If there is one band that seems to have come out of nowhere recently it’s Alabama Shakes. This blues-garage rock band from, you guessed it, Alabama, is the next big thing that has yet to hit the radio. No one seems to know a thing about them and many hadn’t heard of them before the Grammys this year as well as a recent performance on Saturday Night Live. Their album, Boys & Girls, was released last April and went largely unnoticed until this past week, sometimes it takes the populous a little bit of time to catch up to certain trends and the world was caught up by the bore that was and still is Mumford and Sons.
Simply put the Alabama Shakes album is awful. There is nothing redeeming about it in any way. The vocalist, Brittany Howard, has potential but it held back by the rest of the band and even when she is on her own, she still fails to connect to the listener emotionally. The band is comprised of a bunch of guys who sound like they just learned how to play their instruments a year or two ago by taking lessons from YouTube videos. Then once they figured out how to play barre chords on their guitars they thought they could now do a blues rock shuffle. Let’s face it, The Black Keys, who are in the same genre, used only two instruments to create a wholly more satisfying and interesting product, so we know it can be done. Blues rock, or more specifically blues southern rock, is hard to create. It’s a feeling, an emotional connection to the south and the hardships that go along with it. Bands like The Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd sang about real world issues, politics, substance abuse, and personal matters (FREEBIRD!). It’s rather difficult to take someone seriously when all they do is moan on and on about how some guy won’t love them.
There are some blues and rock singers that one should think of and listen to: Big Mama Thornton, Blind Willie Johnson, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield and others, but Brittany Howard is nowhere in that mix, nor should she be, after one album it’s clear that she has a long way to go. In fact, it’s almost impossible to understand what she’s singing through most of the album, it’s as if she’s trying to be Christina Aguilera who plays guitar and sings with a weird yawp and sounds a bit like Jack White being imitated by Sylvester Stallone, and that’s giving her some high praise. What Howard is missing is soul and wholehearted love in her performance. In the song “Heartbreaker” , towards the end she starts wailing and it’s hard to take seriously, one can imagine some fourteen year old sitting in her room just bawling to this song, screaming right along with it because Justin Bieber won’t tweet her back, but for an older listener it’s lacking any real connection.
The album starts out with their “hit” song “Hold On” and as soon as it starts it’s hard to get past the crude rip-off of dozens of blues rock guitar riffs that have come before. Blues rock isn’t original, not by any stretch of the imagination, but those that take it and make it their own have true success, witness Led Zeppelin. In fact, “Hold On” sounds like it could be Alabama Shakes own version of “I Will Wait” by Mumford and Sons and for the most part they follow a similar musical structure; start with a blues riff, let Brittany howl, rise or fall in intensity and then let the guitar player sort of noodle around while he tries to find an appropriate solo and then end. All that’s missing is the banjo. There are some almost good moments on the album though, a bit of a Phil Spector 60s wall-of-sound moment, a Motown, R&B moment, but it’s mostly wasted by Howard’s howling all over the place. The album is drenched in reverb and echo feedback, it’s as if they tried really, really hard to make the album sound old but at the same time it muddles up the album so you can’t hear the players deficiencies. While it’s obvious there isn’t auto-tuning on the album, one wonders how many overdubs it took to make the album sound like less of a mess.
Overall, Boys & Girls is as immature sounding as the album title. This is ultimately a slap in the face of much better modern blues rock musicians and bands like The Derek Trucks Band, Susan Tedeschi or Doyle Bramhall II, even country artist Keith Urban sounds more southern and authentic and he’s from Australia. There’s a fine line between parody and legitimacy and this album crosses the threshold into parody pretty quickly. After listening to the album or a song by them it’s better to go listen to something else to cleanse your poor ear drums, maybe Blind Willie Johnson or Muddy Waters, even Skrillex might have more of an emotional connection with his listeners than this band does. Best advice, avoid these guys, let them mature a bit and revisit them. There’s nothing redeeming here, just another flash in the pan, watered down for the masses, wannabe blues rock that continues to undo all the hard work by all the legends that have come before.