Twelve years after their last album of unreleased songs, Echo & The Bunnymen release «Apples for Isaac», eleven songs with style and bravado
Coming back with a new album after twelve years of silence (“The Stars, the Oceans & the Moon” in 2018 was a remodel of their hit) is always a leap into the void.
But if it’s time for Echo & The Bunnymen to return, perhaps the variable isn’t that important after all.
“Apples for Isaac,” a title taken from a verse in Hijacked, comes with a style and swagger that I didn’t take for granted.
Eleven songs in which Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant, they make the most of years spent playing their catalog live, and for once the long familiarity with the classics can be felt in the craft, not in nostalgia. He also works on the album Clem Burkedrummer added on ten of the eleven songs, who died during the making: the band remembers him as an integral presence in the success of the album, and listening to the album, knowing it, that presence weighs in a way that goes beyond technique.
The journey between the songs begins with Take Me By The Hand, a direct leap into the band’s past, and continues with Can’t Be Sold, from wave breaths, and with Brussels Is Hauntedthe single, of an almost manual classicism. I’ll Be Your Sunshine opens in a brit brand ballad, while In The Honey recovers the guitars and twilight tensions that have always been the band’s trademark. An Unstoppable Force ends on an introspective and melancholic tone, and The Light That Surrounds and Lab Rats Ran continue along the same mood. The final two tracks change register: Asimov fishing from an almost didactic sixties, and We Prayed In The Dark returns to the psychedelia of the origins, closing the album where the band began almost fifty years ago.
What I miss, listening to the whole album in a row, is perhaps the darkness that made the band great in the Eighties: here the general tone is brighter and more relaxed, and the gloom of that time remains in the background. It is the only real limit of «Apples for Isaac», but it is not enough to dismantle the album, because in its place the band builds an effective balance between darkness, pain, optimism, hope and love, held together better than the setlist alone suggests.
It is a mature and successful return, not memorable, with a brighter streak than the band’s history would have predicted, even if not all the songs hold the same weight.
The Echo & The Bunnymen I knew remain, only with less darkness.
SCORE: 7.50
TO LISTEN NOW
I’ll Be Your Sunshine -In The Honey – A Unstoppable Force
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
The album can be listened to from start to finish. Good and with the right voltage changes. No boring skips!
TRACKLIST
1. Take Me By The Hand
2. Can’t Be Sold
3. Brussels Is Haunted
4. I’ll Be Your Sunshine
5. Hijacked
6. The Honey
7. A Unstoppable Force
8. The Light That Surrounds You
9. Lab Rats Ran
10. Asimov
11. We Pray in The Dark
DISCOGRAPHY
1980 – Crocodiles
1981 – Heaven Up Here
1983 – Porcupine
1984 – Ocean Rain
1987 – Echo & the Bunnymen
1990 – Reverberation
1997 – Evergreen
1999 – What Are You Going to Do with Your Life?
2001 – Flowers
2005 – Siberia
2009 – The Fountain
2014 – Meteorites
2018 – The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon
2026 – Apples For Isaac
VIDEO
WEB & SOCIAL
https://www.bunnymen.com/
