The Beta Band
When John Cusack played The Beta Band’s “Dry the Rain” to his Championship Vinyl customers in the 2000 movie High Fidelity, he bragged that five people would buy the disc. In fact, a much higher number of impressed listeners ponied up to hear more. But potential fans who grabbed the wrong album — 1999’s self-titled disc rather than the previous year’s “Dry the Rain”-inclusive The Three EPs — might have lost interest in the Scottish quartet after hearing a sarcastic shrug instead of the single’s tautly emotional surge.
Now, with a nod from Radiohead, which gave the Beta Band an opening slot on its tour this summer, and a flood of positive press, the group is back with a sophomore full-length worthy of the Championship imprimatur.
Once you get past Mason’s odd vocal resemblance to the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward and the recycling of “Dry the Rain”‘s sound for “Human Being,” Hot Shots II is a mellow treasure. At its most rhythmically insistent, as on “Broke” and “Quiet,” which form the disc’s centerpiece, Mason and bandmates Robin Jones (drums), Richard Greentree (bass) and John Maclean (keyboards) come off like a super-smart, unaffected Depeche Mode. Comparisons with more current acts fail the group. Most obviously, Beta Band revamps Radiohead’s wailing disaffection, coming up with a lean, vocal-driven program that stops short of justifying its moodiness lyrically: OK Casio, not OK Computer. Saying that Mason falls short of Thom Yorke’s standard as both a writer and a singer misses the point. Hot Shots II is no manifesto, and its authors aren’t striving for density over content. These songs sound finished, complete in ways even Three EPs wasn’t, as though Mason and his crew saw High Fidelity and learned from their song’s cameo in it that individual tracks deserve separate, controlled effort. Except for a suicidally wrongheaded cover of Harry Nilsson’s “One” (rewritten as a swaggering rap called “Won”) that ends the disc on a sour low, every song here pays dividends on that effort; Cusack’s store owner could play any of Hot Shots II’s other ten cuts and expect to sell out his whole Beta Band shelf within minutes.
