The Beta Band: Heroes To Zeros

THE BETA BAND: HEROES TO ZEROS (2004)

1) Assessment; 2) Space; 3) Lion Thief; 4) Easy; 5) Wonderful; 6) Troubles; 7) Out-Side; 8) Space Beatle; 9) Rhodo­dendron; 10) Liquid Bird; 11) Simple; 12) Pure For.

Artists are rarely capable of taking off from the exact location of their artistic muse. More often than not, it takes them at least a few years and a few personal crises to get there — not everyone can be Jim Morrison or Angus Young. When The Beta Band released their first set of E.P.s, cri­tics fell over themselves praising their freshness and inspiration, but nobody asked the question: what are these guys, and what do they really care about? Like, it is obvious they are busy piling up these loops and mixing up these styles because they want to push forward musical boundaries, but what will they be when they get bored with pushing forward?

Well, now we know. The evolutionary curve has come to end, and on their last album The Beta Band have given themselves away: all they really wanted all along was to sing tender space-pop songs. The loops, the squeaks, the hip-hop trappings, the genre-hopping, none of that was in their blood — they were simply too smart not to try it out. But, six years into their career, they became tired of being smart. It did not pay off too well, and it prevented them from gladdening the heart. So they recorded Heroes To Zeros to gladden their heart. Then they broke up.

Each following Beta Band album is more accessible than the previous one; consequently, most fans of the band are split into those who rank their albums best-to-worst in ascending chronologi­cal order, and vice versa. I would probably join the ranks of the former, thinking more highly of The Beta Band at their most «gimmicky» (read: «intelligent») than at their most «honest» — if only because Steve Mason is not that great a songwriter to be able to get by on the bare strength of his basic melodic ideas. But this does not mean Heroes To Zeros is a failure — only that it tends to feel a bit bland when you arrive at it from the past.

The age of the free groove is over; these are three-to-four minute songs that sometimes (not too often) mutate into mantras, but more often follow the conventional verse-chorus structures. Out of all the innumerable ingredients of days gone by, the band concentrates on just two: folk-rock melodicity and «astral» arrangements — think some of the early Pink Floyd compositions, but without the depressive aspects. The album opener, 'Assessment', greets you with echoey droning guitars, floating vocals, a steady rhythmic punch and a chaotic coda, firmly anchored to the spirit of Nuggets II, and it does not get tremendously different from there.

With everything being so simple, one can only talk about the ratio of beautiful-to-forgettable on the record, renouncing the effort to find and elaborate some overall grand statement. Well, 'Won­derful' is certainly true to its title: a pompous shimmering anthem to beauty, great magical ringing guitar tone, tender romantic vocal, what's not to like? Terrific percussion arrangement on 'Space', making the 'Start is the end, more or less' part of the song one of the most clinging moments on the album. Masterful paranoid atmosphere on 'Liquid Bird'; jangly Byrds-style guitars comple­mented by Cocteau Twins-style background noises. Etc. etc.

Still, count me dissatisfied. Do we really want Steve Mason to open up his 2001 Space Odyssey-fuelled (I was going to write «Star Trek-fuelled», but we do not want to alienate all the snobby readers, do we?) heart to us? There are moments of beauty and power on this record, but much more often it simply strives for beauty and power, stopping short a few inches away from the ac­ceptable levels. And this is exactly where a little bit of unpredictable genre-hopping could have helped, but, apparently, they are through with genre-hopping. Too bad: looks like the world was through with The Beta Band, in return. Decent album, but my thumbs are stuck in a strictly hori­zontal position about it. This is no longer The Beta Band that we used to know, and it is only fair that this was its last album.

The Beta Band: Hot Shots II

THE BETA BAND: HOT SHOTS II (2001)

1) Squares; 2) Al Sharp; 3) Human Being; 4) Gone; 5) Dragon; 6) Broke; 7) Quiet; 8) Alleged; 9) Life; 10) Eclipse.

A strange band indeed: first, they complain that the industry people would not let them turn their unfinished demos into fully shaped songs — then, finally given complete creative freedom, rele­ase a collection of songs that really sound far more like demos than songs. I guess if this reminds you of the typical behaviour of a capricious little kid, that's because The Beta Band have always had this capricious little kid inside them. That's an essential part of their recipe.

