<script async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808"
crossorigin="anonymous"></script>I’m from Indiana, did my college time at Indiana University. With this being the case, it was I think fall of 2003 before I actually got tipped off to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, whose name prior to that I’d just found hopelessly stupid. When it finally came time where they were propagated to middle America, I had this friend at IU who was from Milwaukee just gushing with praise for them: “I know you’re gonna love this disc! [1]” Then during “Red Eyes and Tears” he’d remark “It’s so dark!”, I guess acknowledging in me what was a general stereotype of a turn toward the lurid or the Noir. Indeed, I was one breakup past my former tradition of chilling, smoking weed laced with opium and listening to the Allman Brothers.
So, not really ever thanking him enough or considering him enough of a genius in the recommendations (he also got me into Don Caballero as well as Modest Mouse all of four months before “Float on” dropped), I didn’t so much gather as I did absorb by osmosis B.R.M.C. [2] as my default college soundtrack. And sitting here today on this rainy a** day in fall just takes me back to this mode I was in so vividly, where you’re kind of “on your own” [3] as to how you’re gonna muster up some optimism, or some swagger, even. Well, I, for one, was out at sea no longer.
And yes, it’s true, I think by the time I got into their first album their second album was already out, Take Them on, on Your Own. This sophomore LP actually would become a mainstay of my rotation too, with maybe even more synergy on these rainy fall nights. With the first album, though, the music itself takes sovereignty, spanning across all seasons and realms. One memory I have is riding in the car with my sister when I’d put “Awake” on a mix tape and seeing her almost go into a trance at how trippy and ethereal the guitar sound was. Another is I was listening to it with another friend back home one time and “White Palms” came on, to which he responded, almost like a knee-jerk, “Dude, I REALLY like this.” Indeed, “White Palms” is a spotlighted showcase of the band’s production mastery [4], with rude, booming bass given rabid firepower in the mix, and percussion that seems to give new meaning to the phrase “ear drums.” I think my friend favored the unflaggingly inquisitive lyrics too: “Jesus / When you going to come back home?” My personal favorite section of the album might actually be the segue that I think would straddle sides A and B, which would be “As Sure as the Sun” and “Take My Time”/“Rifles.” Indeed, in a way the two tracks are part and parcel to me: both saunter in deliberately and kind of spooky with the band’s signature scoff at the notions of rushing or being succinct. Fully comfortable in their sonic and melodic robes, then, they seem to awake from sleep, each, in awesome and infectious choruses, with “As Sure as the Sun” in particular ushering in a hearty and satisfying proliferation of guitar sound, at that point. “Rifles,” then, for its part, plays as a haunting dirge dedicated to a lost friendship, crouching either historically or metaphorically in the verse before paring things down to an astonishingly concrete chorus missive: “I see no color in your eyes”.
And I mean, how can you not love “Spread Your Love”? My cousin called it cheesy and I just couldn’t believe it: first of all that guitar sound is way too thick to play in Urban Outfitters or a cafe, as he claimed the song would be. And it’s just so EASY — it’s got the simplicity of a nursery rhyme (“Spread your love like a fever / And don’t you ever come down”), all lain rhythmically over that perfect riff that makes for one of the all-time great grooves in alt-rock, accentuated by that nervously giddy riff between the verses that seems to stand on uncertain stilts over a fire of dread and vituperation. “Head up High,” then, shepherds things into the night phenomenally with some of the most low-pitch vocals we’ve ever heard from Peter Hayes, and some lyrics that seem to lacerate the listener’s sense of stability and identity, like inviting us into some Dionysian abyss. So yeah, I am a little bit “dark,” I guess. “Goth” is a strong term, or at least it was.
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[1] For any foggies there that’s an obscure reference to the artifact known as “CD.”
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[2] This acronym version is actually the title of their first album but here I’m employing it as an abbreviation of the band name in general, as their couple subsequent albums would end up crashing my CD collections too.
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[3] Here I’m kind of coyly making half-reference to their second album Take Them on, on Your Own, which just did happen to have that sneering, defiant sense of independence about it, as well as a bunch of catchy and great songs.
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[4] The debut album is self-produced, according to Wikipedia.