OTR: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Take Them On, On Your Own

[illusionofjoy]

Take Them On, On Your Own, the second album from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club arrived three years after their début, in 2003. By this point, I'd fled Potsdam, New York to live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was doing temp work and my only access to the internet was when I would go to the library on weekdays and spend thirty minutes checking my email. For someone who was not long ago surrounded by the freshest and newest music in over-abundance, the withdrawal was painful. Forced to subsist on broadcast radio, the only station I found remotely tolerable outside of NPR's newscasts was 105.9 - "The X."

"The X" isn't a particularly good radio station - how could it be, owned and operated by a major corporate conglomerate and all, but it did try and put on a good mask of being "alternative." Of course, their idea of alternative was to fill a playlist with bands from the 1990s whose members were either addicted to and/or died from overdosing on heroin. Nobody needs to hear a hat trick of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains every hour on the hour.

Despite this, somehow the first single from Take - "Stop" - ended up on The X's playlists for several weeks. Since I'd enjoyed the first BRMC album, I bought the second one.

Overall, it doesn't sound much different from the band's début, except that the tempos have increased a bit and the sequencing of the tracks is tighter. If you liked the first album, you'll like the second, no question. However, I remember that I originally listened to it a couple of times and then shelved it for quite a while. It's not that I didn't like the record - I did and still do - but at the time, nothing seemed to stick. The immediacy and synchronicity of the first record in regards to where my life was at that point was not occurring where my life was at three years later.

Two years later, the band would release Howl, a record I only ever listened to on their MySpace page. It was at that point I lost interest. I haven't heard anything off of their most recent release, Baby 81, despite reading the press claiming it to be a "return to form."