KICK OUT THE JAMS

Thursday, July 24, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Kick Out the Jams

Black Rebel Motorcycle

Club at the Boston, July 19

Oh, the power of name recognition: The newly transplanted Boston Bar & Grill drew the stovepipe-jean crowd as though the place were some massive hipster buglight Saturday, the strongest testament yet to the venue's reaffirmed place in the music scene. Yeah, when the Converse crowd crawls out to what is essentially a sports bar, the venue must be doing something right (aargh! Plasma TVs showing college basketball! It burns! It burns!). In this case, that something was Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a California-based trio that, for all its mannered sulk, specializes in an accessible brand of droning, propulsive roots rock that samples everything from blues to folk to psychedelia, all from a stiff-legged stance of wearied detachment. Picking out BMRC's influences is easy--from the Stones to the Stone Roses to VU to MC5--but what's not derivative is BMRC's attitude. When it doesn't work, they look merely fake and distracted; but when it clicks, these guys look like they're casually drawing from the invisible vortex whence the lava of rock 'n' roll flows.

Saturday's show saw the trio stomping through an extended set that included cuts off their upcoming album Take Them On, On Your Own, including "Stop," which had guitarist Peter Hayes leading the band chin-forward with a low-slung guitar figure that blossomed gloriously into a grit-spitting wah and warble. That highlight followed "Red Eyes and Tears," a bluesy swampfuzz that emerged from its own murk and into a straight-backed rock strut.

All this from a posture of lucid dreaming, of that kind of surprise self-knowledge when you suddenly become aware of one of your most brain-dead routines and start watching yourself with bemusement. Essence of cool or carefully customized pose? Whatever it was, BMRC tapped that vein as it drilled through the harmonica-laced "Screaming Gun," with its dual blues howl shared by Hayes and bassist Robert Turner, the moto-rock of "Rise or Fall"--criss-crossed with raygun lines--the shifting plaid of "White Palms" and the crazed, angular rave-up of "Rifles."

The set made the incongruous local openers look all the more like they'd landed their slots out of some promoter version of a sympathy fuck; one could imagine a dozen other local bands that would've better fit the bill than the harmless if exuberant whiteboy funk rock of Cherry Hill and Minus One's exhausted throwback alt-rock. Fortunately, the Boston will have plenty of opportunities to try again.--Andrew Kiraly