There were moments during their 2012 rise to fame that the Alabama Shakes seemed less like a real band than a dream had by a particular kind of Uncut-subscribing music fan. Here was a new band from America’s Deep South who sounded not unlike Creedence Clearwater Revival, had CCR been hanging around Muscle Shoals’ Fame studios in the late 60s. As one rave review of their debut album, Boys and Girls, put it, the Alabama Shakes made “music that sounds as if the last 40 years of popular sounds had never happened”, adding admiringly: “You won’t hear a single hip-hop rhythm, disco beat, tripped-out guitar effect or dubstep bass drop.”
You might suggest that rock music’s slavish deference to the past and obsession with a mythic “golden era” has got to a pretty disconcerting stage when the hot new US alt-rock band is literally being praised for its lack of originality. But plenty of people seemed to like the idea: Boys and Girls sold close to 1m copies in the US alone. Perhaps its staunch traditionalism had a comforting appeal to US audiences in an age of EDM; more likely, they were lured by some sharp songwriting and the raw-throated blues voice of Brittany Howard. But, a million albums shifted or not, the Alabama Shakes have evidently clocked that you can’t just keep mimicking the past indefinitely, however good an impressionist you are; or rather, you can, but it’s an artistic dead end. Sound and Color finds them audibly trying to break out of the self-imposed restrictions of their debut.
If there’s nothing here to upset the kind of person who feels faint at the very mention of hip-hop rhythms or dubstep bass drops, some of their new ideas are surprisingly radical. Not least is the deliberate muffling of Howard’s voice, presumably to try to make it seem less like the band’s focal point and more like part of their palette of sounds – which, amid the spectacularly potent riffs of Dunes, expands to include fizzing synthesiser, a muted orchestral arrangement that might even be a sample, and our old friend, the tripped-out guitar effect.
But that voice is still the most arresting thing about their sound, even when it sounds as if they’ve locked Howard in a cupboard. She somehow manages to make a falsetto sound lascivious on Guess Who, and introduces Don’t Wanna Fight by issuing a remarkable noise somewhere between a wheeze and a scream. And the song is fantastic: tense funk decorated with a rubbery bassline, and guitars that keep breaking out of an edgy little riff into something more clangorous and spacey. It shows how great the Alabama Shakes can be when they’re not just paying homage to the past. The same goes for Gimme All Your Love, which takes an old-fashioned Southern soul ballad and amps up the melodrama until it sounds cathartic and abandoned, everything crashing and flailing around Howard’s voice – and Future People, its tricksy guitar part overlaid with slabs of fuzz bass, its distorted, reverb-heavy climax thrillingly fierce.
At those points, the Alabama Shakes sound like a band cutting loose: there’s a real joy and abandon here. But that’s not the whole story. Some of the song names sound like temporary titles, scribbled down in the studio to differentiate sections of a jam session – Shoegaze, This Feeling – and there are moments when that’s pretty much how the music on Sound and Colour feels: like half-sketched ideas, improvised in the studio in lieu of substantial new songs.
Sometimes the spontaneous approach has paid audible dividends – there’s something really gripping about the way the opening title track eschews a standard verse-chorus structure and instead feels like it’s slowly unraveling until it reaches a hypnotic coda – but occasionally, you’re struck by the sneaking suspicion that Alabama Shakes are trying to distract attention from a shortfall in decent material, by shunting the best stuff into the first half of the album and concentrating on dynamics and production. It all sounds fantastic, but that doesn’t quite cover up the fact that some of what’s here is a bit too vaporous. The ballad This Feeling and the lengthy, agonisingly slow Gemini drift by, untethered to any memorable tune. A diversion into hardcore punk, The Greatest, is an intriguing idea in theory – what happens when a band previously rooted in soul and R&B dabbles with a genre that went out of its way to eradicate every vestige of funk or groove from its sound, to sever rock music’s ties to its roots in rhythm and blues? – but it might be more enjoyable in practice if the lockstep rhythm had some kind of song attached to it.
Still, in a world marked by follow-up albums that meekly offer up more of the same, it’s hard not to applaud the Albama Shakes’ boldness: given that a certain conservatism was the attraction of their debut, it takes guts to mess around with the formula. Not all their experiments work, but it’s hard not to be infected by the excitement when they do. This is obviously music still informed by the past, but not cowed by it. Sound and Color feels like the work of a band rather than a historical re-enactment society.
