Prevaill starts off with a rollicking Prince cover, a sign that the Tufts Beelzebubs have produced a new album that hits all the familiar spots. Strong voices! Good arrangements! Top notch production from Bub alums! Ed Boyer arrangements! It's fun here, you'll like it.

Let's Go Crazy — I bet it kills live. It has a great solo from Jaden Pena and lots of energy. It's probably a great choice for people who were born in this century. For me, an old person who watched Prince videos when they were new on MTV, it feels like a throwback. The tenors are just a little fuzzy, the "ba-ba-ba-da"s feel dated, the chorus riffs feel a little forced, I just never quite get into it. All that said, Prince never goes out of style. Neither do the Beatles, represented here with Oh! Darling, even if I personally am rarely looking for tunes in that particular market. The song goes hard and the vocal percussion crashes nicely.

I adore Darwin Derby, the Boyer-setting group showcase. It feels fun and fresh and like a party I am excited to get a peek at. Chariot is another big winner, a good song sung very well via a great Plaid Productions/Matt Chiu arrangement. In other highlights, I'm Coming 'Round has a lovely choral texture to it, showing how the current group of singers works together as a team. This is a piece where the higher voices shine, in the backgrounds and in the excellent trio of soloists. It is nice to hear a ballad that really presents as a proper slow jam, not just a mid-tempo number without any other banner to wave on its own.

Ending the album on an uncensored Billie Eilish cover, Happier Than Ever, is a fun choice that sends you away smiling and ready for more. If you're in the market for a new collection of collegiate covers, this one hits all the notes.

Whatever I may end up thinking of it, getting a new Tufts Beelzebubs album to review always brightens my day and creates a keen sense of anticipation.

Okay, so Prevaill is still only two-thirds of the usual eleven or twelve-song releases we even more eagerly look forward to — but hey, it's twice as long as 2021's Prospect Street, so why quibble?

And their work has been so consistently solid for so long that in truth, I can't conceive of ever truly disliking their efforts.

With that preamble provided, I was delighted and entertained and impressed by roughly 50% of Prevaill; the remaining half, underwhelmed.

Now, going back to a good-faith argument I had with Deke Sharon about The House Jacks roughly two decades ago in an online newsgroup (some of you won't know what those were, and that's frightening!), I can't ding the Bubs too drastically numerically in my scores because, without question, this is — objectively — first rate work that sounds terrifically polished, passionately delivered, and technically near-perfect. It may not all live up to the sophistication and depth I personally have come to expect from them, but compared to the body of contemporary a cappella out there in the world today, the group is still near the top of the heap.

What bothers me, then? I can't pinpoint if it's the choice of certain repertoire or the interpretation of that repertoire; or perhaps it's some combination of both. Where the Bubs have typically elevated themselves is in their interpretation of source material and not their slavish reproduction of it, and they live up to that standard most brilliantly on Let's Go Crazy and Darwin Derby (which I was smiling about even before they started singing, just knowing that Ed Boyer was the arranger).

But choosing tunes like I'm Coming 'Round creates an inherent extra challenge: the original isn't much more than a steady chordal hum behind a solo voice and/or a group of voices singing homophonically, and we don't get much more than that in the translation to a cappella here. Oh! Darling is a memorable Beatles tune, but it's not much more than a typical doo-wop song (albeit with a grittier bridge), and Robbie Veglahn's arrangement either does not do enough to keep it interesting, or — in the case of the shouty, jumpy backing vocals in the bridge — does too much. Even the usually reliable Plaid Productions, whose production work on the album is otherwise stellar (those strings at the end of Sure Don't Miss You are perfect), falls a bit short of the mark in its arranging contributions. Chariot feels a bit mechanized, with a heavier backbeat than needed and its rougher edges smoothed over. And while Happier Than Ever delivers the kind of emo, angsty, full-throated power chords that Plaid excels at, the cumulative effect feels more loud and yell-y than usual, rather than moving and transporting (perhaps because that energy feels less "earned" due to the cutting of most of the plaintive opening two minutes of the song? Not sure, but maybe.).

And yet, Prevaill still gets scores many groups would kill for; and rightfully so. Only tracks 1 and 4 are likely to make my rotation for the foreseeable future, but I don't have to love all of it personally for me to acknowledge its quality. At a minimum, I'd absolutely recommend that you take a listen and judge for yourself.

The Bubs are back again with a new recording, Prevaill (that double L is not a typo!), and in some ways, it's getting harder and harder to find new things to write about this group. Just about every review I've written about the Bubs in the last decade celebrates the pitch-perfect vocals, stunning solos, compelling arrangements, and professional recording quality. That all still holds true on this eight-track album of mostly uptempo, energetic songs.

It also feels weird to sound disappointed that this group still meets the (extremely) high bar that we've all come to expect from them, and it also feels weird to write a (yet another) review of a Bubs recording that says, "Yup, these songs, soloists, arrangements, and recordings are all top-notch". So I'm going to find a few things that I don't typically mention when I talk about the Bubs.

First, this group knows how to sequence an album. Kicking things off with Let's Go Crazy is an excellent choice. It's energetic and catchy, and it's almost impossible to hear this version without tapping one's foot or smiling; listeners can hear the enthusiasm and excitement from these singers coming right through the speakers. Two songs later, the Bubs know how to shift gears into a ballad (I'm Coming 'Round) then bring the energy back up again with Darwin Derby.

Second, despite having a few different arrangers (group members Matt Chiu and Robbie Veglahn each contributed several songs, Plaid Productions contributed the last two arrangements, and Ed Boyer arranged Darwin Derby), these eight songs all sound cohesive together. Each track sounds good on its own and works as part of the larger whole, which is not always an easy line to walk, especially when different people have different arrangement styles. I especially like the rippling chords on Chariot and the rich textures on Sure Don't Miss You.

Finally (and relatedly), the Bubs have songs from a few different eras/genres on this album, and yet the whole release still works together seamlessly. Oh! Darling might be the only song that drags the energy a little bit; but to my previous point, it's sequenced in exactly the right place on the album so that's not a detriment to the work as a whole. The Bubs pick up the energy with the next three songs to carry the album home.

I have one tiny complaint about Prevaill, and this may just be a byproduct of the digital era: while the group has done an excellent job of including every songwriter of every track in the song credits on Spotify, they didn't include any information about the recording credits. It's no surprise that the group still uses Plaid Productions (production, recording, and editing), Ed Boyer (mixing), and Bill Hare (mastering), but I wish the group had included some of those credits on Spotify. That's a minor complaint, though — if you've heard any of the Bubs' recent releases, you'll hear Plaid/Boyer/Hare's (digital) fingerprints all over the group's signature sound, and the average listener may not really care who's twiddling the knobs behind the scenes anyway.

All in all, Prevaill is an excellent addition to the Bubs' discography and a welcome return to a longer recording format after not releasing a full-length album since 2018. There aren't a lot of surprises here, but I don't think that's actually what I want from the Bubs; when they consistently sound this good and put together albums that flow this well, I'm always thrilled to hear what they come up with.