Lumped in with the new wave when the band first came out, for the most part
Blue Peter was actually a fairly traditional power pop outfit, with pretty heavy reliance on loud melodic guitars and an affinity for classic riffs and techniques. It's hard to say why Canadians embraced Bryan Adams and
Loverboy instead of
Blue Peter, but in a way they were all mining similar territory: slightly punkish power pop with keyboards thrown in. (Indeed, it was probably doubly frustrating for
Blue Peter to watch bands like
A Flock of Seagulls and
Duran Duran succeed wildly on Canadian soil, when those bands were, in fact, doing almost exactly the same sort of
Roxy Music redux that had failed to capture much attention a couple of years earlier.) If you can level any complaint against the band's first full-length album, it's that there's not much variation between songs -- but that also means they're all pretty much at the same level of quality, and that level is not bad at all. ~ Sean Carruthers