Punk rock legends The Bouncing Souls will be releasing their 12th full length record “Ten Stories High” through Pure Noise Records on March 24th 2023.
I find it incredible that a band like the Bouncing Souls are able to achieve worldwide punk rock fandom for almost 35 years now, especially if you consider that, in its simplicity (pun intended), the band blends very basic elements of rock music and spits out anthem after anthem, hit after hit. All it takes, is literally a stellar guitar and bass player, a drummer and - yeah, alright - a very good singer with a distinct voice. The Bouncing Souls never overcomplicated things, have committed to a steady diet of catchy vocal melodies and sing along choruses, know how to perform energetic live shows with no facades and gimmicks necessary, while adding plain old fun to it but can create a hit song with as little overthinking as possible and that is a talent not easily found out there in the musical universe.
The band quickly reached peak form with their albums “Hopeless Romantic (1997)”, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2001)”, “Anchors Aweigh (2003)” - my personal favourite -, “The Gold Record (2006)”, “Ghosts on the Boardwalk (2010)” and “Comet (2012)”. What band can honestly boast to having 5-6 seminal records and, that, in a row and with each of them being almost two years apart? Unbelievable!
I thought with 2016’s “Simplicity” and then 2020’s “Volume 2”, that either I myself had outgrown them or that even the band had started to outgrow itself, because - let’s face it - the hits were minimal on that prior record and re-recording older material doesn’t show a lot of promise. However, even if I partially surpassed a little bit of that sound in the meantime, 2019’s “Crucial Moments” was pretty amazing.
And then, the pandemic breaks every band on earth into pieces and you never know what to expect from some of your all-time favourites.
Yet, somehow it’s 2023 now and the Bouncing Souls are gearing up for the release of their newest record “Ten Stories High”, by previewing three singles and a beautiful (as always) album cover. The title track, “Shannon’s Song” and “Higher Ground” left me mostly very satisfied and were established in absolute Bouncing Souls fashion. When I finally got my “virtual” hands on the actual full record I was happy to feel complete, as “Ten Stories High” is a great record. The aforementioned singles are probably the heavy hitters, along with “Kenver”, “Back to Better” and “Magnus Air Organ” (in that order) and, even though the pretty short 26-minute effort has grown on me significantly and I still think there isn’t a clear über-Hit on “Ten Stories High”, there probably isn’t a single song I’m necessarily skipping on this record. The band apparently chose a different lyrical content “creator” in actually reaching out to fans through Patreon over the course of the pandemic and were directly inspired for some of the songs on “Ten Stories High” by other people’s experiences. The production, again, is handled by the immaculate Will Yip at Studio 4 and the outcome is a very balanced sounding Bouncing Souls record, which is a definite plus in my book.
It’s funny how some things come full circle sometimes; I’ve been following the Bouncing Souls for over 25 years now, can name an unending number of hits and lesser known “classics”, still remember a bunch of their lyrics by heart, still rotate a bunch of their songs when listening to music, have seen them live a number of times, even have played with them live. And yet, I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a record of theirs. I can finally pin that down happily with “Ten Stories High”.
8.5/10
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