Blue October - This is What I Live For

 "This is What I Live For" is the 10th studio album by Texan alternative rockers Blue October.  Although this band formed in 1995, thus in their 26th year of existence, this band is my first discovery of 2021.  With this album coming out appropriately in October last year.  The band consists of Justin Furstenfeld on lead guitar and vocals, Ryan Delahoussaye on violin, mandolin, piano and backing vocals, Matt Noveskey on bass guitar and backing vocals, Will Knaak on lead guitar and Jeremy Fursrtenfeld on drums and percussion. Justin, Jeremy and Ryan have been in the band right from the start. While Matt has been in the band for a fair part of the time and Will is new, only joining the band in 2018.

When I first heard Blue October I did find it quite hard to pigeon hole them into a genre.  Being a predominantly guitar driven band sometimes people would just instantly think rock.  But things aren't quite as simple with Blue October due to the diversity of their music.  Also, they just don't feel like a cliched rock band either. When I saw in Wikipedia them being described as an alternative rock band, I did think that yes that probably is the description to me kind of cleans up all the bands who do things differently to conventional rock bands.

I must admit that being so new to Blue October I haven't gone and investigated their back catalogue apart from this album "This is What I live for".  But what I have noticed is that this band does seem to have had a fair amount of recognition. For instance, from their Spotify I can see that their top songs have had 35 million streams. So, they have a decent fan base.  I am surprised I hadn't heard of them before now because of this and also the fact they have toured in the UK.

In terms of this album when I go through each track, I do think to myself, "Oh this is a good track", then the next track comes along "oh this is solid", "oh here's another good one".  Combined it makes this album a very good listen.  And what makes it so good is that the tracks do go off in different directions and there would always be moments in tracks that I would be drawn in by them and each of those reasons would be different.  For example, the opening track "I laugh at myself", the slow, brooding intro and then the powerful, slow vocals come in.  The second track, "This Way I used to love you" has this amazingly heavy baseline which I imagine at gigs would just go straight through you.  It’s just so deep and combine this with the guitar riff and its infectious.  The upbeat, poppy song "Moving on (So long). about being hurt but moving on with life and looking for positives.

One thing which Blue October did with this album, is release the album normally, then release the album again but with commentary which can be found on streaming services.  It is basically the album playing with one of the band members talking over it giving stories to the various songs.  I know bands do interviews, track by track videos when albums come out, but I thought this way of doing it is quite unique.  From this Justin (I think its him) explains that this album is all about depression.  There are so many different emotions on the album though, to the causal listener it’s hard to think that this is a in effect a concept album about depression.  If you listen to the commentary version of this album Justin does talk about this in more depth though. 

But there are songs on here which are sad and moving, particularly towards the end, "Stay with me" being a prime example.  Again, Justin takes a different approach to this song by having spoken word in the intro to the song till moving into singing "Stay with me".  This is so impactful and is about the singer finding out that his Dad's cancer had come back.  He had such wise words about song writing to as he talks about how if you sing about things which directly related to you it makes the songs so much more authentic and genuine.  It's something I had never really thought about but when you hear "Stay with me" you can really hear the emotion in his voice, and you know exactly what he is think about when he is singing it.  As the listener you feel connected and it’s an incredibly sad and moving song.  I must mention “Who do you run from” here too, another incredibly moving, slow piano driven track which is absolutely stunning.

Overall, I must admit I think this is a wonderful album.  Full of highs and lows and real variation in the songs.  I really like how they did a commentary version of the album as talking about it really makes you understand the album more.  There is a lot of albums due out this year that I am really looking forward to but hopefully I will find time to sift through Blue October's extensive back catalogue.