Belles Will Ring – Come North With Me Baby, Wow

Guest post by Colin Ho

Belles Will Ring is a Blue Mountains (Aus) collective that specialises in a special kind of ‘melt-in-your-ears’ music. Following an extended sabbatical in rural NSW (which I assume involved eating food and playing music non-stop and admiring nature and lots of reverb on vocals) they’ve emerged with a confident, impressive sounding album. It also doesn’t hurt that they have a high-intensity live show resplendent with taut riffs, lengthy guitar solos and barely restrained rock out sections – even when they were down one member and without a setlist!

Titled ‘Crystal Theatre’ (apparently the town they were living and recording in housed a run-down theatre by the same name) their latest record is deceptively simple, terse and slightly psychedelic. The harmonies are lush, the chords shimmer, the guitars growl and tremble and the drums swing and swagger. I wonder how worn and dirty the strings were on the bass guitar used in the recording – it kind of reminds me of those thick, plucked basslines from a Spaghetti Western soundtrack or a Dangermouse record. The sleigh bells and the moody keyboard sounds are a nice touch, too. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I felt a definite throw-back vibe in their music which I really dug. As cool as arpeggiated, glitchy electronic beeps and pants-shittingly low synthy bass notes are, for me nothing really beats live instrumentation driven through hot amps. Liam Judson, who also co-produced Cloud Control’s LP ‘Bliss Release’, has done a really bang-up job with the production on ‘Crystal Theatre’.

While I could wax lyrical all day about most of the tracks on the album, ‘Come North With Me Baby, Wow’ is definitely a personal favourite. Featuring a great trumpet line, some boy/girl/boy/falsetto harmonies, gnarly bass and guitar riffs, it sounds like a fresh take on a groovy, mood-setting soundtrack piece from a spy-movie or a 60′s action flick set to a killer sense of vocal melody. While it’s one of the more upbeat songs on the admittedly slow-burning album, there’s also something potentially dark and possibly unsettling that lurks underneath the song. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it definitely adds to its appeal.

In a day and age where ‘traditional’ genres and sounds seem to be mashed up willy-nilly and often to less-than-awesome effect, there’s something to be said when you can create something that achieves this while sounding effortless and organic. Like the way Pink Floyd easily bridged the gap between spacey progressive rock and the Delta Blues, Belles Will Ring brings together the old and the new, the familiar and the strange, the city and the country and the garage and the studio to create a fantastic body of work.

Hopefully it won’t be the last time we hear from these Blue Mountains (everybody knows there’s something in the water there that gives you supernatural music making skills – I’m looking at you Cloud Control) musicians! Definitely expecting some great things from these guys.

Belles Will Ring – Come North With Me Baby, Wow

Belles Will Ring online.