(Muso's Guide, Apr 20th, 2009)
Single review
The ballad of Billy Boy On Poison is a familiar one.
Some might call it the alternative rock’n'roll dream - five teens got the calling from the God of Rawk and decided that they were one day going to own the stage like Van Halen.
Oh, that’s a tad unfair, actually.
BBOP’s singer and architect Los Angelean Davis cites David Bowie and Robert Plant as chief influences, and the band themselves take their name from Anthony Burgess’ revered literary hoopla A Clockwork Orange, so their credentials are actually not in question. It’s just the execution that is a little less Thin White Duke and a little more, well, David Lee Roth.
A thrusting rock riff draws blood before melting into a meat-and-potatoes rock verse with vocals that sound like they’ve been filtered through a loud hailer. There are various points of musical concern - incongruous guitar breaks and out-of-kilter middle eights - but generally it’s all just a bit try-hard.
It’s not that you can’t rock out young, but these guys - four guys and a girl, to be exact - are referencing too much music from the days before they were born and showing precious little understanding of why those legends became so, well, legendary.
The spectre of rock liggers like Little Barry hovers over Billy Boy On Poison like a decidedly pongy reminder of style-over-substance bands, and the aping of American rock vocalists is quite shameless. Even clocking in at just three minutes, ‘Standing Still’ honestly struggles to hold the attention for that long.
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