Bob Belden
Black Dahlia (2001)

review by: Brandon Copple
Date: 5/16/01

I don't know anything about jazz, but I know atmosphere when I hear it, and Bob Belden's "Black Dahlia" has loads of the stuff – dark and menacing jazz that could soundtrack "Chinatown" or "L.A. Confidential" or damn-near any of the film noires that inspired this album. Belden's music will lift you out of your pathetic life and into a world of straight whiskey and twisted motives – a world where a man can take a punch and throw one too, where everybody knows more than they're telling and where, above all, dames aren't to be trusted. I want to live in this world. Which is why I obsess over the novels of Chandler, Hammett and Ellroy, why I rent all those old movies with Bogart and Mitchum, and why I love this CD.

It's a concept album built around the real-life noire of 1930s L.A. and the heinous, unsolved murder of a young would-be starlet dressed all in black. The press dubbed her the Black Dahlia. The name stuck and came back onto the pop landscape with James Ellroy's twisted, brilliant 1998 novel "The Black Dahlia." That book inspired the cool, ominous jazz on this album.

Buy it, listen to it. Then pour yourself a drink, push your hat back and get hard-boiled fast, cause buddy, we got enough soft sisters in this town.