Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat the Devil's Tattoo (2010)

This is the first album by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club I’ve listened to and I immediately understand the widespread positive reaction to this album. It’s a creative take on post-punk, psychedelic, and garage rock that at times shifts closer to one style than the other, but is never easy to categorize. This album boasts a terrific, lively, guitar sound that lends some power to tracks like “Bad Blood.” The vocals tend to be in a lazy sort of drawl, akin to what most of those garage rock groups of the early 2000s went for. While it is a creative combination of rock subgenres, at times a given song will tread a little too close to a particular touchstone. This makes the band sometimes sound too much like their influences. This makes for enjoyable rock music, but it is hard to shake the feeling that they borrow a bit too much from their influences. Lyrics are a weak point (see “Evol,” for example), but since the music tends to either be very strong on its own, or else mostly drown out the words, this isn’t as much of a problem as it could be. Some tracks enter a sort of psychedelic/hard rock area, with “War Machine” especially reminding me of early Black Sabbath. Other times they will enter Velvet Underground territory on songs like “Evol” which makes me think of what it might sound like if Bono joined The Velvet Underground. The only true low point on the album is “Aya” which is an exercise in faux-goth brooding a la Marilyn Manson. I imagine I’ll skip that song more often than not. More often than not, they are an adequate modern day version of some of the more interesting musical styles of the past.

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