The Pack A.D are on tour. They are travelling through America in a van, eating up the road, living the dream. It might be idyllic for the raucous twosome from Vancouver, but it does not make for an easy interview.

Singer and guitarist Becky Black is the one taking the call, and she can’t hear what I’m saying. This is interesting, as I can’t hear what she’s saying either. But I guess you should expect that from a mobile phone reception in the back of a van somewhere in Maryland, on the way to Baltimore.

What’s more, Black is not the talkative sort – she’s one to let her searing and explosive blues duo (Maya Miller takes percussive duties in the duo) do the communicating on her behalf. Initially during our interview, she lives up to the line in The Pack A.D’s song ‘All Damn Day Long’: “I got up this morning / And these blues follow me all day long”.

“We met through a few friends,” says Black of how her band formed. They added the Anno Domini in order to distinguish themselves from Californian rap crew, The Pack. “We were just hanging out and decided to start a band on a whim, neither of us were musicians or anything. We (Black and Miller) broke off from the original band, which was four people.”

That was three years ago. The result of the split was an all-female blues duo that in their limited technical ability, massive volume, well-worn blues riffs and scratchy garage production garnered a fair bit of attention. They’ve released two albums, with last August’s Funeral Mixtape and 2007’s Tintype.

Thing is, the reception has not been entirely positive. Critics have, for example, pointed out the grating wail that is Black’s voice, which seems a curious flaw to pick up on.

While not being quite Joplin, Black undeniably possesses a primal feminine howl in which only the wholly unromantic won’t see a certain skid row majesty. The other thing is that Black and Miller use the rather limited palette that is blues lyrics, about hard done by lovers and whatnot… what is interesting is that both of these characteristics can easily apply to people like, say, Seasick Steve, The Black Keys and even The White Stripes. What’s different about The Pack A.D I wonder?

Like it or not, The Pack A.D are noticeable in this genre because they are two women. When asked how this has affected them Black probably shrugged dismissively when saying: “It hasn’t really I guess. It’s a form of music like any other, and anyone can play it.”

No fervent feminism here. Black is, however slightly more animated by the other observation their audience is apt to make. That being of course, that The Pack A.D are basically an inferior version of The White Stripes and wear this particular influence horribly obviously. It’s almost as if The White Stripes, bless their hearts, were the first people to play blues in this form. How much does it bother them?

“A little bit,” says Black. “It’s only accurate in that we’re a two-person group and we’re playing really simple garage rock that is blues-based, which is kinda what they were doing too.

“But it’s not really fair to say that we’re copying them or anything or any other bands, and there are many these days who are copying The White Stripes, and they weren’t the first band to do that.”

One thing they do share - to a certain extent anyway - with Jack and Meg (and indeed Seasick Steve), is an emphasis on grit and soul rather than instrumental ability. The Pack A.D can barely play. And while this does come across on record (especially their earlier recordings), they more than make up for it with things like ‘conviction’ and ‘passion’ and therefore tap into the very essence of blues.

“We’re not really that good,” says Black. “We don’t practice or anything… well we practice our songs, but that’s all.

We’re not really musicians, we don’t write music or anything, we just play it. The most important thing in our band is soul or heart or something – it’s not really technical ability. We just play with our hearts.”

As a consequence, The Pack A.D are best experienced live.

Indeed, the whole point of committing their sound to the studio was to “sound like we sound live. We didn’t want to add any extras or make it sound ridiculously overproduced.”

To that end, they recorded Funeral Mixtape on analogue equipment – a move more and more blues/psych/rock bands seem to be making, despite the fact it is slowly become less and less available as an option.

Anyway, The Pack A.D’s live energy is something to behold.
“We’ve improved drastically only in the past year,” says Black, “because of all the touring we’ve been doing. When we started out we were so nervous that we didn’t even move, we just stood there and played and didn’t look at anyone or anything.”

A quick YouTube search will reveal that things have very much changed since then – there some severely impressive examples of the two and their ‘non-musicianship’. It would be skating on the thin ice of sexual politics to say that they play in a ‘masculine’ way, (they are who they are! And who says the blues is the preserve of men anyway!) but they do have a certain brio that recalls the possessed electricity of bluesmen passed. Call it a robust swagger.

Of course, Black and Miller don’t exactly hail from the blues heartland, not that Vancouver isn’t a vibrant scene for the more rootsy musician. “There’s a lot of music coming out of Vancouver right now, with Black Mountain and whatnot. I think its pretty good, but you’ve got to get out of the city to get anywhere really, that’s why we left.”

Unfortunately, like Black Mountain (until their recent major success), The Pack A.D find it hard to make ends meet with just music and have needed to work. Full-time musicians on the road they are at the moment, but they’ve had to make the odd sacrifice.

“We quit out day jobs,” says Black, “but it still doesn’t really pay for anything, we both moved in with our parents.”
Enough to give anyone a case of the blues.