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Various: Dark Was The Night
Passion
Pit: Sleepyhead (EP track)
Betty &
The Werewolves: David Cassidy 7”
Crystal
Stilts: Love is a Wave 7”
Sin Fang
Bous: Clamour (album)
Nodzzz:
s/t (12” LP)
Love Is
All: A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night (album)
Sons of
Noel and Adrian: A Wreck Is Not A Ship (track)
Slow Down
Tallahassee/ Standard Fare: split 7”
Piney Gir
& The Age of Reason Of All The Wonderful Things (single)
Navvy:
Idyll Intangible (album)
Various:
Cathedral Classics Vol 1 (Sonic Cathedral comp)
Fanfarlo:
Reservoir (album)
Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career (album)
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Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Howl
Echo
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Article
written by Will M
Jul 25, 2005.
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When the release of this album was announced, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were apparently defunct - drummerless, past-it and irrelevant. Which is hardly surprising, really, given their recent history.
A minor band in that peculiar NME-sponsored “rock revolution” that swaggered unpleasantly across our screens a couple of years back, BRMC were always far behind the Strokes’n’Stripes in terms of critical hyperboles, often cruelly branded mere Jesus and Mary Chain copyists.
They first veered viciously onto the British music scene with the foul-tempered, filthy guitar squall of “Whatever Happened To My Rock ‘N’ Roll”. The two albums, the acronymeponymous debut and follow-up “Take ‘Em On” skived by on a few solid rockers, some mildly interesting experiments and a helluva lot of feedback-seeking-tuneage.
By last year, with the commercial failure of the 2nd record, which simply amped and fuzzed up “BRMC” with varying results, the band had played themselves into a stylistic corner, with the only apparent escape routes tired self-repetition or a discordant, vitriolic split.
So, they half-followed the second option, kicking out drummer Nick Jago for several months, before regrouping, recording and releasing “Howl”, confounding all my well-laid expectations.
Even more surprisingly/alarmingly, “Howl” is really rather superb, a complete reinvention, switching the muzzy fuzz of the debut for a set of songs stripped bare of ornamentation and alive with the musical spirits of the early-mid 20th century.
They kick off with record-company-waking-up-screaming lead single “Shuffle Your Feet” - a drunken tour party in a cupboard with the ghost of a gospel band. It sounds utterly spontaneous, whispers, laughs and clapping audible in the background and shares the rock ‘n’ roll for rock ‘n’ roll’s sake philosophy of Exile On Main Street, an obvious musical ancestor.
Really, that sums up the general feel of “Howl” - it’s a record infused with spontaneity, almost as if the band had recorded it for the sheer joy of making music, without any real intentions of it ever being pressed up into PRODUCT.
Country, blues, rockabilly and punk all rear their collective heads at various points throughout the record, but all are assimilated into the Black Rebel sound so that they always appear masters of rootsy rootsrock. As a result, “Howl” rarely becomes the kind of ghastly pastiche it could have been, a whistle-stop tour of “the places where the charts never go” played by pasty, out-of-their-depth noiseboys.
Instead “Howl” mines the real origins of American music, and clearly aims to follow in the footsteps of the masters. But really - any old fools can strip their sound down to the wire in search of their “musical soul”, but most of the time they’re simply removing the layers of smoke and mirrors that hide the gaping hole at the heart of their sound. That BRMC can pare themselves down to a guitar-drums-vocal-tight trio and still produce darkly evocative little laments like “Fault Line” speaks volumes for their songwriting abilities.
“Fault Line” really is the shadowy soul of the record, and is pure dark ‘n’ roll, a rippling, ominous folk strum, with Turner casting himself in the role of blues-poet, muttering of “running with the risin’ tide to my father’s door”. It’s simply one from an embarassment of retro-gems; the harmonica-vocal duet of “Complicated Situation” brings to mind the young, devil-may care Dylan. Whilst, “Devil’s Waitin’” has a somewhat different feel, a threadbare, weary beauty of a song that shambles prettily along, before sudden swooping massed vocals transform it into a stunning modern spiritual.
Similarly “Gospel Song” in a very bluntly-titled way, alternates dreamy swathes of stargazing acoustica with BRMC’s approximation of genuine real fucking GOSPEL. It’s really rather fantastic and presents a strong case for indie-soul being the musical way forward.
Really, the only serious misstep is the title track, which sees Black Rebel reaching for the comfort blanket of drone, roping in the whine of an organ, resulting in a funereal drag of a song which is oddly weak for what’s probably reckoned to be the band playing to their strengths. Still, they’re swiftly redeemed by obvious single “Ain’t No Easy Way”, which freewheels along, propelled by a jangling, scorching country-punk riff, sinister verses and seedily celebratory chorus. Like most of “Howl” it sounds beamed from some gritty alternate-’30s where this music has yet to become a cliche.
And if that makes BRMC sound conservative, regressive, reactionary perhaps - well, they were never really a great noise-pop band, most of the time a pale screech of the mighty Mary Chain. Admittedly the album isn’t perfect, too monochrome, too backwards-looking to merit comparison with the best of this year’s releases, but it’s unusually convincing for a record so apparently unaware of modernity.
So, “Howl”’s a majestic, if low-key, near-textbook reinvigoration of a flagging, stagnant band. It’s exactly what olders and betters the Strokes will have to pull off next year to avoid a garage-punk Groundhog situation album after album.
You taking notes, Casablancas?
Untitled Document
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