Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Whigs
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Slim's
Better than: Beating the Devil's tattoo -- whatever that means.
Leather jackets? Check. Too much fog machine? I can still smell it. Glee-d-out girls snapping cam-phone pics every 1.5 seconds? You betcha. Burly rock dudes hitting on less-burly-dudes' birds? Of course. Drugs, alcohol, and indoor tobacco consumption? Hell yes.
All this and more went down at last night's sold-out, hometown Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show. It was a performance that proved enjoyable as the epitome of a certain kind of rock 'n' roll -- the kind that is predictable, indulgent, monotonous, derivative, and absurd. Amplifiers outnumbered band members onstage. Strobe lights blasted us into epilepsy. Climaxes lasted days. Rock stars tossed around fancy guitars like Fred Flintstone threw out half-eaten poultry legs. The band even played its fuzzy, one-trick songs sloppily at times, which is saying something, because BRMC's grungy, atmospheric blues-rock ain't Mozart.
But no one goes to a BRMC show looking for art-fag cred or Master's thesis material or musical virtuosity. They go looking for fun. And last night, with all the hipsters elsewhere and the only handlebar moustaches belonging to big dudes who didn't look so interested in irony, some serious fucking fun was had. The S.F.-via-L.A. power trio of Robert Turner, Peter Hayes, and new addition Leah Shapiro (known heretofore as the Raveonette's touring drummer) rocked out for two goddamn hours. Two hours! And only during a few songs did the crowd start to get twitchy with their personal electronics. (I got twitchy way more, but I was sober, which is decidedly the wrong way to experience a BRMC show.)
