Coming on like a European Kings Of Leon with half the members and double the noise, The Black Box Revelation are coming your way, and fast, in 2009.
From Brussels, the duo comprises 19-yearold Jan Paternoster (guitar/vocals) and 17-year-old Dries Van Diyck (drums), and after burning and fast and fiendish trail through their home country, they’re bringing their seething debut album ‘Set Your Head On Fire’ to the wider world.
The pair cook up a blues rock firestorm, informed as much by Nick Zinner as Jimmy Page, all delivered with the wit and sophistication of Jack White and the soul of Mick Jagger. That’s quite a combination for a duo barely out of their teens.
More impressive still is that the band were born quite by accident. Childhood friends Jan and Dries had been playing together in various forms since their early teens, and formed their first proper band, The Mighty Generators, at the start of 2006 with Jan’s brother and a mutual friend. The band were far more of a conventional rock outfit, but with a scarce live music scene in Brussels (things were much hotter in Ghent and Antwerp), they found themselves getting enough attention to lead them to enter Belgium’s biggest band contest, Humo’s Rock Rally. They gamely went in and produced a demo, and found themselves finished with ten minutes of studio time already paid for.
Jan had some songs that didn’t quite fit the Mighty Generators template, so he and Dries laid three songs down in just ten minutes, of which ‘Love In Your Head’ survives to this day. Why not just enter those as well and see what happened?
This is what happened: “The Mighty Generators got knocked out in the first round,” explains Jan, “but the other band made it all the way to the final. We ended up coming second. That was when we knew. It was a bit like, ‘okay…’” Rather than sacking the other members, they decided just to quit The Mighty Generators themselves. With the attendant buzz around the half-formed band’s silver medal, they returned to the studio, laid down the songs they had so far and made what become their debut, Belgium-only EP ‘Introducing The Black Box Revelation’, released to critical acclaim.
The experience saw them hone their sound further. There didn’t seem any point in making up the numbers for the sake of it, so they worked on perfecting the two-piece format, plugging the guitar through a bass amp and playing extra hard and extra loud. And the results became something truly special. And the feral roar of the Black Box Revelation is not a thing that can be tamed, even if you would want to. When they came to record debut album proper ‘Set Your Head On Fire’ in a single week, everything worked in one take. Anything more would have stifled it.
Jan explains: “It was an adventure for ourselves to become better at our instruments and play in that way so nobody misses anything – so they wouldn’t say ‘oh but there were only two of them.”
“I think it works because of our way of playing, also listening to old records, and also newer stuff, a bit of everything. Most of it was just the way of playing our instruments. It came by itself. Or maybe because I never learned to read notes, but we’re comfortable in our own sound now.”
And you just know that any album called ‘Set Your Head On Fire’ isn’t going to be anything like a conventional ride. You might think that the tender White Stripes twang of ‘Never Alone, Always Together’ sounds like a love song. And it is, kind of, until you realise that the interplay is not between two physical lovers, but between two rival voices in the mind of a schizophrenic protagonist. Elsewhere, the radio-gobbling ‘I Think I Like You’ sizzles with the ambivalence of post-adolescent romance, and ‘Gravity Blues’ mines an old world of psychedelic rock for fresh new stones.
“I write about a bit of everything,” muses Jan, “either things that happen in my own life, sometimes about fantasy. It’s not that I write openly about myself, but sometimes I’ll write about myself in other ways – if you look at it very close then maybe you’ll understand what’s happening in my head.”
So with the final piece of the puzzle in place, the boys will be busy unleashing their songs during a mammoth European tour throughout 2009, following successful slots with fellow Belgians Deus, and a mini tour of the east and west coasts of the US. So far the sizzling live campaign has won them fans wherever they plug in and play, and their live shows aim to provide a hitherto untapped potential to be the Red Bull of rock bands. “People need something to give them energy,” says Dries. “We want to give them that.”