Not the Same Old Birthday Songs
Written: Mar 31 '09
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Product Rating:
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Pros: some of the finest old-school power pop out there these days
Cons: none at all
The Bottom Line: Bleu's family and friends serve as the inspiration for some truly memorable power pop gems.
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| DrFaustus's Full Review: Happy Birthday EP by Bleu |
I wish Bleu McAuley were a personal friend of mine. Sure, it'd be nice to know a professional musician, getting to visit them on tour, hang out backstage, tag along to music industry parties, and maybe even cozy up to him enough to get mentioned in the "special thanks" part of the liner notes to some upcoming album. But I could do any of those things if I were friends with any professional musician. Why Bleu, specifically? Quite simple, if I were friends with Bleu, I might have my very own personalized birthday song that the whole world could enjoy. And considering that Bleu serious devotee of the Jeff Lynne school of production and a spiritual successor to ELO, said birthday song would be completely awesome.
Bleu's 2007 Happy Birthday EP collects eight such songs written for family and friends, ranging from brief, quickly tossed off ditties - "songlets," if you will - to full-length pop gems. Given that these songs were mostly written for close personal friends, there tends to be a feeling of playful inside joking, but with Bleu's hook-heavy song writing and impeccable studio polish, it's hard not to get sucked into the music regardless.
Just fire up the album's opener, Ducky, to see what I mean. A slow, languid drum beat leads the song forward at a more than relaxed pace to form a fine canvas for a collage of synthesizer riffs. Moog synthesizers, Whurlitzers, electric harpsichords, and so much more all turn up in the arrangements for a retro-pop party, but Bleu's vocals are what really sell the song. With an arena rock swagger, he belts out goofy best-friend sentiments such as:
♬ who's that guy with the crazy eyes
that could never get old or out of style
he's got flair like a tightened snare
or a sexy pair of underwear
he's so cool he's a Frigidaire ♬
with an emotional gravitas far outweighs the foolish sentiments of the lyrics.
The ELO influence looms heavy on the disc. Kate opens up with a riff that mimics the opening notes of Evil Woman before unfolding into bouncy bit of bubblegum pop full of falsetto "yeah yeah yeah" bridges. Elsewhere, Alex and Kenny bristles with the sparkling energy of Don't Bring Me Down or Turn to Stone. And just like all music that Jeff Lynne helped to produce, the songs glisten with a polished sheen that can only come from untold hours of studio polish.
But Bleu is certainly no one-trick pony, though. Fuzzy, full of wistful apology, and Grandot, written for his grandmother, are both country rock numbers full of acoustic guitar and sweet harmonies. Fumiaki, on the other hand, plays like a jazzy torch song, and even though it has one of the cheesiest rhymes I've ever heard (rhyming "have a good time out there Fumiaki" with "this might sound a little schloky"), but it's genuine sentiments of "I'll miss you, good luck out there" shine through clearly. Rounding things out is 40, a song that sounds like it belongs in a Kurt Wiell-esque cabaret, complete with minor key rumba piano, languid strings, and a full choir of backup singers to echo back a few of the lines. While the song starts a little morbidly with:
♬ you're forty, don't worry
you're life is half over
and soon you'll be dead ♬
but it quickly expands to more positive sentiments of
♬ forty – it's the new twenty
and twenty plus twenty
is better than dead ♬
The Happy Birthday EP is a near-perfect example of what an EP should be. It's an eccentric little concept project that would probably grow stale and tedious if expanded to a full-length album, but at just a hair over twenty-four minutes, it's a tight collection that never has a chance to grow old. It's a perfect showcase for Bleu's hook-laden pop, both musically and lyrically. Too much longer and it's overreliance on just about every power pop cliche might lead us to accuse the music of sounding gimmicky (a valid, but inconsequential gripe about his recent side project L.E.O. and their album Alpacas Orgling). And if it leads a few listeners to look into some of Bleu's other work (particularly his flawless power pop masterpiece Redhead), so much the better.
I'll probably never have a birthday song written specifically for me - certainly not one as fantastic as these sound. Nevertheless, I can't thank Bleu enough for sharing this set of rather personal songs with the rest of us, and if there's ever a follow-up collection, I'll cross my fingers that there's a song that shares my name, so at least I can pretend it's written for me.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
DrFaustus
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 in Music |
 - Top 500 |
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Location: the Lake Michigan shoreline
Reviews written: 474
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I can't help being a big fan of the esoteric and the obscure
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