Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Virgin
The members of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club want to be in the Jesus and Mary Chain so bad you can almost taste it.
Exhibit A
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For proof, look no further than the album cover (compare with JAMC's debut album, Psychocandy, at right) and liner note photographs, from the black leather jackets, punk rock hair and photos that show its members rocking out in a swirl of dry-ice fog all the way through the JAMC-style song titles. "As Sure as the Sun," "Rifles," "Salvation" and "Whatever Happened to My Rock 'n' Roll" comically recall the Mary Chain's "Sundown," "Blues from a Gun," "Reverence" and "I Hate Rock 'n' Roll."
And it's almost too obvious to comment on the whole BRMC/JAMC angle, but I did it anyway.
Throw the album on your stereo, and within about a minute you can guess half the records in the band members' collections. There's the deadpan Mary-Chain-style vocals, bouncy Joy Division-y bass lines, blurred-out, My-Bloody-Valentine-style guitar interludes and an Oasis drum sound so huge you could curl up inside it for a week before you even thought about things like food and water. On a lesser scale, there are nods to the Verve, the Stone Roses and Ride. Of course, all these bands owe a lot to the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones, and it's no surprise B.R.M.C. namechecks those bands on its website, which looks too deliberately low-tech for a major-label band.
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Few groups who wear their influences so brazenly on their sleeves are ever any good, so it's surprising that BRMC tends toward not-bad, occasionally hitting heights of worth-checking-out.
"Love Burns," which kicks off the album, is a terrific rock 'n' roll number, with a muddy, instrumental guitar intro that gives way to those glorious drums, acoustic and electric guitars and so-much-cooler- than-you-could- ever-hope-to-be JAMC vocals. It's almost enough to make you wonder if BRMC plays 20-minute, riot-inducing sets with its backs to the audience like JAMC did back in the mid '80s.
The next closest thing to greatness on the album is "Whatever Happened to My Rock 'N' Roll (punk song)." The band picks up the tempo, and the lead vocals lean more toward glam rock than any of the bands mentioned above. Guitars grind and the drums back off a bit, letting the catchy chorus come through.
The members of BRMC clearly love what they do, and the musicianship and songwriting aren't bad. If only they didn't remind me of all the bands I used to listen to in college and if these lines
Jesus when you comin' back?
Jesus never comin' back
Jesus won't take me back
Jesus never coming home
from "White Palms" didn't immediately recall these
I wanna die just like Jesus Christ
I wanna die on a bed of spikes
I wanna die just like JFK
I wanna die on a sunny day
from JAMC's banned-by-the-BBC hit "Reverence," I could maybe like this album.
Which is to say Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is a great record for anyone who's not a jaded music nerd. Those who think "Happy When It Rains" is a Garbage song won't mind that BRMC sound like so many other bands that if you were to open a 1993 issue of Alternative Press to a random page, you'd find a BRMC "influence" staring back at you. The group's big rock sound and well-thought-out ballads are exactly what's needed on the college rock arena, and it's frankly a lot more comforting to think of a black-clad teenager or 20-nothing rocking out to heroin rock like this instead of joining the sweaty masses for the next concert by Dave Matthews Band or Creed.
As for those other jaded music nerds out there, give BRMC time. The group'll grow out of it.
— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)
