It’s hard not to interpret the title of the third album by The Beta Band as both a tilt at the music industry's set-'em-up-knock-'em-down attitude and an acknowledgement that it's a fate which might well befall them, too. They were loved from the start by critics and fans alike; both were beguiled by the Zeitgeist-defying charms of the three EPs and debut LP which arrived – wonky hip hop and dub beats, woozy psychedelia, punk, pastoral folk, skiffle, molten pop and DIY production in tow – while the champagne supernova of Oasis was still emitting a faint glow. That, however, was then.
It's now three years since The Beta Band's last album, "Hot Shots II" and, although that might not be very long in the life of a petrified forest, it's aeons for a pop group. Early success certainly took its toll. Founder member Gordon Anderson was forced to quit years ago due to mental ill health, guitarist/vocalist Steve Mason has long suffered from depression and, at one point, the group's reputation for reticence in interviews and general orneriness threatened to overshadow their music. Time away from the public eye to focus on the job in hand has dissolved the image problem, but . . . .the difficult third album - to Beta Band or not to Beta Band?
Purists will quite possibly complain that "Heroes To Zeros" lacks the out-field stylistic pitching, bedroom ambience and sweet, almost luminously naive hesitancy that characterised those early records, but purists and progress have never gotten along. This is the sound of an emboldened, beefier Beta Band, certainly, the new songs sounding fuller, freer and more confident than ever before, but it's almost certainly also the sound of four happier, more centred creatives and only a champion churl would deny them that.
That said, The Beta Band's vital, suffused melancholia is still in play, whether flashed briefly, as on the peppy "Out-Side" – which makes brilliant use of a dog's bark as rhythmic punctuation – or flooding out from the vaguely La's-like "Simple". Everywhere, tunes and dynamic definition balance the band's former obsessions with texture and ambience: check the clarion, Edge-like guitar coda that drives the opening "Assessment"; the languid, stoner pacing of "Space"; the casual, soft-shoe shuffle propelling the aptly titled "Easy"; the Velvet Underground-meets-Badfinger hybrid that is "Wonderful"; the fabulously fluid "Liquid Bird", which suggests "Don’t Fear The Reaper" as played by Pink Floyd in a bathysphere and yet still comes up trumps.
"Too many troubles, too many troubles. . .it's time for us to live and laugh. . . .and laugh and laugh and laugh. . .," Mason sings in his gorgeously glazed tones at one point. Well hell, yes. Forget heroes and zeros. Happily, The Beta Band seem to have settled on self.
