BLEACHERS UPDATE THEIR DEBUT ALBUM WITH A SURPRISNGLY MINDFUL TENTH ANNIVERSARY RE-RECORDING
ALBUM REVIEW | Bleachers – A Stranger Desired 4/5
“The origin of this band lies in one sound you’ve been hearing all night…do you hear that low sound? Do you hear that low sound that feels like it’s hugging you? If you take it away, you got so much anxiety flying through the air, all the thoughts. You put it back in? You’re fucking glued together. Do you feel that?!” Jack Antonoff preaches, introducing “Rollercoaster” on Bleachers’ 2023 live album, Live At Radio City Music Hall. He continues “…it’s the story that started this band, that low note in my headphones… And then band started to become a band, we found these band members, and we started playing, and we found an audience of people, who for some fucking reason, wanted to celebrate grief with peppy tunes. Thank you for being here!”
Jack has been introducing “Rollercoaster” – one of the very first Bleachers songs – with some form of this monologue about the signature low humming noise from a juno 6 keyboard at Bleachers shows for years, including at their most recent shows this year. So imagine our surprise when that very specific, very signature sound is completely absent from A Stranger Desired, this year’s brand new, tenth anniversary re-recording of the very first Bleachers record, Strange Desire.
This is not like a Taylor’s Version – you’d be hard pressed to find a re-recorded album that strays as far from the original as 2024’s A Stranger Desired does from 2014’s Strange Desire. In introducing A Stranger Desired, Jack says: “All eleven tracks reimagined without the armour I needed at the time, a different kind now. In search of myself and my people.” What was previously a dense album of low tones and you-can’t-cry-if-you’re-dancing keyboard anthems has been reimagined entirely with soft, airy acoustic-led guitar tracks. It’s thoughtful, spacious, and dare I say – gentle.
“Rollercoaster”, for example, has been transformed from the crowdsurfing rave up we all know and love to an autumn-nights ballad. You can almost hear the crickets and crackling campfire in the space between the fingerpicked acoustic guitar and the soft, drawn saxophone.
“I Wanna Get Better”, perhaps the only song on the original that can match “Rollercoaster” in terms of pure energy, is now a confessional, Jack singing cleanly over acoustic guitar and strings. Instead of the chorus screaming out at you to sing along, the lyrics that hit first and foremost are the verses: “Hey, I hear the voice of a preacher from the back room / Calling my name and I follow just to find you / I trace the faith to a broken down television, and put on the weather / And I’ve trained myself to give up on the past ’cause / I froze in time between hearses and caskets / Lost control when I panicked at the acid test / I wanna get better.”
I’m not sure I want to scream along to this one. It’s so clearly his story to tell, here, instead of becoming a part of it, I want to sit back, breathe, and just listen.
And so, there’s a different kind of purpose to this version of the record – where the original was looking for strength in commiseration, for community and action; this new version is looking for truth and impact. The new arrangements are at times sparse – something you really couldn’t say about Strange Desire – and always efficient and effective. The opener, “Wild Heart”, also the album’s sole single, is welcoming; an introduction to this new, refined, mature sound. “Like a River Runs” is haunting, without the crashing drum machines and vocal modulations. “I’m Ready To Move On / Wild Heart Reprise” (here, sans Yoko Ono,) settles you down, and “Who I Want You to Love”, still an incredible closer for this album, is refreshing, resetting the listener so they can re-enter the real world of compromises and half-truths after 35 minutes of raw honesty, unfiltered by bombast, heightened by intention and clarity.
That being said, the original 2014 Strange Desire still presents a more complete edition of the Bleachers experience, and it’s hard to imagine that any of the versions presented here will become the ‘definitive’ renditions of these songs. At the end of the introduction to “Rollercoaster” on the Live at Radio City album, Jack screams: “And there is a lot of shit to worry about, but I come to Bleachers shows and play them because when I’m up here, I don’t fucking feel anything else/ Because I’m celebrating a certain kind of grief, I think you guys are here for the same reason, so let’s do that!”
A Stranger Desired is not celebratory, and in lacking that, it fails to truly capture the heart of Bleachers as we all know and love it. It does, however, present a deeper, more unflinching version of the same grief. Both albums end with the refrain “I wanna be grateful for the experiences that I’ve had” spoken over a closing instrumental coda. On Strange Desire, it’s a prayer – I want to be grateful, but I don’t know how, so please help me. On A Stranger Desired, it’s a promise – I want to be grateful, and here’s why.
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