Friday, July 14
The Beige arriveAmong the artists listed as influences on the Beige's Myspace website is William Basinski. A sound artist, Basinski is a minimalist composer of ambient music, such as The Disintegration Loops I-IV. This project, released in 2003, was as much about the process of transferring a series of 20-year-old tape loops to a digital file format, and the loss of portions of the music during the transference, as it was about the music itself.
All of which is pretty highfalutin stuff, especially if all you want is a good tune and some pretzels to help the beer go down. Happily, the Beige's eight-song debut CD strikes just the right balance between atmospheric improvisation and linear song structure. Though the tunes often take the scenic route, they inevitably arrive at their destination. "Hammer in a Bell" highlights frontman Rick Maddocks' falsetto turn and Andrew Arida's accordion on what could pass for a Wilco track. "One for Me" is a fairly straightforward love ballad, albeit one hiding behind understated piano, intermittently strummed chords and distant-thunder drums. "Nobody Nowhere" is both determined and disoriented, with Maddocks intoning the words against a droning backdrop. The strategically laidback verses of "Mirror" lead to a forceful, yearning chorus.
Maddocks, who plays guitar and wrote the songs, is also the author of a novel, Sputnik Diner. He's recorded this album with some of Vancouver's most accomplished players, and the result is a disc of literate roots-pop for urban dwellers, with a we-get-there-when-we-do attitude that coalesces into dusty, lovely ballads.
-Shawn Conner
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