Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Take Them On, On Your Own
[Virgin; 2003] From pitchfork:
Rating: 6.9
So, if the three members of the BRMC are any indication, it looks like being in a so-called Black Rebel Motorcycle Club means embracing the vacant, apathetic stare that goes hand-in-hand with just being cool, twenty-four hours a day. The problem is, this kind of Creation-catalog-worshipping mod posing can be both distancing and incredibly tiring. Sure, sneering and flipping up the collar on your leather jacket are perfectly badass gestures, but they're also achingly familiar ones-- particularly for the BRMC, which is nuts, given that this is only their second album.
As the image suggests, though, BRMC don't fuck around: their sophomore disc, Take Them On, On Your Own, is packed end-to-end with tight, clenched-fist rock cockiness; its twelve impenetrable songs bulldoze with fuck-off lyrics, mercilessly effects-heavy guitar, huge, throbbing drum beats, and avalanche basslines. But there are recognizable affections, too, and when they pop up, they're either intensely alienating (the record opens with the fitting admission, "We don't like you/ We just want to try you") or devastatingly boring (the predictably aggressive refrain of "Generation").
Fortunately, there are a handful of transcendent moments to be found, provided you're willing to invest the time it takes to sniff them out-- which you should, since this is one of those records that matures with subsequent spins. Check the face-flattening power of Peter Hayes' prickly guitar cuts on "Rise or Fall", Robert Turner's woozy, tender howls sliding all over the unexpectedly acoustic "And I'm Aching", Nick Jago's pounding drum fervor on closer "Heart and Soul", and the punkish, bouncing choruses of "Six Barrel Shotgun" and "In Like the Rose".
There are also some political agendas being pushed here, as BRMC tackle national identity and brazen superpower ideology with their now-trademark contempt. In style and sound, BRMC have always swayed a little bit Brit (even if their Californian-to-Anglo ratio remains a strict 2:1), and "US Government", the band's pissy homeland diatribe, could, if stripped of its title, be just as easily applied to the dealings of Tony Blair.
Spitting vitriolic quips like "We are the ones that keep you down/ We are the ones that warm the ground while our arms surround," and, "You know they were never, never yours to kill/ Oh no, they were never, never yours to kill," Turner obliquely takes on (on his own?) all of Washington's shady affairs without ever getting specific enough to actually wander into true, sharp-toothed dissidence. Consequently, "US Government" fails to strike as anything more than a vague and boyish suggestion of distrust-- less cumbersome than Eddie Vedder tearing up a rubber Bush mask onstage, but not as coyly subversive as it could have been.
Still, it's a rush of a rock song: opening with a series of high-pitched, distorted pings and descending into a murky, clawing guitar mess, Turner's slow, mangled delivery (each word struggles, nobly, to eek out of his presumably pursed lips) sees every syllable dipped in a syrupy coat of disdain, and by the time the warped and echoed vocals-and-guitar breakdown arrives at the end, "US Government" has become a genuinely chilling lament.
With the exception of a few notable highlights, Take Them On, On Your Own plays like a more consistent version of BRMC's eponymous debut. Tonally, the record doesn't differ much from its predecessor-- or from itself. But regardless of whether this self-duplication is intentional or not, the repetition, coupled with the album's dense, reverberating volume, can become awfully grating. Unfortunately, BRMC's signature garage-gone-psychedelic-gone-shoegazer aesthetic, which has always bordered on bloated, is inherently opposed to overexposure; tracks like the ultimately negligible "Ha Ha High Babe" call unwanted attention to the gobs of heavy, distorted riffing and opaque vocals that BRMC consistently employ. To aggravate the issue, Take Them On also suffers from an alarmingly poor, end-heavy track sequencing (although making you wait for the good shit seems like an appropriately snarky move).
BRMC aren't the first band to mine and mimic the dark, sweaty annals of sneer-rock, nor are they alone in cultivating an off-album swagger that serves as a useful accompaniment to their in-studio bluster. But even though Take Them On, On Your Own chugs along like a glacier-- massive, cold, and flattening-- the chance of it really changing our landscape seems pretty small.
-Amanda Petrusich, September 4th, 2003
