Beta Band
Hot Shots II
[Astralwerks]
Rating: 8.6
There's a reason that shampoo bottles tell you to rinse and repeat. And no,
it isn't just to make you buy more shampoo. Of course, in this day and age,
when hating all things corporate is "cool," it's easy to write off this
advice as shameless commercialism. But if those Herbal Essences commercials
have taught us anything, it's that the shampoo manufacturers of the world
want nothing more than to make us happy. Is it so hard to believe that they
just want to share with us the wisdom they have gained after years of shampoo
production? Certainly they aren't recommending the endless, scalp
bleed-inducing loops of rinse and repeat that have become the stuff of urban
legend. They just want to share with you the wisdom that careful repetition
can often make things decidedly more potent.
I don't know what kind of shampoo Stephen Mason uses. If the snazzy picture
on the back of Hot Shots II is any indication, it's probably pretty
good stuff. And the ten dense, smooth tracks on Hot Shots II reveal
that Stephen Mason has been paying a good deal of attention to the Zen of the
shampoo bottle: rinse and repeat.
While rinsing away the dirt and slop of his past may leave Mason feeling
clean and fresh, it takes away one of the key elements of the Betas'
trademark sound: the almost unparalleled zaniness and willingness to fuck
around. The bizarre, layered samples, the sloppy playing-- all these have
been washed from Mason's mane. The resulting album bears a closer resemblance
in general mood and structure to Mason's most recent King Biscuit Time outing
than to any previous Beta Band material.
Which brings us to the latter half of shampoo bottle wisdom, and the half
that helps makes Hot Shots II so good: repeat. Even if rinsing is
robbing Mason and his cohorts of some of the beautiful weirdness displayed
on previous records, Hot Shots II is a much more comfortable-sounding
record than The Three EPs or the Beta Band's 1999 self-titled
full-length debut. Just about every song here fits nicely into an organic,
pulsing, repetitive groove. It's much more densely and diversely orchestrated
than King Biscuit Time, but much more contained and deliberate than any
previous Beta Band releases.
This new contained and repetitive direction often yields amazing results.
"Al Sharp," the standout from Hot Shots II, is one of the
richest-sounding songs the Betas have ever produced. With xylophones, sampled
strings, a groovy bassline, and some flat-out gorgeous multi-tracked vocals,
there's very little not to love about the track. Especially when it contains
lyrics like, "Or [is it] because the power ranger robots in the skies have
called a war/ To you, honey?" As with the best of Hot Shots II,
there's something beautiful, meditative, and contemplative about "Al Sharp."
As if that weren't enough, the song simply sounds awesome, the result being
perhaps the only Beta Band song on this album that can unequivocally stand
up to the best material from The Three EPs or the self-titled record.
On the darker side of Hot Shots II is "Gone," a sparse guitar and
piano-driven ballad that, were it twice as long and less linear, would be
right at home on The Three EPs. Balancing out the motionless sound of
"Gone" is the near-epic, very much alive "Dragons." Another quasi-love-ballad,
"Dragons" rides a whacked-out, reverb-drenched drumbeat and washed out
synthesizers to a beautiful crescendo of multitracked vocals and samples.
Splitting the difference between "Gone" and "Dragons" is "Life," a downcast
but decidedly goofy-sounding number about unrequited love featuring string
swells, synthesizers, and cowbells. "Life" segues perfectly into Hot Shots
II's prettiest track, "Eclipse," an appealingly long-winded, spacy musing
on books, pizza pie, questions and answers. The song's rousing bridge,
"We all live together on a little round ball," recalls "Yellow Submarine,"
and the song's final line, which finally brings together the themes of
questions, answers, lies, and pizza, provides a perfect ending for an album
that never takes itself too seriously.
That is, "Eclipse" would make a great closer for an album that never
takes itself too seriously. For some ungodly reason, "Won," a pretty
straightforward rap that has nothing to do with anything else on the album
was slapped onto the end as a "bonus track." For the most part, I'm not one
to bitch about the inclusion of extra tracks, but the awkward, out-of-place
"Won" really does fuck up the flow of Hot Shots II, and stifles what
could have been a great closing.
While it certainly doesn't live up to the adventurousness of its predecessors,
Hot Shots II is a pretty damned fine album, and easily surpasses
previous outings in the realm of accessibility. It also does away with the
bizarre rap numbers and twelve-minute psych pastiches that put so many eager
listeners off in the first place. To me, though, that thrown-together sound
was one of the things that made the Beta Band's music so exciting, hinting at
the possibility of wacky revolutions and violent takeovers by silly string-armed
bandits. Rinsing and repeating is working well for Stephen Mason, but it
would no doubt serve him well to work up a more turbulent, frothy lather
next time.
-Matt LeMay