Review Roundup

Bleachers ‘Bleachers’

Jack Antinoff continues to refine his Bruce Springsteen impression on fourth album ‘Bleachers’, this time honing in on Springsteen’s contemplative late 80’s / early 90’s posture. The songwriting and production are as strong as you would expect from the guy behind the boards of the last decade’s most iconic pop albums (‘Melodrama’, ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’, ‘1989’) and he enbues his songs with more weirdness than on 2021’s straight laced ‘Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night.’ But, more than ever, there is a second hand quality to Antinoff’s solo records that he can’t ever seem to shake. When he’s not mimicking The Boss (‘Me Before You’) he’s doing a transatlantic Matty Healey (‘Jesus is Dead’) or borrowing heavily from Lana Del Rey (‘Alma Matta’). Better are the songs that lean hardest into Antinoff’s virtually unparalleled pop instincts. ‘Modern Girl’ and ‘Tiny Moves’ sound like dormant hits woken up for 2024. These are fleeting highlights on a record that more generally runs on borrowed fuel.

6.5/10

–

Glass Beach ‘Plastic Death’

‘Plastic Death’ is a stiflingly busy album from an important fixture of Emo’s fifth wave. Their debut, ‘The First Glass Beach Album’, was an unexpected fusion of prog and punk, and this time around the band move even further away from Emo’s centre. The somewhat exhausting ‘Plastic Death’ positions them as a borderline tasteless, American alternative to Black MIDI. Lacking that group’s art school credentials, Glass Beach instead cite video games and improv as influences. Crucially, ‘Plastic Death’ lacks the very thing at the core of Emo’s identity – emotion. Their inventive musicality is admirable, as is their ambition, but ‘Plastic Death’ leaves me cold in the way that pretentious prog albums often do.

5.5/10

–

Green Day ‘Saviours’

On their 14th studio album, Green Day aim right down the centre; somewhere between Dookie’s snappy pop-punk and American Idiot’s more righteous political ambition. The middle road is a dull place for a punk band to be and as tuneful as ‘Saviours’ is, it’s a difficult record to feel anything for. At best, the songs are perfectly fine (‘Look Ma No Brains’, ‘Goodnight Adeline’, ‘Coma City’) but there is something unbearably cynical about the weaker songs – the theatrical blues-punk of ‘One Eyed Bastard’, the contrived woo-woo pop of ‘Bobby Sox’, the forced nostalgia of ‘1981’. Worst of all is the excruciatingly dated political sloganeering of ‘The American Dream is Killing Me’ which feels like a lazy product of the same diminished standards that birthed the very politicians Green Day are lampooning. At this point Green Day are making music to fill football stadiums where even the cheap seats will set you back £100s. They will be performing their two best albums in full on their next tour, in a move that seems to anticipate the inevitable reaction to ‘Saviours.’ If they do play anything from this, at least it will make a good toilet break.

4.5/10