Hermione Hoby 

Wild Belle: Isles – review

The Brooklyn-based brother-sister duo's promising debut mixes sharp vocals with dub-inflected rhythms, writes Hermione Hoby
  
  


Wild Belle are a fashion-crowd-lauded brother-sister duo from Chicago who now, as custom dictates, find themselves settled in Brooklyn. Happily, their music is less predictable than that geographical inevitability. Elliot Bergman, who makes his own kalimbas (African thumb pianos) provides dub- and reggae-inflected lilt, while Natalie, the younger sibling, cuts through those island rhythms with a voice that's both sharp and sweet and which, on the more soulful tracks, has that same appealingly ragged quality as Amy Winehouse. It's well suited to the casually caustic lyrics, exemplified by Twisted's chorus of: "What's the definition of love if it isn't material things?"

 

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