I’ll always have a bit of a soft spot for Fall Out Boy. Their first few albums came out during my formative years, and I still revisit them from time to time, and would actually stand by Take This To Your Grave and From Under The Cork Tree as pretty good albums. But I’m under no illusion that they got better with age. In fact, after coming off a long hiatus, they got a lot worse, digging themselves into some lame populist fusion of pop, and punk-rock that seems limitlessly corny. So when I saw that they covered “Uptown Funk” — the Mark Ronson/Bruno Mars collab that’s currently sitting at No. 1 on the Billboard charts — for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, my expectations weren’t high. And they didn’t even meet those. It’s not good! They turned an effortlessly fun and enjoyable track into another one of their limp, crunch-rock stadium hopefuls. 🙁 We normally wouldn’t give this the time of day, but we did just bestow Ronson with an Album Of The Week honor, so let this serve as an example that what he does on his new record is in no way easy to pull off. You can check it out below.

Clean your ears with the original: