The Bowery Presents

The Bowery Presents upcoming shows

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Alberta Cross

Venue:
Date:
Fri 4/09
Notes:
18+
Doors: 6:30 PM / Show: 7:30 PM
$26.00 advance / $30.00 day of show
Tickets
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
official website
myspace
Peter Hayes -- Guitar, Bass, Vocals, Harmonica, Keys
Robert Levon Been -- Bass, Guitar, Vocals, Piano
Leah Shapiro -- Drums, Percussion

Somewhere between the five full-length albums and a decade-long road test across the highways of the world, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club found their way.

Eleven years after bassist Robert Levon Been and guitarist Peter Hayes started playing gigs around their hometown of San Francisco, the duo has now started over, with a new vision, a new drummer, and the gift of a future unknown.

The sound of Beat The Devil's Tattoo comes from everywhere and nowhere- it draws a map and embarks on a sonic road trip through American music; from howling front porch stomps on the Chattanooga and beer-sloshing Texas roadhouse rockouts, to swaggering proto-punk sneering in NYC's basement bars.

For six months, Hayes, Been and new drummer Leah Shapiro, holed up in a basement studio together, during one of the coldest winters in recent history. In this house outside Philadelphia - the same place Howl was penned - they built their first album as a new band from the ground up. "It was like a family again, living together and working really closely like that," Been says. "Something happened to us out there though, I'm not sure if we beat back our demons, or if we just let them take us over completely. But strange days make for strange times."

Shapiro replaced longtime BRMC drummer Nick Jago behind the set, bringing a newfound sense of professionalism, which she honed from playing with the Danish rockers, The Raveonettes.

"She knows how to watch when she plays," Hayes says, "there's intuition and there's the ability to watch our body language as we're really going to dig into something."

With Shapiro on board, the band recorded in Los Angeles at the Station House, tracking all basic tracks in a shocking four days.

"We wrote over 23 songs for this record and the hardest thing about it was probably narrowing it down to a final 13 track album," Been says. "There's just a strange effortlessness now, which I haven't felt since we recorded our first album. It's just got that kind of nervous, kind of excited, kind of unsure feeling, where we don't know where it's gonna go next, so everyone just stands out of the way."

Beat The Devil's Tattoo stirs with a raw sexual energy, melting down their previous four records, and forging a style that encompasses them all. The firebrand fuzz bass from their first two albums B.R.M.C. and Take Them On, On Your Own emerges on "Shadows Keeper," and "Aya," Howl's acoustic driven, edgy Americana is ever-present on "Long Way Down" and the title track, "Beat the Devil's Tattoo."

Like the title of the album, a phrase gleaned from Edgar Allen Poe's 1839 short story, "The Devil In The Belfry," BRMC stands on the edge of darkness, but never dives in.

"Leah had given me a book of Poe short stories and I'd immersed myself in it. The one phrase 'Beat The Devils Tattoo' leaped out at me though for some reason. I read up on it and found that it originally meant 'the beat of a drum or a bugle signaling soldiers to return to their camps after dark'. But it's a very old lost phrase. These days, I guess it's used whenever anyone anxiously drums their fingers on a table or taps their foot on the ground incessantly, they're 'beating the devil's tattoo.'"

With songs of self-destruction and redemption, of heartbreak and ecstatic love, Beat The Devil's Tattoo traverses much emotional ground. Like Poe's American Gothic style, the album infuses the soaring spirit of Southern folk with lowdown grit of bijou blues. The slide-guitars and tambourine stomp of "River Styx" brings us "to the water's edge where every sin has been washed away." The dusty howls opening "Conscience Killer" evoke a fire-and-brimstone preacher leading the choir at an Alabama big-top revival.

The piano piece, "Annabel Lee," beautifully ends the UK album with the adaptation of Poe's story of everlasting love beyond the grave.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Like the best balladeers, like Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, and Lou Reed, BRMC, translates feelings into sound, and sound into lyrics that sets off on moody journeys deep into the soul.

"We wouldn't be in a band if people were saying what was in my head, the way I need it heard," Hayes says, "The only thing that satisfies inner reconciliation is music, spitting it out, making and creating ourselves."

BRMC's ceaseless drive to create, to tell stories of redemption and aching desire, keeps them going. It's an addiction, an unquenchable thirst appeased only by the undying love of rock and roll.

"To me music connects everyone and everything, that is the light," Been says, "If we're able to write something, and someone can relate to it, or feel something from it, the light is blinding"

Thanks be to Rock. Amen.
Alberta Cross
myspace
Alberta Cross
Broken Side of Time

More than clever verses and catchy choruses, truly timeless albums offer listeners the keys to another world; they catapult you into another frame of mind and jostle your soul a little bit along the way. Broken Side of Time, Alberta Cross’ ATO Records debut, is one of those albums.

