Blue Rev
| Alvvways
Blue Rev
Blue Rev is the third studio album by Canadian indie pop band Alvvays, released on October 7, 2022, via Polyvinyl and Transgressive. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
The Toronto band’s third album is a triumph of power pop, a densely layered, witty, blithe, and beautiful record that sets a new benchmark for the genre.
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Stereogum
t might take some time to sink in, but once it does all you can hear is an album that’s bursting with sun, blisteringly bright, blindingly brilliant.
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NME
The Canadians’ third album is still identifiably Alvvays, but the hooks here are sweeter, the instrumentation brighter, the energy more palpable.
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Spin
Following stolen demos and flooding mishaps, Canadian group’s third LP is worth the wait.
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Beats Per Minute
With Blue Rev, Alvvays rocket back into contention when it comes to leaders of the cyclical shoegaze revival that pops up every few years. A honed songwriting approach from Rankin seems to fuel Blue Rev, with only a few songs inching beyond three minutes. This excess-trimming approach makes Blue Rev the leanest the band has sounded, but also makes it their tightest work to date.
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Paste Magazine
Alvvays Rough Up Their Perfect Pop Songs on Blue Rev.
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Post-Trash
Like anything worth remembering, Blue Rev is complex and not easily categorized. In this defiance resides a sadness, a resignation that life won’t turn out the way you wanted it to. There is also a rebirth and a power to such defiance. If Blue Rev is what we get when we let expectations go, I’d consider us cosmically fortunate. It’s the kind of album on the horns of a decision, a parallax between worlds. It matters and matters not simultaneously, and therein lies its importance.
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Loud and Quiet
Alvvays’ musical craft isn’t always the most singular, but its myriad layers occasionally transcend the weight of their influences and become something potent and unique. These moments, combined with the consistently strong lyrics, make Blue Rev a small but compelling step forward for the band.
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The Forty-Five
A confident indie pop album that stays true to their roots.
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Clash Magazine
Though the record’s title, ‘Blue Rev’, references a drink from Rankin’s youth, Alvvays have grown up. The future that was so distantly contrived on their self-titled debut and looming on their sophomore record has arrived, but they’ve proven that maturation doesn’t have to be stale. On the contrary, ‘Blue Rev’ is a magical, twisty excursion to a crossroads where the band simultaneously reflects on yesteryear and explores the turbulence of divergent realities.
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DIY Magazine
‘Blue Rev’ is the reflection of a band who know their strengths, keen to immerse the listener in their fantastical world of luscious dreampop that continues the legacy of the genre’s forebears – Big Star, Ride, The Jesus and Mary Chain - while always still injecting their own unique slant. The young love of ‘Archie, Marry Me’ might be interchanged with songs about the kind of heartbreak that only comes with getting older, but boy do Alvvays know how to make a broken heart sound ever so sweet.
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Cult MTL
For a band already quite adept at making soaring, shoegazey indie anthems, Blue Rev is the sound of Alvvays sharpening that sword while also challenging themselves in ways that keep intact everything that made them so brilliant to begin with.
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Northern Transmissions
My introduction to Alvvays came when I heard their 2014 minor hit “Archie, Marry Me”. It was clever but earnest, like most great love songs, and the dreamy garage rock struck a perfect chord in my indie collegiate heart. “Many Mirrors”, my favorite cut off Blue Rev, strikes the same chord. It’s sweet, warmhearted slacker rock, a genuine ode to the person, or people, with whom we choose to spend our years (now that we’ve passed many mirrors/ I can’t believe we’re still the same). Here’s to many more years with Alvvays.
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The Fire Note
Every component, be it instrument or voice, on Blue Rev sounds bigger and more dynamic as singer Molly Rankin guides each track with ease and confidence. Guitar ins and outs with distorted harmonies and a multitude of seamless song structures pushes Blue Rev to another level while also being ultra-catchy. These 14 tracks really will mesmerize your sonic experience as Alvvays have found a way to successfully inject their pop style into a shoegaze cloud that has resulted in one of the better albums released so far in 2022!
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Treblezine
Even awash in bitterness, the nod to the legendary Go-Go’s singer is an unintentional if apropos reminder that Alvvays are, first and foremost, a pop group. And with Blue Rev—draped in transcendent riffs, head buzzing with puzzling and heartbreaking imagery—they deliver the absolute best of what indie pop can be.
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The Statesman
“Blue Rev” is an exceptional body of work, expertly toeing the line between dense and cohesive.
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WKNC
This album took some time to grow on me fully, but each time I listen to it I find something new to connect with. Even though this is Alvvays’ longest record, I think it is their most consistent and fleshed-out project to date.
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The Harvard Crimson
Alvvays’s new album displays all of the bands’ best traits, while also extending and perfecting their production, lyrics, and songwriting. “Blue Rev,” showcases Alvvays as a pioneer of power pop and shoegaze revival through and through. Each song is perfect music festival material, but at the same time the confessional and relatable lyrics make the songs intimate. Alvvays makes the contradictory work: rock yet pop, large yet intimate, sad yet sweet. “Blue Rev” proves that Alvvays is at the forefront of what music can and should be.
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Spectrum Culture
Blue Rev lingers on dashed hopes and realistic stickiness.
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mxdwn Music
Five years since their last full-length album, Blue Rev was long worth the wait. With the band blending elements of hard rock into their indie pop exterior, they are able to come back into the music industry with a bang after their many obstacles to overcome to even release the album. With expert-level eyes for balancing more revealing and darker lyrics with electrifying melodies, Alvvays is able to truly excel with this triumphant return in the indie scope.
