KEY POINTS:
The Bellrays are a soul rock band - like Aretha Franklin meets the Stooges or the MC5. It's the sort of comparison that guitarist and songwriter Tony Fate hates. Sorry, but it's pretty close.
Fate does a good Mr Grumpy impression but he's one of those grumps who are lighthearted and cheeky with it.
One thing he does agree on is the Bellrays are equal parts animalism and brains, something you can check out on Wednesday when they play at Auckland University's Vesbar as part of Orientation Week.
"You know, you have to give into your animal lust and that's where rock'n'roll comes from. But the brain matter is important too, or else you're just going to sound like everybody else.
"Plus, there's a history of dumb rock. Just the stupid head-banging type of music which I dig, and we all dig it, the whole band digs it, but there's a point where you want to think a little more and have a little more lasting power than a bumper-sticker.
"Don't get me wrong. I don't mean dumb rock as an insult. There's great dumb rock. Highway To Hell [by AC/DC] is dumb rock, but man, that's a song you can play anywhere in the world and people just go insane. It's the national anthem of rock'n'roll."
You can't really blame people for being baffled by the Bellrays' mix of rock and soul. On their latest album, Have A Little Faith, they move from the blistering Detroit Breakdown, to the gentle croon of Lost Disciples. Then there's stints of what the band call the tornado ("A jazz approach to punk rock."), and on to the prog-rock slant of the Beginning From the End.
"We're not going to stand up there and be all slick like the Eagles," says Fate. "You can't be all things to all people.
"We just do what we do and don't follow trends, and maintain our integrity. And you look back at music from the past, and The Who could do that, the Rolling Stones went from Brown Sugar to Angie.
"In the old days a band was expected to have more variety. Nowadays, if a band comes out and does something a little different from the other songs they've done people are thrown off. But no matter what kind of song we do, we always have our personality. It always sounds like the Bellrays."
Much of that personality, and what makes the Bellrays special, comes from singer Lisa Kekaula, a booming soul diva with a serious afro and voice to match. You might remember her from singing on the Basement Jaxx tracks Good Luck and You Don't Know Me.
Kekaula and bass player Rob Vennum formed the band in the early 90s in Riverside, Southern California, and soon after recruited Fate.
Vennum and Fate both write the songs. Fate says some of them come in five minutes, others take five years - seven years in the case of Evil Morning, on 2000's Grand Fury album.
Fate's older brothers and sisters got him into music like the Temptations, the Ronettes and the Beatles.
It's those bands, as well as Detroit rockers the MC5, which inspired Fate to want to play rock'n'roll for real.
The first time he heard MC5's Kick Out the Jams was when his brother had just come back from Vietnam. He was washing his car and playing the band's live album from 1968.
"I heard this crazy wild music," Fate says. "I was just this little kid running around in the yard and I thought, 'What the hell is that?'.
"That's what got me into writing songs and playing guitar. Back then they wrote songs that said what they needed to say in two and a half minutes. And that's kind of the way we do things now."
PERFORMANCE
*Who: The Bellrays
*What: High-octane Southern Californian soul rock
*Where & when: Vesbar, Auckland University, February 28.
*Albums: Have A Little Faith (2006); Meet the Bellrays (2003); Grand Fury (2000); Let It Blast (1998).
