Album Review: Citizens of Boomtown by The Boomtown Rats

During their original ten-year run, Irish new wave combo the Boomtown Rats drove a bevy of hit singles across the U. K. pop charts, painting seedy pictures of the urban underbelly with a blend of snarling punk energy and pop sophistication on songs like "Rat Trap" and "Up All Night.

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T he 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.

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