Blue Öyster Cult
Ghost Stories

The judgment on this latest effort (!? see later...) by the B.O.C. depends on the direction from which one approaches its listening: the convinced admirer, more or less historical, of ours will find plenty to sink their teeth into with these nine new tracks plus three covers, and will grant wide indulgence to the fact that the music is not current but rather retrieved eleven twelfths from a full and fertile phase of their career, namely the years spanning the seventies and eighties. Ergo, it is a right and proper thing to have made them available to the fans and to those interested in top-notch melodic hard rock, to which the B.O.C. greatly belongs.

Instead, the skeptic towards them, in turn more or less historical, often the same one who "“...after the first three, four albums they didn’t do anything good anymore, becoming an AOR band (yuck!…)”, will dismiss the work as useless, underperforming, slapdash, the symbol of a long agony that does not want to end.

Both antithetical points of view are true. Almost, since there’s no agony for the Blue Oyster, given that their albums from the 2000s (few unfortunately, the last in 2020) are among their best, oh yes!

The story behind the album, released this year, is that someone took the initiative to recover the leftovers from some recording sessions related to excellent albums, such as "Mirrors," "Cultosaurus Erectus," "Fire of Unknown Origin," and "Revolution By Night." The tapes were partially damaged, but today the possibilities of computers and Artificial Intelligence are incredible, so the primitive demos, exhausted and approximate, were restored and polished until they assumed an appearance, if not to the State of the Art, at least professional. In other words, on this occasion the musicians did not sweat a drop to produce the record. Or rather, one of them did it all, Richie Castellano, the newest member, a guy who can play everything, mix everything and mess around with the computer as is done today.

Curiously enough, in this way, several songs surface that were sung by the bassist or drummer of the formation of that time, namely the Bouchard brothers who, in fact, in the early eighties, left the group, annoyed by the fact that the two guitar-playing singer-songwriter bosses, Bloom and Roeser, left them little space as frontmen.

Well… I mean… Oh well… Yes, come on! Such is my admiration for this seminal quintet with a strong personality and influence, that I accept this Frankenstein (not even the first one... even "Imaginos" from 1988 was somewhat artificial) and willingly place it in my rich Blue Oyster Cult discotheque. Of course, the album from four years ago, "The Symbol Remains," is on a completely different level.

And that twelfth track, not “of the era” like the others, that I mentioned at the beginning? It’s the cover of "If I Fell" by the Beatles and it sits there, alone in its relative modernity (recorded in 2016), closing the lineup. John Lennon would have something to say about it... his is better. Much better.