Album Review: Band of Skulls - Sweet Sour

Band Of Skulls certainly know how to make a good first impression. Their 2009 debut Baby Darling Doll Face Honey was the work of an enthusiastic young band trying to find their feet and getting it right more often than not. It was buoyed in no small part by lead single “I Know What I Am” that made a serious dent in radio airplay and has been featured in TV shows and movies ever since. The last few years have been very kind to Band Of Skulls it seems. They are absolutely more focused on their craft, and the song writing has grown in leaps and bounds. The end result is a joy to hear: wearing their influences prominently while still forging their own identity.

The band has a tendency to come across like a more touchy-feely Black Keys, at least how the Black Keys used to be when bludgeoning blues riffs ruled over stadium-sized choruses. There is still a thrill to be had within the gutsy rock power trio format; sweet tunes being scowled right back to sourness. I guess that explains the album title then - Sweet Sour. The tough guy vs. tough girl shtick is in full force on the title track that opens up the album. Thank God these songs are so likeable or they might well have succumbed to some of their more drab elements. Such meaninglessly clever phrases as “sour by the minute but you’re sweeter by the hour” (again from the title track) or “Lies are the truths that you tell to yourself” on “Lies” pepper the album and threaten to drag the whole affair into the territory of lazy melodrama. It’s a good thing that these lines (and others of the like) are married to a commanding performance that makes them a lot easier to buy into.

While they dabble in coy party anthems (“You’re Not Pretty But You Got it Going On”) and strident rock (“Wanderluster”) songs like the gorgeous “Lay My Head Down” expose the emotional heart of the whole album. The dreamy, serene textures and bewitching vocal interplay between Russell Marsden and Emma Richardson raises an unlikely comparison: Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’. Obviously “Lay My Head Down” is about 17 minutes shorter than that prog classic but a line like “Was I asleep / did you save me from disaster?” is delivered with the same wistfulness as “Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air”.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the inevitable comparison to The White Stripes – an unfair spectre that haunts every modern garage rock band with both guys and gals in it. It’s easy to hear a little Jack & Meg White interplay in all of this if you are straining to find it. While at times it can all feel a bit derivative after the fifth or sixth riffed up howler, the moments of smirking joy that burst through are so damned infectious you hardly care. To trot out an old chestnut; are Band Of Skulls the saviours of rock’n’roll? Any true fan knows that rock’n’roll never asked to be (or even needed to be) saved.

Rating: A-