Events

[ROCK] Naming your band after Marlon Brando’s biker gang from the 1953 film, The Wild One, casts a leathery, engine-revving tone that has stayed the duration for California’s Black Rebel Motorcycle Club— and there’s nothing wrong with that. Essentially the brainchild of once-teen-friends Peter Hayes (who’d done a stint in a mid-1990s version of Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Robert Levon Been—son of The Call’s front man, Michael Been, who died backstage at a 2010 BRMC gig while working as their sound engineer—the trio nearly became a band that didn’t do Stateside tours because of ongoing issues with Brit drummer Nick Jago. Jago, who has had trouble maintaining his work visa, was in and out of BRMC beginning in the mid aughties, dogging a period of time during which they could’ve risen to greater prominence with travel woes and distractions. For the last decade, The Raveonettes’ touring drummer Leah Shapiro has stuck with BRMC, despite a health issue that’s impacted her rhythmic perception. Their new album, Wrong Creatures, dropped in January, and it finds them sticking with the classic-rock-cum-garage stew that’s always been their stock-in-trade, straddling the lines between punchy energy and shoegaze transfixion. In itself, that’s an act of defiance, which is an integral part of rock-and-roll chemistry, but just what it is that BRMC is rebelling against remains non-specific. Perhaps that’s the whole point. Opening for them at Town Ballroom on Saturday, May 12, is The Dandy Warhols’ Peter G. Holmström in his side project, Pete International Airport.