If there really was such a thing as a Rock & Roll High School (and not
just the Ramones' movie of the same name), the strange and circuitous story
of the Beta Band would probably earn a significant place in the "Indie Rock
101" curriculum. Not necessarily because of anything they actually
did, but because of what they didn't do -- because of the
sheer frustration implicit in their painful creative breakdown. (OK, maybe
it wasn't anywhere near as exciting to watch as the Libertines' spectacular
implosion, but interesting nonetheless.) The Betas were feted and acclaimed
right out of the gate, hailed as one of the most promising acts in modern
music simply on the promise of a handful of early EPs. They spent the rest
of their career trying to catch up to these initial expectations, and never
seemed to gain enough traction to escape the incredible gravity of this
"lost" potential.
The following is excerpted from a press release distributed by the band's
American label, Astralwerks, in the wake of the group's 2004 breakup:
"Always regarded as something of an enigma by the media but
widely recognized to be one of the UK's most influential bands, [2004]'s
Heroes To Zeros proved not only their most successful but most
cohesive and engaging album to date. Sadly, eight years of hard work and
critical acclaim but little return in terms of commercial success inevitably
takes its toll and a group decision was made to finally lay the band to
rest."
It seems rather disingenuous to blame the Beta Band's dissolution on
commercial factors. I have a hard time believing that any group who
dedicated their career to making music as willfully left-of-center as the
Betas would have expected to get rich doing so. There are any number of
small independent bands all across the world who manage to carve out
respectable careers for themselves outside the borders of the mainstream
music machine. Sometimes, every so often, one of these groups breaks loose
and hits the big time -- or a commercial group morphs into something more
challenging. Radiohead make music that, by any definition, should be
considered commercially untenable. Yet somehow they have managed to sell
records consistently, if not spectacularly.
Artists such as Radiohead, along with their peers in the world of
alternative rock -- heavily-lauded groups and artists such as the Flaming
Lips, Wilco, PJ Harvey and Pavement -- are the exceptions, not the rule. All
of these groups have (or had, in the case of Pavement) managed to achieve
some degree of success based on overwhelming critical consensus that has
subsequently translated into solid, if not incredible, commercial
accomplishment. But the Beta Band never achieved the level of critical mass
necessary to propel them into the stratosphere of these inarguably popular
indie (or indie-flavored) acts. The Betas were just another in a long line
of talented but decidedly noncommercial prospects that were never going to
have a number-one album, even a fluke number-one like Kid A.
To put it bluntly: if your music can best be described as "quirky" or
"recondite", you will probably never find overwhelming financial rewards in
our modern music industry. You have to satisfy yourselves with the long
view, with recording and touring relentlessly, with the slow and painstaking
process of building a fanbase by hand. The "little return in terms of
commercial success" was only to be expected considering the eclectic nature
of the music they created, and I'm somewhat baffled that they ever expected
anything different.
The Beta Band started strong. The release of The Three EPs in
January of 1999 implied that important things were in the offing for these
Scottish newcomers. Their indescribable and refreshingly bizarre mixture of
genres into a postmodern stew was seen in some quarters as the ultimate
fruition of the musical Catholicism that had dominated critical discourse in
the 1990s. The fact that the Betas blended hip-hop, country, dub reggae and
pop under the aegis of modern college rock with a sheen of gleaming
electronic production fostered expectations that the long-awaited Rapture of
popular music foretold by Odelay was at hand. The day was upon us,
when all genres would melt together in an incomprehensible digital
mélange and the very notion of music itself would be born again from the
ashes of the old world.
Four tracks from The Three EPs are included on Music,
including their trademark "Dry the Rain". As a purely blissful musical
statement, it has no peers in the Beta's catalog, and stands as one of the
best indie-pop tracks of the last decade. The combination of shuffling drum
machine and plaintive acoustic guitar add up to a brilliant melodic movement
that gains momentum as it approaches the chorus. Tracks like "Inner Meet Me"
and "Dr. Baker" are interesting ideas partly sabotaged by spastic, frenetic
production -- the type of production that requires the listener to meet the
music halfway. The only early track here to approach the easy grandeur of
"Dry the Rain" is "She's the One", but even given the track's appealing
two-chord melody, the disparate elements never seem to cohere quite as
magnificently.
The Betas followed up The Three EPs with their self-titled
official debut, which presented their nascent fan base with a far more
baffling and confused image than their comparatively straightforward earlier
material. The Betas themselves famously disowned this album as "fucking
awful". It's never a good thing when the "Next Big Thing" stumbles, and the
rather bewildering performance of their first proper album left many
wondering if the potential of The Three EPs would ever be fulfilled.
Three tracks off the debut are included here, and they point towards what
a more concentrated application of The Three EPs' ideas might have
sounded like. "It's Not Too Beautiful" may outlast its welcome at
eight-and-a-half minutes, but it manages to produce a memorable effect
despite -- it sits nicely in the baldly romantic niche carved out by "Dry
the Rain" and "She's the One". "Smiling" is an odd pastiche of Run-DMC drums
and Smurf singing that represents the off-kilter feel of the first album
probably more accurately than they would have liked. "To You Alone" is less
compelling than it should be, a quirky love song set to a jittery,
caffeine-fueled Timbaland beat -- something that sounded positively
revolutionary back at the fin de siecle, but which now merely sounds
inevitable.