Hot Shots II is crazy, spacy, and seriously minimalistic. This time around, there is no getting side-tracked from the main groove, which is very sharply pronounced on each individual track. There is also no more fair use for the term «post-modern» when discussing this music. Regardless of the actual personal beliefs and values of the band's members, the music they create no longer confounds genres and challenges the rules for the sake of the challenge: yes, it is an intentional merger of trip-hop rhythms with old time psychedelia, but it feels like a sincere synthesis, a heart­felt attempt at blowing the minds of the young generation by giving them a familiar setting stuf­fed with acid-fuelled idealism from days long gone by.

The younger generation did not buy into it as energetically as they hoped, but Hot Shots II still climbed reasonably high up the charts, and why shouldn't it have? Most of this stuff is attention-grabbing, and also pretty accessible. Why deny something like 'Squares', when its head-bobbing rhythm, astral guitar hooks, and singalong vocal melody are as commercial as they come? The opening lines — 'I seen the demons, but they didn't make a sound / They tried to reach me, but I lay upon the ground' — show signs of an uncozy disturbance, but rarely over the course of this album does it become uncozy to the point of putting the record in a different rating category.

There are traces of darker darkness, but timid ones, and also beautiful in their timidity — e. g., the gloomy ballad 'Gone', where the «deep»-sounding guitars and sparse minor piano chords define the very idea of light, but pervasive sadness. Check the lyrics and you will find that the protagonist "fell from a spaceship" and "was taken for a little ride" — of course; this whole al­bum was, most likely, created by people who fell from a spaceship and bumped their heads real hard — but, truth is, the song would have just as easily fit onto a Tim Buckley album, to name but one old-timey candidate. Just a good old moody ballad.

Timid, yes, but if there is one particular direction in which the Betas were evolving, it is «doom and gloom». In terms of instrumentation, the entire album is light, but the mood it sets is anything but; on one side, the record is bookmarked with 'Squares' and their "I seen the demons", and on the other side we get pricked equally hard with 'Life': "I went to look for shadows, but the sha­dows they found me... I want to be somebody else, I feel I won't be free — is this me for life?" and they loop the last question to the sound of rough, unpleasant synth grunts, too. 'Dragon' gets us high in the sky, cooking up images of psychedelic revelations ("I never been the type to sing all night but AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"), but midway through dissolves into a sea of growling keyboard noises accompanied with the telling refrain: "How the West was won is a lie — but it's made to sound like fun...". So when the record finally comes to a close with the bright, innocent, seductively deranged 'Eclipse' ("We all live together on a little round ball, we all sing together when the cuckoo calls"), it is almost like an apology for the pessimistic vibe of the rest — one that smoothes the side effects, but does not wipe them out entirely.

It should, however, be noted that all these things only float out very slowly on repeated listens. With all the minimalism and subdued atmosphere, Hot Shots II defies, denies, and self-parodies its title — this album is as far removed from «hot» as the average portrait of America's First La­dies. To some, it will rather be «tepid» — devoid of aggressive, rousing moments, but not nearly quiet enough to truly count as «ambient»; and «tepid» is clearly a negative assessment. Give it a little time to sink in, though, and you just might get to like these strange furry animals from outer space showing signs of troubled longing for their original homeland. They got the bug, see? Spot the bug, and see why it has forced me to give the album a thumbs up. Unfortunately (or, rather, for­tunately), I don't have the bug myself, so it is only the brain part that reacts positively. But who knows — you may have it, and then Hot Shots II will no longer be just «tepid» to you.

The Beta Band: The Beta Band

THE BETA BAND: THE BETA BAND (1999)

1) The Beta Band Rap; 2) It's Not Too Beautiful; 3) Simple Boy; 4) Round The Bend; 5) Dance O'Er The Border; 6) Broken Up A-Ding-Dong; 7) Number 15; 8) Smiling; 9) The Hard One; 10) The Cow's Wrong.

The Beta Band, quite officially, all but disowned this record upon release, complaining that they were not given enough time or money to complete it properly. Therefore, be warned, future lis­tener: The Beta Band does not, in fact, fully conform to representing the completeness of artist-in-question's creative vision, but merely presents the basic cognitive structures that trigger the process of self-realization without bringing it to fruition. Putting it bluntly, it's a godawful mess, which Steve Mason has admitted himself.

Then again, I cannot help but wonder how exactly the band could have gone about embellishing these creations, given a more generous budget. Turn them into Lenny Kravitz or Ricky Martin was probably out of the question. Hiring the London Symphony Orchestra would be a better idea, but «The Beta Band with the London Symphony Orchestra» would likely only be as good as the sum of its parts anyway. Spending all the extra money on high-class alcohol and adding a genui­nely drunken vibe to the proceedings would also have been smart, but that would mean the band actually complained about the record being too normal rather than insufficiently accessible.

