BLUES PILLS – Birthday

vote
8.0

• Band:
  BLUES PILLS
• Duration: 00:38:55
• Available from: 02/08/2024
• Label:

• BMG

Streaming not yet available

We will never know how much Elin Larsson's pregnancy affected the creative process of “Birthday”, but we are willing to bet that, otherwise, we would have found ourselves with a completely different work in our hands, in terms of atmosphere and sound. The singer, in fact, became aware of her condition during the writing sessions for the new album and, confirming the feminist drive that distinguishes her, she embraced the arrival of a new life by making a real parallel between the creative ability of an artist and the generative ability of a woman, who does not necessarily have to choose one or the other path, but can fully live both, drawing unexpected strength and energy from them.
Whether it is due to the arrival of little Loui or not, however, what we can see is how the Blues Pills have really made a huge leap forward with this new work, taking unexpected paths.
At the time of the review of “Holy Moly!” we said that, despite having written about a valuable album, the Blues Pills seemed not to have a clear direction to take, halfway between melancholy and rock energy. Well, “Birthday” resolves this conflict by choosing neither one nor the other, but by confidently taking a path made of exceptional, sunny melodies, always contaminated by the great music of the Sixties and Seventies, not the darker and more visceral one that we had seen in the past, but the more colorful and carefree one that characterized those decades in a no less incisive way.
So we have an opening that is almost perfect like the title track, with that initial riff a bit like the Clash, on which an irresistible melodic line rests and continues with “Don't You Love It”, which starts with an insistent bass and essential drums, to then explode in a chorus that seems to pay homage to the best rockabilly and surf of the 1950s and 1960s. “Bad Choices” and “Piggyback Ride” recover the most rock and scratchy Blues Pills, with their fiery hard blues; while “Top Of The Sky” is a candidate for one of the best ballads of the last ten years, with a simply stellar performance by Elin Larsson. And again, “Somebody Better” with that epic and majestic crescendo at the end; “Shadows” and its spiritual contaminations; up to the sinuous and emotional ending of “What Has This Life Done To You”.
“Birthday”, in short, wanted to be a hymn to life and it hits the target almost perfectly, thanks to a handful of songs that, if we were in a different decade, could have easily climbed more than one chart. Now we can't wait to hear them live and we hope that the Blues Pills continue to amaze us with albums of this caliber.