release date: Sep. 25, 2020
format: digital (14 x File, FLAC)
[album rate: 4 / 5] [3,88]
producer: Bob Mould
label: Merge Records - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 2. "Next Generation" - 3. "American Crisis" - 5. "Forecast of Rain" - 7. "Siberian Butterfly" - 8. "Everyth!ng to You" - 10. "Baby Needs a Cookie" - 12. "Leather Dreams"
13th studio album by Bob Mould as usual released on Merge follows 1½ years after Sunshine Rock (2019), and it's as usual with Mould as producer and songwriter and composer on all tracks.
It may not be the strongest progression that we are witnessing here - in fact, it's as if in his older days Mould seems to have sought back towards the starting point of his musical career in the harder-hitting punk rock. Where Sunshine Rock was more upbeat, Blue Hearts is its unpolished counterpart. It's a mixture of energetic and raw guitar-driven melodies with an angry and wronged older man, and on the other hand the few more harmony-driven and melodious compositions. Taken together, you are easily led to believe that you are back in the late eighties and are about to listen to music that was to shape the foundation for the grunge rock wave of the early 90s, but this is Bob Mold in 2020. And strangely it's not the experience of old music sounding as something he has already made several times before. It's a collection of solid rockers exuding sheer energy fronted by an artist who appears as someone with a desire to play, and you may think it's a lie when this guy three decades ago explained his withdrawal from music because of acquired tinnitus as he nearly hasn't been this loud before. Bob Mould has always been a kind of valve for the political climate and the living condition of Americans, and you could say he has rarely faced so much to open up about. He comments on the infected political climate, on our collective global climate as well as the handling of a worldwide pandemic. And by that, it's like gasoline on Mould's eternal fount of inner lyrics just waiting to be ignited. As good as anyone, he can compose a 2-3 minute hard-hitting song with three verses, a bridge, and a rich chorus - 'Bang-bang-bang! On to the next one!!'. In fact, three tracks are under two minutes long, and at the other end, only one track plays for more than three minutes, and the entire album of fourteen tracks is over in under 36 minutes.
Never has he released a solo album that bears so many similarities to the music he helped create in Hüsker Dü, and the album emerges as a beautiful essence and a bit of a late journeyman work of art showing us what Bob Mould is capable of as a songwriter: that commenting with a rare directness and precision on social conditions that affect most people - and done with finesse, with and without noise! Some might argue that the album comes 30 years late, but the messages are contemporary and the music is just universal.
Blue Hearts is quite simply one of Bob Mould's very best solo albums and therefore highly recommended.
