It’s getting so you can’t cross the road without being knocked down by one of Jack White’s protégées and driving the garage rock bus this time are the mystical, or perhaps more accurately mystified, female foursome The Black Belles.
Their self-titled album is something of a curiosity. With some many guitar powered girl groups growing up around them – oh Frankie Rose, we are so meant for each other – that bad girl image that The Black Belles cultivate seems something of a point in space and time anachronism. Garage rock, admittedly, is everybody’s favourite influence these days but there seems to have been more of an attempt here to duplicate than evolve with the diffident approach to mixing and production suggesting an attempt to relive teenage male fantasises in sound.
OK, with that feeble psychological analysis now out of my system, it’s time to reflect upon the songs. It would not be unfair to regard them as affectionate pastiches of songs long since left sleeping in a sentimental dream but is that a bad thing? Not really as what comes strongly across here is a girlish charm that is, to use an Americanism, cooky rather than spooky. Throwing a jab with the guitar and following through with some ghostly synth sounds should evoke ennui these days but instead The Black Belles drag a dumb smile on to the face of even this battle hardened critic. It helps that you can sing along to “The Wrong Door” and especially “Leave You With A Letter” of course, and everyone likes candy floss, but, nonetheless, there is clear evidence that this is also a band that can draw blood when it wants to with “Howl At The Moon” providing more than adequate evidence of the onset of songwriting maturity. Similarly, “Pushing Up Daisies” tips its floppy black hat to the Chinn/Chapman school of cart bound lyrical wordplay. Most endearing however was the album’s closer “Hey Velda” that was but a handful of handclaps away from Shadow Morton country.
I enjoyed this album and, while I won’t be at all surprised if their next album takes a stylistic right turn, it does represent a kind of musical innocence that you should really only find in the past. If you then take the mystical image and Jack White hype out of the equation you are left with a tidy foursome having some fun with some catchy songs which is no bad thing in my book.
Inscribed in the runout groove of the vinyl – yes, it has to be vinyl - are the words “We Made Cookies” and that sums up The Black Belles better than anything I could say.