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Our Culture
f you manage to crawl through the muck of time and still stay pretty much the same person, Blue Rev suggests, that, in itself, is something of a miracle.
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Exclaim!
It all amounts to a densely packed album, with most tracks clocking in at less than three minutes and all of them stuffed to the brim with synth interludes, feedback freakouts and snippets of drum machines. Its Alvvays least penetrable, most challenging album yet — but one that still preserves the band's best qualities, sounding chaotic and painstaking at the same time.
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AllMusic
The songs are memorable and fun, the performances are inspired, and the production is varied and always interesting. The creation of Blue Rev may have been beset with trial and tribulation but the result is a heavenly indie pop hit guaranteed to make their already besotted fans fall even more head over heels in love with the band.
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Far Out Magazine
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.
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Empoword Journalism
Overall, the album is an examination of the different paths life takes: lovers, ex-lovers, missed connections, babies, dropping out of college, self-acceptance, self-loathing. It’s far removed from anything else in the indie scene today and feels like a modern classic.
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Medium
Blue Rev also has a generosity worth the wait, with a total of 14 songs to boast of. Looking back on past albums, I realised that this brand new one houses the most tracks, as well as the longest runtime (although, it’s by a matter of a five minutes or so). Nevertheless, Alvvays managed to keep me captivated with a colourful selection of different moods, that allowed the albu to stand as an appropriate release, regardless of the time of year.
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The Line of Best Fit
Blue Rev is an album that begs to be played live. Whilst as a whole the album still sounds very Alvvays, there’s a definite lack of cohesion and a punchy feel missing on the group’s third album. Blue Rev is a slightly disappointing return from such a brilliant indie band.
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Sputnik Music
A blue rev is an alcoholic drink, but one that most only consume at the very start of a drinking career - college parties full of people on the brink of adulthood. As you down the liquid, as your vision blurs, and as the sound of the party grows louder in your ears, you might feel a sense of pride at maturing and entering a new phase of life.
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Stereoboard
‘Blue Rev’ sounds like Alvvays have made the record they wanted to make as opposed to what was expected of them, free from the fear of being shot down. It was a gamble worth taking.
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The Skinny
Alvvays return with Blue Rev, their first new album for five years, and in a strangely radical way, it simply meets our ethereal shoegaze expectations.
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When the Horn Blows
With “Blue Rev” Alvvays have channelled the profound charm which has brought them to such critical acclaim, only to add a handful of creative wit alongside a fuzzy refinement of the sound listeners have grown used to.
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XPN
With their novelistic lyrics, deeply-felt production, and decades’ worth of references, the songs on Blue Rev might as well have been around forever. I’m sure they’ll be sticking around for a while.
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Gigwise
The tunes are shoegazey, jangly and energetic, never too one-dimensional and always interesting. Alvvays have taken their time in creating a record that doesn’t scream for attention, but instead hooks you in with its fuzzy textures and subtleties.
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No Ripcord
Blue Rev is everything I love about popular music; a record so potent that on listening, this bitter, cynical 40-year-old feels like a teenager discovering Loveless or #1 Record or Bandwagonesque for the first time again. It is truly one for the ages.
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Live4ever
Consequently, some listeners may find the initial experience of listening to Blue Rev to be needlessly overpowering. Ultimately, time will tell whether these songs are helped or hindered by their production. For now it is enough to simply celebrate the return of Alvvays, and their creation of another exemplary collection of songs.
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The Needle Drop
Blue Rev, while not particularly consistent, is still one of the year's most colorful rock records.
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God is in the TV
When there is such a long gap between albums, bands often find it difficult to replicate the success they may have once attained. It seemed like Alvvays’ chance to progress from cult underground big fish to much bigger waters may have gone in the intervening years, but at least this body of work provides a timely reminder of their melodic strengths, lyrical dexterity and their new found capability to embrace more sonic possibilities. Blue Rev may not be the album to progress their careers, but it may just be a gateway to an altogether more interesting phase.
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Under the Radar Magazine
Blue Rev is a sublime return and whilst there’s nothing quite as instant as “Archie, Marry Me,” tracks such as the glorious “Belinda Says” or the punky breakneck distortion of “Pomeranian Spinster” are as good if not better than anything they’ve previously released. Indeed, throughout the album, there’s a joyful spontaneity and a sense of pent-up energy and anger that gives the album a genuine edge. Blue Rev is a quite wonderful return and proof positive of the old adage that good things come to those who wait.
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musicOMH
A more muscular sound and a line-up change marks the welcome triumph over adversity that is the Torontarians’ third record.
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Mystic Sons
Given the quality of what we had heard prior to this release, there was never any doubt that 'Blue Rev' would mark another enticing run of form for the band. Forever continuing to improve on its riveting aesthetic, Alvvays have returned with a brilliantly inventive gem, and maintained their engaging legacy so far.
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The Fat Angel Sings
The writing and recording of ‘Blue Rev’ was disrupted and delayed when Rankin’s demos were burgled from her house and the band’s gear nearly flooded inside two days, but – as has become the norm with this band – patience proved a virtue and ‘Blue Rev’ stands as an ode to continuing to evolve despite obstacles, slowly honing and tweaking your craft, and keeping on moving. It’s another total delight from the Canadians.
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Narc Magazine
It’s a rollercoaster of a record, packed with intriguing gear changes and culminating with the brilliant Fourth Figure, this beautiful track providing the perfect backdrop to close out a rather impressive return to form for Alvvays.
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