• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Apr 21, 2021 Web Exclusive By Andy Von Pip

Brighton’s Black Honey return with their second album, Written and Directed, and not unlike a movie from frontwoman Izzy B. Phillips’ hero Quentin Tarantino, it comes out with all guns blazing. The album barely pauses for breath as hooks and earworms detonate like hand grenades at a frenetic pace. The band—consisting of Phillips, guitarist Chris Ostler, bassist Tommy Taylor, and Alex Woodward, who joined the group after the departure of long time drummer Tom Dewhurst—have built up a cult following due to their incendiary live performances and have harnessed that energy and power on album two which expands their widescreen cocktail of pop-noir and fizzing hook-laden pop-rock to a whole new level.

Kicking off with the stomping indie rock of “I Like the Way You Die,”, inspired by a line from Tarantino’s Django Unchained and with additional help from The Libertines’ Carl Barat, Written and Directed mashes up a dizzying array of cinematic influences from grindhouse to film noir to B-movie pulp fiction and spaghetti westerns through to Tarantino stylized ultra-violence. Musically there’s surf, indie pop, soul, gospel, psych, and college rock. The feverish “Run for Cover” with its swaggering bass line is the “The Sound of the Underground” colliding with “Kill Surf City.” “Beaches” mixes surf pop with northern soul brass to create a foot-stomping anthem to a summer that never really happened (thanks to COVID), whilst “Believer” is widescreen spaghetti western rock and roll replete with a video that would do John Waters proud, featuring a blind nun kidnapped by a leather-clad gang who delivers her into the hand of a drag queen Jesus.

Elsewhere, there’s the sonic explosion of “Disinfect,” with its Pixie-esque crunching guitars, and the gleaming “I Do It to Myself” arrives with what sounds like a whole chorus of Al Pacino’s chanting “‘Hoo-Haa.”’ “Fire” addresses female empowerment and is a call to arms to reject the deck of cards dealt by the patriarchy as Phillips talks directly to her female peers. “This is what it feels like/FGM and household silence/We asked for this violence” is a plea to a woman not to be acquiescent but instead to fight for what she deserves.

Phillips and her band of brothers have created their own cinematic universe, full of sleazy B-movie villains and femme fatales, a world where glamour and sleaze, heartbreak and redemption walk side by side. But Written and Directed expands that hyper-real world, with horns, choirs, crashing guitars, and the occasional foray into New Wave pop (“Back of the Bar”) and is perhaps the album they were born to make. It’s even more impressive when you consider Black Honey are an unsigned band with no massive label behind them. Album closer “Gabrielle” feels more like an epilogue than a huge swelling finale, but after the effervescent pop that has gone before, it could be seen as the perfect come down. (www.blackhoneyuk.co.uk)

Author rating: 8/10