MELØ – “Don’t Change”

MELØ – “Don’t Change” – Single Review

Great to hear things working out this well for MELØ, I dig this dude.

It’s crazy though y’all…I gotta admit, I love how little I know about music sometimes.  I think us critic-types tend to get to a point where we think we’ve heard it all, or even worse, think we know it all…and I can tell ya firsthand that’s never the case.  Take this case of MELØ covering a track from one of the bands he personally looks up to for example – INXS.  I can distinctly remember the first time I heard them for the very first time…it was up in a tiny rural part of British Columbia’s interior – a town called Salmo and it was 1990; I was ten years old & it was Christmas.  My cousin Luke had just got their brand-new album and was completely stoked to get it.  I was smart enough to know what I was hearing in a song called “Disappear” was something absolutely extraordinary, and just aware enough to know what I was listening to wouldn’t have been created by a band that had only been around for a day – it wasn’t until right at this very moment in writing this review that I learned the album that song came from, X, was actually the seventh release by INXS.  For whatever reason, in my brain, I felt like Kick and Listen Like Thieves would have been the only records that came before X…yet clearly there were six others in total, and one of which, contains the original “Don’t Change” that MELØ chose to cover.  That was their third record, called Shabooh Shoobah.  The things we don’t know I tell ya.  Whether we tend to admit it or not, the act of listening tends to be a very linear thing for most of us…we have a starting point, and generally continue on from there.  If you’re among the awesomest people on this planet, you dive right into the back catalogs…but even if you think you can get to it all, I can promise you that you can’t.  There is so much music on this floating rock we call home at this point, that you could easily fill each and every day of your life with non-stop new music until the day you died and you STILL wouldn’t even hear it ALL.  How insane is that?  I try harder than most people I know, and I’m still barely just scratching the surface.

Anyhow.  I suppose the real point I’m making is, I would have told ya I loved INXS about as much as any real fan would, and in learning how much I didn’t know, I’ve learned I’m a much more casual fan than I thought I truly was.  X was where I started, Welcome To Wherever You Are is my favorite record by far, Elegantly Wasted was probably where I finished listening on the regular, and I couldn’t even really tell ya what fellow Canadian J.D. Fortune brought to his era of the band post-Michael Hutchence, if anything.  Like I was telling ya…we move in a linear way for the most part…there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.  I went back & listened to Kick and Listen Like Thieves, and those records still remain in my catalog of archives over here to this very day, but they never gave me that feeling that listening to X ever did.

So to learn that not only did MELØ choose to cover INXS, but chose to dig deeper than I’d personally ever listened made for a seriously unique experience – I was only two years-old when this song originally came out…so you’ll have to forgive me for not immediately grabbing the cassette when it was released.  As you’d expect, the original is much more of a Rock-infused cut and about twice the length of this cover by MELØ…I enjoyed what I heard from that first version by INXS, but at that point, I was actually going backwards once again – I had already heard “Don’t Change” in MELØ’s style.  A first impression or experience can count for so much when it comes to what we listen to…and it’d be hard for me not to say that I actually prefer MELØ’s mellowed-out synth version, because I honestly do.  That being said, credit where credit is due – any time you hear a cover song where you feel like the version beyond the original is the version you like the most, it’s not only because that artist or band did an exceptional job with the source material, it’s also because the writing itself was completely transferable.  Especially in an instance like this where a song shifts into a completely different style of sound, more than THREE DECADES after it was created!  No one can have the foresight to see how many lives a song might live.

Stellar, ain’t it?  I think this kind of stuff is insanely cool to look at on paper, and of course to hear the results when they come out this great too.  MELØ really played this track like his own and it slides right into the catalog of shiny synthesized tunes he loves to create…he’s got real respect for the material and it shows in the results.  It’s an outright beautiful song at the core of it…”Don’t Change” is really all about acceptance and finding a way to appreciate who we are, and celebrating that together with the people you truly love.  It’s a song that reminds us we’re all perfect in our own way, the way that we are right now in the present.  Honestly, I think it’s a brilliant way to start out the new year for MELØ, with a song that not only has a stunningly positive message to fuel his mindset for the year as he goes on to crush 2023 even harder than he did in his debut throughout 2022, but also to toast and tribute a band that has helped blaze the trails before him.  They might sound different, but when you realize how the past and present intersect through the roots of influence, you begin to understand how connected we really are through the music we listen to and how it genuinely affects us.  It’s definitely a version to be proud of, not only for how it came out, but for what it truly represents in this visionary artist rising in our scene.  Sounds like it’s gonna be a great year for MELØ if “Don’t Change” is any indication.  It’s a cover with real heart & soul to its shimmering synthetic vibes, he nailed the melody & hooks in a brilliantly unique way that draws out the beauty inherent to this song, and he’s brought the past right into the present.  You can’t ask for much more than that with a cover tune I tell ya…great job MELØ, “Don’t Change” a thing about the path you’re on & the dedication you bring to your music…it’s absolutely inspiring – keep it going my friend.

Find out more about MELØ from his official website at:  https://www.melomusicofficial.com

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