Aural Fixations
THE BELLRAYS
The Red, White & Black
(Vital Gesture/Alternative Tentacles)
As a music reviewer/critic, I'm often asked if I have a favorite band. It's impossible for someone with as many albums as I have to answer that, of course, but I can narrow it down a bit. If you're talking about the live arena, there's only one choice for me: the BellRays. I've seen a lot of incredible live shows over the years, but nothing comes close the power, fury and soul of the BellRays in full flight. Fortunately for this intrepid Riverside, California band, there's nothing lost in translation between stage and studio when the band makes a record. The proceedings are crisper, of course, as the group can ply its high-volume trade without competing with bad stage mixes and drunken chatter. But the commitment level is the same: this is music to die for and by, whether there's anyone but a recording engineer listening or not. There's an intensity to the BellRays' work that few other musical artists, I'm talkin' maybe less than a dozen, share. You know that through the course of making The Red, White & Black, through the course of the 45-odd minutes it absorbs your stereo into itself, that nothing else mattered to these people that making this music, creating these songs. Nothing. Not their families, not the state of the world, not the shaving cut or the menstruation or anything else going on in their lives. That's commitment, and it oozes from every note in a way that makes a doctor's Hippocratic oath seem like a manufactured sentiment in a Hallmark card.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the BellRays' latest album The Red, White & Black. The first 'Rays record to get decent distribution in the States, thanks to a pact with Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles, it also may be the band's best. This is not a collective that's ever made a bad record—let it never be said that singer Lisa Kekaula, guitarist Tony Fate and bassist Bob Vennum, plus their various drummers, have ever been at any less than the top of their game. But there's a finesse to this hard rock/punk/soul/jazz fusion, a sharpening of melodic pens, an intuitive, immeasurable grace in these songs that's never quite been there before. Fate wrangles his Gibson SG with fire and fury, but also a melodic touch—even if that melody has more to do with free jazz than punk rock. Vennum's busy bottom end lifts the tracks without ever cluttering up the space. Current drummer Eric Allgood, the latest in a long line of brilliant drummers, swings harder than any of their prior skinbeaters. Then there's Kekaula, able to call up a hurricane one minute, a gentle breeze the next; she's the gospel-fueled, soul-trained, punk-fired vocalist every rock & roll band wishes it had. Give these four an amazing batch of songs and you've got near-perfection in louder-than-god action. And the tunes gathered here—punk nuggets "Black is the Color" and "Sister Disaster," heavy rocker "Rude Awakening," singalong anthems "Find Someone to Believe In" and "You're Sorry Now," jazz/metal hybrid "Poison Arrow," R&B pop tune "Making Up For Lost Time," rock & roll fireballs "Street Corner," "Voodoo Train" and "Stone Rain"—rank easily as the band's best. This is a combo reaching the height of its powers and looking up at that ceiling, pickaxes in hand and determination in their eyes. The Red, White & Black embodies pure, uncut soul—after hearing it, will you ever accept any less? Michael Toland [buy it]
