Label: Hopeless Records
Released: 3rd May 2019
Rating: ★★
A New Found Glory covers album is as welcome as a Grandma’s Christmas present; never wanted, never needed, but always appreciated. ‘From The Screen To Your Stereo III’ is their third movie-themed covers collection, arriving twelve years after the last, and much like the previous effort, there’s not much substance to grip onto bar for some much-needed comic relief.
Having fallen on a path of career resurgence following their best-in-a-decade performance on 2017’s ‘Make Me Sick,’ it’s disheartening to see the pop-punk pioneers playing it safe. It’s no secret that a New Found Glory cover is a formulaic power-pop affair where every single note of the song is amped up in American chick flick gloss.
After an entire album was dedicated to the chart-topping world-stealing musical The Greatest Showman, was a pop-punk cover of its superhit ‘This Is Me’ needed? No, not really. It’s super-charged pop-punk, and vocalist Jordan Pundik is in fine form, it’s just an utter shame it’s not an original song he’s flashing his vocal pipes on.
Counting Crows’ Shrek theme ‘Accidentally In Love’ gets a carbon-copy do-over while Frozen’s ‘Let It Go’ is given a mid-way run-through that’ll have Disney’s new generation of pop-punkers jumping up and down at their own little pizza party.
Power chords whiz and blur past distorted guitars, the pop-driven harmonies of the cover’s originals shining in the pop-punk sheen. The songs that suit pop-punk aren’t anything new, and the ballads that are burned out by their covers are worse off; no one needs an upbeat pop-punk version of Twilight’s big ballad ‘A Thousand Years’ and yet here we are, screaming as Jordan Pudnik fails to hit the mark.
It’s a shame that bands as prestigious as New Found Glory spend their time trickling out movie soundtrack covers when they’ve got a reputation for making some of pop-punk’s finest tunes of the last twenty years.
