29.9.11

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “SOLO EN TÍ”

3 May, 1997


Two covers in a row! The original of this one may be slightly more familiar to my English-language readers than Vicente Fernández; it is, of course, Yazoo's "Only You." (Enrique also covered the original and released it at the same time to English-language markets; but his time as an Anglophone hitmaker was not yet.)

As a cover of "Only You," it's only okay; the cheap-sounding keyboard presets are no match for the synthetic worlds of 1982, and Enrique, no matter how hard he emotes, will never be Alison Moyet. The melody, however, is a timeless one, and the Spanish lyrics, if not as subtle as the original (which is pretty universally true of translated songs no matter which direction they're going), are a fairly faithful rendition of the sentiment.

So as an Enrique Iglesias song, at least by the standard set in his early years, it's a qualified success. The limited range of the melody, typical of the synthpop pioneers who were generally better at programming than singing, prevents Enrique from indulging his habit of turning everything into self-serving melodrama; there's just not enough there to oversing.

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