Albums by this artist

Heroes To Zeros (2004)

The Beta Band (1999)

The Beta Band

» MARK T.R. DONOHUE | STAFF WRITER

The Beta Band

The Beta Band

Astralwerks, 1999

RiYL: Beck, Chemical Brothers

They're British, they have a DJ, and they like to dress up as cowboys. How can they be bad? Mixing folk, lo-fi, and a healthy sampling of hip-hop beats, the Betas first came to my attention for their stateside debut in 1998, a collection of three EP-length releases imaginatively titled The Three EPs. At points both riveting, hypnotizing, and irritating, the record was a disaster, but a promising disaster.

The Beta Band is a big improvement, but they're not quite all the way there yet. Wherever "there" is. The (badly) American-accented blather of "Dance O'er The Border" is nutty and cool, and it's not like Bob Pollard hasn't been butchering THEIR manner of speech for years now. "Round The Bend" mixes acoustic strumming and cuckoo clock samples to fine new/old indie effect. "Broken Up A Ding Dong," despite the silly title, is a spectacular mixture of bluesy slides, strummed acoustics, and buried percussion.

The Beta Band does occasionally indulge in the overlong sound-effect fests that marred Three EPs, but the better production here makes them sound more interesting, and they're much better placed. There's some very long songs, but since each Beta Band track tends to have extra, semiconnected segues at the beginning and end, they don't get boring. The album has some kind of dull passages, but there's more than enough good stuff to recommend it over them.

This group could easily be pegged in the post-post-rock movement I've recently, somewhat flippantly, been positing the birth of. There's all sorts of nonstandard additions -- beats, samples, jingling bells, steel drum -- but the songwriting is rooted in folk music that's older than the history of recordings themselves. The Beta Band's greatest strength is making the bridging of that seemingly wide chasm sound natural and, you know what, poppy.

MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.