She Beats –
Beaches
The sound of delicate female vocals hovering above a mess of
tangled, loud guitar noise is one of rock music’s secret weapons. The contrast is genuinely gorgeous, and when
it is done correctly, eerie; like a Crane Kick, or a fully armed and
operational Death Star, there is simply no adequate listener defense for its
potency. Lush made a few albums years
ago that highlighted this reality to thrilling effect. Ditto Pale Saints.
Latest case in point:
Beaches’ most recent album She
Beats. There are times on the album
when the production, particularly for this type of thing, feels a bit
thin. And there are times when the
lyrics spill over from hypnotic to repetitive.
But there are few times indeed when any such flaws compel a listener to
reach for a skip button or turn down the volume. She
Beats, it turns out, is both lovely and fascinating, a glorious and
remorseless killer of evenings.
Beaches are from Melbourne.
This fact launches an immediate epistemological crisis, pitting their
sublime sound and excellent songs against the paradigm that all music from
Australia not made by the Triffids or Kasey Chambers tends to be wretched. This is only their second proper album,
which further compounds both the degree of difficulty and the magnitude of
achievement.
It all starts out innocently enough. Some 40 seconds of clanging guitar and
effects-pedal-recruitment lead off track 1 “Out of Mind.” It sounds like very safe, standard-issue
Indie—right up until the chorus kicks in with the wattage of a hundred
suns. Suddenly the number of guitars
appears to quadruple, and a mega-fleet of harmonized lady vocals screams across
the sky. They are singing the phrase, “out of mind,”
which provides the surprise joy, and rare glimpse, of onomatopoeia in
action. The song is so elaborately
constructed that it feels quite a bit longer (in a good way) than its four-plus
minutes. It is a powerful opening
volley; a door kicked in.
And speaking of crossing the threshold: track 2, “Keep On Breaking Through,”
pointedly steers She Beats away from
the likelihood of a trim noise-pop album and toward something quite a bit grander. It is, in fact—at second position—an
instrumental, which is pretty gutsy tracklisting. This is not the track 2 that you release if
your intent is to love ‘em and leave ‘em in pop-outfit fashion. The tempo is deliberate, and while the song
is both pretty and interesting, it is not particularly action-packed. There is a touch of noir to these noisy
proceedings, and it works.
Beaches will not be rushed.
While very few of these songs stretch beyond 4-ish minutes in length,
most arrive in increments and are expanded to full effect with deliberate
timing. The technique succeeds in
building skylines or horizons, or it graphs the data of elegant equations for a
very compelling area under the curve.
There is a lot going on here: a
lot of thought and effort.
By third track “Dune,” the unifying image behind album
begins to take shape. Again there are
guitar pulsars revving up and shorting out from ear to ear. And again there is an impressive backdrop of
howling guitar, most impressively during the choruses. But all of the light and energy opens up an
expanse of desert under an enormous night sky.
How do we get to the image of desert? The guitars are full of energy and life, but
there is simply no shelter or succor here.
It is all fire and rock, a barren sound and light show, full of aweing
beauty and precious little comfort. “And
you know you didn’t sleep last night / and you know you will be shining
bright,” singeth the angels of hallucination.
Flattering, but again not particularly reassuring when one hears them
here. Essentially all of the rest of the
lyrics to this track are indecipherable, but they are gorgeously sung, and they
seem to rhyme. The beauty of the desert
is frequently almost alien.
A brief detour follows on track 4 in the form of a gesture
toward an actual pop song. “Send Them
Away,” tosses off the confection of a lyric, “Take those blues and send them
away.” Again, and again, and again. There are also some precious countermelodies,
and a delicate guitar intro like something off of K Records a long, long time
ago. It is a trickle of very
sweet-tasting water.
And then back to the desolation! “The Good Comet Returns” is another
startlingly well-done instrumental to cleanse the palate/decimate the horizon,
and following it are a quartet of statement pieces, most not far removed from
the desert theme: “Distance,” “Weather,”
“Granite Snake,” and “Tanzanite.”
Of the four, “Weather” and “Tanzanite” are probably the most
evocative and the most likely to linger in memory. “Weather,” for starters, is a careening and
deconstructive piece, devoid of a pop song structure but still very easy on the
ears. This appeal comes despite, or
thanks to, a mass of racket, including but not limited to the obligatory guitar
wails, and the hoot-hoot owl lyrics trying to carry on through the gathering
din. How something so relatively
formless and disorienting can render such appeal is a neat trick indeed.
The deconstruction is to good effect: the parts are used to build eventual follow
up “Tanzanite,” which then serves as the album’s worthy highlight. The song begins humbly with some tentative
string bass and whispered lyrics. Then a
rhythm guitar, then a lead, and ultimately an honest-to-goodness bassline that
exhumes the very best Britpop of the early 1990s. It is a little bit drone-y, a little bit
trance-y, and it would have absolutely set the world (or at least a good chunk
of England) on fire at Spike Island in 1990.
Which is to say: it is pretty
fucking great.
She Beats falters
only to the extent that its production regularly feels underdone relative to
the scope of the album’s imagery and the implied space it aims to fill. These songs have the potential to be both
massive and dense, and yet only the former trait is realized. There are strata missing from the sediment: shadings absent from the landscape. Unfortunately, the historical competition for
works of noise like this includes contestants such as My Bloody Valentine,
Spiritualized, and the aforementioned Pale Saints, among many others. It is no surprise that the more successful
examples were captained by monomaniacal lunatics: the resultant sprawls of accumulated detail
work demanded it.
And so, some humble and appreciative requests for next
time: similarly gorgeous melodies. Similarly overpowering vocal work. And maybe a tad more obsession.
Keepers: 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11
