Boston
Life, Hope & Love

It is with heartfelt and vibrant regret that I announce the artistic death of this American melodic hard rock band with the most illustrious pedigree and explosive beginnings. A confirmation nonetheless: even the previous work (from 2002!) "Corporate America" sounded irritatingly flat compared to past exploits. And indeed, we waited eleven years to see this sixth career album arrive, the worst of all, light-years away from the bombastic debut "Boston" of 1976, the splendid and perhaps even more consistent follow-up "Don't Look Back" of 1978, and even from that charming 1986 re-emergence, albeit not without flaws, titled "Third Stage".

Tom Scholz, the factotum of this group/project (on the album he does everything except sing: guitars, keyboards, bass, electronic drums, designing and at one point even marketing the special strictly analog amplifiers and effects designed to characterize the Boston sound, and still composition, production, and mixing) has lost his mind, and this is now established. The banality of these eleven songs is unbearable for anyone who has in their ears the magnificence of invaluable sound architectures such as "Long Time", "Smokin'", "Hitch a Ride", "More Than A Feeling", "Don't Look Back", "The Man I'll Never Be", "Amanda" and several others.

Yet it's them, Boston... the sound of the guitars is there, compressed and hyper-distorted in an admirable manner... but here they accomplish nothing good! The best that can be done is to have them continuously accompany in staccato, without ideas... they don't produce a solo worthy of the name, they don't dominate the tracks as has always been demanded of this group. The cover looks promising... the spaceship/city/guitar is in its place, drifting through the Milky Way and as evocative as ever, but these two aspects (cover and guitar sound) are really the only remnants of a greatness that has waned, indeed become deep night.

To be rejected without question is the anachronistic and amateurish insistence on electronic drums! Is it possible that the multi-millionaire and famous Scholz can't find a rock drummer to use in the studio? That a producer and sound engineer so meticulous, innovative, and sharp doesn't realize that his rhythm programming is horrendous, without groove and without style, as if it were done by a kid in his bedroom? I have nothing against electronic drums, but they need to be used well since it's also quite easy to do so with today's samples and sequencing techniques: here instead we are served an execution so unnatural and so un-drum-like, reflecting a depressing arrogance and egocentrism, an example for all the annoying hi-hat that keeps the same open position and the same mechanical eighth notes, literally killing the rhythm.

And then, if only there were a guitar solo worthy of the name! Instead, all we have are small and insignificant interventions, and to think that guitarist Scholz is the same who literally painted exhibition canvases in the solos of "The Man I'll Never Be", "My Destination", "Holyann", "Hitch A Ride", "Long Time" (here the solo was actually by then colleague Barry Goudreau, but it makes no difference). Same goes for the Hammond organ, an instrument that stands out in his hands in past numbers like "Smokin'" or again "Hitch A Ride", while here it is absent and largely replaced by an insignificant piano.

None of the songs rise above an embarrassing mediocrity, even with a taste of déjà vu especially for those well acquainted with the Boston repertoire. The many singers involved (even the late Brad Delp, who committed suicide seven years ago but is still present here, although his voice never once reaches the angelic and sublime high notes of the past) fragment and depersonalize the musical offering, particularly when the voice is the rather country (!) one of a woman, the bassist (but only live) Kimberly Dhame.

De Profundis, then: we must finally resign ourselves to the fact that for the past twenty years, this glorious musical entity, pioneer of what is called AOR (the 1976 debut already had all the features of this typically eighties genre), a master of arrangements and sounds so effective that they lifted melodies and harmonic progressions to anthems, not exactly genius ones, has irredeemably plunged into a shadow cone both qualitatively and, justly, commercially.