Personally, I would say that the Beta's Band initiation into the world of long-playing art is per­fec­tly fine as it is. A little tiresome in parts, perhaps; most of the «songs» hang around for too long, which is confusing, considering that the band members are overflowing with creative ideas — yet they avariciously hang on to them, only dispensing a few per composition. Where a guy like Zap­pa would have gone for oversaturation, cramming fifteen different melodies in fifty different ar­rangements per one long track (not a very recommendable approach either), these people take their time, hanging each track on one, at most two, different stable grooves, and then seeing what happens over the course of some whacko improvisations.

This complaint does not apply to the first song, though, which may give a false impression that the whole record may fly under post-modernist banners. 'The Beta Band Rap' does have a rap sec­tion, but only in the middle; the first part is fast-paced folksy vaudeville that sounds freshly deli­vered from the ovens of Sesame Street, and the last one is delirious rockabilly with some mock Elvis/Gene Vincent imitations — but what they all have in common is that the lyrics, rather strai­ghtforwardly and not without humor ("Since we've been signed, we eat real good / We always wash our hands and chew our food"), retell the story of the band up to the present.

But the Beta Band's prime purpose of existence is not to confuse and stupefy your mind: like their faraway ancestors from the unearthly paradise of Pepperland, they are here to blow it, and they begin doing this as early as the second track, 'It's Not Too Beautiful' — which it, fairly eno­ugh, is not, but it is still trippy enough to guarantee a pleasant journey through the white clouds and bright skies, occasionally interrupted with dangerous moments of turbulence that seem to have been sampled from some heavily orchestrated movie soundtracks.

What follows is almost completely unpredictable — and undescribable. Actually, it is very much describable, but a detailed description of each track would occupy a few weighty paragraphs of space and would make about as much sense as describing Bosch's The Garden of Earthly De­lights to someone standing on the steps of the Museo del Prado. There is a whole swarm of groo­ves — folksy, funky, hippity-hoppity, even ambient — each one saturated with whatever turns up on the cards: crazy Keith Moon-style percussion outbursts, symphonic swoops, cowbells, whis­tles, tape loops, white noise, electronically treated vocals, you just name it.

In terms of innovative power, it could be said that the album could have been a direct influence on Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — or, at least, it independently did pretty much the same thing that Jeff Tweedy and the boys came up with two years later. When Steve Mason sings "Once upon a time I was falling apart, now I'm always falling in love" in the monotonous, but seductive re­frain to 'The Hard One', he pretty much sounds like Tweedy — but, more than that, what they are do­ing is taking the age-old folk-pop singer-songwriting vibe and dipping it into a complex psy­che­delic-electronic sauce, exactly the kind of thing that tracks like 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' would be lauded for in a very short while. It's simply that 'The Hard One' is less catchy and more befuddling in its structure — but this should not make it any less deserving of attention.

With albums like these, the obligatory question is always «Would this sound better if I were on drugs?» Fortunately, I cannot answer this based on personal experience; but if there ever was an argument that psychedelic music as such puts together a grander, more diverse and exciting uni­verse than any amount of drugs could ever hope to, The Beta Band are its chief proponents in the modern age. At least, their psychedelia leaves plenty of space for humour, dancing, and basic human emotions. Listening to this on drugs could, in fact, close your mind to many of this al­bum's charms rather than the opposite. It is quite a brainy experience, and so the brain takes the lead in awarding it a brainy thumbs up, while the heart still cannot help but see this as a slight letdown after the pleasures of 'Dry The Rain' and 'Dog's Got A Bone'.

The Beta Band: The Three E.P.s

THE BETA BAND: THE THREE E.P.'s (1998)

1) Dry The Rain; 2) I Know; 3) B + A; 4) Dog Got A Bone; 5) Inner Meet Me; 6) The House Song; 7) Monolith; 8) She's The One; 9) Push It Out; 10) It's Over; 11) Dr. Baker; 12) Needles In My Eyes.

The Beta Band's first batch of EPs is frequently considered to be their finest, or, at least, most «se­minal» (actually, I hate this word) — and it is fairly convenient that, before going on to LP-length material, they bothered to package all three of them together on one disc, delivering me from the bother of thinking whether to review them all separately, or not to review them at all.

