Sorry if you were not aware yet, but France is not only the country of culture, champagne, tasty gastronomy, social rights and impetuosity (I made it short, you can complete the list… hahaha), for quite some years now it’s also a growing source of heavy and doomy sounds!
I hope, Volume 1 already proved to most of your ears this new solid trait ! Now I tried to push this volume 2 even further in terms of quality, diversity and with some nice surprises for the occasion (like a special comeback, songs in avant-premiere).
From doom/death to harsh sludge, while not forgetting stonerized or psychedelized stuff and naturally more traditional Doom spheres, you’ll get here a pretty dense and diversified inventory of the underground scene I’m succumbing for…
Now enjoy your journey in our tortured yet beautiful soundscapes and please SUPPORT our bands !
Stoner Doom in fact. My latest musical effort. I know you wanna hear it. Cooked up on a Sunday afternoon…..Fender Stratocaster straight into a Focusrite Scarlett, and thereby into Ableton Live with a Neural DSP Archetype Cory Wong plugin. Enjoy!
Our first musical collaboration 2021 and possibly our toughest/best yet. We are covering Little Feat’s ‘Long Distance Love’. We have Madame Blance on lead vocal, Jim Condie on Acoustic and Slide guitars, Rod Millgate on Keyboards, and new boy Peter Jezukiewicz on bass. I’m playing some additional guitars and drums. We hope you like it! Remember, all parts were recorded at home by each musician, then it was all put together later.
The BellRays True Believers is a facebook group for fans of The BellRays that are more than fans. They are True Believers. A place to hang with like minds and the band. Special offers, LIVE events and more to come.
Blues is the teacher. Punk is the Preacher. It’s all about emotion and energy. Experience and raw talent, spirit and intellect. Exciting things happen when these things collide.
Bob Vennum and Lisa Kekaula made The BellRays happen in 1990 in Riverside, California but they weren’t really thinking about any of this then. They wanted to play music and they wanted it to feel good. They wanted people to WANT to get up, to NEED to get up and check out what was going on. Form an opinion. React.
So they took everything they knew about; the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, the Who, the Ramones Billie Holiday, Lou Rawls, Hank Williams, the DB’s, Jimmy Reed, and Led Zeppelin (to name a very few to whom “BLUES IS THE TEACHER”) and pressed it into service.
Those bands and artists have since become “buzz words”, things to imitate and sound like. That was never The BellRays intention. The BellRays were never about coming up with a “sound”, or fitting in with a scene. It was about the energy that made all that music so irresistible. The BellRays’ influences learned from the Blues and then learned how to to make it their own. The Beatles wanted to play R&B, converted that energy and invented “Rubber Soul”. The Ramones were trying to be Del Shannon or Neil Sedaka and out came “Rocket to Russia”.
The BellRays believe combining Rock and Soul is not meant to be a conscious effort. You shouldn’t have to force them together because they’ve never really been separated in the first place. It’s an organic trail that flows through Bob and Lisa and the current rhythm section of Bernard Yin (Fur Dixon, Par Avion ) on bass and Dusty Watson (the Sonics, Dick Dale) on drums, and comes out honest and urgent. You will learn and you will feel. Blues is always teaching and Punk is always preaching.
The bass player in the funk band that I play with found this rhythmic displacement line on a youtube channel called ‘studio jams’. He’s been driving us mad with it ever since. Thing is, when the guys on YT play it they speed up slightly, making it very hard to get just right. I decided to see if I could put it together ‘straight’. Here’s the result…..
Thanks to Tim Bragg for the flute, Andy ‘SupaWal’ Bennett for the drums, and Serge Bardot for the bass. I played the guitar and keyboards parts. It was fun! 🙂
