The Babies at White Heat

The Babies at White Heat

23 November, 2011
by: Domzig

Meh?

Whenever I see the words ‘side project’ in a press release, an alarm bell rings in my head. I know, in my line of work I should be above applying my cruddy preconceptions to everything that floats across my desk, but there’s a reason you like a certain band, right? Just because the singer plays guitar in some other act doesn’t make that band amazing by default. It doesn’t apply in all cases – Queens of the Stone Age, Animal Collective and King Khan and the BBQ Show all spring to mind – but plenty of good people have put out some real crap under the guise of a side project. Come on, did the world really need to endure Audioslave or The Transplants?

To be fair to The Babies, Brooklyn’s indie scene is so incestuous it’s hard to know who is in what band most of the time, so it hardly feels right to call them a side project when everybody is in 20 other bands anyway. A four-piece formed around the backbone of Woods bassist Kevin Morby and Vivian Girls songwriter Cassie Ramone, their woozy indie rock is far more straight-up sounding than both of the protagonist’s main bands. You can kind of imagine Woods and the Vivian Girls being the cool kids at a house party chatting about what the greatest Neil Young record was or something, whilst The Babies are the slightly nerdy kid necking White Lighting and bouncing around to old Vaselines records.

Tonight they’re playing White Heat, and even though they’re clashing with Devon Williams and Fool’s Gold at the Shacklewell Arms and Okkervil River at KOKO, the hype machine has clearly done its job, as Madam Jojos is rammed. Trying to find a spot in all the humanity, I must have missed the part where the band get on stage, bash their instruments and say hello to everyone, as the next time I look up, The Babies are playing. It’s like they’re ninjas.

It’s very hard to actively dislike The Babies. After all, everybody likes melodies and harmonies, and this band have both in spades. Morby’s gravelly, Bob Dylany voice mixes well with Ramone’s more deadpan singing, and the band’s reverb-laden indie rock throws more hooks at you in 45 minutes than most other bands manage in their entire careers. Shifting from punk to indie and then to sweet sounding psych-pop, they barrel through their set like a group of workmen, barely stopping to draw breath between songs.

However, whilst they certainly look the business and tick all of the right boxes musically, I find myself desperately wanting to like The Babies more than actually enjoying them. You can’t deny that they’ve got a few bangers in their repertoire, but for some reason they just don’t seem to fizz on stage like their other bands do. It’s strange – on record they sound like a band you could easily party to, but tonight they just sound a bit vanilla. By the time their set stutters to a close, I’m starting to think that this could be any average indie band in any indie club.

It’s annoying, as this is a band that clearly oozes potential, and I’ll probably see them again in a few months and be properly blown away by them. But for tonight The Babies just leave me feeling a little cold. It’s all been a bit disappointing really.

The Babies self titled debut is out now on Shrimper Records. For more info on White Heat, check out their website.

Domzig