Boulevard
What's Up

Swedish band Boulevard surely did select a terrible name, I wonder if that had anything to do with them not being that successful in the day this album was released. Of course Yesterrock blames poor promotion and of course that might also have something to do with it. One thing is that this album was released back in 1987 and didn’t really achieve any form of success and now they are once again unleashed upon the world, maybe to see if things will be better this time or as a service for those who cannot get enough of eighties rock albums. Besides the band having a terrible name they had people move on to Easy Action, Innocent Rosie and so on after they split, they did also have a dull and bad cover to this their only album called What’s Up and what is up?

Musically there is not really that much up with the so called individuality which is something some bands has oodles of while others like Boulevard has none of it. Their music is melodic rock, glam, hair, or whatever it is called, of the kind that was commonplace in 1987. Production and sound is very dated as it was back then and to be honest it does not really offer anything that stands out from the rest of the music that was released back then. There are fourteen tracks on this album of which three are bonus tracks that are demo versions of songs already in the eleven of the original songs. With the bonus tracks this album plays for 45 minutes on which we as I have already alerted you to, get typical eighties rock music.

Was it worth rereleasing then? Well, I guess you can say that I am a bit ambivalent on that one. On one hand why not, after all it never got a real chance but on the other hand it maybe never really made any impression because of it being just another album. Believe me, this album has been a bit difficult to judge as it may be easy to point out that there are many of these albums out already and we don’t really need any more but at the same time it is actually rather good, the opening track along with Running are really nice melodic rock tracks I enjoy listening to so it is not bad. The bonus tracks however, they serve no purpose at all, why add the same tracks again that sounds a lot worse than they did the first time I heard them? it makes no sense and as this album never caught on the first time it probably isn’t many people who feels the need not to buy this album because it is the same as the original. They could have released it as it was when it was released that would have been better.

With a few enjoyable tracks this album is decent enough, it may not sway any nonbelievers to the eighties rock but it is still a good listen for a while. So I would say that if you are a fan or a collector of eighties melodic rock music, you will probably want to have a look at what’s up with this album. But if you are not a fan of the genre or just a casual listener it is not something you want to waste your time on as you probably have heard a lot of albums like this already some of which better, most of them a bit worse. So a decent album that offers absolutely nothing we haven’t heard before.