Exploding outta the streets authenticity and a psychotic desire to confront and rebel are valuable commodities in rock'n'roll. Ever since year zero, the desire to keep it 'real', alongside a modus operandi intent on nailing the tails of the world's blue meanies, has been irresistibly rapacious.
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have done the maths. Initially, the signs were promising: a bad ass, smack belch of a band seemingly manufactured by a panel of junkie icons and outcasts, featuring Lester Bangs, Marlon Brando, Jim and William Reid, Iggy Pop and, er, Noel Gallagher. The oily darkness leaking from every pore, the gulping for air, cuttingly pertinent sloganeering - 'whatever happened to my rock'n'roll?' - and an exhilarating sensory attack of barbaric potency.
However, this veneer was swiftly cracked by the band's self-titled debut album, exposing a surface of programmed, capricious insouciance, dangerously in tune with the times and those with the loudest voices. Indeed, as confirmed by 'Take Them On, On Your Own', BRMC have little to say for themselves, let alone the fact that we appear to be slowly squeezing the trigger on the world's face.
It all starts in hammering, if typical, style. 'Stop' reeks and rolls with BRMC's formidable stench of heaving mass: the fuzzsaw bass, bulbous distortion and Peter Hayes' provocative "we don't like you, we just wanna try you" swagger. Next up, 'Six Barrel Shotgun' zeroxes the wounded thrash so righteously minted on breakthrough track 'Punk Song'. Essentially, it is that very song. This is a recurring revelation throughout 'Take Them On...'
The suggestion that this record is a machete-wielding, bloody blade of slashes at the world's ills and power mongers is way off the mark. The vague, clumsy polemic that litters 'Take Them On...' actually reaches its nirvana with the shrugging disdain of 'Generation', where Hayes makes a feeble stab at America's rather lively foreign policy: "I'm choosing sides. I'm keeping up with you and your invasion eyes." Wow. The rest is as lucid and sturdy as a chocolate kettle. Equally, 'US Government' and 'Shade Of Blue' manage to make institutionalised, '1984'-style control and imminent death sound about as disturbing as an episode of 'Friends'.
Elsewhere, it's a blitz of interminable sonic repetition, attitude by default and false dawns. 'Suddenly' boasts the lines "I'm so high" - the security code to the gates of 'creative drought' - whilst the acoustic ballad 'I'm Aching' contains the surely ironic vocal outro of "I move on". Finally, closer 'Heart And Soul' has as much in common with Joy Division as you or I do with the current whereabouts of Ian Curtis.
'Take Them On... ' is a skull-numbingly dull record, utterly bereft of the anti-establishment rhetoric these boring fakers aspire to. Fittingly, such sloth is the one thing most likely to truly level BRMC, rather than drug addiction, the CIA or the rock'n'roll hellfire they supposedly eat for breakfast. "We don't know where to stop," Hayes insists in the opening seconds of 'Take Them On...' How about right here?
