Album Review
Black Honey - Soak
4 StarsContinuing on their well-travelled path of taking influence from the silver screen.
Black Honey’s fourth continues on their well-travelled path of taking influence from the silver screen, following the Tarantino-inspired ‘Written & Directed’, and the hints of Wes Anderson that came sprinkled across ‘A Fistful of Peaches’. This time, the artwork for ‘Soak’ alludes to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, while ‘Psycho’ name drops one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous pictures. The track itself is a fizzing, synth-laden number, buoyed by its huge hook and Izzy B. Phillips’ Gwen Stefani-esque intonations, before giving way to a spoken-word interlude in which she denounces “the big time producers who tear your scripts to shreds”.
Another recurring theme for the band is their blurring of the lines between tell-all and fantasy. The Lynchian ‘Carroll Avenue’, with its foreboding, reverb-heavy guitars, leans into the gothic romance trope; spacey stomper ‘Shallow’, meanwhile, dabbles in industrial sonics that nod to Björk’s ‘Army of Me’, with reverb-drenched backing vocals elevating the track in its outro. Softer acoustic numbers like ‘Vampire in the Kitchen’ find Izzy leaning into temptation - “I think I wanna dance with him” - before transforming into a dazzling guitar breakdown that gradually fades to a crackle.
Elsewhere, the contemplative closer ‘Medication’ finds her reflecting on personal growth atop a transcendent synth tapestry: “Flashbacks killed me awake, now I feel like a stray […] Got an eight-page CV with a meltdown guarantee.” Her multi-tracked vocals reach celestial heights during the chorus, becoming increasingly distorted, almost mimicking a state of semi-consciousness. On ‘Soak’, Black Honey have finessed their trademark cinematic sound, alongside a renewed sense of clarity.
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