Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

What've You Got? - A Review of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club doesn’t shy away from being labeled retro. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club??? BRMC takes its name from the name of Marlon Brando’s gang in 'The Wild One', the 1954 biker epic that established Brando as the quintessential rebel of his generation. But BRMC’s image takes a back seat to the music; they also wear their musical influences on their (leather biker jacket) sleeves, playing loud, over-amped, reverb-stuporous rock inspired by those bands who rebelled against pop music—old schoolers the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and especially the British shoegazer bands from the 80’s—the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Ride.

Peter Hayes and Robert Turner are the architects of the band’s sound. Turner’s the group’s bassist and vocalist, and Hayes plays guitar (expatriate Englishman Nick Jago is the band’s drummer). In addition to co-writing the album’s songs, Hayes and Turner produced, engineered, and mixed the album themselves, and even had a hand in the album’s art direction.

Having developed a solid reputation as live performers and a high degree of recording studio technical expertise, BRMC got their career off to a solid start by producing a very polished demo disc. Record companies were soon stumbling over themselves to sign BRMC. The demo so impressed Oasis’s Noel Gallagher he wanted to sign them to his Brother Records, and went on record in MOJO magazine saying BRMC was his favorite band. Ultimately, though, the band chose Virgin Records.

Because their label allowed them to record their debut working both sides of the studio console, the band has produced a record that’s unusually focused, cohesive, and, well, gritty for a first album. It presents—like many of the best rock albums—an idealized version of the sound the band developed playing live prior to signing with Virgin, never straying from Hayes and Turners’s original vision of their music.

The songs on BRMC’s self-titled debut album fire like the pistons of a Harley engine, not unlike two other albums that should have found their way into your collection by now, the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells and Steve Wynn’s Here Come the Miracles. BRMC’s first album does one thing and does it well: seething, psychedelic-tinged garage rock that wanders the badlands between catchy melodies and white noise.

--Matt Parks (Feb 7, 2002)