Liner Notes: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, 'Beat the Devil's Tattoo'

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB named its sixth studio album after a phrase the group found in an Edgar Allan Poe short story, “The Devil in the Belfry.”

But singer/bass player Robert Levon Been admits having a contentious relationship with the infamous gothic writer.

“I thought he was one of the required reading assholes you had to get through in school,” he says. “The whole thing of being required always turned me off.”

It took him years to finally come around on the Poe, who is now one of his favorite authors.

“It’s actually good when you’re not forced at gunpoint to read something. You can actually enjoy it.”

In rock history, BRMC might be viewed as required reading: The band was integral to the back-to-basics garage-rock revival of the early 2000s, although they sounded nothing like The Hives, The Strokes or The White Stripes. But the band’s debut single, “Whatever Happened to My Rock and Roll?” introduced a thundering mix of heavy psychedelia, twisted stoner rock, rustic folk blues and mind-bending shoegaze that has influenced younger bands like A Place to Bury Strangers and Alberta Cross.

“Beat the Devil’s Tattoo” is, however, hardly academic. BRMC don’t sound like a band you would be forced to listen to, nor do they sound like a band with more than a decade behind them. In fact, this is arguably the group’s best, most invigorated effort since its 2001 debut.

It’s also one of their most expansive albums, not just in size — 13 tracks, 65 minutes — but also in style. In the past, BRMC has embarked on largely unrewarding forays into acoustic blues on 2005′s “Howl” and ambient instrumentals on 2008′s “The Effects of 333,” but here the band seems to have incorporated these stray doodlings into a sturdier, more surprising whole. “Long Way Down” bounces along on a piano-pop theme that recalls solo Lennon, and “Shadow’s Keeper” works in dark Manchester rhythms reminiscent of Joy Division and New Order.

“Beat the Devil’s Tattoo” is the band’s first album with new drummer Leah Shapiro, previously a member of The Raveonettes. Been and Pete Hayes formed BRMC back in 1998 with friend Nick Jago, who was fired in 2004, rejoined in 2007 and left again in 2008. But Shapiro adds a massive thudding beat to these songs, adding structure as well as the freedom to jam at length.

Been gave Express a tour of the album and reflected on the perils of writing while stoned, watching too many Elvis movies and playing backstage pianos.

“Beat the Devil’s Tattoo”
This is the only song that I was really stoned while writing. I don’t recommend it normally to all the kids out there. I was pretty much incapacitated, with no sense of space and time. I was trying to play other things and I jut couldn’t do it, and this melody on the guitar was the only thing I could physically play. So I just kept playing it over and over again until it became this mantra that kept me from freaking out.

I noticed that every 20 seconds in the songs, something changes. It tripped me out. It’s actually down to the second — if you actually go through it, down the second there’s a change. I wander if my space and time were broken into 20-second intervals, so things only happen for 20 seconds since my brain would start over or I was only present for 20 seconds at a time. Then it would change and I had to restart it. It’s spooky.

“Conscience Killer”
Pete watched a 24-hour marathon of Elvis Presley movies on TMC. I think it was Elvis’ birthday, and they had every movie Elvis ever did. I remember going to bed and he was watching it, and I woke up and he was still watching it. I was like, “What the fuck? You haven’t slept.” But he had just gotten into these Elvis movies. He watched some really bad ones, but he was in a trance or something. It was like a car crash: He couldn’t stop watching. He really liked “King Creole,” and they started repeating [the films] afterward and we both watched “King Creole” again.

He was sleeping in the basement of this house, and that’s where we were rehearsing. And so we’re all living there in Philly, so we started rehearsing and he started doing this Elvis thing, like at the beginning of “King Creole.” Whoa-oa-oa-oa. We started following him on that. It was just a complete Elvis thing until we kicked in and it became a strange Elvis-Stooges lovechild. But, yeah, it’s the product of far too much Elvis Presley.

“Bad Blood”
We actually first wrote this song at the Metro in Chicago. It used to be called “The Metro,” because we just named it after the venue. We had a couple of songs that we wrote on the road and we just named them after the clubs and the cities because it was the only way you could remember the song. It was at the end of the night, and this jam at the end of “Heart and Soul” became “Bad Blood.” Or at least parts of it. When we got to Philly, we tried to finish the song. We wrote some more to it, and we got caught in this never-ending insanity of changing the arrangement. That song has about 13 different arrangements. For some reason we never felt like it clicked. It was always like it could be a little different, a little better. And the funny thing is, we just changed it again for the radio edit. It’s a totally different arrangement. It’ll probably never stop. The song itself probably hates us right now, but we still like it. It just wants to be left alone.

“War Machine”
Trecord was pretty much done and we needed some b-sides. Peter was up in Washington, and Leah and I went to the studio to just record some bullshit—just some experimental stuff to put out. We walked into the room, pressed record, and I didn’t know what she was going to play and she didn’t know what I was going to play. And we started in on “War Machine” and she came up with the drum beat on the spot and I came up with the bass line on the spot. I sang about half the song and then we stopped recording and said, “What the fuck was that?!” And we listened back and said there’s no way this is a b-side. It was kinda cool. Because sometimes that happens when we play—we get really lucky and write something completely spontaneously. It only happens a couple of times a year, and it was just by chance that they were recording at the time. So I really like that people got to hear a song born in the moment. We didn’t change the drums or the bass. It’s just exactly the first thing we did. And that’s why the song meanders at the end as well, because we didn’t really know where we’re going with it. But we kept it all in, just rough and ragged. Then Peter got back into town, and he put guitars on over it and made it a cool T. Rex feel.

