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Rambling guys
Britain’s Beta Band break all the rules
BY MAC RANDALL

Right from the start, the Beta Band had the arbiters of musical category scratching their heads. Emerging from Scotland in 1997 with the four-song EP Champion Versions, this playfully experimental quartet seemed to exist in several genres simultaneously — krautrock, British folk, Beatle-esque psychedelia, and funk, to name but four — as they bounded from one bizarre sonic idea to the next like a sugar-buzzed kid opening a pile of Christmas presents. Two more EPs (released with Champion Versions as The Three EPs by Astralwerks in the US) and two albums followed, each evincing the same indefinability. As bassist Richard Greentree, on the phone from the band’s rehearsal studio outside Edinburgh, puts it, "The one consistent thing about us is that nothing’s ever the same."

That’s not altogether true, since you can usually count on the Beta Band’s songs for two things: a tendency to ramble and a lack of focus. Entertaining as these traits can be, they haven’t always served the band’s music. But that was then. On the Betas’ latest Astralwerks release, Heroes to Zeros, the situation has changed. Not a single song reaches the five-minute mark, and several boast pop hooks. The opening "Assessment," for example, hitches an economical guitar line reminiscent of U2’s "I Will Follow" to a muscular rock-groove ghostly chorus ("Sometimes I feel a love there, baby") courtesy of lead singer Steve Mason.

How did the Beta Band achieve this incisiveness? They hired new producers: themselves. Star producer/engineer Nigel Godrich, whose most famous client, Radiohead, toured with the Betas back in 2000, helped out, but only in the mixing stage. The results are the complete opposite of what you’d expect from a largely unsupervised band with a reputation for abstraction. Instead of sinking into the mire of technological possibilities, the Betas have tightened up their sound.

"In the past," Greentree explains, "we kept every idea we had. On the first album, we’d write a basic diagram for a song and say, ‘Do that bit, then that bit, then in another minute go into that other bit.’ Which is why the songs are eight and 10 minutes long. It was all pretty vague. Now we concentrate on getting the one bit that works and throwing away the dead wood. We work on the songs separately at home, end up with four different versions of each song, decide what the best elements of each version are, turn those elements back into one song, record a new demo version, try to play that as a band, and then record it for real. It’s a long process, but it seems to work."

That EMI, the Beta Band’s parent label, allowed the album to be made this way was, Greentree says, "a major turning point. We’re in a huge amount of debt with them, about $2 million. They see us as a kind of financial black hole, and we figured that to go in and say we want to produce our own album would start alarm bells ringing and doors slamming. So we first did a test session with [producer] Tom Rothrock in London. Great guy, but when we listened to the finished product with our record-company people, they fortunately had the taste to say that it wasn’t right and that our demos had the magic. That was the best business meeting we’ve ever been in."

If it’s too soon to know whether the financial risk was worth taking, it is clear that EMI made the right artistic decision. Heroes to Zeros achieves succinctness without sacrificing the Beats’ wayward charm. "Easy" matches the gritty thwack of a clavinet, the instrument that provided the riff for Stevie Wonder’s "Superstition," with the skiffle rhythm of an acoustic guitar. "Space Beatle" morphs from an ambient meditation to a Pet Sounds–style chorus of "I love you to pieces." And on "Out-Side," Mason’s discussion of "the knocking in my cranium" is interspersed with sampled barking dogs and a Moog synth solo that sounds like a malfunctioning cell phone.

As for the Betas’ style, it still differs from just about everything else out there, and Greentree couldn’t be happier. "Seems like the most fashionable thing right now is exhuming dead bands and climbing into their shoes. I’ve got nothing against the White Stripes, for example, but why have they got a disclaimer on the last album saying, ‘No computers were used in the making of this record’? So what? You might as well say, ‘No condoms were used during the sex we had yesterday,’ or ‘No cheese was eaten at dinner last night.’ It doesn’t make you cool not to use computers. You use the technology that’s available to you." Easier to keep the categorizers baffled that way.


Issue Date: June 25 - July 1, 2004
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