BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB

Despite choosing such an embarrassingly blockheaded name that even a fifteen year old boy would reject as too clumsy and posing the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are actually one of the better bands to have emerged in the Strokes' wake, back at the turn of the millennium. It seems strange now to think back to the moment when every new band went from being vastly uninspired to obviously inspired by classic bands of previous eras. It is understandably hard these days to come up with a dazzling new sound and I'd always take a band that tried to recreate the rock'n'roll fantasies of their punk and post-punk heroes than the previous batch of ugly kids unsuccessfully trying to ape Radiohead and Jeff Buckley's dullest songs. Of course, if a band is immediately losing marks in the originality department it needs to make it up with other positive characteristics. A few might succeed with astonishing musicianship (Mars Volta), or sheer style and poise (Interpol, Franz Ferdinand), but the obvious fall-back for these young upstarts is simply great songwriting. So we were happy to welcome the Strokes and Libertines, whilst the likes of the Hives soon lost their appeal when the sheen had been rubbed off to reveal not very much beneath. The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have led a rather rockier path. They never cracked the pop scene and their heavily stylised image put off the more sceptical of the hacks. They are good songwriters but perhaps their greatest strength has simply been their staying power. Despite not selling as many records as many of their rivals, long-running problems with record labels (arising no doubt from the former), and internal disputes (with drummer Nick Jago in and out more than once), they have still managed to put out three good records that all have enough on them in part to suggest they might be here for the long haul.

The original gimmick of the band was the fact that despite coming from California (originally San Francisco before relocating to L.A.) they took most of their influences from the little-popularised British neo-psychedelic scene of the late eighties. Their debut album saw them often compared with the likes of Spaceman 3 and Jesus and Mary Chain but the best stuff was that which was closest to good old-fashioned rock'n'roll. They refined such a sound on their second album, which was simultaneously slicker and flabbier than the debut, before performing an abrupt volte-face and penning an almost all acoustic third album (due mainly to Jago's absence) which mostly took in their native influences of country-based 'Americana' and, less dubiously, Bob Dylan. Unfortunately, no album is consistent enough for it to reach classic status but there is enough on each, along with the obvious progression, to suggest that the band might be capable of one in the future. I have seen them live twice now and whilst the first time (just after BRMC's release) they were interminably dull they were much tighter in the wake of Howl's release which is again suggestive of the fact they are developing into a more formidable prospect than a mere over-stylised retrospective rip-off band.

Given rock music was undergoing a rapid renaissance during the early noughties Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were one of the many new bands to generate a significant buzz before even recording an album. Initially championed by Oasis (not much of a benefit, I'd wager) a bidding war developed between various record labels with Virgin eventually winning out, no doubt slipping a significant fortune the band's way. The album that surfaced actually more or less justified the frenzy that had surrounded the band, not least because it contained two potential smash hits in the form of the traditionalist "Whatever Happened to My Rock'n'Roll?" and the neo-glam rock boogie of "Spread Your Love". Both indeed were minor hits (in England at least) but the album did not take off in the same way the major exports like Is This It and White Blood Cells had. Whilst Virgin may curse the fact that the rest of the album did not include any quite so straight-forward crowd-pleasers it was still a remarkably strong set, with a melodic depth that ensured a substantial longevity that has certainly kept me coming back over the years. As has already been said in the introduction, initially the band were hailed as suckling pups to the works of the early-nineties British alternative scene, although such comparisons are primarily superficial. The shoe-gazing comparisons must surely have originated only from people who watched their motionless live shows (a terribly shy bunch of boys) given one would be very hard pushed to pick out any really similarities with, say, My Bloody Valentine. I am unfamiliar with early Verve and Spaceman 3 but, even so, it is surely primarily the fuzzy production and brooding vocals that drew comparisons with them and Jesus and Mary Chain. At the heart of this record, really, is just good old-fashioned rock'n'roll. "Whatever Happened to?" is as much an answer as it is a question as the band obviously intend to restore faith in a genre that had taken an increased battering as every new Travis tribute band was formed. Quite frankly, the influence is incidental when the group hit their stride with brooding, fuzzed-up rock anthems like "Rifles", "As Sure as the Sun", and "Love Burns". Although the weaker moments are usually the ponderous ones the blackened redemption of "Head Up High" is one of the clear stand-outs, with its steely, defiant chorus. It certainly would have made for a better closer than the plodding "Salvation", along with "Too Real", a blunt ballad. Similarly, when the band do try too hard to ape their alternative influences the quality tends to drop with the deliberately abrasive "White Palms" lacking the usual attention to the actual melody (I was also unfortunate enough to have to sit through it at both gigs). And, that, neatly is the real issue at the heart of this album. Despite the over-attention to style and imagery and the unnecessary weight of retrospective influences, when the band thrash out their own appropriation of rock'n'roll against a set of reassuringly strong melodies it becomes clear that this album has fulfilled its initial promise of outlasting the mere faddishness of the times. Not just a strong debut but one that deserves to be regularly returned to in the years to come.

