What goes around comes around. No music ever dies; it just gets put to the back of the browser bin for a while. At one time any band attempting to sell this kind of stuff to the punters would have been laughed off stage as veritable dinosaurs.
But Icca’s Belle have confidently Looked back over their shoulder and taken the baton from an oeuvre that many might wish to leave to the confines of memory. Without doubt one of the most distinctive elements of this combo is the gravel-hued voice of Edward Harden. His tonsils act as a proscenium to a kind of vocal theatre. Not many bands attempt creations like this nowadays, adventurous and ambitious music making - a bit grandiose, a bit prog rock, a bit hard rock. There is nothing low key about their remit, especially with the vocal posturing and slightly overblown lyrics, but one wouldn’t have it any other way with fusion like this.
It’s music for students, music for intellectuals, and music for romantics. If you had sat down to compile the ingredients of characteristics that define this band it may have appeared a bit implausible on paper, a bit twee and old hat. Not exactly Ed Sheeran or High Flying Birds. Somehow the finished article gets away with it. Listen to a song like ‘No more’ and there is an undeniable throw back to the Doors and the sound of Jim Morrison, mindful of ‘Riders on the storm’. And then there is the keyboard playing of Ben Haugh, simmering and swirling to such effect. Again it dredges up memories of Brian Auger’s Trinity in the seventies, long before artists became cynical and caustic and everyone became a wretched entrepreneur with a port-folio of investments.
The instrumental ribs hang off the Tyrannosaurus backbone strength of Rod Dragone’s drumming and percussion, exemplified in ‘Crimson Rose’. Even the title of the song is not dissimilar to another bunch of seventies megaliths – King Crimson. Similarly not many keep an idea going for over eight minutes in this day and age. We live once more in the era of three minute pop songs so it’s admirable that these guys are happy to buck the trend and go for full blown over-indulgence in the timing department. The advantage is that it allows for paced and elegant development of a piece. ‘Crimson Rose’ has elongated passages and separate sections composed in conjunction, and it’s nice to hear this old style form of rock that allows for balance of darkness and light. Lugubrious interludes of gentle plucking or spaced out meandering are followed by the obligatory blistering fretwork by James Huntington, oozing with the ecstasy-ridden facial contortion and histrionics…. Just when you thought head-banging was a dying art it’s back with a vengeance.
This is the kind of music you put on and listen to, rather than just have playing on your Ipod while you go jogging. And then, to stop your assumptions in their tracks, they do a number like ‘change of opinion’, an infectious little jig that gathers pace like a pumped up Greek wedding song with Peter Barton impressing all and sundry with his accordion and melodica, and played with such bonhomie. Start smashing plates. Start dancing in frenzy.
Then change the mood again with ‘You fool’, a slow smouldering fire that inhales oxygen and ignites with bravado. Not many can recall the likes of Tony McPhee or Robin Trower but their spirit lives on through these guitars. It would seem a debt of gratitude is owed to the likes of Icca’s Belle. Without people courageous enough to cherry pick from the past then the future might continue to be bland, homogenised and hermetically sealed. They have dug out a forgotten recipe and are serving it up freshly baked and piping hot, just like in the good old days.
Review by Peter Heydon
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