Dirty Glitter 2013 In Review #4: Sunset Strip Music Festival Edition

Saturday, August 3rd in West Hollywood, CA was the Sunset Strip Music Festival. Born in 2008, it takes place on and along the notorious Sunset Boulevard as well as inside it's world famous venues the Viper Room, the Roxy and the Whiskey where, once upon a time, the Doors were actually the house band. The fest is all about honoring and promoting the live music scene that the Sunset Strip was built on and every year's festival has a special honoree who has been an influence on The Strip: past honorees have been Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Slash and last year, the Doors. This year the Strip recognized that girls rock, too: 2013's honoree was none other than the one and only Joan Jett. Why? Because just like us, the Sunset Strip loves rock & roll.

Dirty Glitter 8/1/13: Sunset Strip Music Festival Edition

Andy Clockwise- "Everybody's In A Band"
He's charming, roguish, audacious, a bit of a wild man on stage...he's Andy Clockwise. An Aussie who came to Los Angeles for a visit and, in discovering that he felt quite at home among the madness, never left. "Schizo pop" is Clockwise's trade but what it sounds like is a swaggering maestro of wit and awesome. On Saturday at the Sunset Strip Music Fest Clockwise played the Viper Room stage where he did, indeed, pull out this song: from his 2011 release The Socialite (which was an examination of the cult of celebrity through humorous and partially vodka-iced eyes) it's appropriately titled, "Everybody's In a Band."


Sabrosa Purr- "The Lovely People"
Sabrosa Purr is an LA four-piece that sometimes defies description but often gets compared to notable bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Jane's Addiction. I simply call them "a collision of stoner fuzz and metal punched up by guitar rock, glam and as ethereal and enigmatic as any drug induced head trip". They've two EPs and one full album and listening to them takes the mind on multiple trips as Will Love’s vocals bend from pliant, boy/man coos to eye-watering, nu-metal howls that would earn Kurt Cobain’s seal of approval...and those will be happening in this song. During SSMF they occupied Viper Room stage. Sabrosa Purr is guitar driven, ethereal, haunting, bombastic, occasionally quiet and with a female rhythm section, it officially makes them one of the sexiest bands, period.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club- "Rival"
The Sunset Strip isn't the typical stomping grounds for garage rockers Black Rebel Motorcycle Club but Los Angeles is their home, LA loves them and BRMC are always ones to rock for a good cause. The good cause in question was the non-profit Music For Relief (which was founded by headliners Linkin Park). A portion of SSMF ticket sales went to MFR which is all about musicians supporting disaster relief efforts. So on Saturday BRMC did their awesome thing at the festival on the main stage and it was loud and from the heart, which there's a lot of tucked inside the leather jackets of Peter Hayes, Leah Shapiro and Robert Been. This track is from their latest release, Specter At The Feast, and it's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at what I described as possibly their 'hi-octane grungiest'. It also contains my favorite drum performance from Leah Shapiro since she joined the band in 2008.

Signed, 

Diary of a Concert Whore  aka @dharma69

VIDEO: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Shed A Little Light

It's no secret that my head and heart are both card-carrying members of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club...in spirit, which is truly all that matters. It's a club that asks precious little of its members, gives no directives, charges no dues, does not participate in hazing and whose motto is, effectively, "Come As You Are" and I have. Bless their hearts, they've been quite gracious and welcoming and accepting.

BRMC’s music and I go back a ways. I don’t claim to have discovered them on some dark and stormy night after randomly popping into the revered Los Angeles venue and launch pad known as the Silverlake Lounge and I cannot give you an approximate date when I officially became acquainted with the Robert L. Been, Peter Hayes and Nick Jago version of BRMC (we've since welcomed Leah Sharpiro to the fold) or what song served as the introduction. But the detail, itself, is a minor plot point within the bigger picture because, at this point, it just feels like they've always been there.No matter how darkly lit the room, it's been all of the subsequent moments, the lyrics, the guitar chaos, the ridiculously athletic bass lines that followed that have solidified them, made them musically and in some ways, emotionally necessary and, oddly, a point of light. So much so that Ive found myself going the extra mile to see them, hear them, experience them.

“I fell in love with a sweet sensation, I gave my heart to a simple chord…”

In 2007 I found it necessary to see BRMC (opening for Kings of Leon at the time) at the Greek Theatre, in Los Angeles, Radio City Music Hall in NYC and the Tower Theatre in Philadelphia. Oddly one of the most vivid memories of that Tower show: when doors opened and we entered the venue, the floors were nastily sticky. As in “Did no one mop up after last night?”-sticky.

