Who will save us from the boy bands?

Before the onslaught of the boy bands, there were the April Boys and April Boy Regino, and before them, there was Boyz 2 Men, the prototype boy band, although this one was strictly a black soul brothers act.

If you think it's easy to get four to five young men together, who are talented enough to sing and dance and look alike enough as if they come from the same mother, think again. Radio stations and record companies have started a boy band search by conducting nationwide auditions, to capitalize on the current craze, and all they've been able to come up with so far, according to one source from BMG, are three women and a male singer, a la Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

If you think too that the market has reached a saturation point with these talented young pretty boys who've gotten many an adolescent girl daydreaming and singing along, then nothing could be farther from the truth, because the youth can't get enough of them.

From the malls to the sidewalk stalls, both pirated and legitimate CDs of such acts as Backstreet Boys, N 'Sync, Boyzone, 98 Degrees and Westlife proliferate. If you can tell one band from the other then you may well have the most discriminating pair of ears around. Or undiscriminating, depending on how you view these bands.

There's no need to get excited if many of the older generation tend to write off these boy bands as another fad that will pass -- so did Menudo many years ago. It takes a lot of restraint on the part of parents these days to try not to criticize the CD playing time given by their children to, say, the Backstreet Boy's Millennium or Westlife's self-titled first album.

Perhaps now we know how our own parents felt when we monopolized the phonograph player with the likes of Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and it's highly unlikely too that our elders could tell these groups apart.

So we should give the kids a break, at least they are listening to music, then again the cynic would say that is debatable.

It's a long way from Bruce Springsteen's Backstreets, full of angst and loathing, to the Backstreet Boys' I Want It That Way, which has got many singing along whether they like to or not.

The Backstreet Boys seem to have stronger soul and Motown inclinations than, say, Westlife, an Irish group that is slated to hold a concert at the Folk Arts Theater this Tuesday.

But make no mistake about it, Westlife is also talented, with a sound that is more streamlined than the Backstreet Boys'.

Westlife has hit the airwaves with a couple of remakes as well as a few originals, whose titles can be inter-changeable to the casual listener. The remakes could well sum up the band's laid-back trademark: Seasons in the Sun and More Than Words, which was popularized some years ago by the duo Extreme.

Seasons in the Sun, in particular, can be heard practically everywhere one goes; there's no escaping it. Perhaps now even the noontime variety shows are holding their obligatory Westlife-sing-alike contest to drum up further interest in the upcoming concert, which is sure to be punctuated by shrill screams, assorted sighs and vigorous hand-clapping. Enough already?

Not exactly a possible antidote to the boy bands are their counterpart girl bands, which have also had their time in the sun courtesy of the Spice Girls, who have more or less gone their separate ways.

The better acts have indeed opted to go solo, following the path of Madonna, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Lopez. But this doesn't mean that the girl bands have outlived their usefulness, or that you can begin to tell them apart.

Indeed both girl and boy bands have a sameness in style and mode, as if factory-produced. One suggested means of torture is to be trapped inside an air-conditioned bus on EDSA with the sound system blaring out nothing but these bands.

Who will save us from them? If Westlife or Backstreet Boys survive their own fad and outlast all the hype, who will save them from themselves?

Maybe Tom Jones should stage a comeback concert in these islands, and so deliver us from the onslaught of these unusual harmonies.