“Sweet Feeling”
That’s one of Pete’s most beautiful acoustic songs. We were all begging him to put it on the record, but he didn’t want to. He wrote that outside, playing for people on the sidewalk after shows, so some people got to hear it really early on. I just think it’s crushingly beautiful, and I’m glad we included it. The record needed to balance itself with acoustic songs. It felt like a good comedown from “War Machine” at that point.

“Evol”
“Evol” was one of the first songs Pete and I ever wrote. We put it out in 1999 or something on this demo in San Francisco, so this old version got out there on the Internet. But we were never too happy with it. We always thought we could do it better, and on every record we had it in the back of the brain that we’d do it, but for some reason we always skipped it. We did try re-recording it once but it didn’t click. But finally it clicked on this record. It never got old, even 10 years later. I guess that’s a good sign. That song proved itself.

“Mama Taught Me Better”
This was the first song we wrote with Leah as a band. We were all on pins and needles because we didn’t know how things would flow writing-wise with her on drums. So much of our music is written by just jamming live together in a room, so that one was the proof that she knew how to roll with it and go along with the ride. It was just a riff we started on, and the song was finished in about 15 minutes. It all just tripped out. We didn’t know where it came from. It was a giant sigh of relief after that.

“River Styx”
We played it on the last tour a lot. We played a different version, though. It was a little faster and it had a Depeche Mode “Personal Jesus” guitar thing to it. That was the only thing I didn’t really like about the song. We played around with it a little bit during the sessions, but we were thinking about dropping it. And then one night we played it one more time. Nobody was feeling it. It was late, so we all just started playing it really slow. All of us were a little … we’d been out in this house in Philadelphia for a while, so we were all kind of … I don’t know … getting a bit of cabin fever. And no one had been laid in a long time. So I think there was some sexual tension in that song that came out. Actually, a lot of this record is about sexual tension, but that one more than anything just became this voodoo sex beat that we all let our tensions out with that song. It was good to get some relief. So I’m really grateful for that song.

“The Toll”
Pete first recorded “The Toll” a while back and put it out online, a different version of it. But we always thought we could do it a bit better. Pete wrote it with a friend of his named Courtney Jaye, and she’s harmonizing with him. It’s nice to have another voice on there. We recorded it and felt like we got it right the second time. The beginning of it has this kind of Brian Eno thing; we call it whale sounds, and it goes on for about 10 minutes, but we shortened it up to a few seconds. But I actually like the whale sounds.

“Aya”
“Pete worked on “Aya” for a while. It was the only song that I didn’t like, and I pouted about it a lot. It became a bit of an issue, because Pete really loved it and I just didn’t hear it. And then, during one of my pouts, I started detuning my bass and retuning it, just being grumpy, but I ended up really liking that sound. Almost the whole song is played on tuning pegs, detuning and retuning it and getting a good growl on it. And as soon as this growly, dirty bassline came along, it totally changed the song in my head. I really love it now. It changed my perception of it, and it became a song that really needed to be on the album.

“Shadow’s Keeper”
“Shadow’s Keeper” was written on tour in Manchester. We’d been to Manchester before but I really didn’t get anything out of it. I’ve been to a lot of places and never really got never really felt anything in particular. I’ve never felt romanticized by any city or gotten caught up in it. But Manchester this time around, it felt like I was able to get into the spirit of that place and Joy Division and all those great bands that came from there. We were sound-checking at the venue and we wrote this song caught up in the spirit of the city. I really love that about it. It’s got that good early Manchester feel to me. The ending of the song, we just lose our minds for a while. It felt good because we hadn’t done that for a while. It’s nice to have everyone loosen up and really dig into their instruments and see where it goes, until it sounds like the Titanic crashes at the end. I think that’s fitting. We’re ending all our shows with it right now, and it sounds really good. It’s become the anthemic finale.

“Long Way Down”
I started writing “Long Way Down” on the road. There was an old piano backstage, it might have been New Orleans. I started playing this piano, which was pretty fucked up, and it was nice to noodle around on it offstage. I came up with this piano part and kept fucking around with it every time I saw a piano at the back of a venue. It kept growing through relics that people had forgotten about — all detuned and weird. I actually thought about doing the song with a really off, detuned piano, because that was the only way I heard it at first. The song’s about a friend of mine. It’s more personal I guess than the other ones. I’m happy that it made it on this album. It was more of a song song than some of the other ones. I crafted that song more, whereas the other songs are more jams.

“Half-State”
The original version of “Half-State” is three hours long. It never stopped. We cut it down to 10 minutes, but fuck, it’s a long one. It’s one that you think we were all stoned while writing, but we weren’t. It’s a really good song to get stoned to, I hear. And that was kind of the point, to come down after all is said and done. We thought about tightening it up to five minutes, but it’s meant to take you on a trip.

» 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW; Mon., April 5, 8 p.m, $20; 202-265-0930. (U St.-Cardozo)

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo by Tessa Angus