Bob Mould “Blue Hearts” 2020. Merge Records. Limited edition blue/black/white tricolor vinyl. An excellent and rightly angry protest album recorded during the height of the pandemic by the elder alt-rock statesman, Blue Hearts marks Mould’s sixteenth solo effort (that does not include his work with Hüsker Dü and Sugar); it went to #181 on the US album charts.  We caught Mould this past weekend at Summerfest where he performed a superb mix of solo tracks (some from Blue Hearts but also older hits like “See a Little Light“), Sugar songs (one of my all-time favorite songs ever “Hoover Dam“) and Hüsker Dü cuts. Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard joined Mould onstage for the Hüsker Dü classic “Makes No Sense At All” which was a happy surprise. DCFC was set to headline the same stage later that evening and according to a tweet from Mould’s bassist Jason Narducy: “Before we walked on stage at at Summerfest, Bob told Ben Gibbard the chords to ‘Makes No Sense At All.’ Ben said he thought he could learn it before we got to the end of the set. He grabbed my red guitar and did it.”

Blue Hearts is aggressively loud (I’m pretty sure I lost a decent amount of my hearing at a Sugar show back in the early 90’s) and dense yet still melodic, like most Mould albums. My top tracks are “Next Generation,” the all-out rager “American Crisis,” “Siberian Butterfly,” the very catchy “Baby Needs a Cookie” and the LP closer “The Ocean.”