Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 10/10/05
Label: Parlophone

The public gets what the public wants, as many a cultured sage has noted over the years. The story of The Beta Band is a case in sad and heavy point. Though their career was emblazoned with as much mercurial and flying music as it was cursed by dismal hurdles, ultimately what did for them was you lot. Here was a group so liberated by sound that they swapped ideas like instrument fetishists in a Fleetwood Mac covers band. Here, also, was a band that split reportedly some £2 million in debt to their record label.

So, where did it all go wrong? More to the point, where did it all go right, because, and we should get this out of the way swiftly, The Beta Band rank as one of the most dazzling groups of the past decade. Emerging in a hailstorm of hype from Edinburgh, there was very quickly an exotic buzz about the group. A buzz that detailed not a whippersnapper bomb of noise and spunk, rather of fantastical music melded into an usually challenging, bravura whole. Noel Gallagher was amongst the many heroes spotted at early gigs, at a time when it was wrongly assumed he had good taste.

During 1998, The Beta Band released three EPs, prompting almost illegal excitement at their potential. It's no wonder, listening to the four tracks from that period here. "Inner Meet Me" and "She's The One" still sound astounding, the latter mutating from a rolling acoustic shuffle into a rampant, blinding rainbow of beat-driven sound, ending, naturally, on a jew's harp. This alone was an epic example of the wuthering ambition that, crucially, seemed to confound and confuse their subjects.

Across the course of four albums, Steve Mason, Richard Greentree, Robin Jones and John Mclean gleefully cannibalised rock, pop, hip hop, electronica and R&B, painting a form of digital future folk in flash colours for the world to see. Of course, there were problems. The Beta Band were gruesome public orators of their music, one second utterly diffident, the next wilfully bolshy. How must their label have reacted to the execution of their eponymous debut album in the NME at their own hands? It was some considerable distance from being "f*cking dreadful", as nailed on the disorientating, "Black Hole"-sampling "It's Not Too Beautuful" and the enormous hip-pop of "Smiling", featuring the Beastie Boys on drums and Stevie Wonder on clavinet.

Come third album, "Hot Shots II", and The Beta Band were hit by a full-on blow-out with the disastrous, delayed release of "Squares", a commercial crossover punctured by the simultaneous, chart-slaying release of I Monster's "Daydream", which features the same Gunther Kallman Choir sample. Here, the detailed complexity and vaulting pace of both "Broke" and "Human Being" show a band at one with their horizon-busting vision, but also one, as the latter track promises, that "might just break" anytime soon. Awe-inspired reviews don't, generally, pay the rent.

Returning for a last stand with "Heroes To Zeroes", "Troubles" and "Simple" are vaguely forlorn, bucolic pop songs, imbued with a delicate touch and four wired but, ultimately, beaten brains. The Godzilla footsteps of "Assessment" was one of the few final examples of the group in full, barrelling flow, a lightning U2esque riff charging into a wall of horns as Steve Mason declares "the time has come for decision". That decision was to quit. You broke The Beta Band. You really should have known beta.

    by Ben Gilbert