“Baby 81″
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
RCA Records
(Out Of 5)
Face it. Particularly in the case of shoegaze, it’s never going to be as genuine as the late ’80s, early ’90s cusp. But entrenched in a battlefield of U.S. v. U.K. musical warfare dating back to the ’60s, many current bands continue to fight the good fight.
While the fighting itself may not exactly constitute the collar-flipping, New Musical Express-posing antics the members of Los Angeles-based Black Rebel Motorcycle Club engaged in rather prematurely (Virgin dropped them after their second album), the glacial aesthetic of “cool” has always managed to play itself out favorably, with just enough warmth: rooms of songs suspended in lush guitar verves, and live odes upon the band’s main U.K. influence, the Jesus and Mary Chain.
On “Baby 81,” the band returns to conventional influences after the shameless gospel singing and Dylanesque harmonica plugs from their previous album, “Howl.” Now taking cues from notorious music borrowers Led Zeppelin, the droning “666 Conducer” (like Zep’s “When the Levee Breaks”) is just one example of finding BRMC nestled comfortably in their own musical terrain, keeping nostalgia close by.
Drums are key for BRMC. Nick Jago’s assertive flairs make the album impossible to put down through the first three songs. “Baby 81″ begins with the crunchy Black Keys-riffing of “Took Out A Loan,” a blues stomp left over from the end of “Howl” recording sessions. Next is the catchy, high-hat driven “Berlin,” which has such a shaky balance between proto-political one liners and pulsating “oohs” that it could very well instigate a sexual revolution. The album’s single, “Weapon of Choice,” seems at moments a ready candidate for a car commercial, but redeems itself with monster truck guitar fender-bending by singer-guitarist Peter Hayes.
Vehicles aside, “Baby 81″ includes noteworthy slower tempo tracks as well. BRMC differentiates, wisely, between gospel and soul, tangling soul in the guitar raunch of “Killing the Light,” one of its most fully-realized ballads, featuring pristine falsetto by singer-bassist-guitarist Robert Levon Been. But it’s the nine-minute epic “American X” that earns these boys the letters on their leather jackets. The bleak anthem begins with a stomach-churning guitar intro that grinds through to the end as shoegaze vocals rush out of Hayes’ languid guitar interlude. Been’s delivery of lines like “There’s nothing left that you want to believe / Your fallen eyes are torn at the seams,” are defeated, faithless moments of verse, carrying a message the rash boyishness of the first LP’s “Generation” couldn’t have imagined conveying. For almost a decade now, the members of BRMC have offered a U.K.-distilled brand of Americana and a blues-inspired shoegaze which can make the observant listener dizzy.
Musically speaking, it remains unclear which terrain BRMC favors, but “Baby 81,” named after an infant claimed by nine different mothers before finding its family in the wake of 2004’s tsunami, plows through the listener with utmost gravity in pushing its own conflicts. American and British listeners alike never need ask “Whatever Happened To My Rock & Roll” again.
E-mail Kalenderian at tkalenderian@media.ucla.edu.