33 rebellions per minute
"Too paranoid to go the store, much less to Egypt to see my favorite pyramids"
1999
Beta Band, S/T
Beta Band, a Scottish band benefitting from good indie hype, released two U.S albums in 1999. The first, a collection onto one disc of three British EP's, was helpfully called THE THREE EP'S. I bought it, listened to it three times, and took to describing it, with a resigned shrug, as "too damn weird for me" (which got me some amusingly stunned responses). It was loony in a very polite, burbling way, so I did pack it to take west that summer and see if further listens would make me warm to it. But it just suffered the fate of all the CD's I took west that summer: Greyhound checked the bag and placed it on the wrong bus, Bus 57 over the Bermuda Triangle. That should have been that. Then John Cusack intervened. It's like this....
As thrilled as I'll be if my column's modest readership ever serves as the embryo of some obscure musical genius's ascent to the big time, the fact is that I do not have the gift of spotting trends in advance. I buy basically unknown albums, and years later, they're still basically unknown. I own lots of bestsellers, but I bought them _because_ they were best-sellers. I liked the songs I knew from them, or the friends who gave me directions to the nearest bandwagon stop. It is true that I bought the Cherry Poppin' Daddies' FEROCIOUSLY STONED -- a really quite interesting melange of swing, hot jazz, Oingo Boingo, and Motown -- one year before their genre exercise ZOOT SUIT RIOT helped kick off the swing revival. It is true that I bought Alanis's JAGGED LITTLE PILL and Jewel's PIECES OF YOU some months before they took off. And I'm glad, but: this wins fewer hipness points than you'd think.
On the other hand, my novel-reading tastes run shamelessly to worldwide bestsellers (Dave Barry, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Orson Scott Card) and
praised middlebrow literature (John Irving, Jane Smiley, Robert Coover, Richard Russo). Nick Hornsby is in the latter category, I guess, but in 1999 I read his High Fidelity -- an introvert music geek's amusingly insightful tale of love, mating strategies, his Top Five Most Painful Breakups of All Time, and the psychology of depressing songs -- and recommended it to half a dozen friends, all of whom loved it. Then it's 2000, and John Cusack -- the man whose Grosse Pointe Blank showed one of movie history's finest quality-to-creativity ratios by using exactly one original idea (to cross a generic serial killer movie with a generic high school reunion movie) brilliantly -- decides to make High Fidelity into a movie. For once I'd been ahead of the curve. Cusack's movie blatantly plugs the _new_ Beta Band album, the one called BETA BAND. Okay, okay. I bought it.
Beta Band get compared to Beck's ODELAY a lot, and since some sort of comparison somewhere is useful, I can see why. Beta and Beck use similar woozy, processed beats, like hip-hop too drugged to actually hop and thus attempting gamely to shuffle in place. Beta and Beck both use lots of instruments from lots of genres, though Beta Band use many more Hawaiian and Caribbean stylings, and take sleigh bells seriously as an instrument. Steve Mason's singing and occasional rapping are as casual as Beck's, too, though his fairly deep voice is much friendlier, his tones are sing-song, and accurately or not, he always sounds like a stoned Muppet (except on "15 Reasons", where he seems to be going through withdrawal). Janice's rich, slurred contralto filtered through Zoot's flatness, maybe. And a lot of echo.
In terms of song structure, though, BETA BAND reminds me much more of an album I really like: Saint Etienne's FOXBASE ALPHA. The beat goes on, and the ooverall song structures are somewhat repetitive, but something new or altered is always happening, literally every measure. Take "15 Reasons", for example. Hawaiian marimba/ windchime-y things (okay, what's the real name for the instrument I mean? Anybody?) drive the song with a simple pattern. Strafings simulate what the clock sequence of Pink Floyd's "Time" might've been if all the world's clock variants had cuckoos. The bass does a reggae beat for a while, then it doesn't. The windchimes suddenly refract into a busy, arrythmic kaleidoscope of notes, all in the same note range as its main hook. Then the chimes shape up and the drum machine goes crazy, then the chimes refract again, and all fades out on a simple pattern. A hip-hop drum machine introduces "Smile", which is soon being buoyed on faint organ notes, phasing-pedal whizzings, someone trying to brush his teeth with a padlock, and deranged chant/rap with backup vocals like Chipmunks (or the Super Furry Animal of your choice). "Smile" acquires this jazz-rock groove somewhere between Booker T and the Charlatans UK, then slowly devolves toward world-groove trance music, only even more like the Chipmunks.
Special mention should probably go to "the Beta Band Rap", which starts with a bizarro Christmas-jingle manifesto about how the band members came to learn hygiene; then amiably recites the band's history over a backbeat that could've been ripped straight from Black 47's band-history song "Rockin' The Bronx"; then devolves into retro rock'n'roll with extreme echo. "Dance Across The Border" shows that Mason can rap non-ridiculously too. Then there's "the Hard One", where the party noisemaker twitterings and video-game missiles in the background do nothing to erase the dark mood of the drones, the piano, and Mason's sad meditation "Once upon a time I was falling apart, now I'm always falling in love" (falling apart, after all, is something you can do quietly to yourself without bothering anyone). "Broken Up A Ding Dong" evolves into the sound of a Dixieland jazz band fighting off three percussion ensembles at once. The jaunty "Round The Bend", best of all, is my nomination for Pop immortality, as a variety of tuned percussion keep pace while Mason muses distractedly about fading from reality, not seeing friends, not going to Egypt, and playing the Beach Boys' WILD MEN ("not their best album, but it's still pretty good/ it's got a lot of silly little love songs/ not a Van Dyke Parks production/ so it's probably not as good as something like/ PET SOUNDS").
BETA BAND is a weird album. How it compares to THREE EP'S I can't say, nor whether my new fondness is the result of a different record or a different me. BETA BAND certainly doesn't sound like any _other_ album I've heard. It's fun when it wants to be fun. It's astonishingly affecting and emotional when the drones and faint minor-key synthesizer noises come in and when Mason injects some song titled "the Cow's Wrong" with gravity and introspection. It's certainly my impression from listening that Beta Band want to be liked, not frowned at in confusion, and that they want to like you back. And someone went to a lot of effort to make sure the album's never, even for a measure, boring.
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