The Tarantino-trumpeters return with a 30-minute offering that falls short of their incredible debut offering

★★★✰✰

Black Honey return with a much tighter and more consistent sophomore album, drawing on a plethora of indie and alternative rock from the ’90s and ’00s and, at their most exciting moments, plundering sounds from further back in time.

On first listen, Written & Directed seems like a misnomer. The cinematic language, which appears to reference the likes of film auteur Quentin Tarantino, encases an album of very un-cinematic pop-rock. You won’t find any orchestral swells, extended instrumentals or ambient passages on this album, but instead a tight sequence of rock anthems and ballads that draw on the likes of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The White Stripes, PJ Harvey, and many other icons of the ’00s and 90’s alternative and indie rock scene.

None of the tracks on Written & Directed breaks the 3-and-a-half-minute mark or veer far from the pop standard structure of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. However, as the group segues effortlessly from style to style, incorporating rockabilly elements, cassette sound effects, and a little psychedelia into their angst infused pop-rock, I am reminded of the media eclecticism of Tarantino’s own Pulp Fiction.

The album openers—the stomper I Like the Way you Die and the gothic rockabilly of Run for Cover—explore dark contradictory erotic narratives, where implied power dynamics seem to shift line-to-line: “I wanna suffer / In these sheets where I play… I’m gonna whisper/ Loud as thunder”.

The following highlight of the album Beaches is a hedonistic anthem which sounds like Blur’s Girls and Boys siphoned through a 60’s girl group, with swung claps and speak-sung Dusty Springfield references – “The preacher’s son, he taught me how to come / Right down to the beach where we can have fun”, all of which leads to a powerfully cool chorus where Izzy Baxter Phillips’ vocals repeat “on the beaches” oh-so-casually over swaggering horns.

The following Back of the Bar is an attempt at a break-up ballad that lands a little bit flat, filled with lyrical cliches such as “let’s go for a ride,” “all I do is dream of you” and “I’m dancing on my own tonight”.

The next two tracks, despite being well-produced, suffer from sounding too much like the work of other artists, especially in the lyrical content. Believer follows the rock trope of a gospel-inspired love song a-la The Monkee’s I’m a Believer, with acid-house pianos nostalgic of Primal Scream’s “Movin’ on Up.” The only point where Black Honey sound like a band of their own on this track is in the “Born again!”  chants of the bridge.

Similarly, I Do it to Myself, suffers too much from the 90s nostalgia that runs through the entire album; a pop-tinged track somewhere between PJ Harvey and Portishead’s Glory Box, that is, until the chorus’s “I do it to myself” refrain kicks in, sounding eerily similar to Radiohead’s “You do it to yourself” chorus from their 1995 alt-rock banger Just. The track redeems itself slightly with a massive horn riff that follows the chorus, accompanied with orcish “Ooh-ah” backing shouts.

Disinfect follows the loud-soft dynamics of post-grunge groups like Garbage, resulting in an exhilarating interchange between the verse’s tense chugging guitars and the chorus’s wall of distortion followed later by a short industrial-tinged bridge that wouldn’t be out of place on a Nine Inch Nails album. The lyrical content of the track, matched with the video which features grainy news-footage of explosions and war atrocities, seems to use disease and unrest as an aesthetic, rather than say anything specific about state violence, socio-political issues, or the pandemic we have lived with for the past year and a bit, creating cognitive dissonance in the listener within an otherwise enjoyable track.

Summer ’92 continues the smorgasbord approach to songwriting, bursting through with psychedelic leads, surfer rock tremolo guitars and strange chromatic backing vocals that feel reminiscent of Yo La Tengo, culminating in a pleasing retro melange.

The penultimate track Fire is the closest that the songwriting comes to saying anything political, putting alt-rock moodiness to one side to make an empowering feminist anthem, filled with maxims like “I know exactly what I’m worth,” “I won’t apologise,” and “I’m not yours, don’t belong to you.” However, when Izzy references specific feminist issues like FGM and the gender pay gap, her vocals are mixed so low that the urgent political message gets lost in the mix, dwarfed by the vague affirmation – “We are Fire”.

It is perhaps a bit strange that this song of female empowerment and solidarity is followed by a Jolene style torch song, Gabrielle, where Izzy sings of a beautiful woman who has stolen her man with her “spell,” “white skin and golden hair,” and complains that “Bitches think [she’s] crazy.” Although the vocal performance is not bad on this track, neither the vocals nor the instrumentals match the high points elsewhere on the record, resulting in the album ending on a bit of a lull.

Throughout the record, the production is classy, crisp, and clear, even when the guitars don heavy distortion on Run for Cover and Disinfect. Tracks like Beaches and Believer stand out as earworms that you will carry around for days, while the more inventive points like the psychedelia of Summer ’92 are pure, engaging fun. However, the album—perhaps in an attempt to remain accessible to a mainstream audience—often tones down the punk and progressive sounds of their influences rather than building on them, never straying far from pop-rock conventions.