Black Tulips Demo

The Black Tulips, much like their name suggests, are a band of contradictions. Occasionally they are the aural equivalent of a pot of earl grey in a cottage café with trains adorning the table cloths and a petite older lady called 'Betsy' minding the stove. Maverick frontwoman Alexandra's sultry, cut-glass accent and tales of Ice Cream vans and daytime television on 'I don't want you' could not be more quintessentially English if the
chorus were sung by the Barmy Army following a particularly good day at Lords.

However, as much as The Black Tulips revel in following an esteemed lineage of great literary English songwriters, their sound is very much reflective of the twenty-first century. After all, a bottle of cider by the duck pond is just as English an image as anything Dickens conjured. Guitarist Tris' distorted, fuzzy riffs jangle and jar in equal measure and  coupled with relentlessly sharp bass lines provide a pleasing sonic backdrop to the soaring vocals upon which everything The Black Tulips do is centred.

'It's not often a band can be believed in' screams the promotional information which accompanies this demo, and while that might a bit of an assertion too far, these nine minutes of entertaining contradiction have definitely proved a step in the right direction.

Jack Shankly