Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Avalon Ballroom, Boston. 5/29/07

The best concert I’ve ever been too? No. The best club show I’ve ever been to, maybe. I love this band. This is the third time I’ve seen Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and each time is better than the last. This is a band that needs to be seen live to be appreciated. I had their first two albums, and I thought they were good, but nothing special. But, when I did see them live I was blown away. Robert Levon Bean is the most fun to watch bassist I’ve ever seen, and they rest of the band is just as talented. If you haven’t heard these guys it’s difficult to describe their sound. It’s equal parts folk, punk and shoegazer. That’s actually a really bad description, but I don’t care.

The last couple of times I’ve seen this band I’ve gotten there early, and the venues have been empty. Last time I saw them was in Northampton and I think it was a Sunday night. The venue was pretty damn empty. I think there may have been 80-120 people there. They were touring for Howl, which was an album that went a lot of different ways with fans, but I loved it. For that show I was right up front, close enough to smell the bass guitar. If you play guitar, especially a semi-hollow body, you know the scent. Tuesday night was different. The venue was packed. It may have been a sellout crowd, but I cannot confirm that. I didn’t get there as early as I wanted to, but I still ended up with a great spot to watch the show, behind a row of really tiny camera wielding Asian girls (I’ll get to this later). I was about 5-8 feet back from the center of the stage.

The band came on the stage at 9:05 and went straight into the lead track from Baby 81, “Took out a Loan.” They followed that with “Berlin” before moving onto some older tracks. The new album is to date my favorite album of the year. I’ve been listening to it non-stop. The only album that’s come close to getting as many listens has been the new Jarvis Cocker record. The band played a lot more tracks from B.R.M.C. than I had anticipated, but still managed to cover most of Baby 81. They only played four tracks from Howl, two of which were Peter Hayes on solo acoustic guitar. Some songs off the new album that just bled me away were “Lien on your dreams” “Windows” (although Peter botched the solo a bit it seemed), and “American X.” Remember those camera toting asian girls I mentioned before?, well this is where things get interesting. During “American X” Peter and Robert switched instruments, with Peter on bass and Robert on guitar. While Robert was singing and playing guitar the Asian girls went crazy taking pictures non-stop. They had been doing it the whole show, but with the members switching the side of the stage that they were on it got to Peter. During a lull in the song he reached out to try and snatch one of the girls cameras. She had the wrist strap on and was able to fight it from him, but you’d think he made his point. Nope. They kept taking pictures, eventually Peter walked back over to them and put his boot over one of the camera’s like he was going to stomp on it. They finally stopped. The song ended and Peter went up to them, and appeared to ask them to stop taking pictures, he was obviously angry at this time. He and Robert once again switched instruments and the band went into “All You Do Is Talk” which sounds like it could have been written by U2, or maybe Coldplay trying to sound like U2. I think it’s the best song they’ve ever written, from a pop-song point of view, at the least. If they could write entire albums like this the music critics would hate them and they’d be the biggest band since U2, or is that Coldplay again!?! This was the bands last song. They hadn’t done a proper encore, but what they had done was play their main set, then an acoustic set (with Peter doing 2 songs off of Howl, and Robert doing “Mercy” off of the Howl Sessions ep), then they came back out and did “American X” and “All You Do is Talk.”

I thought they were done. The house lights came up, and the PA started to play typical house music. But the audience didn’t stop, we kept clapping and cheering, and I could see the set list, there were no more songs listed. After what seemed like 5 minutes I saw a roadie run back stage and then the band came out. Peter’s guitar appeared to be packing stuff up, I saw him coiling cables and it looked like he was tearing down the gear. If this was all a put on, they did a great job making it seem like the real deal. If it wasn’t a put on, this was the first time in my life a band has ever come back on stage after the house lights came up and PA music started playing. The band did 4 more songs, all of which where requests. The first of which was “High/Low” an old b-side, and the remainder were all off of Take Them On, On Your Own. Before playing “High/Low” Robert commented on how they hadn’t played the song in years and he doubted his ability to remember the lyrics. He also had to consult with the band, Nick Jago and Peter if they remembered it. I was trying to request the song “Screaming Gun” which is probably my favorite BRMC song ever written. I know Robert heard me, because he told us to stop requesting such obscure tracks, and then asked Peter is they could play it, which they couldn’t. During the last three songs and dance pit type thing even opened up. It wasn’t a mosh pit, it was just a bunch of guys and a couple of girls jumping around rocking out to one of today’s best rock bands. Because that’s what these guys are, one of the best rock bands around. They’ve done their pseudo-shoegazer thing, they’ve made a folk record, they’ve made an almost punk record, and now they’ve made an angry rock record, which is exactly what a rock record should be.