The album title says it all, really: we are indeed blessed by the Go-Go’s simple existence, at least those of us with a taste for punky femme power-pop of the sort that inspires serial shower and road trip singalongs. This quintet knows their hooks better than a 75-year-old wharf rat with a toolbox full of fishing gear.

The Go-Go’s—Charlotte Caffey (guitars/piano/vocals), Belinda Carlisle (lead vocals), Gina Schock (drums), Kathy Valentine (bass/vocals) and Jane Wiedlin (guitars/vocals)—were the first all-female group in rock history to both write all of its own material and play every note heard on its initial albums. The group’s original meteoric rise-and-fall spanned 1981 to 1984 and the albums Beauty And The Beat, Vacation, and Talk Show, spinning out infectious hits like “We Got The Beat,” “Our Lips Our Sealed,” “Vacation,” “Head Over Heels,” and “Turn To You.” As has so often been the case, the rush of attention and string of charting singles only partially cushioned the pressures of success that led to the group’s temporary implosion in 1985.

After a couple of one-off reunions in 1990 and ’94, the Go-Go’s reconvened and seemed to settle into a second career of playing the old hits on the road, interrupted since only by various timeouts for injuries, addictions, solo albums, and the occasional intra-band lawsuit (and if that sounds like an episode of Behind The Music… yeah, there was one of those, too). Between their 1990 reunion and this album’s 2001 release, they had recorded a handful of new songs as bonus add-ons to other releases, but a new studio album didn’t seem to be in the cards, until suddenly it was.

God Bless The Go-Go’s, an album that didn’t seem to have any burning reason to exist at the time, nonetheless re-established the group’s bona fides as not just performers, but songwriters and recording artists. As usual, Caffey, Valentine and Wiedlin are the primary writers, with Schock and Carlisle chipping in here and there, as well as a few notable guest co-writers.

The highlights begin with opener “La La Land,” a reintroduction to the band that’s full of that familiar surge and fire, punctuated by ringing riffs and yeah-yeahs that would have made it right at home on 1984’s underappreciated Talk Show. That instant sonic connection also reminds you of what the Go-Go’s wisely didn’t do here: update their sound to fit the times. They were defiantly crunchy new wave punks in 1981 and they still are 20 years later.

Second track “Unforgiven” finds Billie Joe Armstrong contributing a co-write as well as guitar and vocals, and it came out just like that sounds—raging and raucous. “Stuck In My Car” and “Automatic Rainy Day” also rock out to good effect and “Kissing Asphalt” delivers a mid-album highlight with a chunky, fun rocker that feels both autobiographical (“I am spinning out / Kissing asphalt / It’s all crashing down”) and like an attractive cousin to their 1981 debut’s “Skidmarks On My Heart.”

The rest of the album is uniformly good without ever really breaking through to great. There’s nothing especially memorable about songs like the mid-tempo kiss-off “Insincere,” the catchy/silly ”Sonic Superslide,” or the Susanna Hoffs co-write “Talking Myself Down,” —they’re just solid Go-Go’s tunes in that familiar, reliable vein we’ve come to appreciate. That in itself was a welcome return to form after the band had seemed all but doomed 16 years before.

The group gets topical in places, addressing body image in “Throw Me A Curve” and mythologizing their own tangled history in closer “Daisy Chain”; both are more memorable in terms of their subject matter than the music itself. Finally, this 20th anniversary edition adds a pair of enjoyable bonus tracks in the snappy, upbeat “I Think I Need Sleep” (another song about addiction?) and the punchy, appropriately muddled “King Of Confusion.”

This re-release also follows on the heels of wide acclaim for Alison Ellwood’s documentary The Go-Go’s, which premiered at Sundance and is now available on Showtime. God Bless The Go-Go’s is both a worthy companion to the group’s classic ’80s albums and a vivid reminder that Caffey, Carlisle, Schock, Valentine and Wiedlin are genuine rock and roll survivors, five strong women who can’t wait for you to try to count them out, so they can come roaring back again.

Rating: B

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