Dani Bell & The Tarantist impress once again
Debuting in 2015 with Dark West, San Diego based Dani Bell is set to release her second recording, the LP Wide Eyed, on January 18th. Dark West was a strong debut, but many strong debuts give way to a less than stellar follow-up.
Such is not the case with Dani Bell & The Tarantist.
Wide Eyed builds upon everything great about Dark West while adding a new and substantial emotional depth to the mix.
The band self-describes as “psychedelic pop”, and while that’s not an inaccurate description, it doesn’t do justice to the well-crafted tunes.
From the moment the sixties ended, folks have spoken with reverence (sometimes to the point of tiresome excess) of the music of “the sixties.”
No movie about the era is complete without a de facto soundtrack of Hendrix, CCR, Janis, et al., but this is a narrow view of a decade that saw the Motown juggernaut dominate the airwaves while pop music underwent a Renaissance that hasn’t been seen since.
This minor historical observation is necessary to provide the context for Dani’s music which draws from no one single influence but is rather an amalgam of the best of some distinctively different genres that spanned a ten year period in the middle of the last century.
The band acknowledges the influence of early Motown on this record, and this is nowhere so evident as the second track, “Driving Me Crazy,” which could easily have been recorded by Ronnie Spector or Darlene Love. Layer the vocals and it would be a dead ringer for Martha and the Vandellas.
On the other hand, tracks like the sitar-infused “The End,” and Iron Butterfly fuzz-toned, “Mystery” are undeniably “psychedelic.” “Tension” and “Down” are Donovan-dreamy tracks with no small amount of Beatles/Stones hidden in the chords.
In fact, every track on the album draws from multiple influences, combining them seamlessly in new, and frankly, delightful ways.
Though I question whether Dani and the band view it this way, I can’t help but hear the album as a loving tribute to an entire era of music, but with one very keen and important addition.
Bell’s vocals are achingly sweet, but that sweetness belies an underlying tension that, while not cynical, evinces a certain wariness absent from the source material.
It is this which makes the album so much more than a tribute or a clever mash-up of vintage styles because while the album is chock-full of sixties pop sound, that music was notoriously bubble-gum and naïve in its day.
This music is not.
While it’s not necessarily a “dark and gritty reboot,” it is the music of your parents or grandparents all grown up, reimagined for a time in which listeners are all too aware that the summer of love gives way to the winter of our discontent.
Again, it isn’t cynical by any stretch, it is simply…aware, and this is a radical departure from its escapist forbearers.
Make no mistake, you could play this in the background all day and enjoy it simply as beautiful sounding music, but you could also delve deeper and see revealed a music much more firmly grounded in the reality of life in the modern age.
This synthesis of seemingly disparate elements, or at least the unconventional use of a musical style more commonly associated with “sunshine and lollipops” to express something deeper, at times darker, and certainly more “human,” is a stroke of genius and a testament to the artistry of Dani Bell and her bandmates.