Aiming to improve upon a tried and tested recipe of jangly guitars and shaky vocals, The Rightovers, with Blue Blood, have a noticeably familiar quality about them. It’s The Pixies meets Tigers Jaw. REM meets The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. Weezer and American Football. That nineties-feeling alternative rock crossover with the warm, amateurish lo-fi sounds gives the whole album a snug wrap, a sort-of comforting feel about it.
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‘Valerie’ is a kind-of sun-soaked ‘Here Comes Your Man’, ‘So Famous I’m Fucked’ borrows more from the contemporary likenesses, daring to wear that flat, apathetic effortlessness to put a certain spin on life in a band. ‘Hello Cruel World’ seems honest, thought-through, without being overly-elaborated into something glib or ineffective. In fact, the album does, for the most part, seem to just be a collection of short stories – a series of quite open and meant messages, commentaries, ruminations. Once you get past the what the sound is, once you begin to pay attention to more than just how miserable and yet, oddly, how much better-off you feel for listening to it, the care that’s gone into a few of the more stylised lyrics in itself marks the record out as something really quite special.
It’s a careful, delicate recipe that makes Blue Blood work, and one that may require a few attempts to learn. It’s not something posturing to be understood immediately. It doesn’t try to be something it isn’t – despite the resemblances – and it doesn’t need the technical riffs or the hooky punchlines to be memorable. However, if it is something different that you are looking for, something you are willing to give some time to, then this is your album.
9/10
Words by James Reynolds