Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Baby 81

(RCA)

Record Review by Marcel Feldmar

So here we are, another Black Rebel Motorcycle Club album on our hands, and I have to admit… I was worried. About seven years ago (yes, really… seven) I found myself wondering exactly what had happened to my rock ‘n’ roll… then I realized that the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club had found it. I joined instantly – seeing them live in Seattle opening for the Waterboys – I had no idea what to expect, but found myself instantly enthralled with the smooth pop rock fuzz distortion crashing out from behind red lights and black shadows. I barely even remember hearing the headliners at all, as I was so immersed in the sounds of BRMC.

Since then it’s been a hard journey, trying to reconcile what I first had seen and heard with what was to come afterwards. I’ve seen this band play live about eight times now, including one in-store that they say they never played. I’ve seen them in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Toronto. I’ve listened to their albums and EPs, seen the videos, and thrown their songs onto mixtapes and into my DJ sets. I never gave up, even though sitting through 2003’s Take Them On, On Your Own was a struggle, holding hints of the previous album, pushing through some slick and catchy driving bass lines that made me swoon, but it still failed to capture me like their debut did.

Then they hit that acoustic spot with their live shows and their 2005 release of Howl. I swear, I was almost in tears, and not those good tears that I had when I first heard the band, either. It’s not that it was bad, or even unwanted… I appreciate the Blues, I love the old school Bob Dylan and the guitar string swing of the Mississippi Delta men. I didn’t want it from this band, though. I loved the sliding sound the gospel swing, the dark overtones that hit between the tambourine shakes, but when I hear that, I want to be listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson, or 16 Horsepower, or even the Cowboy Junkies. Just not from this band. It was like Iggy Pop suddenly doing a shoegaze album, or, probably more like if you went and bought the third album from The Strokes, and it was all '70s power ballads. I mean, I thought “Shuffle Your Feet” was an amazing song, but perhaps it should have been offered by Spirtualized, or even Ryan Adams for that matter. Perhaps the sounds that made me think of The Beatles or even Steve Earle would’ve been better off coming from somewhere else. I didn’t feel betrayed, I felt let down, I felt like this was the band that had promised to bring back that rock ‘n’ roll and they brought back something entirely different. I wanted a continuation of “White Palms” and “Spread Your Love.” I wanted those bass lines that hit on songs like “Ha Ha High Babe.” I wanted “In Like The Rose” and “Red Eyes And Tears.” It’s not that I wanted everything to sound the same, I wanted this band to keep moving forward and making new sounds that let my ears smile. I wanted the future to sound as good as or better than the past, and what I got with Howl was a few steps backwards.

It’s like the band hit such a high and distant target dead-on with album number one, and then with the second album, they started to feel locked in to that sound and needed to find a new twist, which brought about the third album. I think this is where it fell apart. Album number three was a history lesson. It was band homework and the songs should have been left to find their way on to miscellaneous B-sides and into random live shows. It shouldn’t have become the band like it did. I didn’t want to see them play live after seeing them perform those Howl songs, I didn’t want to hear what they were going to do next, because I was worried, scared… and the band that almost saved me, almost made me, again, lose my faith in this rock and roll. Please don’t become an alt.country band. Please don’t leave the electricity behind. Please don’t let the next album sound like The Wallflowers.

Then Baby 81 hits, and I’m saved. It breathes again, it moves again, and it takes what they learned by playing through the blues and pushes it against the noise they had made in the past. They rediscover electric like Bob Dylan did in 1965 and they come out swinging again, hitting Led Zeppelin with a black nite crash. It still doesn’t wrap me up and carry me away as far as their debut did, but that’s always a very difficult thing to do. It does come close, though, and while I may still not appreciate their last album as much as some, I now understand it, and that alone is worth something. I can listen without worry, I can respect and value the songs and sounds that this band gives.

The sounds… there are so many here. I mentioned Led Zeppelin because they push out that “Kashmir” groove in “666 Conducer” and it makes me swoon. I say Bob Dylan because they hit those notes with extra guitar noise, and they take what they’ve learned from their alt.country experimentations and put them to good use with melodies that take something from The Beatles and Wilco and place them into a Love & Rockets, Jesus & Mary Chain space, like “It’s Not What You Wanted” and “Need Some Air.” It’s the BRMC sound transformed again, but back into something dark and rock. This is what is happening to my Rock ‘n’ Roll, and I like it.

The guitars and the drums move effortlessly back into the atmosphere created on the first two albums, “666 Conducer” pulling from perhaps “Rifles,” “American X” has a beautifully familiar guitar sound that wouldn’t be out of place on some version of “Spread Your Love,” and “Weapon of Choice” has some ties to “Stop,” but then there’s an added spaciousness within the songs, a depth that wasn’t there earlier. There were hints of it, like on “Salvation” from their self-titled album, maybe “And I’m Aching” off the second release, but now, after exploring some new roots, or even digging deeper into their own, these blues are even sadder and more solid.

The sounds and styles explored within “Howl” are now infiltrating their earlier influences and bringing in a new life, a new originality, while still remaining true to the vision of the band and keeping in tune, in time, in a voice familiar to the fans. “It’s Not What You Wanted” pulls out the swampy slide and blues, but saturates it with distortion. “Killing the Light” is a laid back Stonesy groove that moves against a fuzzed out shadow, and then “Lien On Your Dreams” hits with a White Stripes vibe, if those stripes were more into listening to Creation Records than hanging out in garages. Blues and rhythm, rock and soul, pop and noise and feeling vibrant and alive.

ZZ Top (and I’m talking Tres Hombres here) meets the Dandy Warhols kicking out from under the guitar riffing and floor hitting beat of “Took Out a Loan,” with wailing solos that pull at the veins. There are new sounds coming in, and old sounds being made better. Piano pop on “Window” that jumps out like some old school Britpop, but with an Americana twist. Crooning vocals that sway over psychedelic treats that flow through bass and piano. Like James playing Whiskeytown tunes. Could Howl have been that point where the band sits down, like some neo-psychedelic goth pop rock version of that scene in Bill & Ted, and they realize that before they can become a great world-changing band, they need to go back in time and learn how to play their instruments? Perhaps that’s what their third album was… a sonic version of the telephone booth time machine, but instead of looking for Van Halen, they went and found Mississippi Fred McDowell.

It’s not only the sound, but the subject matter within the songs seems to have shifted as well. There has always been a little bit of the religious iconography appearing in the songs, but after the choir touched savior soul of Howl, it’s nice that the band has managed to move a step away from the obvious connections, though some of the same worlds are explored. The sneer, the attitude, the waves of noise are still there, or should I say back, but now they have been placed in different positions, there is more meaning behind the mood. It’s not a band reinventing themselves here, it’s a band finding themselves. Baby 81 is the best next record that the Black Rebel Motorcycle could have made. It’s like they brought the rock, lost the rock, went searching, and finding it, they give it back to us, and I, for one, am thankful.