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Live Review
by SaschaS
22-1-2002
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| Beta Band |
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Live: Beta Band
Shepherds Bush Empire
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
Beta Band is a combo of Scots who really contest music guidebooks
The Beta Band world is awkward in a way to make a lot of my colleagues describe this Scottish lot as a combo that really appears to inhabit a universe that is of peculiar configuration. Refusing to follow normal methodology of media encounters, the band also prefers to do something else at their concerts but celebrate individual egos of performers.
For the previous evening’s show, at Hackney’s Ocean, they encouraged fans to dress up in ‘Star Trek’ gear just for fun and to break with tradition of concert attending. Tonight we are let off such fancy-dress code to be lost in our anti-fashionista statements and vogue-wilderness is the best we come up with. But, who cares when music gives a lot of food for imagination.
Best music is like a mental journey into the deepest reaches of one’s psyche and Beta Band do provide a gate to the stellar nights with Alistair being given a blank notebook that is to be turned into a hitchhiker’s guide to the wonderland. BB members are not guides but map-charting explorers of the galaxy of ignorance. There is something that connects them with the fellow-Scotsmen Mogwai and yet they are miles apart.
Beta Band tend do make music with more samples and dance elements, it is rock that travells in the rarefied air of experimentation. Each show is an event although more cerebral than what that description implies. There is also sense of humour, taking the pish out of the whole art-thing while strictly remaining within the art-soundscapes. That transports one out of the whole painful existence.
Most of popular culture nowadays goes for the redundant value that, in its eternal search of commercial success/profit, bypasses innovation big time. Beta Band’s agenda is embracing it, in their sonic vocabulary, in the backprojected visuals, beatzy pastorallity. The band’s ‘Hotshots II’, the current album that has been overlooked by large masses, performed live becomes even more vital.
Hail the reluctant heroes.
SaschaS
9-7-2001
The Beta Band’s album ‘Hotshots II’ is out now on EMI
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