There’s an awful lot of noise being made around this album’s release about a return to form. We’re not so sure about that. A return perhaps to life before acoustic breakdowns (2005’s ‘Howl’, a not too unsuccessful foray off track into desert-baked Dylanisms), to club-sized riffs, tension, groaning, lump beats, sounding a little like the Jesus and Mary Chain from time to time and to the sense that leather-jackets are worn like uniform at all times, zipped at least the regulation two-thirds of the way up. It is an altogether more difficult task to return to form. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club probably lost their chance the moment people started taking an interest in them and they engaged right back, maybe when they got a record deal, became part of the system, began giving thought to progressing what they did.
What they did do on that first remarkable record was create a distinctly introverted, dense drone-bubble of evolving pathos, build dark psychedelic walls of sound around an anxious heartbeat and toy with rock n roll cliché though never become it because the focus elsewhere was too great. It was more than its constituent moves. There can be no return to form. That is unless you consider Primal Scream’s ‘Riot City Blues’ a return to form, which of course it wasn’t. A par can perhaps be drawn between the two though, stylistically, expressively, by the established rock ‘n’ roll standards to which they adhere. In fact, ‘Berlin’ (“suicide’s easy / what happened to the revolution!”) could switch interchangeably between the two records with little danger of rejection. But ‘Baby 81’ easily comes out of that battle as the greater album.
It is clearly BRMC’s broadest work to date, incorporating established elements with wider influences, sounding ultimately like a more confused band (their focus was their bedrock to begin with), but also fresh and exploratory. ‘Took Out A Loan’ sounds like them waking from ‘Howl’ and slamming on the distortion pedal again, a segue to their current more wired frame of mind, ratcheted up yet further by the protesting ‘Weapon Of Choice’. ‘666 Conducer’ also takes the pared down approach as a template, melding it with the hypnotic pace of their early work, despite some rubbish rhyming. ‘Windows’ is the first break from normality with gently pounding piano, Lennon/McCartney melodies and spiralling guitar, while ‘Not What You Wanted’ is almost Dandy Warhols bright and ‘All You Do Is Talk’ is New Order with chugging psychedelic bells on. ‘American X’ is at least filthy and drugged up like they used to be, all Spacemen 3 style vacancy and half-speed Stooges basslines.
It’s not all brilliant – they ruin what would have been a viscous slab of big-bellied gothic pop, batting the boulder between JAMC and Sisters Of Mercy on ‘Need Some Air’, by throwing in some perplexing arena rock “woah-oh-OHH”s. We’re talking Van Halen, dude. But these are all reasons that this could never be considered a return, not when they’re out finding new form. This record survives because of that.