release date: Jun. 4, 2021
format: digital (11 x File, FLAC)
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,32]
producer: Markus Dravs
label: Dirty Hit - nationality: England, UK
Track highlights: 1. "The Beach" - 2. "Delicious Things" - 3. "Lipstick on the Glass" - 4. "Smile" - 6. "How Can I Make It OK?" - 11. "The Beach II"
3rd studio album by London-based indie rock quartet Wolf Alice follows almost four full years after the duo's Visions of a Life (Sep. 2017) and is made with super hot producer Markus Dravs, who has made his name as producer from his work with Björk, Coldplay, Arcade Fire, and Kings of Leon, to mention a few.
Musically, the band moves naturally with Dravs at the mixing desk towards a more commercial expression with a sense for dynamics and the grandiose. Dravs has a fine touch in maintaining a quirky distinctiveness and mixing it perfectly with equal parts harmony and a rocking energetic expression.
In this way, Blue Weekend appears as a well-welded piece of galvanised titanium in a pile of aluminum blocks. It's almost too perfect - and that's probably what I generally find least appealing about Dravs' productions: it's bound to be oh-so-bee.a-utiful! Beautiful arrangements, swirling guitars and a dose of quirky indie rock, but all the while held tightly to a strong chain so that everyone a able to admire the ascending airship illuminated by a setting sun. It's always dramatic and pumped-up pompous.
The album has garnered great and highly enthusiastic reviews, and it's perhaps also the band's finest release. To my ears, it reminds me of a new The Killers album that would much rather be Kings of Leon. That said, it's not particularly original, and one may wonder where the motivation lies. Then of course, it's not all music that has to push new boundaries, and Blue Weekend is by all means beautiful and almost perfect - I'm just not impressed and just feel that I've heard it all before. Lead vocalist Ellie Rowsell sings mighty fine as a British version of Lana del Rey, and if you think that's cool, so be it.
The album is by no means a poor one. I just don't find it great. It kind of lands in the big mainstream pile with so many others who want to make it big. Sometimes Wolf Alice sounds like Lana del Rey, sometimes they sound like Arcade Fire, other times they remind me of The Killers, who (again) so badly want to be Kings of Leon. Perhaps you just have to be grateful that they don't aspire to be Drake or Phoebe Bridgers, or well, Bridgers is actually also there alongside St. Vincent. But, Alice Wolf, you can only be yourselves! And this is precisely the album's greatest weakness: that it falls between so many chairs with obvious ingredients from all sorts of others that it lacks the essence of originality.
It's an album you can put on repeat without tiring of it, because it sounds like a playlist where you have no idea when it actually starts all over, but also without ever feeling overly excited. Maybe you just want to put something else on. And although the British press almost unanimously thinks this is a masterpiece - it's definitely solid craftsmanship and definitely beautifully produced - but it is! But a masterpiece it is not!
Without comparison, moreover, I rate the album Pastel by young Australian band Fritz, also from 2021, better because, despite other limitations, it lands a much stronger independent expression.
[ allmusic.com, Mojo 4 / 5, The Guardian, NME 5 / 5, 👍Pitchfork 7.2 / 10 stars ]
