The damaged licks and feedback-fattened melodies of LA’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have always suggested a karaoke riff on your favourite avant-pop outsiders.
Few bands, in fact, have appeared so blatantly in hock to indie-pop’s founding generation. Whether giving decaffeinated homage to The Jesus And Mary Chain, cribbing from The Pixies or promulgating a bummed-out, west coast Sonic Youth, BRMC sounded like an amalgam of other peoples’ great ideas. Even the name – macho, clunky, obvious – conveyed a derivative sheen.
For their third album, the frazzle-mopped three-piece turn to an older, less pilfered songbook. Largely devoid of electric guitars, Howl offers a grab-bag of campfire blues, Appalachian dirges and snaggled-tooth neo-folk.
There are tinges of Dylan, a genuflection at the alter of Johnny Cash’s Def Jam recordings and, in the dark places between, something unexpected: a jot of originality.
Kicking off with the lurching space-age stomp of ‘Shuffle Your Feet’, Howl dances wildly between honest paean and lipped-curled pastiche.
On ‘Devil Waitin’’, BRMC plunge into a torrid steel-pedal freak-out; elsewhere the funky strut of ‘Weight Of The World’ brings to mind Oasis learning to play bluegrass. The wheels, alas, come bouncing off on ‘Gospel Song’, a ghastly sliver of Spiritualized-lite.
Howl cadges its title from the beat poet Alan Ginsberg and at its best, sticks an inquisitive snout in the shadowy margains of the counterculture. The result is a beguiling contradiction: a retro album with something new to say about the past.