Alvvays make a welcome return on new album ‘Blue Rev’

Name: Alvvays - Blue Rev
Rating: 3.5

Tyler Golsen

Fri 7 October 2022 9:00, UK

Alvvays - 'Blue Rev'

3.5

A lot can change in five years. Back in 2017, Canadian indie pop group Alvvays were on the cutting edge of modern rock, pairing jangly guitar lines with throwback 1980s synthesisers and monstrously catchy melodies. Now, just about everyone in the indie world has caught up to them. How does Alvvays adapt to what is essentially a brand new world?

The answer is by making their most challenging album to date. Blue Rev, the band’s third LP, is jam-packed with punk energy, wavvy sonic experiments, dense arrangements, atypical solos, and an almost completely different vocal delivery from singer Molly Rankin. If you were so inclined, you could find traces of hyper-pop, chillwave, bedroom pop, electronica, and even traditional folk music.

It’s all laid out in the opening track and the first single, ‘Pharmacist’. With a whiplash-inducing key change in its chorus and an explosively destructive solo from Alec O’Hanley, the track is far from the driving thrill of ‘Adult Diversions’ or the warm electronic embrace of ‘In Undertow’, the band’s two previous album openers. ‘Pharmacist’ is aggressive and angular, setting the tone for the rest of the LP.

If you need clear diction in your indie rock vocals, then you should avoid Blue Rev with all your might. Taking cues from Cocteau Twins vocalist Liz Fraser, Rankin is at her most inscrutable on tracks like ‘Very Online Guy’, where her voice is processed and filtered to extreme degrees.

But just when you think that Alvvays has gone off the deep end, the heavenly tones of ‘Many Mirrors’ and ‘Belinda Says’ bring you back to reality. It’s true that this is Alvvays at their most confrontational (and it really is best to play this album as loud as you can stand to hear it), but they haven’t sacrificed their melodic sensibilities. Far from it, they’re just surrounded by more layers of production and experimentation.

There are still traces of the bare-bones indie rock style of the band’s past, especially on tracks like ‘After the Earthquake’ and ‘Pomeranian Spinster’. The punk-focused drive of new the band’s new rhythms section, bassist Abbey Blackwell and drummer Sheridan Riley, really shine when they’re able to let loose and bash away, bringing an almost reckless abandon to the more manicured stylings of the band.

Once again, the unheralded MVP of the album is Kerri MacLellan, whose keyboards and harmony vocals are more upfront than ever before. The signature sound of her Farfisa organ is still present on tracks like ‘Bored in Bristol’, but this is the Alvvays album that leans heaviest on her keyboard work. Anyone who’s seen the band in concert knows the invaluable role that MacLellan plays, but she tends to get relegated to the background over Rankin and O’Hanley. Not so on Blue Rev.

For the most part, the album is wonderfully structured. Would it have been more impactful if Blue Rev ended with ‘Belinda Says’ and cut the final three songs on the LP? Probably, but that would be asking for less Alvvays, something I am not interested in doing. Even in an age of reduced attention spans, Blue Rev is consistently captivating and engrossing enough in its production that going along for the entire ride feels more like a treat than a chore.

In this writer’s humble opinion, Blue Rev doesn’t quite live up to the lofty standards that Alvvays established with their first two albums. It’s a bit too varied and inconsistent to have the same impact as their previous work. But Blue Rev is still a wonderfully wonky return from indie pop’s premiere band, one that will delight fans and casual listeners alike. It might have taken half a decade, but Alvvays is back, and here’s hoping they never leave us for that long again.