voila_la_scorie So here we have a classic band of the seventies whose fortunes declined in the eighties, who were in disarray throughout most of the nineties, tried to get back in gear in at the turn of the century and who then carried on mostly as a classic rock band playing their classic tunes. Then after 19 years of silence from the recording studio, Blue Oyster Cult drop a new release. The title, "The Symbol Remains" seems less like a victory shout and more like confident statement made through weathered and grim lips with a knife edge of a smile. "It's 2020. BOC is still here."

I was curious. I had never been a huge fan, but my musical travels brought me to BOC Base on a few occasions, allowing one or two more albums to nestle into my collection. My recent reacquaintance with the much-derided "Club Ninja" exposed me to the new album's cover. Somehow, I felt it had to be good.

Of the original line-up, only the two guitarists and principal singers, Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom remain. That's something important though as what defines a band's sound is mostly in the vocals and lead instruments, as well as the songwriting. And to my delight, I feel that this is very much a Blue Oyster Cult album!

The band's familiar heavy side opens the album with "That Was Me", a song that I thought was a reflection back on a "career of evil". At this age, I think this song is very suitable and it is executed in the familiar style of Blue Oyster Cult.

The next two, "Box In My Head" (about his brain), and "Tainted Blood" (a vampire song) continue that familiar sound and style. Obviously, the two legendary members are that much older and the sounds of the instruments and recording is very modern, but they deliver songs worthy of the legendary band name.

I'll confess, though, that partway through the album, it begins to sound more like a generic old dudes' rock album. While at the start I felt it was without a doubt a BOC album, by the middle I thought had I heard this without knowing who it was, I don't think I would have even suspected that I knew what band it was.

Fortunately, once we reach "Stand and Fight" we know who put out this platter. It is actually a heavy tune, perhaps in the sense of classic heavy metal of the seventies but again with a modern sound. "Florida Man" is pretty good, but "The Alchemist" is totally a Blue Oyster Cult track with the heavy guitars, some piano, and an epic tale of fantasy and a quest. Had the album ended here (and I expected that it would as I was listening while walking and not looking at the track list), I would have applauded the band.

However, there is yet another track, and another, and another. It became a game to guess if I had heard the final track yet. I would think, "Now there's a great conclusion to a song and a great way to finish up the album." But then another track would begin. Not that the last five tracks were bad or dull. There are still some very good ones there and some even better than those in the middle of the album where I was wondering if I would recognize the band. I suppose after 19 years, the band had enough material for a 60-minute album. But I personally feel the album could have been more cohesive and more like a BOC album if some of the songs - three or four - had been relegated to CD/download bonus tracks that were separate from the rest of the songs.

My impression is that Blue Oyster Cult have released a surprisingly good album for a mature band. They keep the BOC flame burning for us with songs that both musically and lyrically are congruent with the classic sound of the band.

Any disappointments would be in two or three tracks that could have been either left off or come after the main album track list. I think the album would have had more of a wow impact at somewhere around 10 or 11 tracks.

Overall though, it's a solid release!

voila_la_scorie Blue Oyster Cult were on the top of their game in the early eighties. They’d scored a huge hit with “Burnin’ for You”, they had contributed to the soundtrack of the animated film, “Heavy Metal”, and they’d been touring with Black Sabbath. Unfortunately, things would start sliding for the band. Drummer Albert Bouchard was fired, seeing the first change in the classic and long-running line-up. Then came the disappointing sales of 1983’s “The Revolution by Night”, which failed to reach gold. By the time the band was ready to record their tenth studio album, keyboard player Allen Lanier also parted ways with the band. Former manager, Sandy Pearlman was called in, perhaps in hopes of restoring something from the band’s classic days.

As the band had done in the past, outside songwriters were contacted to write some of the lyrics, and one song, “White Flags” was a cover song from the Canadian Leggatt Brothers 1981 album. Pearlman was very meticulous about the sound he wanted from the band and some of the eighties pop sounding percussion and synthesizers were at his insistence.

“Club Ninja” was for many a big disappointment, even though the song “Dancing in the Ruins” became a minor charting hit. The road of fortune from here on would lead to the band losing bassist Joe Bouchard, the confusing “Imaginos” album that was not meant to be a BOC album, the band being released from CBS, and ultimately, Blue Oyster Cult spending most of the nineties without releasing any new material.

“Club Ninja” was my second BOC purchase after “The Revolution by Night”, so you could say that my introduction to the band was through two of their lowest rated and ranked albums. At the time of the release of “Club Ninja”, I was getting into more extreme heavy metal all the while balancing my musical taste with more melodic glam metal and hard rock. “Club Ninja” surprised me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. There were the hard rocking and heavy guitars but there were also bright, eighties pop synth sounds which I still cringe at to this day. There was dramatic music with really catchy vocal melodies but there were also electronic drums which I have never cared for much. Did I like the album?

I found certain songs intriguing as they offered something new or at least rare in my cassette collection. That jangly eighties guitar sound I didn’t like actually sounded pretty good on “Perfect Water”, and in spite of the keyboard sounds, I felt the song drawing me back for repeated listens, eventually becoming one of my favourite tracks on the album. It had a mysterious and also beautifully serene atmosphere to it. Not one band in my music collection had a song like this.

Then there was “White Flags”. A song packed with tension and spots of release sometimes simply through a keyboard effect but more so with the break into the chorus. One of my favourite parts was the organ bit that follows the, “Take me away! Yeeeaaahhh!” part. When I finally heard the original version recorded by the Leggatt Brothers, I was disappointed that there was no organ part.

