In the news last month was a story about an alleged ‘lost’ Caravaggio painting found in an attic in France that sent art critics’ cravats into a twist over its genuineness. Real or not (there’s only a negligible £94m difference), Baroque’s bad boy won’t shiver a shiny hoot either way seeing as he’s been lying snug in a boneyard for the past 400 years.
But that probing query of authenticity has ripened into an ongoing welt for Southampton’s Band Of Skulls, one they haven’t yet been able to ameliorate since their debut in 2009. Are they the UK’s perfect domestic homage to The Black Keys, Jack White and Queens of the Stone Age? Or do they just crave after the blues, Southern rock and big guitar riffing as much as their American contemporaries, it merely being down to thumbing a limited palette of influences that the trio tend to sound a lot like them?
For their fourth album, ‘By Default‘, an ambitious if not exhaustive sounding 100 songs or so were written inside a couple of hired churches, in between one wedding and a gyspy funeral, and pared back to the 12 songs heard on the record. The ideas-mill, then, is chugging full to the point of cloying, and with some shift to show for it.
‘So Good‘ stands hipshot and shoulders above what the band have sounded like before. Its flaunting chorus adept to pivot mosh pit-anger into disco swagger. The boogie-bility extends to ‘Bodies‘, a track that gurgles on toe-taps and bell chimes, and ‘Back Of Beyond‘s rush of snappy adrenaline is fit for one of those teen-has-preposterous-adventure 80s films starring now-obsolete actors. Pushing their rock credential boundaries to the absolute limit is ‘Tropical Disease‘, a track that runs as shifty as a sniggering Dick Dastardly.
They might have you believe they have a fresh hide on show – ‘a new era’, reads one interview – but underneath the skeleton they’re still riddled in heavy rock bromides. Even so, a touching death has never felt quite so welcomed as on ‘Killer‘. Doomy fingers riff their way through while its titular repetition goads. Opener ‘Black Magic‘ summons up a Jimmy Page jangle along with a flurry of fluent harmonies between singers Russell Marsden and Emma Richardson. ‘This Is My Fix‘ honks a glam horn without as much makeup.
The back-end of the album turns an emotional corner, notably on ‘In Love By Default‘, where it’s arduous not to have surrogate sensations for the spitting ball of Marsden’s impassioned vocals. The lambent ‘Something‘, a chance tribute to Prince unless they knew something we didn’t, closes ‘By Default’ at outright antipodal ends to its beginning.
Fewer iou notes have been left behind for antecedents this time around, but the search for Band of Skulls’ veracity goes on. Until it’s found, switch your quality sound control default setting over to them.
