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

Half way into Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's sophomore album, Take Them On, On Your Own, singer Peter Hayes opens the song "Generation" with the irony-smothered line, "I don't feel at home in this generation." Such a lyrical protrusion is so obvious given the three-some's continuous recycling of the Velvet Underground's proto-punk filth and the Jesus and Mary Chain's distortion pedal-driven rock sound that you cannot help but feel sorry for the three young men who makeup the Club. They persist in aspiring to become the leather-clad rock icons that made such incendiary and timeless albums as Psychocandy and White Light/ White Heat, but continue to utterly fail with a lack of creativity, vision, and originality that their ancestral sound bearers were rife with. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, for two full albums now, have been living in the past, eclipsed by their musical precedents who cast two of the largest looming shadows in rock-n-roll's lineage. So what, exactly, is the point of distilling their feedback-fueled guitars and cigarette-tinged vocals into a lackluster 21st century version? There simply is not one as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club entirely miss the point and continue to make cliché rock music that is tired and bored of itself. [www.blackrebelmotorcycleclub.com]