Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Specter At The Feast

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Specter At The Feast

(Vagrant)

March, 18, 2013

Grade: B+

EDITOR'S NOTE: So I've been busting my ass with school, and work at the paper to have suddenly realized I have a crapton of album reviews that I haven't printed nor uploaded (not sure if that's the proper use for" nor" but I get to use that word so rarely as it is) Still tweaking around with format ideas till I find one that suits my fancy and then promptly throw it away again. So odds are pretty good that I'll never be satisfied with just one format. But hey, in a world where so much is predictable this is a good thing yes?

One more minor b. Trying to secure an interview with Mike Muir, legendary front man of Suicidal Tendencies  Yeah THAT Suicidal Tendencies. Frankly, I'm geeking out on a level that can't be measured. Bu the timing of them going on tour to support their new album 13 (stray observations: In other news, Suicidal Tendencies have an album of new material, and wow, an awful lot of bands are running this whole "thirteen" thing into the ground huh?

If I get lucky, I;ll be posting the interview in it's entirety hear. A little Blu-Ray extra if you will :) Wish me luck! And without further ado, yeah. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are still a band apparently. 

Okay full disclaimer. BRMC front man, Robert Levon Been lost his father Michael Been to a heart attack back in 2010. The loss of your father is an incredibly crushing blow to deal with, but Michael Been had been severing as the sound engineer  tour manager, and moral center for the band since their inception back in 1998. For all the cracks I make about BRMC being about as edgy as a moist napkin, there's alot that can be said for a band that manages to muck through a personal loss in the middle of tour and manages to complete said tour AND recording an album. Needless to say, the band was going through alot at the time of this recording and it shows in some subtle ways. 

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have got the blending of “old-meets-new” , blues/garage rock influences down to a science by now. So it’s tempting to go into their seventh studio album not really expecting anything more than the same blues/grunge/noise/folk smoothie they’ve been putting out for the last decade; that very same smoothie that only sounds fresh to a pre-Band Of Horses and Luminiers generation. But damned if BRMC don’t find a way to push their sound into a new direction by introducing some studio experiments with ambience to the mix; complete with multi-layered sonic textures and a echoey guitar drone that draws more than a few comparisons to The Edge.

In fact, an awful lot of the “new” sounds BRMC bring to their latest outing sound an awful lot like lifted throw aways from Unforgettable Fire era U2; right down to the arena rock trappings, the room filling tones, and the dead ringer Bono impression on the vocals. But whether the band’s aware of the U2-heavy influence or not, it plays out more like an accidental homage than a blatant rip-off. And dueling guitarists, Peter Hayes and Robert Been, do a way better job of nailing the blues then The Edge ever did.

That’s not to say BRMC have forsaken all their old troops for their sonic experiment. They find a way to marry both approaches successfully without anything sounding out of place. The transition from slow, soulful crooners like “Returning”, to rollicking foot stompers like “Hate The Taste” is almost seamless. Whether it’s grunge injected rock n’ roll rifting or beautiful, heavily textured walls of sound,  Hayes and Been don’t half-ass a note.

If there is a weak point to be found, it’s in Been’s vocals, which are still pretty forgettable when their not just flat-out weak (or sounding an awful lot like Bono). Though to be fair, his voice has never done it for me, and it does work best when it’s utilized as just another instrument in the mix, like on the albums slow boil opener, “Fire Walker”. In comparison to their past works, Specter, is sonically the most creative and inspired BRMC have sounded in awhile. It’s a cohesive work that manages to successfully blend  the new,with the old, with the new-old.