Music
by Saby Reyes-Kulkarni
For a while there, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s haircuts provided an all-too-fitting window into the band’s music. An ambitious mélange of psychedelia, blues-rock, garage and British-angled pop, the Los Angeles group clearly had no problem coming up with a distinct sound. But more often than not, the material sank under the weight of its own surface gloss, and leather-clad album covers conceived with such obvious nods to fashion design suggested a self-conscious desire to cultivate an aura before the music caught up.
On paper, BRMC’s vague sense of darkness matches perfectly with their music’s brooding tone, but it’s no fun to listen to records when you can hear marketing right there in the grooves—no matter how clever it appears for three musicians who probably aren’t bikers to cast themselves in leather jackets and lurk in doorways. (The band’s name is drawn from Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang in The Wild One.)
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Playing Wednesday, 6th at City Hall w/The CobbsBut finally, BRMC give listeners the opportunity to throw down the CD booklet and just get lost in in sound with their just-released new stomper, Baby 81, a move that renders the band’s image-consciousness moot. (This time, it wouldn’t have even mattered if that woefully superficial image-monger David LaChapelle had shot the album cover.) On Baby 81, BRMC encapsulate everything that trend-followers would look for in records by the White Stripes and their blues-rock ilk, while suggesting new creative horizons.
Opener “Took Out a Loan” takes us down those familiar Mississippi dirt roads and unabashedly channels the ghost of...Robert Johnson? Not exactly. Try everyone’s favorite carpetbaggers instead: John Bonham and Jimmy Page. So convincing is this tune’s “Black Dog”-styled groove that any bands tempted to plow the same over-farmed soil—and we know that hundreds upon hundreds wait in the wings—will hopefully think twice about going back there. “If I’d been mistaken,” sings Peter Hayes, “I’d be confused about the way it’s done.” No worries—Hayes and his bandmates quickly achieve an effortless glide in finding their voice and letting it rip.
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Then, as if to issue an achtung to bands trying to sell us the same blues-rock bridge we’ve fallen for way too many times, BRMC execute a perfect lane change into “Berlin,” a song with hard-rock crunch not delivered with this much verve since, uh, Stone Temple Pilots. No lie: you know a band’s mojo is working when it can go from aping Scott Weiland to Robert Palmer to John Lennon on the same record (and blatantly at that) and avoid the Buick-sized cliché potholes those artists left in the road behind them. Here BRMC rattle off one style after another, including shoegaze and acoustic strum-strum ballads, finally giving us catchy, memorable, invigorating tunes—and a multi-faceted mix to match.
Apparently, breaking up helped this band more than it hurt. After losing drummer Nick Jago in 2004, remaining members Hayes and Robert Been took an abrupt, well-received detour into acoustic-based folk on 2005’s overtly Ginsberg-referencing Howl, which soon enough led to Jago’s return. The time apart must have worked some serious charm on the band’s writing process. Jago claims he spent most of the time recording the album on the verge of tears, and it’s easy to see why, particularly if he was thinking he’d nearly derailed his band before it reached its prime.
BABY 81 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (RCA)
Sure, BRMC tickled critics and peers early on with their self-titled release, but here they bring an unprecedented focus to their clever, stridently left-of-center amalgamation of styles. Mystery, it turns out, isn’t something you can contrive. You can strike lurking poses in as many darkened doorways as you like, but you just have to let it happen. Let Baby 81 be that lesson for us all.