In 2008 it was necessary to see BRMC in June in at the Ink 'n Iron Festival in Long Beach, CA (that show where Robert did that thing with rail) and on tour with Stone Temple Pilots in July at Qualcomm Stadium, San Diego, CA and in August at Jones Beach, NY.

That same August it became necessary to rearrange certain flight plans because BRMC decided to add a headlining show at Irving Plaza in Manhattan a few days prior to the Jones Beach gig. Arriving at JFK airport that evening, my luggage and I hauled ass to the venue in order to make the show. Mission accomplished. My luggage enjoyed the show as much as I did.

In October of 2010 I had the strangest urge to ditch work and fly to Atlanta for BRMC at the Masquerade, so I did. After the show near the back bar I heard someone call my name. Having no idea who the hell in Atlanta would know me, I turned around to find Julian Dorio of the Athens, GA band the Whigs, staring at me. Our conversation went exactly like this:

Julian: "What are you doing here???"
Me: "What are YOU doing here?"
Julian: (cocked his head, gave me a "Really?" look): "I live here. What's your excuse?"

Fuck. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

So technically I have gone a few thousand extra miles, but I well know that I’m not alone. This disturbing pattern has repeated itself and as prophet of truth iAN Ottaway has keenly divined, this is a thing, a condition that may require treatment. Meetings. A withdrawal program, even. Or not as I honestly believe that we are all safe within this particular realm of dependence. 

Earlier this year I reviewed Specter At The Feast and called the song "Sometimes The Light" a pause in the album's aggression to "genuflect, soul search and spirit-chase." It's a beautiful and typically atypical moment of grace from the band that feels like a hymnal on the ears and a warm balm to the soul. Yesterday iAN decided to gift us with visual accompaniment to the song; something iridescent and reflective, cherry blossomed and almost too pristine to bear. So when you watch this video (when, not if) should you feel something akin to your heart squeezing itself a little too tight within the confines of its containment or a certain shaft of pure clarity, almost absolute in its ability to make you believe in the God that you swear doesn't exist, feel that. Pause and feel yourself as Hayes' voice, part beacon, spins gossamer threads of web to keep you safe. Now revel in it for just a moment.

B.R.M.C - SOMETIMES THE LIGHT from ian ottaway on Vimeo.

Felt good, didn't it? Of course it did and that feeling, my friend, is also a gift. Because, whether or not you knew it or perhaps you just needed a reminder, sometimes the light turns out to shine with everyone. In everyone...including you.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club Prep Return w/ New Album, Club Dates

12/13/2012

“The war is over, let the battle begin-
The album was officially completed and wrapped in the studio on 12-12-12…
ROBERT LEVON BEEN*” 

This was the Facebook announcement that many have waited for with breath bated and the many collectively exhaled.

Because it meant that a certain wondrous thunder was about to roar again: Los Angeles based trio Black Rebel Motorcycle Club have wrapped up their seventh studio album (due out March 2013, title unknown) and follow up to 2010’s stellar Beat The Devil’s Tattoo. Nine months from beginning to end as the band entered the studio in March of this year, Been summed up this finale with, “Not a moment to late…and not a moment to soon.”

This on the heels of their mid-November announcement of three intimate West coast club shows to close out the year. Shows in the types of spaces which they and their music seem to thrive where BRMC will road test some of the new material on some of their most avid fans. The fortunate few/locations/venues and dates are:

Dec. 19th @ Slim’s, San Francisco, CA (SOLD OUT)
Dec. 20th @ The Catalyst (the Atrium), Santa Cruz, CA (tix available HERE)
Dec. 21st @ The Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA (SOLD OUT)

The musical landscape always welcomes the return BRMC (Peter Hayes, Robert L. Been and Leah Shapiro); they are one of the most disarmingly understated, hard working, notoriously enigmatic bands yet the quality of the atmospheric fuzz, psychedelic and blues infested noise they make resonates louder than anything they could possibly say. Except when Been said, "Peter, Leah and myself are dying to get out of this studio right now and back into the fight. It's taken us a long while getting back on our feet, but the time has come." And it’s that ethos that continues to endear them to the many.

Come Spring 2013, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club takes on Europe and the UK with the first leg of their world tour. Check the dates right HERE so that you can catch this rock and roll gang doing what they do best.