Album Review: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Specter At The Feast
- Written by Ben Gibson
For many, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are perhaps the greatest living example of what I would call a “singles” band. While writing good pop songs that urge you to turn up your radio, they never seem to have enough variation in their tracks to make listening to a whole album worthwhile. Considering we've now had six albums worth of predictable garage rock from the trio, in order to prove their longevity Specter At The Feast really needs to be something special. More importantly, it needs to be different.
Written while the band were grieving the loss of their long term sound engineer and mentor Michael Bean, their latest effort is partly a meditation on mourning. I say partly, because while some of the tracks tap into unseen emotional depths, the rest unfortunately fall back into the type of generic rock track this band could write in their sleep.
Initially Specter At The Feast gets off to a hair raising start with slow burning opener 'Fire Walker'. While not a complete transformation, there is more texture added to their trademark sound. You get a real sense that they may have evolved. Not only that, but thanks to a tender vocal performance by Pete Hayes, they finally sound capable of more than professional sounding throwaways.
Unfortunately this doesn't last. Their cover of The Calls' 'Let The Day Begin' is a fitting and classy tribute to Michael Bean. But despite being a cover, it sounds exactly like every other BRMC song. Were this the only slip backward into the band's old style it would be a poetic tribute to the man who helped create their sound. As it is, it forebodes the disappointing lack of artistic growth found in other parts of this record.
This is not to say their attempts at change are failures. On the tracks where the band have set their ambitions higher, like on jangly balled 'Lullaby', they succeed more often than not. Even tracks where their experiments aren't quite as fruitful are more interesting than clichéd tracks like 'Teenage Disease' and 'Rival'. It's not even that these tracks are bad. On the contrary, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club do this type of bluesy rock pop better than almost anybody. It's just that they've done it before and they've done it better.
It's a shame because when listening to Specter At The Feast you really want things to be different. You want this to be their masterpiece. Not just because the band deserve it, but because occasionally they write something like gorgeous album closer “Lose Yourself”. But right now, it appears they haven't quite got the imagination to pull it off.
Specter At The Feast is out now and available on amazon