New Jersey punk legends The Bouncing Souls were a highlight of Rebellion 2022 for this reviewer, so I gave this album a few spins before I started to think about it critically. My initial reaction was that it was good, but was it great? It was only when I read about how the album came to be created that I got it in the way it is probably intended to be got. The methodology behind this album underlines that this is, for all its punky power-poppy glory, anything but a colour-by-numbers exercise by a band with a thirty-year plus pedigree. Ten Stories High is ten songs. Ten stories, the result of a unique period of connection between band and fans. On a pandemic-enforced touring hiatus, the band hit upon offering a certain level of fans on their Patreon platform the opportunity to collaborate ...
