The BellRays

Have a Little Faith (Lullaby)

By Sheba White
Published: July 5th, 2006 | 11:22am

Mavis Staples and Bob Dylan had a love child. That child grew up with Mavis in and around Chicago, Detroit, and Watts when the Staples family were signed to Stax Records and Booker T. & the MG's were their backup band, or later when they were working with Curtis Mayfield on

Let’s Do It Again

. The kid was there during all of that time. Well, most of it. The rest of the time the kid spent around her babysitters: Jimi, Aretha, Tina, and Iggy, until she was old enough to have her own band. There’s no other story that makes sense when listening to the BellRays’ lead singer Lisa Kekaula.

Have a Little Faith resonates with many of the band’s soul influences. Yet, the BellRays can clearly leave their predecessors’ recordings behind just as easily as they embrace them. “Motown schmotown ain’t nothin’ left / No more Iggy or the MC5,” Kekaula sings to some of their other progenitors in “Detroit Breakdown,” and once the vocal stance is set then it breaks down into the Dionne Warwick-inspired bossa nova “Lost Disciples” or the Ozzy Osbourne-vocal sweep of “Beginning From the End.”

Oh, it seems impossible, all right, like something that kids tell other kids in order to look cool, as in: “I saw this black chic sing like Ozzy once….” And maybe propagating urban myths will be the only way to explain how the BellRays can jump back and forth — musically, lyrically, and thematically — and yet sound completely free of self-consciousness about their genius.

Mythologized births aside, nothing like them has come along since X-Ray Spex. Whatever divine source brought the BellRays together must have needed them to make Have a Little Faith and must have needed us to follow the command of the album’s title when it comes to music.