It’s no secret that Swedish pop-duo jj love mainstream R&B. They famously covered Jermih’s “Birthday Sex” and made it into a twinkling, synthy meditative piece, but now Joakim Benon and Elin Kastlander have taken it a step further. The Hip Hop Update has turned us on to their cover of The-Dream’s “Right Side of My Brain” and the results are making it easier for us to forgive them for jj n° 3.
While the nearly four-minute track doesn’t stray too far from the version on Love vs. Money, Benon and Kastlander do manage to simultaneously keep The-Dream’s vocal melody intact while stripping the actual vocal of auto-tune and making the cut’s instrumentation hauntingly bare-boned. Kastlander sings the opening line “I fell in love/ with a real heartbreaker/there’s nothing I can do to shake her,” like she wrote it and she makes the pre-chorus into what amounts to the auditory equivalent to a trigger on an emotional teenager’s tear ducts.
The video is just as stripped down and melancholy and pretty much shows jj sitting in a living room and tooling around on an organ in slow-motion. It’s all available for your viewing pleasure below.
