Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
American X: Baby 81 Sessions
RCA, 2007
*** out of five
San Francisco’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has been peddling their brand of faintly evil psychedelia for nigh on a decade now. It’s a cavernous, cadaverous sound that owes a lot to Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain: great peals of mammoth echoplexed guitar set against deadpan vocals. It also tips a hat to the ubiquitous My Bloody Valentine, whose 1991 landmark release Loveless is the touchstone against which any album that has more than a passing acquaintance with a delay pedal is measured against.
American X: Baby 81 Sessions is one of those stopgap mini albums (or maybe maxi-eps) that you sometimes get from prolific bands. At eight songs (and one short film), it’s not quite up to current full album standards. However, including the film, it does run for almost 40 minutes, so it’s as long as any single Beatles record, and it’s reasonably priced. Of course, if the music sucked, it wouldn’t matter one whit what kind of minute-per-dollar ratio we’re getting, but happily, it’s a pleasant disc, full of the same kind of BRMC sounds we’ve come to know and love.
Baby 81 itself lost much of the Americana and acoustic leanings that marked 2005’s Howl, and returned to a heavier, more amped-up vibe that was found on their eponymous 2001 debut and on 2003’s Take Them On, On Your Own. This disc, made up of outtakes and off-cuts, reveals just how completely they turned their back on the Howl experiment in favor of full-on Marshalls and Big Muff distortion.
American X, the titular song with the video attached, has an almost Doors-like feel, especially while the song noodles to a lengthy coda. As the tune meshes with the sound of the rain and thunder in the video, it threatens to invoke the wrath of the Lizard King himself. I don’t know why they chose to make a video for this song, because rewriting Riders on the Storm isn’t going to do any favors for a career. Here’s hoping BRMC will never again find themselves in danger of being tagged with the frightening “jam band” sobriquet.
Of special note is 20 Hours, a power ballad that’s much more akin to Slowdive / Mojave 3 than anything by The Scorpions, or whatever other lame band you think of when you are presented with the phrase “power ballad”. Thus, I apologize, and solemnly vow never to pair the words “power” and “ballad” again, but no matter, it’s a really good song with a great guitar melody. Whenever You’re Ready has a spoken-word middle section that could have pretty much been grafted from The Velvet Underground’s The Gift.
I could make the somewhat churlish observation that BRMC frequently wears its influences on its sleeves, and finding their antecedents isn’t very difficult at all. Record collector rock, to be sure, but what great collections they must be… Creation records 1990-1992… The VU… Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets series… Man, there’s a world of great music out there, and if BRMC is an avatar for entering a new world of rock and roll, then American X: Baby 81 Sessions is as good a portal as any.
Review by Greg-Hood Morris
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