Black Bananas - Electric Brick Wall

She released the first album under the Black Bananas moniker – Rad Times Express IV - a couple of years back to glowing acclaim. Since it was Royal Trux’ M.O. to take an outmoded musical style and scuzz it up to make it cool again, it was no surprise that JJ took aim at the uncoolest of the uncool genres and made it rad again on RTXIV. That genre was, believe it or not, hair metal. If a listener had no idea of the lineage that IV sat in, they would have presumed that it was either an authentic WASP record from 1986, or that the band that had made it were 80s also-rans having a particularly explosive comeback in 2012 (WASP??). Jams like “Killer Weed”, “Foxy Playground” and “Rad Times” would have been the killer-est tracks on any 80s Alice Cooper album, while detours like the Prince-on-brown-acid trip of “Do It” and the Kenny-Loggins-in-a-blender widescreen heft of “Nightwalker” only confirmed what we all knew already: Jennifer got game.

This record, Electric Brick Wall, is less about the hair metal and more about the sex. It’s still scuzzy and rotten and filthy and packed with riffs – how could it not be? – but the riffs are slightly toned down, and in their place you’ll find something that RTXIV didn’t have a lot of and didn’t need any more of: Groove. Rad opener “Powder” has groove, distortion and sex appeal by the tonne – and the space-age outro is cool too. On an album full of tracks with incredible names, the winner of ‘coolest track title’ might be “Dope on an Island”. The track itself is basically a squalling hot mess of JJ’s voice (buried in white-noise distortion) and a tasty guitar lick or two (buried in that same fug) chugging away in perfect disharmony. “Hey Rockin” amps up the intensity – it splits the difference between industrial rock (think NIN) and dinosaur pomp ‘n’ rock (think Led Zeppelin) with stunning aplomb. The off-kilter, wailing guitar solo adds to the disorienting sense of oddness that pervades the track – this is what Black Bananas do best.

“Physical Emotions” is, for lack of a better description, fucking sick. It was released earlier this year, and it caused a hell of a stir – it sounds like JJ’s was listening to a lot of the early Snoop Dogg/Dr.Dre collaborations (think “Deeez Nuuuuts”) during the making of this track (and later track “Give It To Me”, which features a bizarre Clapton-like solo). The carefree, summer time vibes seem perfectly suited to Black Bananas, and you begin to wonder why they haven’t made a whole album full of that kinda killer material… that is, until the robo-death-funk of “Highway Down” pops up next on the record. It’s heavy on the rockist riffage, but even heavier on the funkist rolling rhythms – a perfectly Yin to “Physical Emotions”’s Yang. Of the second half of the record, the mutant dubstep of “Creeping Out of Line” and the electric-burn intensity of titanic soft-rock number “Old Gold Chains” are the highlights. But other tracks like the fiery closer “Bullshit and Lies” and oddball rocker “Ride the Chump” (also a contender for best title) keep the momentum of the record at a suitably maximal level.

After I’d heard the record for the first time, I had to just sit for a minute and try and remember some of the tracks I’d just been battered over the head with. The truth is, you can only remember them after maybe the fourth, fifth listen, because the record is so disorientating and covered in a slimy fuzz that makes it hard to pick out individual tracks from the dense sonic miasma you’ve just been supplied with. But, once those hooks start getting in your head, and once those riffs start to pop out of the speakers, you’ll realise that this is the best record JJ has put out since the demise of RTX. RTXIV was a superb, full-throttle rock ‘n’ roll record, but Electric Brick Wall is a next-level release. The inclusion of – and spotlight shone on – a killer single in “Physical Emotions” shows that Herrema and Co. are on an upwards trajectory… here’s hoping she doesn’t do something silly like reform Royal Trux. That’d kill the buzz, man.​