Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Boston never really typified the typical rock and that really is a good thing. The bands that were around them around the same time changed their ways and became less in your face and took on the approach that not every rock track needs to dogmatic, the same tired rhetoric filled with the only ambition being to be louder and brash than everybody else. Boston, or rather Tom Scholz bought a new and exciting feel, one more filled with the love of music and lyrics that play with love as an ideal.
More than a decade after the only album by the band to break the America Top 40 and after the very sad passing of Brad Delp in 2007, Tom Scholz returns with Tommy DeCarlo, Kimberley Dahme and David Victor at his side to produce an album, Life, Love & Hope that, whilst not exactly kicking at the very high standards set down by the eponymous debut album of 1976, is still a welcome back to the form that made Tom Scholz such a renowned musician, a man of musical integrity and class.
Perhaps the album owes much to time passing, the sentimental looking back at life and those who have been part of it and the memories they leave, whether with an indelible smile or with a scar so deep that it breaks the heart every time the recollections are bought to bear fruit. Life is that exactly, one filled with love and hope above all; above the despair and above the anger and mistrust, for that is Boston’s stamp completely, it is a life that should be filled with wonder.
The reminisces certainly helped with the album as Brad Delp still makes an appearance on the re-mastered tracks Didn’t Mean To Fall In Love and Someone (2.0), it is these wonderful nods to the respect felt by all rock fans to perhaps one of the most decent men in Rock that give the album the serious gravitas in which makes it such a strong and almost bountiful record.
With other tracks such as Sail Away, which was written as a retrospective to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the beautiful voice of Kimberly Dahme that haunts If You Were in Love, the honesty of those that stand up to the rule of the bully in Someday and the charm of The Way You Look Tonight which completes the album in a very fabulous way all making Life, Love & Hope a very special love letter to those we love and to those that we lose along the way. The spirit of the edifying beauty of Rock that was captured in Boston is back, if it truly ever went away.
Ian D. Hall