The first Boomtown Rats album for 36 years comes trailed by promotional bumf that really does it no favours at all. Pondering the state of the world, it asks, amid a great deal of other hyperbole: “Where is the noise that feels like this? Who is going to sing these blues?” The band’s pitch would lead you to believe that first time round, they were somewhere in the rock pantheon between Bob Dylan and the Stones at their most commanding, and that they’re returning only because they’ve been beseeched to by disenfranchised kids who’ve only been kept alive by occasional plays of Banana Republic on Absolute 80s. The hype is so overdone that this really would have to be a new Never Mind the Bollocks – at the very least – to justify it. And it’s not.
Citizens of Boomtown is actually the kind of comeback album that bands tend to make after a long time away: it has nostalgic nods to their first musical loves, bits that nod back to the first records they made, plenty of vim and spark but without the fuel that was first ignited by that spark. And, of course, it has toe-curling attempts to be current, just in case there really are disenfranchised kids listening. The best songs aren’t ashamed to be nostalgic – the opening Trash Glam Baby rollocks along on its muscle memory of 1973; Here’s a Postcard is simple, pretty and memorable; Passing Through’s borrowings from David Bowie are so obvious they’re charming, and it has a lyric that’s delicate and understated.
Sadly, delicate and understated are not words you can apply to most of Bob Geldof’s writing here, which has a tendency to wander off into a strange hey-daddio-I’m-down-with-the-streets chattiness that sounds like an elderly uncle talking to a teenage boy about girls, under the impression he’s still 18. And then, oh God, on KISS, the Boomtown Rats discover rap (and on Get a Grip they discover four-to-the-floor house as well), and the world stops turning. The rapper isn’t listed on the credits, and who can blame him? The lesson: be afraid of trying to be young, not of getting old.
