(2023) The Bluebells - In the 21st Century

Review:
The Sound of Young Scotland has reached retirement age with plans to live it up. First, Altered Images broke a 40-year recording silence with the pop spangle of Mascara Streakz and now the first album in over two decades from Young At Heart hitmakers The Bluebells opens with a skiffly immediacy, a squall of harmonica, the scrape of fiddle and embedded pop harmonies – it transpires that The Bluebells in the 21st Century will be operating much as they did in the 20th, stripping the years away with the warm, melodious guitar and Glasgow soul of Gone Tomorrow. The many moods of The Bluebells on display here include the melancholy melodrama of The Boy Who Slipped Away, the happy/sad pendulum swing of Beautiful Mess, the gritty, bluesy lamentation of Blue Train and the more raucous nostalgia of Anyone Could Be A Buzzcock, paying tribute to the accessibility of punk and, in particular, the Manchester band who particularly struck a chord with aspiring musicians in Glasgow. It was their tunes, you see… though this homage is more shouty celebration with some rock’n’roll riffing. Ballad of the Bells is more explicitly autobiographical, celebrating their youthful ambition. “Time will tell how far we’ll go,” sings frontman Ken McCluskey. All the way to the toppermost of the poppermost as it turned out. — scotsman.com

Track List:
01. Daddy Was an Engineer
02. Gone Tomorrow
03. Orienteering
04. Stonehouse Violets
05. The Boy Who Slipped Away
06. Beautiful Mess
07. Anyone Could Be a Buzzcock
08. The Ballad of the Bells
09. Blue Train
10. Living Out Loud
11. Disneyland and Rock 'n' Roll
12. She Rises


Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop
Country: Scotland
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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