Such is the nature of the music industry at the moment that it is pretty easy for practically any new band to make waves with their debut album. What has proved significantly more difficult, and a strong indicator of the real quality of a band, is following up the debut with a successful second album. As it happens, it has proved to be the public that are more discerning than the critic with many secondary efforts receiving complimentary reviews only to be disdainfully left on the shop's shelves by the buyers of their debut albums. Typically, BRMC's effort at consolidating their position was met by fawning reviews (9/10 album of the year, according to the NME) and a steep decline in sales figures. Virgin were far from impressed and when challenged by the band over their perceived lack of support told them to sling their hook and take their under-performing albums with them. I myself am guilty of not following up on promising debuts and cannot tell you whether the sophomore releases by the likes of the Vines, Hives, and Cooper Temple Clause deserved to flop but I can categorically say that anyone who regards this album as a shadow of B.R.M.C.'s excellent debut either hasn't heard it or is trying too hard to save face in the wake of its commercial failure. I loved this album when it came out and I still love it now. I might be the only person in the world prepared to rank it as their best effort to date but that doesn't meant the majority aren't wrong. The most prominent improvement over the debut is the fact that the band are so much tighter. The songwriting is just as melodic but the majority of the songs are leaner, tighter, and more concise bursts of hi-octane rock'n'roll and ominous gothic anthems. The band might have reached their immature posing extreme with the unwieldy, cheesey album title but there is no doubting the sincerity of the cynical sneer on propulsive opener "Stop" or the snarl on the rock'n'roll extreme of "Six Barrel Shotgun", a far heavier re-run of "Whatever Happened to My Rock'n'Roll". Furthermore, almost every facet of the band's original approach has been defined and refined with almost effortless bravado. The breathlessly anthemic "We're All in Love" is probably their finest individual effort to date, along with the punishing, darkened charge of "Rise or Fall", led by a wonderfully fuzzed-up bass riff. The highlights on here easily surpass the admittedly brilliant material on B.R.M.C. and a listen to just them could easily convince one that the band reached perfection on only their second release. Unfortunately, the album irreparably suffers from an overload of mediocre material, all placed in the middle-third (bar the muddled-but-rockin' "U.S. Government"), which weighs down the overall listening experience to a notable degree. Whilst the first four tracks (ending with the acidic "In Like the Rose") and the last four (beginning with the brooding "Suddenly") are material worthy of any band's name the overall album is compromised by far too much unnecessary filler (troughing with the ill-informed acoustic ballad "And I'm Aching"). In this way, even though the songwriting of the band is at its tightest their quality control is simultaneously at its slackest meaning a great follow-up is reduced into being merely a very good one. It is still surprising it flopped so badly as many of these songs made for potentially smash hit singles but this time it was the swooning critics that were bang on the money and not the fickle indie kids. One listen to the likes of "We're All in Love" and "Rise or Fall" should be enough to dispel any doubts that this is a band that belongs to the top flight.

By rights, the undeserved commercial failure of Them Them On, On Your Own should have signalled the end to Marlon Brando's motorcycling friends. They found themselves without a record label when Virgin dropped them and without a drummer when Jago said 'see you losers later' and took leave. But, in a Simpsons-style 'crisistunity' the band salvaged victory from the jaws of defeat. They took their time finding a new record label, making sure it would be one that would be patient and supportive rather than with dollar signs for eyes, and took the blow of losing a drummer as an opportunity to change direction and experiment with a different approach to songwriting. Robert Turner also changed his name to Robert Levon Been but I don't quite know how that fits into the comeback story. Instead of taking their inspiration from their favourite bands from their teenage years Hayes and Levon Been looked back not to their own formative years but the formative years of music as a whole. They no longer needed to pander to the British-born Jago by pretending to love English music and instead embraced their own heritage, in the form of American folk, country, blues and, essentially, all the sorts of songs you can only write with an acoustic guitar. Some of this stuff does sound genuinely pre-rock'n'roll, the traditionalist "Fault Line" in particular, but mainly due to their croaky vocals the vast majority simply sounds like early Bob Dylan. No more so than on the excellent "Complicated Situation", which could've come straight out of any of Dylan's acoustic albums (or the second half of Bringing it All Back Home). Of course, ripping off Bob Dylan makes for very slippery ground and it is to the band's immense credit that this album rarely sounds anything other than sincerely genuine and authentic. The obvious criticism to be made is that an entirely acoustic album does not make for the most diverse of offerings but the band manage to take in and experiment with enough varying styles for each track to stand out from the other. "Shuffle Your Feet" and "Ain't No Easy Way" are surprisingly up-tempo, with the delta stomp of the latter calling to mind Led Zeppelin's "Bron-y-Aur Stomp". The best material on here also suggests the band have matured as songwriters with the brooding "Weight of the World" and the weary and climatic title track being two of their most impressive songs. There was even a happy ending to this whole saga as Nick Jago realised the grass isn't always greener and rejoined the boys, but only in time to play on the superb power ballad "Promise", which drops the Bob Dylan impersonation for a John Lennon one instead. In fact, drums appear on nearly every track but clearly it was their absence in the songwriting sessions that so affected the change in style. Unfortunately, it is the narrowed approach that holds the album back. Although the majority of the songs are distinct and impressive enough some tracks retreat too much into acoustic mood, with "Gospel Song" being too generic and the likes of "Devil's Waitin'" and "Restless Sinner" being just a little too much old-fashioned. It is an obvious point to make but if the admirably mature and accomplished acoustic material on here had been spruced up a touch with some songs akin to the rock'n'roll classics from the two preceding albums then this would have gone from being a successful comeback to being a great one. Doubtless this is an album that has silenced the internal doubts as much as the external ones and if the band's progression can be maintained who knows where they might end up in the future.

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Email me at: jackfeeny@yahoo.co.uk