Blue Oyster Cult - The Symbol Remains (2020)

^LOL!!

I’m kind of split on imaginos, Albert did not quite have the voice to carry the whole thing but then the official release is such an awkward monster

― covidsbundlertanze op. 6 (Jon not Jon), Saturday, October 17, 2020 6:47 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago)

tbf these are not his best vocal takes, maybe he's just getting ideas down but yeah listening to this I wanna hear Eric Bloom singing and Buck Dharma playing guitar. It's like a cupcake without the icing or something, it's still recognizably a cupcake. Idk that sounds dumb.

See, this is where Blue Oyster Cult starts to lose a little of its potency, when they brought in these damn portastudios and then Agents of Fortune is more like the White Album where everyone has their little corner and the band reconvenes to basically copy shit off the demo. BOC do not need portastudios, they just need a pile of Sandy Perlman lyrics and a dilapidated house in Long Island where they can convene in a moldy basement to put their stuff together collaboratively. Not that those later records are bad by any stretch, don't get me wrong I like that stuff a lot too.

I Ching this morning said 枯楊生稊，老夫得其女妻，无不利。(rougly: A withered willow tree sprouts new shoots, an elderly man takes a young bride, there is nothing that is not beneficial). I think the advice in this is to check out the new BOC record.

Full disclosure, Albert Bouchard is my friend's dad and I used to go to parties at his house in fuckin' Great Neck when I was younger. Fwiw I don't think I am biased because he was my favorite member of BOC for years before that.

I agree that it becomes a different band agents through mirrors (cultosaurus and fire kind of seeming to blend that vibe back with the original 3 album one somehow) that demands a different appreciation

haha full disclosure: eric bloom is the uncle of my best friend when i was growing up, which is how i wound up at the academy of music when i was 15.

damn crazy BOC connections

my controversial opinion:
Spectres is secretly better than Agents of Fortune but Reaper is so iconic it fools people

Only listened to this album once through but I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It's kind of like the most recent Judas Priest album where it's like "here's one of basically everything you guys like about us" — and that's good, because *ducks* BÖC have no front-to-back great albums; they always go off the rails somehow (usually with a fake doo-wop song or some gooey ballad) so this "new songs that sound like a greatest hits comp" approach was absolutely the right move. I'm gonna listen to it a few more times for sure.

I haven't heard the new Deep Purple album because to me DP were even worse than BÖC at the whole "two or three great songs, everything else is mediocre or awful" approach to album-making. May I recommend that y'all check out the last few Uriah Heep albums, though? They've done about five in a row now since 2008 that have been ridiculously solid — not great, because they were never great, but B+ material for sure.

xp dpectres is better than agents of fortune! reaper is not even the best song on it imo, i would say their best album is secret treaties, followed by tyranny and mutation but i don't have all the later ones so am unqualified to say. i would probably like their early 80s albums a lot.

heh, well, at least you ducked :)

yeah that’s certainly blatantly wrong

You think they have a front-to-back great album with no bad songs or missteps? Which one is it? I own everything from the debut through Fire of Unknown Origin and the only one where I never skip a track is Secret Treaties.

Secret Treaties is perfect

there are no bad tracks on either secret treaties or fire of unknown origin. tyranny and mutation too

honestly i love every song on agents of fortune and spectres too

Cagey Cretins is the somewhat skippable track on Secret Treaties imo. Tyranny and Mutation is more reliable but the highs are higher on Secret Treaties. Supposedly The Marshall Plan is the real dog on Cultosaurus but I harbour a sneaking admiration for it.

I feel like Fire... falls apart in the second half. The best song after "Sole Survivor" is "Joan Crawford," and there are some painful keyboard choices on "After Dark" and "Don't Turn Your Back."

man who gives a shit both of those songs rip

"after dark" in particular boogies

i recommend not listening to it through one's hangups about synth tones but i also loooove the 8-bit-sounding chimes on "after dark"

painful keyboard choices

8-bit-sounding chimes

Okay, clearly I NEED this record.

Adore all the synth work on FOUO

my controversial opinion:
Spectres is secretly better than Agents of Fortune but Reaper is so iconic it fools people

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

even more controversial opinion:
side 2 of agents of fortune is better than side 1. morning final/tenderloin/debbie denise ftw.
i agree with brad tho, love every song on it.

so I streamed FOUO on youtube and about half the new album.

can't write a long post now but when i heard them sing "joan crawford has risen from the grave!" for the first time I laughed so hard my side hurt.

only regret is that i waited so long to check out this wonderful album.

reaper is insanely great i think i just feel this disconnect between reaper and everything else, so when i feel like listening to blue oyster cult it's not the vibe i have in mind, and when i feel like listening to reaper none of their other songs really satisfy that.

yeah reaper is such a singular work of art
i hate that fucking stupid snl sketch
but nothing anyone ever did is like it

"I Love the Night" maybe comes close to the vibe, the weird romantic creepiness

Fire of Unknown Origin is so good

even more controversial opinion:
side 2 of agents of fortune is better than side 1. morning final/tenderloin/debbie denise ftw.

it's true

also: mirrors is really fun and consistent

I wish Mirrors didn't have such brittle production

I'm pretty on board Side 2 of AoF being better but only ETI is making me pause

that anthemic chorus melody mixed with the bizarre lyrics

All praise
He's found the awful truth, Balthazar
He's found the saucer news

is one of my fav BOC moments ever

I think I underrated Mirrors for a while because it kicks off with Dr. Music one of the corniest songs they ever wrote

In Thee is one of their prettiest songs

yesss "eti" is one of my absolute favorite böc songs

BTW was looking up lyrics on the new album and I really like the pre chorus (?) on It Was Me, but I'd been hearing it as "I'm the sad man that the ladies tease" and it's really "I'm the Saturn man that ladies tease"

classic wtf BOC word choice.