A cathartic, kaleidoscope of influences, from Depeche Mode to The Band, it’s also the sound of Alberta Cross’ two principals—frontman/guitarist-vocalist Petter Ericson Stakee and bassist Terry Wolfers—going for broke and stumbling across the sound of their dreams in the process.

Broken Side of Time took root in an April 2008 jam session, Stakee and Wolfers’ first with three players they would quickly enlist—guitarist Sam Kearney, drummer Austin Beede and keyboardist Alec Higgins. With the aid of a little drink and a little smoke, the five jammed on a group of Stakee’s then-new songs, giving birth to Alberta Cross’ second incarnation almost immediately: “I remember thinking that night, ‘This is gonna be insane,’” remembers Stakee.

It was a time of upheaval for Stakee and Wolfers, ex-pat Brits living in Brooklyn. They had moved to a new, tough city, lost the major-label record deal they had moved there with, and were in the midst of reinventing both their band and their sound, while sleeping on friends’ couches. Their well-received debut EP, 2007’s The Thief & the Heartbreaker, was a modest, folk-minded, acoustic-based disc that garnered glowing reviews. But, for Stakee and Wolfers, it was a baby step.

Broken Side of Time, meanwhile, is a giant stride ahead, one that marks the band’s official introduction to America. Grand in volume and vast in vision, it’s an inspired set of electric songs that finds the intersection of The Verve, My Morning Jacket and Neil Young (with or without Crazy Horse). Recorded in Austin, produced by the band with Mike McCarthy (Spoon, Dead Confederate, Heartless Bastards) and mixed by John O’Mahony (Depeche Mode, Coldplay, Kasabian) at Electric Lady Studios, the album melds propulsive, throbbing bass lines and crashing waves of guitar to a haunting, impassioned voice that can sound ancient and Appalachian.

Something of an about-face from The Thief & the Heartbreaker, the album, says Stakee, bears the influence of years of frustration logged in the shadow of Manhattan: “It’s kind of a desperation album, a darker album; it’s definitely angrier. We’ve been in a crazy place during the whole album, and you can hear that.” Appropriately, Stakee was listening to Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, and the grimmer, gospel songs of Depeche Mode while writing the songs of Broken Side of Time. On songs like “Rise From the Shadows” and “Ghost of City Life” he speaks directly of their situation and surroundings.

Despite any struggles, Wolfers and Stakee in many ways have had a charmed career thus far. Born in Sweden—where he spent a childhood on tour and in studios with his musician father before moving to London in his late teens—Stakee and Wolfers—a Brit charmed by everyone from Prince and My Bloody Valentine to Metallica and Ride as a teen—were playing in a guitar-rock band in London’s east end some four years ago, when Stakee brought some new songs and ideas to the band. When all were roundly rejected, Wolfers invited his bandmate to record those humble, acoustic songs on the makeshift equipment in his apartment.

“Right then and there I instantly realized that he was an extremely talented fellow,” Wolfers says. “That’s when I realized I had found someone who I could create some really great music with—after just jamming on a few things.” Those demos would become The Thief & The Heartbreaker—featuring Petter’s brother, John Alexander Ericson, on keyboards—released via Fiction in the U.K. and re-released by popular demand on the bands new U.K. label, Ark Recordings

Bored with the scene in London and in need of a burst of energy, Stakee and Wolfers moved to New York, where they immediately created a buzz, playing spellbinding acoustic shows at venues like The Living Room, en route to capturing a new deal with ATO Records. Seeking to create more of a band vibe—“and we wanted it to be a family,” says Wolfers—they added Beede, Higgins and Kearney and a louder, grittier sound was born. “We had a show at The Mercury Lounge [in New York] like two days after that first jam,” says Wolfers, “and, without really any real time to rehearse, I remember being onstage that night thinking, ‘This is the best I’ve heard the material.’”

Alberta Cross has toured extensively through the U.K., sharing the stage with Oasis, The Shins, Bat for Lashes and Simian Mobile Disco, among others. “If we weren’t playing for people every night, we would be going mad.” Stakee says. Adds Wolfers, “We do it, because we have to.”

“I remember going to see The Verve on the Storm in Heaven tour, and I stood right in front of [guitarist] Nick McCabe the whole night,” the bassist continues. “I remember walking out of that show feeling like I had just seen a group of people pour their heart and soul out, and I felt it. It changed my life. And that’s what we want to do: We want to give people something honest, and move them, make them feel.”

Echoes Stakee, “We’re trying to give people truly soulful music, which is hopefully inspirational. I want to ease their minds and give them a little break from reality.”
For more information please contact
Jaime Rosenberg, Brendan Gillen or Carla Sacks at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000, jaime.rosenberg@sacksco.com, brendan.gillen@sacksco.com or carla@sacksco.com or Ambrosia Healy at ATO Records, 310.273.2266, ambrosia@atorecords.com.
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