Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

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Specter At The Feast
For 15 years, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has carried the torch for true rock and roll. The latest edition of
the firebrand rock troupe, sees them at their most dynamic. Their sixth studio album, Specter at the Feast,
ventures into diverse sonic territory, delivering their most ambitious offering yet. It's an album of
impossible dichotomies; opposing sounds amalgamate into a seamless, entirely coherent package, that
rumbles with driving rhythms, and soars with skyward-arcing guitar howls. Robert Been delivers growling
bass grooves on "Hate the Taste," and Peter Hayes' guitar wails on what may be their most hard-rocking
song, "Rival." Counterbalancing these frenetic outbursts are moments of star-gazing ambient textures, like
the crystalline harmonics introducing the slinking album opener, "Fire Walker," and the organ drones of
"Returning." There are moments of down-home blues paired alongside flailing punk bombasticism; gnarled
dark rock shores upon uplifting, and optimistic anthems. Taking cues from all points of the band's many
years on the road, this record is the band's most well-realized album to date. "We thought about making it a
double album," Been says of the many songs that were written for the record.

To write the album, the Los Angeles band traveled north to the sleepy Northern California town of Santa
Cruz, where they holed up in an old Post Office-turned-recording studio. It was here, just a few blocks from
where Been grew up, that they began to write.

"Peter would spend all day and night in that studio," Been recalls, "[Drummer] Leah [Shapiro] and I would
go and check on him every few days, and he'd show us these incredible textures and guitar lines that he
built."

"I've never seen the sunrise so many times," Hayes laughs, "I'd work all night on these songs, trying to get
them right."

Prior to heading north to Santa Cruz, Dave Grohl invited them to his Studio 606, home to the storied Neve
8028 console soundboard from the legendary Sound City -- the subject of his recent documentary -- and on
which Nirvana created Nevermind and BMRC recorded their debut album in 2001. "It was a nice sense
return," Been says, "to come back to the place where it all began for us."

For two years, the band worked on creating the album, a process that they all agree, was one of the most
difficult of their career. Like the Macbeth quote that became the album's title, there was a painful shadow
that had been cast upon the band.

During the band's 2010 tour, Robert's father Michael Been -- known for fronting 1980's alt-rock group, The
Call -- died while backstage. He was BRMC’s Sound Engineer, and as Hayes says, "he was like another
member of the band." They finished the tour but afterward, the trauma began to set in.
"Music began as the best way to escape what was out there, all the shit in the world that feels false,
everything you want to say against it," Been says, "but when a loss like this is so close to music, it turns
everything upside down. Music becomes the one place where you can’t escape. It’s like waking up in a
completely different world. How do I get my bearings in this world?"

Slowly, the band began to rebuild. They fought grief and the pain of Michael's death by confronting it
directly, with no fear.

"The only thing that felt good was just getting together, plugging in, and turning up loud as shit," Been
says. "It was kind of this therapeutic process, playing really loud, and just feeling this energy; letting that
be a release. It really helped us pull out of that darkest place that we were in."

As their momentum regained, their synergy reconnected them to one another. Then one session began the
process that unlocked their creative energy again. "I began playing this drumbeat that I had been working
on," Shapiro says, "the guys started playing, and suddenly we realized that we were playing the Call's 'Let
the Day Begin.'"

The unintentional homage to The Call turned into their own high-powered take on the song they performed
with Michael around the world. The energy was explosive and real; it became the first song they recorded
at Grohl's studio, as a tribute to Michael's place in the band. For Robert, of course, the meaning transcended
music. "This song was one of my earliest memories of my father's music," he says.

Grief transformed to joy. On this album, where they dug deeper than ever before, mining these difficult
emotional landscapes, the result is intense, but rapturous. From personal and intimate hymns like the
"Sometimes the Light" to the buzz-saw guitars of "Teenage Disease," Been says "it was these two extremes
that we were drifting back and forth between, you feel both when you are going through what we went
trough."

Above all, Specter at the Feast is honest; it tells the story of a journey to Hell and back, revealing that in
darkness, there can be light. Wounds will eventually heal, and maybe, music can save your life. As they
sing on ‘Returning,’ “I will follow you till we all return, till we know our souls' survived."



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