horrid album of her own half a decade ago, “Solo Star”. However, she’s probably most known for creating a chink in the fresh-scrubbed Knowles family image by getting knocked up at 17 (Papa Mathew Knowles almost immediately made Solange marry the baby’s father, a move that Mr. & Mrs. Spears would have been wise to emulate). Now a 22 year old divorcee, Solange makes her re-entry onto the musical scene with “Sol-Angel & The Hadley Street Dreams”, a title so pretentious you almost want to hate the album before it starts playing.
Not only was Chris Martin a guest at Beyonce & Jay-Z’s wedding, but he’s been covered by Beyonce’s little sis Solange. The Knowles who released the better album last year tackles Coldplay’s #1 smash, and the result isn’t the train wreck it looks like on paper. However, keep your pants on. What it really amounts to is Solange singing karaoke to the Coldplay song. The band just recreates the original arrangement. The best covers have twists and turns in order to deviate from the original. This could be any chick with a moderately good voice in a karaoke bar. In this case, I wonder what’s worse, it sucking or it just being kind of “eh”.
