Album: Blues Pills - Birthday

Swedish-American four-piece Blues Pills are new to this writer but have been around since 2011. Their fourth album makes me wonder why.

Of its 11 songs, judged purely on sheer pop-rock chops, nine have real legs. If a friend had put Birthday on and told me it had topped the charts in the US for three weeks, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Mind you, I might also have asked if it had been a hit some time between 1977 and 1982.

That’s not quite fair. Birthday has a production sheen and feel that flirts with the modern. “Top of the Sky” sounds akin to Lady Gaga doing one of her lighters-in-the-air stadium ballads, albeit rockier, and “Piggyback Ride” has vocal effects that are very 21^st century. But, at heart, Blues Pills sound like a unit in thrall to the blues-rock of 1968-72, but who’ve also taken on board the lessons of late-Seventies/early-Eighties new wave “power pop”.

Heavily pregnant and joyfully sweary Swedish singer Elin Larsson really belts it out. Cuts such as the title track and “Holding Me Back” are carried as much by the sheer zest of her vocals, as by their festival-swaying contagiousness. Her lyrical concerns come from a place of looking back knowingly at a life lived well, especially on the self-explanatory “Bad Choices”.

It’s an album that drifts hard into Seventies rock pastiche, and therefore cannot help but invite comparisons. Very loosely speaking, imagine the early work of LA femme-rock ground breakers Heart crossed with the ballsier output of more contemporary blues-rock outfits such as Larkin Poe and the late, lamented Deap Vally.

I have form in being dismissive of bands who sound like other, much older outfits, or who sound, generally, like the past, rather than focusing on the actual songs. Blues Pills are in this category. They sounds like yesterday, and, while I’ve yet to find out if I fall for them further than a passing fling, there’s no denying they have the songs.

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Below: watch the video for "Don't You Love It" by Blues Pills