Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is just about the gloomiest thing to ever come out of the Bay Area. The band’s fourth album, Baby 81, conjues up the image of three angry musicians dressed in black, riding down the road to the apocalypse with a deadly brand of rock-guitar holstered at their sides. At times, the album rocks violently with only echoes of the hip folk-grunge sound of their previous disc, 2005’s Howl. Baby 81 is catchy at times, murky and misplaced at others, wholly challenging and overbearingly negative, and it clocks in at only one-hour long.

God only knows what BRMC was thinking when it decided to name its new album after the famed baby who survived the devastating tsunami in 2004 only to get caught up in custody litigation. But the bottom line is, the album title doesn’t matter; the album rocks, despite all its misguided social commentary.

After all, BRMC has never really been the band you latch onto for its prose; lyrical competence is all that’s necessary. Still, it’s hard not to cringe when the first words on the album opener, “Took Out a Loan,” come through the speakers: “I took out a loan on my empty heart, babe.” Luckily, the chunky riff supplies the hook, kicking off the first of 13 dark, raw grooves. There are glimpses of The Stooges, The Beatles and, at times, even Nirvana, throughout Baby 81.

“Cold Wind,” one of the heavier tunes, could easily find a home somewhere on In Utero with its feedback-laden guitars and screechy leads. For those who grew accustomed to the more acoustic BRMC of Howl, it might be a rough transition at first; certainly, this latest album is not always as pleasurable. The band, made up of three pale, vampire-looking rockers (can they really be from sunny California?), paints a miserable picture of America with bleaker-than-thou strokes; storm clouds hover over every song.

Several tracks suffer from the hefty album length, droning together without standing out as individual songs. “Berlin,” with its nauseating guitars, could easily be lost without damaging the production one bit. Similarly, “Need Some Air” seems better left on the cutting room floor; the album rocks plenty without it, and in far more interesting ways.

Oddly enough, the longer tracks prove to be some of the greatest pleasures on Baby 81. Breaking the nine-minute mark (dangerous territory for many rock bands), “American X” is jam-packed with desperation. Things get surprisingly loose during the extended instrumental sequences, as meandering guitar solos and reverberation prevail and come together for an epic, frightful climax.

“Window” finds BRMC in a blatantly-Beatles moment (it’s the piano chord progression; pure George Harrison), with a dark mentality that is straight out of the White Album-era. Since Elliott Smith’s posthumous album, no one has been able to nail a solid rendition of The Beatles in the band’s red-eyed, paranoid and hopelessly doped period. However, BRMC seizes the day, though without Smith’s penchant for gut-wrenching harmony and confessional poetry. Nevertheless, it too sounds at home in a bad trip.

On “Not What You Wanted,” psychedelic guitars swirl over acoustic strumming, building to a noisier, more electric finale featuring some buzzing slide playing. The song cycle seems about evenly split in its focus on either the crushing weight of the world or disastrous relationships. Following the latter, “All You Do Is Talk” comes dangerously close to sounding like something care of U2 or The Killers, neither an advantageous fit for a group of bad boy rockers named for Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang in The Wild One.

However, the album’s production and themes manage to tie the whole bundle together well enough. It’s good to see BRMC up for a challenge, and maybe Baby 81 is the band’s most musically compelling effort to date. Though not nearly as depressing as, say, Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss (no album is, really), Baby 81 suffocates from its unrelenting onslaught of pessimism. Just a glance at the track listing (“Killing The Light,” “666 Conducer,” “Lien On Your Dreams”) is enough to conjure up images of infinite blackness.

Still, if downbeat rock is what you seek, then Baby 81 shouldn’t disappoint. Though the band diverges on some questionable tangents, and though the first single (“Weapon of Choice”) is disappointing when viewed in the full scope of BRMC’s potential, the guitar-work is impressive throughout, showcasing the individual members’ instrumental prowess. All in all, it’s a strange, depressing album, with BRMC’s strengths and weaknesses shoved to the foreground.

Contact reporter Zachary Herrmann at zherrm@umd.edu.