Beachwood Aged

When Beachwood Sparks stepped into the spotlight a couple years ago, it was an easy group to tag: four guys sailing along on a hickory wind and infusing the old Gram Parsons sound with a healthy dose of psychedelia. This was twang touched by acid blotter, country music viewed through a kaleidoscope.

Its debut album — a pleasant, if subdued, affair — garnered enough praise and sales to warrant a second effort. The band could’ve played it safe, replicating the formula, coasting on the strength of its style (vintage threads, moptops and muttonchops) and taking the easy way out. Instead, the brand-new Once We Were Trees provides the splendid, if all too rare, thrill of hearing a band fuse together its disparate influences with sparkling clarity. It’s what the embryonic country-rock of Parsons or Gene Clark might have sounded like had they grown up listening to Sonic Youth or Joy Division. And if you’re a certain kind of music fan, one whose stereo rotates The Band, Underwater Moonlight, Gilded Palace of Sin and Moby Grape, it might be the best record you’ve heard in a long, long while.

The group has just been afforded its widest mainstream exposure to date, having been handpicked by Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson to open that band’s fall tour. And to the Sparks’ surprise, the band has been met with overwhelming approval from the Crowes’ constituency.

“We thought we’d be fighting for our lives, but they’re digging it,” singer/guitarist Chris Gunst says.

“We’ve been fitting in really nicely,” multi-instrumentalist David Scher agrees. “We’re playing for people who’re coming to hear — I don’t know — I guess you’d have to call it American rock music. But there’s also a sense that a lot of people who appreciate us just love music, period. And I don’t know if there is a name for that.”

That — in part — seems to be the essence of Beachwood Sparks’ dilemma. Too trippy for alt-country aficionados, too country for indie rockers and too unorthodox for anyone else, the band’s inscrutability has proved to be a double-edged sword, earning it points for originality but leaving it in a stylistic no-man’s-land.

None of that was a concern in late 1997, when Beachwood Sparks began as a side-project for a group of L.A. music vets. At the time, bassist Brent Rademaker and Gunst were crafting some compelling noise-pop in a group called Further. Adding Gunst’s old college pal Scher and a trio of like-minded talents, the group was born. Eventually, the fledgling sextet was pared down to a four-piece, with drummer Aaron Sperske cementing the lineup.

By the time the band really began to define its direction, its members — all native Californians — gravitated to an amalgam of indigenous sounds. The quartet settled on a ’60s West Coast hybrid: the blissed-out harmonies of the Beach Boys; the biting guitarscapes of Buffalo Springfield; dashes of Working Man’s-era Grateful Dead; and heaps of Parsons’ ISB/Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers axis. While reaction to the Sparks seemed to focus largely on its debt to the latter, the group maintained that its sound wasn’t the result of some grand design.

“We were just trying to make country music,” insists Gunst, “and not really knowing how to play country music, it might’ve come out sounding like that.”

Regardless of its intentions, the Sparks’ hometown concerts quickly spawned a small scene, becoming a melting pot for fellow musicians (among them early supporters Beck and Lou Barlow), hipsters and industry insiders. After releasing a handful of 7-inch singles on indie imprints, the band generated a sufficient buzz that major-label monolith Interscope records came calling. Instead, the Sparks signed with Seattle’s Sub Pop, recording and releasing its self-titled debut in March 2000. That disc was often described as “mellow,” a stark contrast to the group’s live sets, which mutated its material into a dense assault of focused noise.

By the time the touring cycle for its debut drew to a close late last year, the band had decided to make a conscious shift with its impending follow-up — not to toughen its approach so much, but rather to give the music, as Scher puts it, “more edges and texture.”

With a batch of fresh material ready, the band reunited with producer Thom Monahan (Chappaquiddick Skyline, Scud Mountain Boys) and headed for Amherst, Massachusetts, and the home studio of indie-rock godhead J. Mascis. With the frigid Northeastern winter still lingering, the band settled into Mascis’ warm, comfortable digs for nearly a month.

“We were really bouncing off the fact that we were in J. Mascis’ house with all the snow falling down outside,” Scher says. “That was really kind of magical and inspiring.”

The resulting fifteen-song Once We Were Trees, which was released October 9, is an achievement of roots-rock alchemy that immediately recalls The Band’s famed eponymous disc. While the group doesn’t approach Robbie Robertson’s grand Americana themes or sharp narratives, the Sparks do achieve the elusive “white soul” feel, the combination of country rollick, spiritual fervor and bucolic blues that The Band (and Parsons) was hailed for.

In doing so, Trees moves several steps beyond the stylish L.A.-canyon cool of Beachwood Sparks’ debut. And though still clearly worn on their faded denim sleeves, the band members’ seminal influences have been blurred together, merging fleeting snatches of the past into a single familiar barrage. To wit, “The Sun Surrounds Me,” which manages to pack in a funky Garth Hudson organ riff, a chesty Stephen Stills vocal, a Brian Wilson lyric and a string-searing coda worthy of Mission of Burma, all in just less than three minutes.

“The first time, we didn’t push many limits,” Scher admits. “It might seem a little freer, the music on this album. We weren’t as tested as a band when we recorded [Beachwood Sparks]. The whole machine was a little more subdued. With this record, we worked to change that.”

Another departure evident on Trees is the band’s decision to excise some of the softer sonic touches of its debut, replacing them with gospel overtones — holy-roller piano fills, moody church organ — and heavy doses of fuzz, echo and reverb, which results in far more urgent-sounding fare.

“We didn’t want to compromise excitement for fidelity demands,” Scher explains. “We wanted it to be exciting on the ear. I really think we wanted this one to sound crazy — literally.” And it does, as the band approximates the cracked hippie melancholia of Skip Spence’s landmark Oar on the acid waltz of “Let It Run” and the wandering lullaby “The Good Night Whistle.”

With its multiple layers, litany of rock references and expansive scope, Once We Were Trees is a kitchen-sink record to be sure, yet it doesn’t come off as sonic indulgence but rather a heartfelt expression and thorough digestion of several generations of music-making.

“Hopefully it won’t just be considered a retro thing,” Gunst says. “We like old music, but we like all music. All that gets filtered down into what we’re doing, and it turns out to be something original in the end.”