Label: Virgin Records

Release Date: September 2, 2003

Website: www.blackrebelmotorcycleclub.com

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Take Them On Your Own
Tyler Baber

Even Pat Boone wears a leather jacket. The black-cow-hide-over-white-t-shirt-and-jeans thing is certainly as mainstream as it is rebel, what with J.V. cheerleaders reading S.E. Hinton novelettes and James Dean cutouts lining '50s nostalgia diners next to Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. So let us begin by realizing that Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is as badass as Johnny Depp in Crybaby, and you can take that how you want.

On Take Them On On Your Own, the BRMC boys once again don the classic rock wardrobe complete with saucy sneers, Kamel Reds probably between their lips. You can practically hear them unload their instruments with biting cocksureness in their eyes, plugging in to amplifiers in such a way that shouts at the listener "You can't handle this, I've got more rock in my carefully styled mussed up hair than you do in your entire being." Feedback is followed by fuzzed guitar, persistent bass and crashing drums to produce nothing but the most carefully planned rock and roll.

Somehow BRMC's debut narrowly escaped the beginnings of music critics rediscovering the word garage, and the band was heralded with the same "saviors of rock and roll" brand as the Strokes and the White Stripes. Where BRMC was an attempt to remind the world what rock and roll used to be all about, Take Them On is the jaded disillusionment that follows after the prophet realizes their message will always be bastardized. Almost every track on the album finds a new and exciting way to alienate the band from the rest of the contemporary musical world, including the listener. "I think I've had enough of this generation," Peter Hayes snarls in the album’s ironically radio-ready rebellion anthem "Generation." If BRMC is attempting to escape the falsity of the musical world, someone should have told them that putting up a prima-donna front wasn’t the best way to go about it.

Of course, Take Them On is basically about being rock and roll, and if taking rock and roll to seriously is the album’s biggest fault that isn't quite as bad as, say, not being able to rock. The album is chock full of traditional punk influenced rock style, filling every crevice of the disc with pounding noise and catchy bitter lyrics. BRMC certainly has the ability to make every song an anthemic statement of varying levels of maturity above Quiet Riot's "Cum on Feel the Noise." No single track seems any more important than the aforementioned '80s hair rock staple, however. The album's opening number, "Stop," sets the standard for fast, hollow singles to worried about being hip to be fun.

The boys in Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have proven that it is possible to save rock and proceed to bully it to the point where no one pays attention anymore, all in the span of two albums.

posted 11.08.03

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Tyler Baber, the famed velociraptor expert, works from his home in Sri Lanka. E-mail him at b1191@messiah.edu

2002 White Elephant Productions