Beangrowers

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 Amazon

 Lala

Not in a Million Lovers is music for ditching school for an alley, looking bored against the backdrop of a pre-gentrified, brick rowhouse, and pulling casually on a cigarette all day. This sort of gin-soaked rock thrives in the grey skies of Northern England’s industrial cities. So it’s surprising that Beangrowers hail from the radiant east coast of Malta Island, a tiny spit of land in turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. It is fitting, then, that Beangrowers does at least intersperse a few breezy, shoegaze tracks between the nonchalant cool of the remaining songs, making this album well-rounded, if a bit too prosaic overall.

Opening track “Quaint Affair” immediately transports the listener to that back alley as singer Alison Galea wrestles with her super-ego. Galea’s vocals range from sultry and husky to light and airy. On this track, husky combines with a cool disengagement as she ponders the depths of attachment in various relationships. There’s no wishful thinking going on here, just frank realism: “Sunlight hits / The lonely streets / Love despairs / For the one in my bed / It’s a quaint affair / With an air of defeat”. Emotional honesty has rarely sounded so good.

Title track “Not in a Million Lovers” again taps Galea’s husky vocals as she lays down brusque lyrics over an ominous bass line. “Ours Is a Small Flat”, on the contrary, pulls directly from early ‘90s shoegaze to create a layered, shimmering epic perfect for the delicate end of her range. Mid-album track “Captain Darling”, too, captures the shoegaze aesthetic as Galea’s vocals braid golden tones into a vibrant melody for one of the album’s best pieces.
               
Thousand mile per hour drumming and a dancey bass line highlight “Depths of Bavaria”. Galea tops off the music with precocious lyrics and playful inflection: “Life is a friend / To the ones / Who deceive us all / Time isn’t fair at all / To the lost souls / Who are dreaming of you”.

While the standout tracks on this album make it worth a listen, Beangrowers seem to have gotten stuck in genre-monotony. “Love Can Do You No Harm” sounds like it was ripped from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs without the benefit of Karen O’s spastic yelping skills. Galea instead sounds slightly hesitant and mostly bored. While she can flip between both sultry and airy vocals very well, her voice tends to work better on more relaxed, bluesy numbers like “Quaint Affair”. Of course, all rules have at least one exception, and Galea’s vocals on fireburner “Good Band Bad Name” are just feisty and energetic enough to compliment the sonic mania of that song.
               
Still, there’s something wearying about the rest of the album. Not in a Million Lovers is Beangrowers’ fourth full-length, and it shows: they do everything expected of a band in their position, including self-producing this time around. But there is nothing that elevates them above any other female-fronted, post-punk-inspired band at the moment. They have crafted a few excellent songs here, but the others are crashing bores – not bad, sometimes even catchy, but ultimately indistinct and forgettable.

While listening, I found myself wishing for more intensity, more sass, more wit, more viscerally entrenched vocals – something that would push these songs over the edge into singularity or at least greatness. It did happen, but not consistently enough. Far from capturing an interesting aural aesthetic, the nonchalant coolness throughout the album has instead provided merely adequate filler for those handful of gems to stand on. Everyone knows people who are too cool for their own good, and no matter how nonchalant they seem, there is something unnaturally sculpted and generic about them. Unfortunately, this same phenomenon applies to the majority of this album.

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