Ebony Bones Flexes Some Muscle

Label: Sunday Best
Artist: Ebony Bones
Album: Bone Of My Bones

There are many bands and acts that wow their respective scenes with lauded live performances, only to fail to produce a record of equal significance. Then there are those that churn out good studio work, only to fall short in live performance. Ebony Bones! seemed sure to be a contender for the former of these groups.  Her live performances have often been the subject matter to sentences started with, "Yeah actually, I saw this girl play the other day..."  Thankfully, the debut album Bone Of My Bones is every bit as emphatic, punctuated and gloriously excessive as their live performances that have won them deserved praise from the critically astute and varied legions of giggers that smear over Londons streets like Pigeon excrement. Ebony Bones! has become the word-of-mouth over the last 12 months, and how!

Jazz hand jumping out of the soap opera and into the land of music, Ebony Bones! has taken her enviably sharp lyrics and presented them with a sound not unlike that of akin M.I.A. and Santigold.  In fact, imagine the sound of Santigold with equal pace, and somehow, the ear-bleeding loudness of My Bloody Valentine.  This debut album should come with the manufacturer advice of "best played loud".  There's a lot going on with the projected sound. The seven-piece band providing the support for her shaky, yet irrepressible voice sits more than comfortably.  Their effort is pop based, positive, but reserved enough to shy away from happy-clappy and sensible enough to avoid any shoe-gazing.  The element of leg-wobbly funk is well adopted too, and on tracks such as W.A.R.R.I.O.R., In G.O.D. We Trust (Gold, Oil & Drugs) and Im Ur Future X Wife is wielded into a resin of funny, bastardised Punk.  It's true to say that the album as a whole is adoptive of various danced music, and never less than culturally aware.  The humour and wit connived upon the listener shouldn't be underestimated either.  The delicious chorus to Smiles & Cyanide will leave any Bill or Betty ever afflicted by the bitter twist of break-up smiling wryly to themselves whilst bopping a head, lip clinched tightly by the teeth.  But before that Im Ur Future X Wife sets Ebony up perfectly with a darkly menacing bass line that would have most Maiden fans wincing behind the couch.  "So frustrated now, Im dancing like a retard/Im only here cos Im trying to get you hard", gets the album's strongest non-dance tune underway.  It's a good job Ebony's voice is utterly twanged with London; it's the only accent and dialect grubby enough to honour this triumphant sound. She manages to make a fun, summery song like The Muzik or her opening track in W.A.R.R.I.O.R. (a thoughtful foot-stomper with which she blew this year's South by Southwest away) sound every bit as harsh, foggy and polluted as a Dickensian villain.  Story of St.ockwell is pretty much of the same ilk, but fails to capture the honesty of the rest of the album and can seem slightly contrived.  The topic of police shootings and media cover-up has been tackled in other forms more vividly and openly than in this one-girl's-opinion effort from Ebony Bones!.  Thank heavens it's followed up by the aforementioned The Muzik, a song destined to soundtrack gold-skied summer carnivals.  Its relentless rhythm and beat refuses to negotiate tempo and offers something new and invigorating to the realm of fem-punk that bands in the early part of this century, such as New Young Pony Club failed to do. The album as a whole is exactly that, a clever slice of sounds we're not quite sure if we've heard before. The flow is questionable, and plays a bit like a playlist created by a mouse-hogging drunkard at a Freshers party, but this only distracts enough for us to appreciate each song for its individual prowess - and theres a tonne of it. This record, released on 29th of June, is a muscle, not just bones. Its strength is what sets it aside from other pop offerings of this first half of 2009. Ebony Bones and her band of merry noblemen (is that the drummer from The Damned?) can be proud of themselves. They've pulled off a trick in releasing an album as good as anyone who has seen them live had hoped: a rarity of their age.

Release date: 29th June 09