BEAK>
(Ipecac)
Portishead might not be renowned for their work-rate, but lately Geoff Barrow has kept busy running his Invada label, co-producing the Horrors and, most recently, getting together with BEAK>. Despite his high profile, though, Barrow isn't at the top of the pecking order in BEAK>, an equal partnership with two fellow Bristol musicians: keyboard/synth fiddler Matt Williams (Team Brick) and bassist Billy Fuller (Fuzz Against Junk; Malakai). Barrow takes a literal back seat, at the drum kit, and while he contributes sporadic vocals, they're not exactly conventional front-man fare; rather, his disembodied, reverb-treated Damo Suzuki-style moaning gives the impression that he's in a different room from the other musicians.
BEAK> blend Krautrock homage with a tangential kind of psychedelia -- think Terry Riley, Silver Apples and early Floyd (the spacey variant, not the whimsical one) -- all interspersed with Conradian drones, some proggy organ, a contemporary noise sensibility and rumblings of doom metallurgy. It's a heady mixture. However, this is hardly new territory for Barrow, Fuller and Williams, and the material shows kinship with their other endeavors: there's continuity with Team Brick's cacophonous experimentalism and the occasional cosmic weirdness of Fuzz Against Junk, and the record also revisits a few key influences on Portishead's Third and the Horrors' Primary Colours in its affection for the Teutonic motorik and Simeon Coxe's primitive electronics.
Given the band members' pedigrees, BEAK> qualify as a supergroup of sorts. But whereas such entities are often infamous for bloated projects involving endless hours in various studios, perhaps in different countries, BEAK> wrote and recorded this album in under two weeks, in one room, without overdubs or after-the-fact finessing -- just some editing. In fact, a couple of the tracks were only ever performed twice. It's tempting to see this no-frills, less-is-more approach as a reaction to some of their own previous experiences: Fuller played on Robert Plant's Mighty Rearranger and the never-ending, still-in-progress fifth Massive Attack album; the perfectionist Barrow, of course, worked for four years or so on the last Portishead record.
The immediacy of BEAK>'s modus operandi leaps out at listeners. Befitting the material's essentially live genesis and construction, there's a strongly organic, jam-based feel to much of it. For the most part, the individual contributions quickly coalesce and attain critical mass. Propelled by Fuller's pulsing bass, "Iron Acton" gets into a straight-ahead "Mother Sky" groove, while the Silver Apples-esque "I Know" hits its stride with a more syncopated, Barrow-powered drive. "Pill" kicks off like Tony Conrad and Faust before gathering momentum to suggest PiL playing "Church of Anthrax." Indeed, someone trying just a little too hard might go so far as to say that Lydon's outfit is playfully referenced in the track title, "Pill," which is actually a village near Bristol. (Like many other Bristol artists, BEAK> show a sense of place, something that's conveyed here in most of the titles, which borrow the names of West Country locales. There even seems to be a pub among them: "The Cornubia.")
Not everything here centers on hypnotic, repeating patterns: the almost idyllic "Battery Point" is a more melodic exercise in Mogwai-like slow-building intensity, and the mildly distressing "Ham Green" lumbers along, punctuated with doomy riffs and fleeting cartoon-metal solos; the unhinged, chaotic interlude "Barrow Gurney" more than lives up to its title, which -- aside from incorporating the vocalist's name -- namechecks a defunct West Country psychiatric hospital (also immortalized by Somerset's legendary Wurzels in their magisterial "Drink up Thy Zider": "We'm off to Barrow Gurney / For to see my brother Ernie").
Just as improvisation and jamming can lend themselves to some transcendent creative synergy, they can also spawn some less than interesting work, and a few tracks fall into that category, meandering and failing to come together in any compelling way: "Dundry Hill," for example, lurches aimlessly for too long, and "Ears Have Ears" calls to mind Can's "Yoo Doo Right," a song that was tiresome enough the first time around.
But these quibbles are incidental to the overall strength of the material. With BEAK>, Messrs Barrow, Fuller and Williams have hatched a fine album.
Standout Tracks: "Backwell," "Iron Acton," "I Know" WILSON NEATE
