Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Supply Five Years of Integrity On ‘Wrong Creatures’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

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Five years it’s been since we last saw a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club record. It’s a lengthy spell between meals for any band, but it somehow feels right for the California rockers. It seems an age since they burst onto the scene with B.R.M.C. in 2001 and it’s been a long and often bumpy road. Theirs is a timeless sound wrapped in a timeless image of cool, the black leather-clad weary souls cranking out the churn of highway rock’n’roll from a bye-gone era. But timeless as it may be, it can also get tired; a pitfall that BRMC has battled for much of their career. With Wrong Creatures, the band uses that tiredness to their credit as they show the natural and understated maturity that time and living brings. It feels like it’s been five years of thoughtfulness.

Much of this can perhaps be attributed to the trials of drummer Leah Shapiro, who underwent brain surgery and was still recovering during recording sessions for Wrong Creatures. It’s not a topic that dominates the record, but adversities such as this have a habit of affecting those they touch and there’s a delicacy to many of these songs that haven’t always been there. It doesn’t always feel particularly inspired – and the middle of the album certainly dips into a series of rehashed rock numbers – but the restrained tenderness that underlines the best parts of the record gives the impression that catharsis rather than inspiration was the goal here – or at least the result.

In fact, for the opening third of the record this feels like some of BRMC’s very best work. ‘Spook’ cruises along desert highways with its steady momentum and swaggering riffs, the grimy churn of ‘King of Bones’ is reminiscent of some of the band’s best work from their formative years while the earnest chorus of ‘Echo’ raises it to a memorable stadium rocker. Crucial to it all is a restlessness that bubbles under the surface and is exemplified in the outstanding ‘Haunt’. A delicately pressurized builder that never feels the need to explode; there’s true beauty in the tension that stretches over its six minutes of gently chiming guitar lines, unsettling echoes and Robert Been giving his best Nick Cave impression to gorgeous and moving results. It’s on these softer moments that Wrong Creatures shines, the sense being that these are musicians for whom the subtleties of life are becoming clearer with age.

It’s also why it’s such a shame when the album gradually loses that slow-burning fuse that lights up its early stages in a soft glow. Wrong Creatures never gets bad by any stretch – and BRMC fans will no doubt appreciate its rockier moments – but its latter half feels more like going through the motions than drawing on experience. ‘Little Thing Gone Wild’ is an understandable enough single with its crunching riffage and instantly recognizable sound, but in the context of the record it plays out a little as just another rocker amid several rockers that aren’t particularly distinguishable from one another. The tenderness that broke up the early punches fades and the result is what feels like an opportunity lost amid the familiarity of fuzz and the coolness of classic rock. Closer ‘All Rise’ does its best to rekindle that feeling and leave a lasting impression, but even then it can’t quite recapture the album’s early promise.

“I just keep playing that restless haunt, nothing I can change”, Been rasps on ‘Haunt’. It’s a line that in many ways captures Wrong Creatures in a microcosm. It’s a record that feels like it understands its own problems but can’t do anything to change them, and that feeling is what makes its best moments so damn good. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club consistently make very good rock music, the album is testament to that and is a fine listen all the way through. But it’s beginnings tease the promise of a complete work of subtle beauty and grace amid the storm that could have been something truly great and is what leaves a lasting hint of disappointment at what could have been.

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