Black Rebel Motorcycle Club will release their fourth album, Baby 81, on May 1st with RCA Records. With their 2005 critically acclaimed album, Howl, BRMC proved their stalwart musicianship with their own brand of stripped down Americana and are now deftly transitioning back towards the color-saturated wash of guitars that made fans fall for the band in the first place. Baby 81, named after an infant admitted to the hospital in the wake of 2004’s tsunami who was claimed by nine different mothers until it found its way back to its own family, is an ambitious, powerful, emotional, guitar-driven rock n’ roll record that is guaranteed to get people jumping and thinking.
The opening track “Took Out a Loan” and the Led Zeppelin-style beat driving “666 Conducer,” were recorded at the tail end of Howl’s Los Angeles sessions. The first single, “Weapon of Choice,” a collaborative effort by the two songwriters, Peter Hayes and Robert Levon Been, is an anthemic and jagged-riffed track that cleverly hides a wall of acoustic guitars behind electrics.
Clocking in at 9 minutes and 11 seconds, their longest song to date, “American X” features an inspiring and sprawling mid-section. And there is plenty more to be inspired by on Baby 81: the stompy, dreamy “Windows,” the buoyant “It’s Not What I Wanted,” the gorgeous drone of “All You Do Is Talk,” and the ‘90s-inflected, grungy rock of “Cold Wind.” Baby 81 ends with “Am I Only,” a song Hayes’ wrote in his late teens, a beautiful, mid-tempo track that’s fleshed out with strings and xylophone.
Although it starts off with a song that originated at a two-year-old session and ends with one of Hayes’ oldest tracks, “The sequence of the record is almost perfectly chronological from the first song we recorded for the album to the last,” Been points out. Together, these 13 tracks make up Baby 81 — songs born into conflict that represent hope for the future.
Track Listing:
Took Out A Loan
Berlin
Weapon Of Choice
Window
Cold Wind
It’s Not What You Wanted
666 Conducer
All You Do Is Talk
Lien On Your Dreams
Need Some Air
Killing The Light
American X
Am I Only
