Stream: The BellRays, ‘Mine All Mine’

Kevin Bronson on January 3rd, 2018

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Climate change is turning the planet into a fireball, politics has become mere playground taunting and the National League baseball team from Chicago has won a championship. But it’s 2018 and the BellRays are still at it, so please hold the apocalypse. The pride of Riverside is like that finely tuned muscle car purring at the curb: Who cares how many miles are on the odometer?

For the uninitiated, the BellRays, forged behind the energies of husband-and-wife duo Lisa Kekaula and Bob Vennum, have been making their soulful hard rock since the 1990s. They’ve released eight LPs, the strongest coming in a four-album stretch between 2000 and ’08, capped by the explosive “Hard, Sweet and Sticky.” Their music has been aptly described with a series of those conjoined influences: “Aretha Franklin meets the Stooges,” or “Tina Turner fronting the MC5.” Between Kekaula’s wail and Vennum’s riffs, there’s something timeless in the way the BellRays make veins pop.

The formula has not changed on their new EP, “Punk Funk Rock Soul, Vol. 1,” which is the band’s first new original material since 2010 (Kekaula and Vennum released music as Lisa & the Lips in the interim). Vol. 1 came out in November; Vol. 2 is due in February; and it comes as advertised — the BellRays’ signature “revolution rock,” voiced by the one of the most powerful rock frontwomen in the past quarter-century. Start your engines.

||| Stream: “Mine All Mine”