Album Review: Blue Oyster Cult - "The Symbol Remains"

 

Unfairly remembered on these shores as a mostly being a one-hit wonder (Don't Fear The Reaper just in case you've been living in a cave for the last 45 years), the truth is that Blue Oyster Cult are a band with a very worthy back catalogue and, back in their 1970s prime, could kick up a hell of a racket in their day. Put it this way, their tag as the American Black Sabbath definitely wasn't unwarranted hype as anyone who's heard This Ain't The Summer Of Love, Astronomy or Godzilla will tell you.

All of which is very well and good of course but the 1970s were a long time ago and there's a big question hanging over whether BOC have still got it now. However, as the sinister riff of That Was Me kicks in to open this album, the signs are encouraging. Box In My Head sees them veering over to their more melodic side (think a 21st century version of Burnin' For You).

Essentially The Symbol Remains is exactly what you'd want from a Blue Oyster Cult album in this day and age and takes the strongest elements of their classic sound before bringing them up to date for 2020. So we get the sinister Then Came The Last Days Of May slowie that is Tainted Blood through the swaggering riffs of Stand And Fight and Edge of the World (with the attendant conspiracy lyrics) to the epic piano-led apocalyptic odes of Nightmare Epiphany and The Alchemist and the Thin Lizzy style straight up rock anthem Return of St Cecilia with some good guitar work from long standing guitarist Buck Dharma.

There's a few curveballs here too - Train True explodes from a mid-paced opening to a turbo-charged Chuck Berry style riff-fest and There's A Crime almost goes into Dead Boys style punk territory but for the most part this is BOC sticking to what they do best and it's no worse for it. Given how many bands of their era seem content to simply phone it in on the revival circuit, it's to the band's credit that they're still putting out credible new material some forty odd years into their career. Good stuff.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure,
Read more