The Black Box Revelation

The dark arts of rock’n’roll can be practised in all kinds of places. But up until now, the city of Brussels hasn’t had the most illustrious of histories. Meet the Black Box Revelation, the two-headed sexy-rock hybrid set to blaze a white-hot trail through 2009’s very soul.

BBR are 19-year-old Jan Paternoster (guitar/vocals) and 17-year-old Dries Von Dijck (drums). Hearing their debut album ‘Set Your Head On Fire’ and you won’t believe that this explosive brand of funked-up punk blues is made by just two people. Witness their incinerating live show and, after checking that your eyes are still working, you still won’t quite believe it.

The teenage twosome 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.

Our story begins in early 2006 when the pair, friends since childhood, found themselves playing in their first proper band, The Mighty Generators, with Jan’s brother and a mutual friend. The scarcity of live music in their hometown saw them 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.

Entering both demo tapes, they found that The Mighty Generators got knocked out in the first round, while the nascent new line-up survive to the final. It was obvious what they had to do. Rather than sacking the other members, they decided just to quit The Mighty Generators themselves. And from here, in a roundabout way, their band was named. The Black Box, of course, is the component from a doomed aircraft that lets investigators know what happened. The Mighty Generators may have crashed and burned, but from the wreckage, inspiration was found. “You look inside the black box, and what you discover is us,” reasons Dries. “Also, it just sounded cool!”

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 ferociously loud. 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.

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; and listening to old records alongside newer stuff, a bit of everything. Most of it came from the way we were playing our instruments. It was like it just happened by itself.”

Peer inside the Black Box, and what’s inside is indeed nothing less than a revelation. You might think that the tender White Stripes twang of lead single (???????) ‘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 voices in the head of a schizophrenic protagonist. The video, directed by Joris Rabijns, sees the band performing live on the roof of a building, Jan haunted by a sinister female version himself, mouthing the words back at him.

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 this electrifying live campaign has won them fans wherever they plug in and play, and their live shows aim to be nothing less than a bringer of life itself. “In the modern world, people need something to give them energy,” says Dries. “We want to give them that.”