“On the Extent to Which We Can Take Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Howl Album as Apocrypha”

Somewhere within my recent tenure of teaching Freshman Writing at Indiana State, I developed this idea on what the “conclusion” of an essay should represent. It dawned on me, randomly, that it could be a platform for the objectives of others to develop theses, or central points, on the topic, based on the essay you’ve just written. It’s a portal into future discourse.

Howl comes from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, 2005. It’s comparable, perhaps, to Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, for several reasons. One would be that, although it’s a third album, it strips things down and gets more emotional than ever, letting bare, acoustic production spotlight what seems to be a newly rejuvenated approach to songwriting. Another would be that it contains a staggering, profuse amount of pain and melancholy, and the sort of wisdom that seems to typically accompany these maladies.

I vaguely remember purchasing the album on CD in Bloomington, my senior year at IU, finding it listenable but probably not as “classic” as their mind-blowing debut, B.R.M.C. (2001), or their sneering jawbreaker of a sophomore effort, Take Them on, on Your Own (2003). At the time, I was on a huge Morrissey, You are the Quarry kick, so you might say I didn’t have any more room in my psyche for any additional whining and moping. Morrissey was ample enough in that department to handle exclusive duties.

I hung onto the disc, though, letting it slowly sink in. And it’s hard to say how it happened but I ended up liking it, eventually, about as much as their first two records. On this one B.R.M.C. mix, I put three songs on from each album, totaling 18 songs, ultimately. The six I put on from Howl were “Devil’s Waitin’”; “Suspicion Holds You Tight”; “Fault Line”; “Promise”; “Restless Sinner” and “Gospel Song.” And as long as I live, I’ll never forget this exact set of these six tracks that I put on this disc, though I have no idea what tracks I chose from the other two albums.

So there’s something ABOUT Howl. That’s what I’m trying to say here. I don’t think it was the album anybody WANTED them to make. As I mentioned earlier, it’s quite acoustic as compared to their former records, perhaps comparable to an extent in this way to Wilco’s turn toward bedroom pop on the almost concurrently bequeathed A Ghost is Born (2004). Something about the present landscape leading up to Howl’s construction and recording told the band to shred the rock veneer and “get down to Jesus,” in a pretty startling way. And all the gospel themes, images of mortality and a sort of almost hopeless, hard-won wisdom act poignantly to both sound the death knell of commercial rock as we know it and illustrate what the future could hold for people still precariously interested in creating this type of thing and making money doing it.

2005 was certainly a time when the future of music seemed considerably uncertain. The recent garage rock revival of The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives and company was starting to wear thin, with each of those bands having contributed two stripped-down, punky albums to the classic canon already. I think it was the general predicament to wonder how much more meaningful clones of Green Day tracks these guys had in them. Hip-hop fans were disenchanted to the point where rappers who lambasted popular rap music were revered, such as Talib Kweli and Sage Francis. The idea of what music in the impending decade and beyond was going to be was certainly murky at best.

So Black Rebel Motorcycle Club pared things down, made simple, direct and undeniable statements and went with what will always work: deep expressions of human sympathy. “Promise,” for instance, perhaps the best track on the album, embodies one of the most touching second-person accounts of grace ever witnessed on popular rock: “I’ll comfort you / I’ll stay with you / That’s a promise / Not forgotten”. These gentle words are delivered over soft percussion and steady but firm piano riffing, which guides the song’s melodic drive.

“Gospel Song” gets more humanistically abstract but more spiritually specific, proclaiming “I will stand with Jesus / Until I can’t take / Another stone… And the people must know / Not to feel any sorrow”. Robert Levon Been is in the business of absolving suffering here and business is good, replete with that anointing sound effect we get in the similarly Christ-handling “White Palms” from their first album.

Another track that works very well on Howl is “Still Suspicion Holds You Tight.” Like the other composite lyrical swatches active on this LP, it seems to deliver messages that are starkly, amazingly devoid of ambition and judgment. The rhetoric, that is, seems preternaturally prone to dissolving on point, after it emits its subtle guidance to this sort of implicitly embraced ideal of humility and self-awareness applicable to everybody. Another particularly amazing thing about this song, and about this album and band in general, is that “Suspicion Holds You Tight,” though it seems to impeccably jibe with the rest of the album both musically and in disposition of lyrical themes, is actually the work of Been’s bandmate, Peter Hayes. Truthfully, for a while, I didn’t even know that it were two different singers and songwriters working collectively on these tracks. They seem to mesh with each other with this otherworldly ease and purpose. “Still Suspicion Holds You Tight” sidles along with grimness and a sure sense of mourning but also just enough festivity to qualify it as one of the album’s more energetic tracks. All the structural cracks seem inundated with playful, verbose harmonica soloing, lending itself to this album’s ironically eclectic feel, despite its general simplicity of production. It’s rare to hear an effects pedal or echoed vocal, that is. And I mean, these lyrics just go deep. I don’t know how else to put it. Peter Hayes is in the midst of a deep sea plunge into his subject’s psyche, apparently a person demonstrating some positive characteristics but also some “hang-ups” and inability to really relax. The landscape of extreme alienation and spiritual ennui is illustrated remarkably with the lines “Now everyone’s a threat / ’Cause no one moves / Not toward anything / Worth anything to you”. We’re dealing with an individual who’s lost not necessarily his will to live but his will to relate, or ability to relate, on common grounds. Again, it jibes perfectly with the ebb in good rock music prevalent everywhere or in music’s direction and purpose. Hayes really brings the house down with the last stanza, though, a set of words and ideas so opaque and packed with strange meaning that I feel unable to even unpack it at this current time. In that same, steady tone and uniform melodic set, he sings “The righteous come and bleed you / From the bone / It’s all the ever wanted / From your soul / The hating and intentions / Are no more / And it’s all you’ll ever get / If you let go”. From there, things fall gracefully and benignly into the night, returning to the chorus of “You’re everything you need / But still suspicion holds you tight”, repeated ad infinitum, like a hazy, hypnotic mantra meant for nobody in particular, as much, probably for Hayes, as anybody else. The overall message, anyway, given what could be gleaned as the album’s thesis statement, would be to follow Jesus, with the masses just lecherous and the alpha mind turned to abject vindictiveness. It’s not what anybody would call the “Bohemian way,” certainly. But then, these are messages delivered over a harsh, vituperative and undeniable panorama of ill will and attrition — a race of beings that have forgotten how to connect with one another, and for whom communal life has become meaningless and even, sometimes, animalistic and volatile.

crossorigin=”anonymous”></script>