My music discovery for the week is a metal band called Eternal Champion. They are awesome, but the dice decide what album I review next and it has chosen…indie pop. Here is some.
Disc 1443 is…. Jump Rope Gazers
Artist: The Beths
Year of Release: 2020
What’s up with the Cover? This looks like some cursed relic brought back from the lost tomb of dread Cthulhu. I like to think it binds the taker with a disturbing and faceless doppelganger who appears before you every time you pass your reflection to manifest and kill your loved ones, before returning to the depths of the mirror when the policy come calling for your alibi. As a basis for a horror story, that’s good stuff. As an album cover, it is not the greatest. Good thing for you I was here to provide context.
How I Came To Know It: I read a couple of reviews. I wasn’t sure about the Beths, as their previous album was good, but didn’t grab me enough to buy it. This time they won me over.
How It Stacks Up: I only have one Beths album, so it can’t stack up.
Ratings: 3 stars
Who ordered the indie pop…again? Yeah, that was me. In recent years I’ve become a sucker for a certain sound. Surfer reverb, pop sensibilities and a dash of punk rebellion, ideally fronted by a woman with a melancholy delivery. Welcome straight from far away New Zealand - the Beths! Latest band to feed this obsession.
In my defence, I only buy the good records that meet this description. It all starts with lead singer Elizabeth Stokes. Her vocals have a combination of eighties pop sweetness and the disaffected, slightly flat delivery of nineties pop. She’s also got a compelling falsetto which she deploys just enough to show it off, but not so much it gets tiresome.
The band is solid, particularly drummer Tristan Deck, who has a bit of a later-days Police vibe. Like a jazz drummer being forced at gunpoint to play rock and roll. The guitar has a reverb that is somewhere between sixties surfer reverb and eighties Goth. Put it all together and it sounds like a lot of what I imagine would be good for the radio, if the radio were five times better than it is.
The music has a bit of a wall of sound that takes some close attention to separate, but it is worth the effort. Because of this I liked it more on headphones walking home than in my car. My car stereo is amazing, but there is something intimate and insulated about the record that just needs to be close to your ear.
The album’s opening track, “I’m Not Getting Excited” is the Beths at their most punk. A rock riff flails away frantically, with Stokes singing in both chest and head voice as she holds down the melodic structure so the guitar can just bang away and suggest polite slam-dancing, should the occasion warrant it.
The album calms down from there, causing a few people I knew to say the first track is the only good one. Those people are manifestly wrong. They are also likely to say the band's previous release (and critical darling) "Future Me Hates Me" is the better album. This is also wrong, although I'll grant you it is a matter of taste and that "Future Me Hates Me" is a great title for a record. But I digress...
What I mean to say, is the whole record is solid, and them cutting to a more surf pop sound for the rest of the record is only a problem if you don’t like that. As noted above, I do.
In particular, the title track is lovely, and would be at home on a mid-nineties teen romantic comedy. The Beths, like a lot of modern bands, are a blend of a lot of eras – the result of easy access to any song they feel like listening to. People of my vintage were stuck with our own records, or – when they visited – our friends’. It is a glorious time for music.
Later in the record, “You Are a Beam of Light” strips things down until you almost think it is contemporary folk (it’s not, but it’s adjacent). With the light picking pattern and introspective feel, it feels a far cry from “I’m Not Getting Excited” but the Beths walk you down through tunes that get you there naturally.
The Beths did not crack my recently published top 15 albums from 2020, but they easily could have. They are definitely top 25.
Best tracks: I’m Not Getting Excited, Dying to Believe, Jump Rope Gazers, Out of Sight
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