ROSETTE GONZALES Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
guitarist/vocalist Peter Hayes creates sweet
distortion on the dark stage of Vynyl in Hollywood.
By Scott Schultz
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The amps were turned to full blast and the feedback was
shrieking on Hollywood’s ultra-hip Cahuenga Corridor Thursday
night, as local psychedelic, distortion, power-pop phenoms, Black
Rebel Motorcycle Club (BRMC), made its triumphant return to Rock
City.
The three-piece combo played to a capacity-filled Vynyl Club,
focusing on songs from its self-titled debut while previewing songs
from its follow-up disc, which is due in early 2002.
On stage the band was vacant and shy, but its expert precision
more than made up for its lack of stage presence. It relied on
back-lighting to shadow the faces of the musicians, providing a
noir feel to the event.
The songs off BRMC’s CD were expanded live, with greater
emphasis on distortion and feedback, which made the band seem more
like a rock power-trio than the cleanly produced CD would
suggest.
Ear-piercing squeals from the sound-system between songs was
common-place by the end of the night, but the band was creating
such intense noise that hipster’s covering their ears in pain
could be spotted in the crowd throughout the show.
The crowd for the former San Francisco band turned Hollywood
mainstay, was as should be expected, extremely hip in a
self-consciously, non-intentional way. The crowd was more into
metronomic head bobbing than dancing or stage diving. This crowd
was so cool, they heckled the DJ from KCRW’s “Morning
Becomes Eclectic,” who introduced the band, forcing her to
flee the stage.
The trio made up of Peter Hayes (guitar), Robert Turner (bass)
and Nick Jago (drums) used distortion tricks to extend its
four-minute songs into eight-minute jams, reminiscent of other
distortion-based bands like Sonic Youth or Jesus and Mary Chain.
Yet its music maintains a tight pop sensibility that has made it a
radio favorite in England, hailed by mainstream bands like
Oasis.
Hayes and Turner would swap vocal duties, with one singing while
the other would torture their guitar. Both singers have similarly
psychedelic singing voices that lean toward the higher registers.
Jago provided a steady monotonous thumping on the drums that
recalled the driving percussions of the early Velvet
Underground.
Highlights of the 100-minute set included BRMC’s extended
version of the droning “Red Eyes and Tears,” the
thumping “Whatever Happened to my Rock and Roll (Punk
Song)” and the 30-minute version of “Salvation,”
which led into a high-powered sonic jam that had all amplifiers
turned as high as they could go, making the room vibrate so hard
that the bartenders had to keep an eye on the premium label alcohol
that rested on the neon-colored bar.
Its stage precision intimated that this L.A. band is ready to
leap from the smaller clubs to the mid-size theaters like the El
Rey or the Palace. BRMC has previously opened for larger bands like
the Dandy Warhols and the band looks tighter and more confident for
its experience. The music rarely dwelled into redundancy or
self-indulgence, which is often a problem with sonic
distortion-based bands. The band, on the rare occasion that it
talked between songs, would ask, “Are you guys cool with
this?” And the crowd, though quiet during the songs, would
scream it’s approval.
The show was the first performance of a national tour, which
should be a precursor to a greater push from their label (Virgin
Records).
The band sounds nothing like the current musical trends being
pushed over the past couple of years by corporate shills like KROQ.
However, BRMC, along with other anti-pop bands like The Strokes and
The Dandy Warhols, is using touring and club performances to carve
a niche scene for those who like their rock without hip-hop or
video-genic pretty boys.