Blues Pills have been quiet for some time. Taking time away from touring after a relentless couple of years which saw the release of two studio albums and two live albums, they’ve finally broken cover with a new album in the shape of Holy Moly! While Lady in Gold picked up where the debut left off with even more psychedelic elements, this feels like a new direction but staying true to themselves.
Everything which makes Blues Pills is still present, even if the band have reverted back to a fourpiece with mainstay Zack Anderson moving to lead guitar. In tinkering with the formula once again, they’ve peeled away the trippy sound of the predecessor and even pulled back some of the blues. An odd move for a band whose core sound is literally in their name but there’s always been more than just blues in their music.
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Instead, Holy Moly! presents Blues Pills as a band leaning more into their retro and fuzz influences. Despite this, there’s still a familiarity in some of the numbers like the ferocious march of “Rhythm in the Blood”. Dripping with fuzz, its blues-infused serrated guitar solo ensures the song gallops with menace. Its following number, the more serene “Dust” is contemplative and acts as the other side of the same coin. It’s also Elin Larsson’s distinctive roar making its long-awaited return, having been more subdued in the preceding tracks. That’s the main downside of this album; there’s not so much vocal somersaulting as previous releases. There’s more restraint but with it comes more measured control, backed by experience.
In that same vein, “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Song From a Mourning Dove” sound like they could have come from the debut album, the former brooding with an undercurrent of bombast before it explodes into it whilst the latter takes a sombre tone, psychedelic hints peppered throughout. However, it’s in the more forward-facing numbers in “Proud Woman”, a song as relevant now as it would have been in their 1960s influences, and “Low Road”, where the band truly shine. “California” acts as a bridge between the two sides of themselves they present on the album. Longing and wistful, the tenderness of the track is laden with fuzz and hints of Janis Joplin’s work and retro pop tones pervade throughout the song.
Blues Pills, and the genre of blues itself, have always been loaded with ion and it’s not lacking in any song found here but the tracks in the front half of the album have just that bit more. It’s not lacking in those later numbers but it’s akin to a band keeping themselves in check to not divest their past completely. There’s a big meaty sound coming from the band with its old-school sound, evolving from blues-powered rock into punchy music which evokes that same freewheeling attitude of the 1960s.
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It may sound like Holy Moly! is an album at odds with itself. But it’s more than that, it’s about Blues Pills showing the world that they, like the genre itself, can take many forms. With the reversion back to the single guitar and the fuzzy, retro feel of the production, this sounds more like the mid-1960s than any other release from Blues Pills which came before. It may not be their best album but the sense of catharsis which bleeds from it gives it the sense it was the album Blues Pills needed to make as they transform.
Header image by Patric Ullaeus
Holy Moly! is out now
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Sounds good.