Alabama Shakes' lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter Brittany Howard began cobbling her band together in high school mostly just for the sake of having a band. It certainly wasn't with the notion of breaking into her hometown's music scene-- in Athens, Ala., there's not much of one to break into. So she and her friends Steve Johnson, Zac Cockrell, and Heath Fogg made do playing cover-band gigs in dive bars, occasionally slipping their raggedy garage-soul originals in among the Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, and eventually making enough to warrant some studio time up in Nashville early last year. Those sessions produced the 11 tracks of Alabama Shakes' debut LP, Boys & Girls, which they shopped around for a while and finally released on ATO (Rough Trade in the UK) this week.
Things are now moving fast: The band has hit the late-night TV circuit, they followed Fiona Apple's headlining slot at NPR's big SXSW showcase last month, their upcoming shows are almost entirely sold-out, and they've been booked as openers for Jack White's spring solo tour.
Of course, because Alabama Shakes boast these fairly aw-shucks origins, lyrics that seem deeply felt, multiple sonic reference points predating 1975, an affinity for analog, and more than one guitar, by default they've been thrown like chum into the shark tank that is "real music," where fans and critics with false memories of rock's pure and noble past-- and others with aversions to earnest craft both feigned and actual-- gnash out their differences.
But engaging with these paranoid extremes bypasses the whole middle swath of the matter-- the weird, beautiful part, where all the blood and guts are. Here's what seems real enough to me: Boys & Girls is a solid debut, really good but not earth-shifting, a record clearly (blessedly) recorded before anyone much cared who they were or weren't, possibly even before they were entirely sure themselves.
The album is largely confessional-- not in the singer/songwritery sense, but in that it's riddled with admissions that probably wouldn't have been made by any other means, words that feel lighter sung than spoken. Album opener and lead single "Hold On", its central guitar riff ribboning and pooling like slow-poured honey, is the first of many tracks where it's not entirely clear if Howard is singing to, about, or as herself, God, or some boy as she rips through the chorus: "Yeah, you got to wait/ But I don't want to wait!" "I feel so homesick/ Where is my home?" Howard wonders on "Rise to the Sun" before the song dips into a coda of timorous guitar and crashing drums. On the shadowy, fingersnapped "Goin' to the Party" she sings about running around town, getting wasted, and taking care of some drunk boy; when she woozily coos, "gotta take me back now, I'm still somebody's daughter," she sounds half-annoyed and half-comforted in that very particular way that comes from being young and restless and knowing there's someone waiting up for you, but at least there's someone waiting up for you.
Howard's pain feels raw, but like it won't always be-- as if once these first scrapes heal, her skin will be good and tough, but right now they smart like hell. "Heartbreaker" is staggering, gut-punched, a shiny organ weeping and straining away as she laments, "Oh, I wanted to grow old with you/ You told me so, but then you go/ How was I supposed to know?" But later on the slow-boiling "Be Mine" she's regained her footing-- she's direct, nearly petulant: "If they wanna fight/ They done started fucking with the wrong heart." Three minutes in the song shifts focus to a single demand, Howard crowing and screaming, "Be my baby, be my baby!" over and over as the band spins out, crashing and bumping, then circles back home as she loosens into a string of cries and hoots.
Live, Howard often plants her feet flat onstage before bellowing out a line, as if bracing herself against the force of what's to come, and it's easy to imagine her doing that in the studio, too. Most of the time there's a payoff, but sometimes the build-up dwarfs the delivery, her voice coming out thinner and tighter than you'd expect; maybe she needs a vocal coach, or just a little more time to work out exactly how those pipes of hers like best to blow. For now, though, flashes of more contemporary analogs (Macy Gray, Amy Winehouse) swirled in among the more obvious classic-soul vocal touchstones keep her Janis Joplin tendencies from curdling into "Jackie Jormp-Jomp".
Boys & Girls was recorded live in the studio, but the power of the band's stage show hasn't fully carried over-- at times their delivery also seems thin and tight. Perhaps it's a matter of timing, the number and profile and intensity of the gigs the band has played in recent months solidifying their groove to a degree that outstrips what they were capable of throwing down on tape this time last year. Or maybe it's the production-- a little muddled, and not always in the cozy, old-school way they may have been going for. So many bands get churned out of the hype machine seeming either too fully formed or too ephemeral to get attached to, but Alabama Shakes have sparked, in me at least, a degree of ownership, and one that urges, "work with Jack White." Maybe sometime this summer, after the tour, he could work his analog-only magic and coax some big, crunching, whalloping mess out of them--something to ensure they get to stick around for a while, and on their own terms: weird, sweaty, desirous.
