The group released a sophomore effort, 2003′s shinier Take Them On, On Your Own, which met with slower sales. They grew unhappy with the promotional efforts of their label, which wound up releasing them from their contract. B.R.M.C. retreated to a friend’s basement studio in Philadelphia to begin work on their third album.
After years of writing the occasional country song, Hayes and Been thought they might finally have enough to put an album together. “We thought it was an important part of the band,” Hayes says. “We didn’t want to leave it on B-sides.”
Everyone involved was worried about the authenticity of the project; no one wanted to make O B.R.M.C., Where Art Thou? “I was really nervous,” says Been. “If we were gonna do something different, it had to be our voice.”
In the early days of the Howl sessions, the trio went on the road. Onstage at a festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, things fell apart in grand and violent fashion, and Jago left. Hayes and Been finished most of the remaining dates on their own, in one instance with a fill-in drummer from the crowd.
No one was sure what was happening — Was Jago coming back? Did they want him to? And if it was only the two of them, were they even Black Rebel Motorcycle Club anymore? — but everyone knew why. “It wasn’t any great mystery,” says Been. “We took [the band] for granted…we were pretty lost. Nick left, and Peter didn’t even know if he wanted to play music anymore. He thought he might go back to being a mechanic. He didn’t care as long as it wasn’t in the music industry.”
Hayes and Been returned to the studio alone. “Me and Peter first made a decision that we were gonna make the record and finish it, even if it was our last record ever and we never toured,” Been says. “Then the record started to inspire us, and open up all these new things for us. It was the first time we’d had fun in the studio. It was a really painful thing [in the past].”
Jago returned to the fold in time to finish Howl, which derives its title in part from the Beat poem of the same name. “We needed a break…to rebuild the band a little,” Hayes says. “I don’t say it was a good thing, but it helps to make sure you’re all coming from the same place.”
After years spent stumbling from gig to gig, album to album, Been figures the hiatus was the best thing that could have happened. “All of us learned what we’d lost,” he says. “At least now, whatever we do, we’re fully in it.”
Howl is their best record yet, stripped-down and almost meditative in places, upbeat and jangly in others, supplemented by harmonicas, trombones, even a makeshift gospel choir. It’s the least noisy record the band has ever made, and the first that owes a greater debt to the Staple Singers than to the Cocteau Twins. It’s spare and lovely and, considering the circumstances surrounding its birth, surprisingly upbeat.
It’s occasionally hard to tell whether B.R.M.C. have merely shrugged off the affectations of early ’00s garage-rock revivalism for affectations of another kind, but they seem to mean it. To that end, Howl feels both desperate and brave, a Hail Mary pass that risks alienating their old fans and irritating potential new ones. That they’ve chosen to be reborn in a genre that prizes authenticity was part of the point, says Been, who wasn’t sure they could pull it off.
“We grew up a little bit,” he admits. “It’s easy to turn it up as loud as you can and hit it as loud as you can and just kind of escape. We worried we weren’t good enough singers or songwriters, because once you strip those things away, you really have to know what you’re doing.”
Howl also has a distinct religious undercurrent. “Gospel Song” — “I will stay with Jesus till I can’t stay anymore/And I will stand with Jesus till I can’t take another stone” — is unexpectedly devout, at least for a band as previously secular, and as occasionally louche, as B.R.M.C.
“People have been bringing that up quite a bit,” says Been. “I’m a little suspicious as to why it’s brought up.” Maybe because you’ve made a record with songs about Jesus on it? “I don’t know what I believe in, and I’m not preaching to anyone. I’m singing songs I don’t completely understand. Some people seem way too happy that I’ve written [religious] songs. I don’t want them to run with that and make it a rallying cry. And there are other people who don’t want you to talk about that. I think everyone’s kind of full of shit. I always thought we were here to ask questions.”
Even with a newly revived and reconstituted Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, there are plenty of questions that need answering: Will they stay together? If so, what kind of band will they be? If one considers that the group has two sounds, one loud and one not, which is kind of how they look at it, which one will they choose?
Hayes and Been seem to regard Howl as something more than a one-off and something less than a permanent shift in direction. “It wasn’t so much a concept record as it was something we always wanted to get around to,” says Been. “But it’s not like we know what we’re gonna sound like for the rest of our lives.”
Six minutes after they finished recording Howl, the band started rolling tape on a new collection of songs. The new tracks sounded so different, “it felt like six years had gone by,” says Been, who describes the new tracks as “some form of rock ‘n’ roll. But pretty tough, not the Howl sound.”
To Been, Howl is a new start. “I feel reborn again,” he says. “I fell in love with words again, the way I did when I first started listening to music.”
Hayes isn’t so sure. To him, the idea of starting again discounts the years of toil that got them here. “That’s a little bit of a drag. We did a lot of fucking work on those first two albums,” says Hayes. “We’re just putting our music where our mouths are.”
