Blue: Reflections Review – An Old Remake of the Y2K Boy Band Heyday | blue

‘forLouie’s at home / Oh, it’s party time! Consider the 40-man band on Souls of the Underground, the penultimate song on this seventh album, and their fourth since their reunion in 2011. The British four-piece are keen to take us back to the heyday of the early 2000s, a time of Met bar table service, with the ladies having “a little prosecco” and the gents having a “nice cold beer”. Musically, this is almost more complex than the (relatively) more solid hybrid of pop, hip-hop and R&B; Think 2002’s “low flight” anthem Fly By II but on a Megabus budget.

It makes sense that they’d want to tap into modern pop music’s deep well of nostalgia, but rather than remembering what originally made Blue stand out, Reflections often feels like homages to other evergreen boy bands. For most of the album’s thirteen tracks, the tempo is mid-tempo, with the somber Westlife-on-a-bad-day candlelight fading to a definite rock bottom. “One Last Time” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” are attacked with gusto, but both sound like the age of Patience’s Take That, while exhilarating epic opener “The Vow” is hampered by very un-Barlow lyrics: “You’re a sweet child of mine / You’re like a grape on my vine.”

With multiple references to the band’s history, acoustic closer Find That Feeling cries out for a chance to go back to the beginning, “to be young and foolish.” The meditations make you wish you focused on more of the latter.