“Shadow Warrior” was a wonderfully ominous and dark track with lyrical imagery typical of the band’s works – a kind of future, science fiction / fantasy tale. And “Madness to the Method” had this dynamiic piano solo in the song’s dramatic conclusion. “Spy in the House of Night” also was not my usual cup of tea but somehow strangely attracted my ears. In fact, the only songs that I thought were a little silly were “Make Rock Not War” and “Beat ‘Em Up”, mostly for their atrocious meathead rock band-sounding titles. Musically, they were actually not so bad except for the keyboard sounds.

I finally bought this album on CD and listened to it for the first time in about 30 years. I was surprised how much I remembered of the songs. I must have listened to this album more than I thought because I felt like I was listening to an old classic or an old favourite. True, I still flinch at some keyboards parts and “Beat ‘Em Up” is still a goofy title. But I found that I actually really like this album! In fact, I think one of the things I appreciate about it now more than before is the prog element. In the mid-eighites, prog was carefully concealed beneath the pop flash of former prog kings or in the more complex music of some metal bands. “Club Ninja” on the other hand grasps hard and heavy rock, pop sounds and melodies, classic rock, and progressive flare (heavy organ and dramatic piano solos plus seven-minute songs with sci-fi and fantasy concepts) and sets them all out on the table. The album was costly to produce and took nearly a year to put together under the strict guidance of visionary Sandy Pearlman. In the end, the results were probably more baffling to most people who couldn’t make sense of what the band was trying to do. My opinion is that Blue Oyster Cult created an album of intelligent lyrical content, music of atmosphere, drama, energy, and dark and light, and many modern sounds that captured both the light, popular side and the harder-edged rock side.

Having this album back again, I appreciate it even more now after decades of exploring heavy and progressive music much, much further. For fans of heavy music, this album cannot be said to be an excellent addition to any heavy metal collection. It’s really a matter of preference in this case. I give it four and a half stars out of my own taste, but for this site, I’ll give it three.

Warthur This is basically your one-and-done Blue Oyster Cult collection, spanning their entire career with Columbia Records from their debut album to Imaginos. (Yes, in theory they have produced some material since then... but none of it is particularly significant compared to their 1970s and 1980s work.) You get the studio albums, you get the official live albums, you get a nice rarities collection, you get Radios Appear: the Best of the Broadcasts (a collection of 1980s live material which is a decent fourth live album - early editions of the set came with a code to download a now-pulled collection called Harvester of Lives of four live shows, but these are just the shows from which the songs on Radios Appear were selected and you don't really need more than that single disc in terms of that material).

As far as the first five studio albums plus Some Enchanted Evening go, the editions you get here are the standard remasters that have been around for some time, with the same bonus tracks. Other albums are present in new remasters, giving them a long-overdue tidy up, but don't have bonus tracks (one suspects that much of the material which would have served as such ended up on the Rarities and Radios Appear discs anyway). All of this is served up in a selection of cute little cardboard LP sleeve replicas - which breaks some of the gatefold artwork in some cases, but eh, when the value's this good that's no big deal.

Even superfans will want this collection for the rare cuts on there - and those who are less keen on BOC but still enjoy them enough to want a selection of their albums will find there to be plenty to explore here. If you are going to do a cheap and cheerful collection of a big fat chunk of a prolific band's discography, this is how you should be doing it.

Warthur The Blue Oyster Cult tendency to push their pop flirtations a little too far for the fans they won with their heavier work to stomach strikes yet again here. Club Ninja is to their 1980s output what Mirrors was to their 1970s output - an album where the distinctive Blue Oyster Cult weirdness which remains present on their better pop albums threatens to disappear.

However, whereas Mirrors had some interesting sonic experiments, even if they were quite un-Cultish sonic experiments, here the band spend entirely too much time adopting the sound of utterly generic mid-1980s rock. It's entertainingly and competently done, mind, which is why I don't rate this lower than I do, but at the same time it's highly jarring if what you are expecting is something which sounds like Blue Oyster Cult.

That said, Method to the Madness and Where the War Comes seem to include sniffs of that distinctive Blue Oyster odour, and there seems to be an overarching idea here - a recurring theme of the allure of violence - but to really unpack that further, you'd need to listen to this album a lot, and it's a love-it-or-hate-it prospect - or, rather, a like-it-or-hate it prospect, since I think you're more likely to go "Eh, yeah, this is pretty good" than you are to say "This is FANTASTIC!"

Warthur Blue Oyster Cult may be primarily revered as proto-metal and hard rock pioneers, but a broader look at their discography reveals that there's always been this tension between the heavier and poppier sides of their sound, with one aspect or another usually holding sway over any particular album.

Take, for instance, The Revolution By Night, the first studio album put out after the original, classic lineup that had endured from their debut to Fire of Unknown Origin had come to an end. Sure, four of the five classic members are here, with newcomer Rick Downey taking Albert Bouchard's spot on the drum stool, but that's not the only thing that's different - this time, the band have gone even deeper into a 1980s pop sound than they were on the previous album, with synths and reverb aplenty.

This will shake anyone who was highly invested in the heavier side of the group's music - but as I become more accustomed to the pop side of BOC's music, I find that it's an interesting album in its own right. They might not be heavy any more, but they're still weird - dropping more UFOlogical references in opening track Take Me Away to remind us that they're still not your typical 80s pop group. The 2012 remaster makes the album sound more palatable than it has in a long time.