Released 27/04/09, T4 Tunes 

Like dirty-as-hell garage rock ditties? Into Iggy, The Velvets and BRMC
on the weekends?  A place in your heart always open for songs about lust, standing up for one’s self, with some more lust just in case you haven’t had enough that day?

Then The Black Box Revelation are very much for you.

They hail from that haven of grubby rock n’roll, Belgium, revel in the classic
garage rock sound and  make no attempt to convince us otherwise with their leather jackets and skinny black trousers.  What might be surprising,though, is that the two members of the band are only 19 (lead singer and guitarist Jan Patermoster) and 17 (drummer  Dries Von Dijck) ,and that they are already major splashes in their homeland, with number one singles and a big native fanbase. The UK release of ‘Set Your Head On Fire’ sees them try to spread their popularity abroad and though they don’t seem to have garnered much in the way of publicity, frankly, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t because the music is fun, its melodic underneath the scuzz and, most importantly, there’s genuine toonage in there.

Foremost among these are recent single ‘Love, love is on my mind’, ‘I Think I Like You and ‘We Never Wondered Why.’  ‘Love, love...’ opens the album and it wastes no time telling us what its about, with Patermoster wailing over the top of som incessant drums whilst knocking out a riff that Jack White might have knocked out during a night on the Stella.  The lyrics aren’t particularly deep- ‘love, love was already on my mind/The one thing I live for/It’s like my gasoline’- but hey ho, these are young lads, and you can barely hear them anyway.

‘I Think I Like You’ carries on the wail factor, and is the kind of song you’d
like to imagine Iggy’s love-child would churn out during their addiction
days.  ‘There’s something and it makes me smile/ I think I like you/ There’s something burning in my mind/ I think I like you.’  Again, the lyrics won’t be studied at Oxford or anywhere else anytime soon, but it doesn’t matter. These are direct, hammering rock tunes meant for late nights, parties and orgies (not that I can say I’ve been to many orgies, but imagine this would be the sort of stuff on the stereo).

These two open the album and, interestingly and positively, the duo that closes it are probably the next two strongest tracks.  ‘Set Your Head On Fire’ is built around a melodic simple riff and a haze of reverb which harks back to the pre-acoustic days of BRMC, who are clearly a huge influence throughout.  Even the lyrics are reminiscent of Jago and co, with the repeated chorus of ‘set your head on fire in the all black night’.  It then goes all a bit Zeppelin at the end, with a savage whig-out that’ll have plenty of middle class parents, rather ironically, tutting and bemoaning ‘all this noisy modern rubbish.’

Album closer ‘I Don’t Want It’ has a real sing/shout-a-long chorus with guitar lifted from the Keith Richards guitar school, and is a track for impoverished and laughed at indie kids across the land , with its ‘you don’t have to call me by yourname/you don’t have to treat me like your friend/I don’t want it, don’t want
it/ I don’t want it’.  Its also one of the longer tracks on here, and shows a considerable confidence for ones so young.  Again, we like this, just as we
also like ‘Never Alone, Always Together’, a much slower track which explores more blues friendly territory and sounds a lot like The White Stripes.

One wonders why they’ve received so little exposure, especially when you’d think that this isn’t particularly inaccessible stuff.  Admittedly some of it is somewhat by-numbers but, frankly, a few duff tracks isn’t that unusual with
music of this genre. The proliferation of electronic music could well be at the
heart of the matter as this sort of stuff isn’t particularly fashionable
anymore and the new rock explosion snuffed out a little while ago now.  But it would be a shame for these whippersnappers to slip by the wayside as they have put together a finealbum worthy of those beyond their tender years.

Posted In Album Reviews, Apr 28 2009. Words - Terry