Myles Black & the Pearly Whites' Folk Ass Bitch Music is filled with impressively diverse cuts

Chicks make things better, at least on Folk Ass Bitch Music, where singers Portia Boehm and Charlotte Coleman turn good songs into something great. The eight-track release is Myles Black’s show, but it’s the XX-chromosome faction of the Pearly Whites who often steal the thunder.

The album’s title suggests Ani DiFranco–indebted music for unwashed Commercial Drive radicals, while the band’s name would make a great moniker for a Blues Brothers–style R&B unit. What you get on the album’s impressively diverse cuts, however, is songs that are loosely tethered to the mean-nothing genre known as alt-country. The key word is loosely, as “Unwanted Pop” nods to Brylcreemed-rockabilly and “Tak’ Wahnin’” manages the seemingly impossible feat of dragging tribal jungle-boogie into the world’s most styling ’50s lounge.

Folk Ass Bitch Music doesn’t work so swell when Black and his hired guns are going the quirky route, with the kick-off track, “Totally Boss”, bringing to mind the Meat Puppets without the peyote-hazed charm. And on the Bo Diddley–beat surf-thumper “Cry, Cry” things get just this side of creepy, the bunny-boiler-inspired lyrics including “If you ever leave me I’ll cut myself” and “If you ever leave me I’ll fucking die.”

On the outright-lovely front, though, there’s the gothic-cowboy waltz “Baby Let’s Rot”, where Black is good and his hired ladies trade off vocal parts with results that are stone-cold sublime. Take a bow, ladies, while gently suggesting that maybe this project should change its name to the Pearly Whites With Myles Black who, in his defence, is smart enough to know that there’s nothing wrong with sharing the spotlight.