The lead single off 2001's Hot Shots II was set to be "Squares", a rather
interesting exercise in melancholy splendor. The problem was, "Squares"
contained a sample of an obscure song by the Gunter Kallman Choir called
"Daydream". This would have been an unremarkable bit of trivia if it weren't
for the fact that a group called I Monster were also releasing a song that
sampled "Daydream", called "Daydream in Blue". The resulting
mini-controversy (tempest in a teapot is more like it) was enough to scuttle
any momentum for the Beta's sophomore release, while I Monster's tune racked
up a successful run on the British charts. "Squares" flopped, and despite
fair reviews, the album didn't do much better.
"Squares" is included on Music, and it comes off as positively
Spartan in the context of the band's earlier material. In place of the
dizzying, kaleidoscopic instrumentation and production, the Betas have
instead focused on a more austere, focused sound. Something is lost,
however, from the hectic energy of the early singles, an energy that can't
quite be supplanted by more focused songwriting. "Human Being" recalls the
early material more fluently, while managing to deploy their trademark
kitchen-sink noise to more studied effect. The repeated mantra of "We might
just break, / Can you hear us trying?" hints at the possible frustration at
this point in their career.
Which brings us to the release of the Beta Band's third proper album,
final and fourth overall, Heroes to Zeroes. The announcement of the
band’s demise was made official, and the story revealed in hindsight for
anyone who cared to go back and piece it together from songs like "Human
Being". Even the title reflects a note of distinct bitterness -- just as
Hot Shots II had proven itself an accurate reflection of their
self-deprecating humility. a band that had once been lauded by the critical
establishment was subsequently devalued to a novelty status, and the
transformation from conquering "heroes" to no-account "zeroes" was complete.
But the evidence -- five tracks included on Music, more than any
other of their albums -- strongly implies that their third album was
probably their best, or at least their most cohesive. "Wonderful" is a love
song in the vein of their past highlights but not without its own charm.
"Assessment" is an unlikely guitar-rock track in the vein of middle-era U2,
with an extremely Edge-ish guitar line floating above a rumbling, echoey
drum line.
The vestiges of past ambition form a prism through which the meaning of
certain tracks from their later career snap into crystal clarity. The
low-key, melancholy "Simple", which tellingly serves as the concluding track
for both Heroes to Zeroes and Music, highlights the gnawing
inadequacy which must have dogged them for the entirety of their career:
"I tried to see it their way, /
I tried to be alone, /
I tried to do my own thing, /
But the trouble with our own thing is, /
You end up on your own.
Music comes with a second live disc, a recording from late 2004 of
one of the last shows of their farewell tour. Despite the group's
occasionally soggy sound, the general impression is of a band that has
managed to incorporate its multiple disparate elements into a far more
cohesive whole than could have been expected. I'd heard horror stories of
their live show -- a jumble of random noises adding up to any live
engineer's worst nightmare -- but the group sounds quite spry. Much of the
first disc's track listing is replicated on the second, albeit -- in most
cases -- with far different arrangements. A few live favorites not on the
"Hits" disc creep in as well, like "Dog's Got A Bone" and "House Song",
which represents an inexplicable omission from the first disc. Probably the
funkiest track in the Betas' catalog, as well as their most successful foray
into the realm of straight dance.
Crafting an appropriate follow-up to a great record is one of the great
challenges in all of popular music. Some acts never even get around to
recording that one singularly great album, but for those that do the
pressure is worse: can they top it? Will they embarrass themselves horribly,
or fall apart under the pressure? But what about those artists who never
even get that first great album? I imagine the most thankless lot in
all of music must be the group who never succeeds in facing up to their
Potential (with a capital "P"). These artists live in perpetual shadow, but
it isn't the shadow of past greatness, it is the shadow of an unrealized
potency. There is no way to compete with the specter of might-have-been, and
there is nothing more impossible than trying to live up to hypothetical
standards of perfection (see Adams, Ryan).
So, that's it. A handful of shiny plastic discs, a pile of reviews, a
fair amount of dismal resentment all around, and now, the requisite
anthology to tie everything up in a nice bow. Sounds like a career, then.
They were good, but the fact that they should have been fantastic was never
going to go away. Perhaps their dissolution makes a bit more sense now,
perhaps not. These things rarely make sense, anyway. But listening to
Music it's easy to see why their early material was greeted with such
unqualified enthusiasm. They may not have had a very good batting record as
these things go -- even their "best of" has as many misses as hits, as many
experiments that go awry as not -- but when they were on, they had something
special.
Note: Portions of this essay have been adapted from an earlier essay on
the topic written by the author, which was posted a long time ago elsewhere
and which nobody ever read. It's not plagiarism, it's recycling.
— 26 October 2005
