‘Blue’s in the house / Oh it’s party time!” muse the fortysomething man-band on Souls of the Underground, the penultimate song on this seventh album, and the fourth since their 2011 reunion. The British four-piece are keen to take us back to their early 00s heyday, a time of Met bar table service, where the ladies have “a little prosecco” and the guys have a “nice cold beer”. Musically, it’s a clunkier approximation of their (comparatively) harder-edged hybrid of pop, hip-hop and R&B; think 2002 “low ride” anthem Fly By II but on a Megabus budget.
It makes sense that they would want to tap into modern pop’s deep well of nostalgia, but rather than recalling what made Blue originally stand out, Reflections often feels like a tribute to other evergreen boybands. For most of the album’s 13 tracks, the tempo is mid, with the dreary, Westlife-on-a-bad-day Candlelight Fades a particular nadir. The windswept One Last Time and The Day the Earth Stood Still are attacked with gusto, but both feel like Patience-era Take That, while the pleasingly epic opener The Vow is hindered by very un-Barlow lyrics: “You’re a sweet child of mine / You’re like a grape to my vine.”
With multiple references to the band’s history, acoustic closer Find That Feeling pleads for a chance to return to the start, “to be young and to be foolish”. Reflections makes you wish they’d focused on more of the latter.
