There is a big, laddy crowd out to see Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and, obligingly, the band make a big, laddy noise. They are ostensibly an American band in love with a certain era of British music. In fact, most obviously, a Scottish band (the Jesus and Mary Chain), who were, in turn, in love with American music - most notably the Beach Boys and the Stooges. If that makes BRMC sound like a copy of a copy then that is, to a large extent, what they are, with all the fading and distortion of the original image that implies. But their American-ness is unmistakeable, from the sludgy boogie that recalls ZZ Top shorn of all southern-fried camp, to their supreme eligibility as the band in the modern-day equivalent of a John Hughes teen movie - Buffy, say, or The OC.
There used to be something stupidly thrilling about BRMC's posturing noise, and it is better suited to small venues. This isn't preciousness about a band becoming successful, it's simply that what seems marvellously obscene, overripe and out of context in a confined space, has become superfluous. What was once exciting was the way in which the band's studied sullenness and convulsive racket seemed to push all the oxygen out of the room; now it just appears wheezy and lumbering.
The odd tactic of dedicating the first two-thirds of the set to uniformly mid-paced songs doesn't help either. Songs from four different albums slouch into each other anonymously, with vocals set permanently on sneer. Things pick up with current single Weapon of Choice, or would do were it not soon clear that the fast songs also come in a big, uniform clump and, almost without exception, they are pretty much the slow songs at double speed.
The name, too, feels disconcertingly tawdry now: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. It's like that cut-price work-wear branding on jeans and T-shirts: Vintage American Haulage Co, a default conflation of empty signifiers. Indeed, it makes you think of the way that Motörhead T-shirts, or T-shirts for 80s American soft-rock bands such as Toto and Kansas -worn ironically, of course - became must-have fashion items. "Whatever happened to my rock'n'roll?" BRMC sing. It became a T-shirt.
· At the Wulfrun Hall, Wolverhampton, tonight. Box office: 0870 3207000. Then touring.