These guys are Scots, but they actually represent the kind of Scots who are fairly happy to get away from their Scottishness — at the very least, bagpipes are notoriously absent from these re­cordings. Their most deep-reaching influences would probably include the likes of the Holy Mo­dal Rounders, the Fugs, and the Incredible String Band — «psych-folk» outfits who found fun in adding various kaleidoscopic pebbles to basic folk melodies. If you think hard, you will discover that the approach, for the most part of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, was all but dead: folk music went its own way, striving for rigidity, solemnity, and authenticity, and the «psych» bit ten­ded to connect with poppier or hard-rockier stuff instead.

Thus it is that Steve Mason and Co. try to revive this spirit — take the folk vibe and marry it to whatever else comes along as long as it's modern and «relevant»: avantgarde, electronica, hip-hop, trip-hop, whatever works. And, for the most part, it works, because it's fresh and fun, and at the same time solidly bound to traditional harmony structures. Do they have a point? No. They are post-modernist goofballs. You are supposed to make that point for yourself.

The first of the EPs, Champion Versions, is the most accessible. It is bookmarked by two relati­vely straightforward folk songs, 'Dry The Rain' and 'Dog's Got A Bone', that are catchy, «toe-tap­pity» and almost obnoxiously friendly — but saved by the lazy, nonchalant, seductively static vibe. 'Dry The Rain's opening lines ('This is the definition of my life: lying in bed in the sunlight, choking on the vitamin tablet the doctor gave in the hope of saving me...') could just as well be taken from some obscure Kinks song, and, in fact, there are nuanced parallels between Mason's singing style and that of Ray Davies — even though the Kinks as such could only have been a re­latively minor influence on the Beta Band.

In between these two tracks, however, they sandwich something a bit more challenging: two odd constructions that combine trip-hop rhythms with folk-pop guitars (feel the ever increasing magic of the hyphen!), and eventually become psychedelic jams where anything is liable to happen. But the challenge is worth living up to, because somewhere in the middle of 'B + A', everything clicks, and the trip is activated without any additional substances. The rhythm will never get you off the hook, and the addition of keyboard, percussion, and vocal harmony levels might unfurl a few extra cosmic dimensions if you are willing to take them.

By the time of the second EP, The Patty Patty Sound, the band has already gone off the deep end. This is full-blown unpredictable psychedelia, also bookmarked by cute folksy ditties ('Inner Meet Me', 'She's The One'), but this time they rather function simply as brief enticing intros / re­lieving outros to the reign of absurdism. Case in point: 'The House Song', which begins with an in­cessant loop going 'Put it in your pocket for a rainy day, sing your song and you know you're wrong now', then adds extra vocal countermelodies reminiscent of Gentle Giant, and then just throws it all away in favor of a (possibly improvised) rap in pseudo-Japanese. The fifteen-minute 'Mo­nolith', for the most part, dumps the rhythmics altogether, and ends up hanging on a deep, brain-drilling bassline while organs swirl, drums crash, guitars reverberate, tapes roll backwards, seagulls whine, and records scratch. It is easy to hate the thing, but there is so much going on that I find myself constantly interested — it is really one of these love-hate-relations that people can have with unpredictable escapades like the Stones' 'Sing This All Together', or certain sonic pano­ramas by Amon Düül II.

Finally, the third EP, Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos, tries to find some middle ground — all the songs are weird again, but they are generally shorter, and less strikingly innovative. For instance, 'Dr. Baker', with its ringing vocals, echoey instrumentation swooping at you from high above ground, kiddie chimes, and mantraic chorus, would not have felt out of place on Nuggets II, whi­le the free-jazzy, repetitive 'Push It Out' brings on memories of the early days of The Soft Machi­ne... well, actually, it is not nearly as retro as it all seems: with modern production, modern ap­proaches to rhythmics, and modern ways of genre-mixing, you could never accuse these guys of wanting to exclusively reproduce the styles of old.

But, in reality, it does not matter all that much to what exact extent The Beta Band are innovating, and to what extent they are merely making us remember the well-forgotten past. What matters is that these three EPs do a killer job in mixing pretty melodic ideas with odd arranging ideas with totally whacko ideas about sectioning and developing the songs. If you want catharsis and senti­mentality and find yourself here, you got seriously sidetracked; but if you are looking for the old psychedelic vibe bottled in a new, vibrant, ironic post-modernist type of container, you came to the right place. It does not exactly make your brain think, but it does split it in the middle, and that sure as hell deserves a thumbs up.