The Bouncing Souls – Ten Stories High

New Jersey punk legends The Bouncing Souls were a highlight of Rebellion 2022 for this reviewer, so I gave this album a few spins before I started to think about it critically. My initial reaction was that it was good, but was it great? It was only when I read about how the album came to be created that I got it in the way it is probably intended to be got. The methodology behind this album underlines that this is, for all its punky power-poppy glory, anything but a colour-by-numbers exercise by a band with a thirty-year plus pedigree. Ten Stories High is ten songs. Ten stories, the result of a unique period of connection between band and fans. On a pandemic-enforced touring hiatus, the band hit upon offering a certain level of fans on their Patreon platform the opportunity to collaborate on the raw material for the album. The result was a set of custom songs, rooted in fans’ real life experiences expressed via Zoom meetings. Those experiences and insights into the fans’ own worlds were transformed through intense writing sessions and eventually captured by producer Will Yip (The Menzingers, Title Fight, Tigers Jaw) into the Ten Stories High album.

Even with this new twist on the recipe, the trademark Bouncing Souls flavours are to the fore: upbeat, anthemic and energetic guitar pop-punk with strong melodies. The origin of the songs are diverse and the band have reflected this diversity in the range of styles deployed. There’s subtlety in the songcraft and the solid understanding of the dynamics of the genre you would expect from a band with eleven full-lengths already in their back catalogue. It’s this security, the knowledge and self-belief that comes from such a substantial canon, that allowed the band to take the raw data of their fans’ experiences and mould them into an album that’s zero filler. The album, if played in sequence is book-ended by two songs written to capture the process. Ten Stories High is 1:58 of glorious, rambunctious, careering power-pop. Higher Ground has a more introspective intro before exploding into supremely confident, driving punk, replete with some ‘whoah-ohs’. You’re never far from a singalong chorus (Get Back To Better, Another Day In Denver) or a nod to something that has gone before, such as Shannon’s Song‘s surely deliberate homage to I Fought The Law. Andy And Jackie is a coiling, throbbing mid-tempo romp through odd time signatures and King Missile-esque monologues welded onto a glorious, soaring chorus. Vin And Casey is pure punk, a battering yet poignant tribute to two friends no longer with us. Magnus Air Organ (a real musical instrument, trivia fans) is a jaunty toe-tapper and To Be Human could well be by The Chats. Throughout everything, the drums batter, the bass growls and the guitars are texture, no solos, and they all combine to underscore that impassioned but uplifting vocal.

OK, you could argue that this album is a bit obvious in places, but that’s just griping because there’s a comfort in familiarity. If this album – with its unique genesis in collaboration with fans – had turned out to be a bloated and self-indulgent punk rock opera, well, that would have been much worse. What we have in ten tiny slices of real life expressed as short bursts of joyous and melodious noise you can’t help but sing along to. This is a road trip album. Put it on repeat, sing along. Yes, you may have heard something somewhat like it before but is that really a bad thing? No, I say. Recommended.

Ten Stories High by The Bouncing Souls is out on Pure Noise Records on 24th March.