Blue Oyster Cult
The Symbol Remains
(Frontiers)

The good thing about reviewing BOC at this stage of the game is, I don't haveta expend TIME and SPACE describing how monumental a power and influence they are. You already know. (And if you don't: What are you doing reading this rock'n'roll blog, anyhow?)

I first got hip to the BOC guitar militia in '74, when I was 15 and my late brother Rick brought home LPs like their eponymous debut, Secret Treaties, and Tyranny and Mutation. And I knew they were SPECIAL in ways I'd only just begun to understand. The dynamism, the riffing, the hooks -- all were of magnificently organic construction. 

(It was also in that era that older siblings Rick and Kath brought out Creem magazine, which extolled BOC and from which, if you've not yet intuited, I purloined the very scribe mode currently before your eyeballs. Particular nods go to Messers Lester Bangs, Rick Johnson, and R. Meltzer.)

Listening to 2020 BOC, it's like the intervening annums have passed without diminishing their capacity for blowing down whole cities full of arenas. An UNSTOPPABLE FORCE, they can toss off cascading sheets of Heavy Metallic SCHIZZ without breaking sweats on brows. Burroughs' 1961 term applies, as ever.

The alchemy is in their inflamed bloodstreams and it thunders from all-but-aburst amplifiers. That kinda prowess separates WHEAT from CHAFF. And it'll always be worth the scant bucks a lifetime of reward goes for.

Recommended: All tracks.

Videos: "That Was Me"
             "Box In My Head"


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