Do we know who wrote lyrics on this? My friend said one was a Richard Meltzer

You'll feel me in the urban breeze
I'll be there when the moment's seized
I'm the Saturn man that the ladies tease
Yeah, my darlin', that is me

According to wiki the lyrics for that one are from author John Shirley. Meltzer only wrote for "The Return of St. Cecilia" on this new one.

hmmm interesteing. "St. Celicia" is a callback to the Stalk-Forrest Group song (which oddly Meltzer didn't write) so I wonder if it is something old of his they had sitting around?

I know that has happened before, he was pissed about Burning For You I think because they hadn't been in contact with him and just used it, not sure what their relationship is now

thought I suppose Meltzer has probably softened some and tbh could probably use money coming in the door

"Box in My Head" feels very They Might Be Giants to me ("Dead," "Birdhouse in Your Soul").

Something I like about early BÖC is that they're in this uncanny space between dangerous and goofy. The murky, distant sound of the first album captures this best for me, where you can't quite discern whether you're on genuinely evil territory or not. The band sounds sharper after that, but never as mysterious. It feels of a piece with the schizophrenic attitude toward sheer evil in Last House on the Left (released the same year), an end-of-the-sixties thing, even though album and film are totally different experiences.

that anthemic chorus melody mixed with the bizarre lyrics

All praise
He's found the awful truth, Balthazar
He's found the saucer news

is one of my fav BOC moments ever

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 19, 2020 10:23 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is my fav BOC moment ever.

It's the song I'd like playing as I line dance into the alien ship come to abduct me.

The rest of the album is incredible, too.

everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1980, on the second side of cultösaurus erectus, at some point in the middle of “fallen angel.” it’s scientific fact

I thought that moment occurred during the jazz interlude of "Monsters."

in other BOC new - Albert Bouchard's Re-Imaginos is up on streaming

pretty interesting take on the project....sounds *so* much better than the horrid production of Imaginos. Albert's vox can be a little rough at times but I dunno, it's growing on me...

sad Imaginos wasn't tackled around the time of Spectres as Pearlman wanted to

"the girl that love made blind" is gorgeous

omg hooray

i got so obsessed with the imaginos lore when i wrote an essay about heavy metal a few years ago. the one deleted sequence from the movie is kind of an imaginos story in itself

is that up?
I think you'll really like this

only bright spot of 2020 is an unexpected BOC revival

that essay's definitely still up but there's a nonzero chance i will find it mortifying, it was for bright wall/dark room though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miar5eKG4uY

this is the very rad deleted/unfinished heavy metal scene

That's better than most of the finished sequences.

otm

i find myself singing it to myself butchering the lyrics like "there's box in my head and my head is a box and my skull is a box and there's a box in my skull and there's box in the box and a head in my skull"

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, October 14, 2020 11:43 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

ha, that's me now. sometimes replacing 'box' with 'cat.'

Good article detailing how a new album came to be

https://www.loudersound.com/features/cult-heroes-the-audacious-return-of-blue-oyster-cult

Cool! Thanks for the link.

Also, Real Gone Music has a pre-order up for the first official release of their Pasadena show from 1983. Apparently a pretty popular bootleg, finally in an authorized release.

Relieved (and a bit surprised) that this album is basically quite good. I'd put off listening to it for a while because I had a feeling that after all this time it was bound to be a disaster but it's... not?

Am I the only one who likes Nightmare Epiphany? Don't think I've seen it mentioned. Otherwise the songs that stand out for me seem to be the same as the thread consensus: Box In My Head, Stand & Fight, Florida Man, Alchemist, Secret Road. Secret Road might be my fave at the moment.

In my head the album title keeps changing to The Symbol Remains The Same.

agreed Nightmare Epiphany is a definite highlight and has the vintage BOC feel

I should make a play list where I cut the duds from this and fly in the highlights from Curse of the Hidden Mirror

Post it if you do

So many BOC threads, not sure which to bump, but this has been the most recently active.

Real Gone just reissued Live '83, a performance from July 24, 1983 in Pasadena and it absolutely slays. I guess this was a radio broadcast and has been a bootleg favorite for some time, but I'm just now hearing it. Absolutely smokes and a great setlist.

1. Stairway to the Stars
2. Harvester of Eyes
3. Workshop of the Telescopes
4. Before the Kiss, a Red Cap
5. Born to Rock
6. Hot Rails to Hell
7. 7 Screaming Dizbusters
8. Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll
9. Burnin' for You
10. Joan Crawford
11. Born to Be Wild
12. Don't Fear the Reaper
13. Roadhouse Blues

“The Marshall Plan” was the first BOC song I heard as a new song of theirs. It was so weird!

I could probably deal with like a singles edit that didn’t include Marshall’s rap where he’s conceiving his Plan. As I’ve said before BOC were the masters of a unique brand of lame-cool e.g. RU READY 2 ROCK but on a few occasions it gets away from them unlistenably - Marshall, dr music, let go

Great revive!