Like their Kiwi predecessors The Clear and The Bats, the Beths appear to return by their earworm melodies naturally: To jangle is their nationwide birthright. Since 2018’s Future Me Hates Me, the Auckland band has constructed a catalog of anthemic choruses as forceful as a worldwide climate occasion. The ice caps soften, the Beths rock: that is the way in which, and by no means extra so than on Straight Line Was a Lie, the group’s most incisive album, the place life feels much less like going to a celebration and extra like being thrust down a steep hill.
Straight Line forgoes the nail-biting, lovelorn angst of the Beths’ earlier releases and jumps straight to existentialism. Written within the aftermath of frontwoman Elizabeth Stokes’ new SSRI prescription, it interrogates the heady relationship with the self: half mirror (oh, in order that’s how I’m?) and half chasm (am I unknowable?). “Til My Coronary heart Stops” may sound like a standard love tune till you map the lyrics to the antidepressant on-ramp: out-of-body calm, detachment, questions on how deeply it’s doable (or suggested) to really feel. It’s tonally hopeful, a self-aware admission of dysfunction and need. Elsewhere, the title observe tacks in direction of Superchunk’s school radio shred, an electrified shrug on the notion of linear progress. “No Pleasure” marks each a sonic and tonal shift, veering into Devo-style new wave and a deadpan depiction of medicated anhedonia.
Nature is usually the trail again to embodiment, as on the sunny “Metallic,” an album spotlight whose call-and-response refrain acknowledges that to be alive is to be a “collaboration of micro organism, carbon, and lightweight.” “So that you want the metallic in your blood,” you may sing alongside, hips wiggling whereas the planet’s polarity retains you anchored to your bathe flooring. That the melody itself is so magnetic solely emphasizes its cheeky fusion of kind and topic. On “Mosquitoes,” Stokes describes visiting a close-by creek when her “home felt like a locked room.” There, she’d “watch the eels taking part in cool” earlier than strolling down a mud path to “the most important waterfall/My metropolis limits may produce.”
It’s a duality the Beths have perfected: what appears cheerful is tinged with a creeping disappointment. In the long run, irrespective of the vista, Stokes—like all of us—is frail and mortal, “solely right here to feed mosquitoes.” The album’s finest songs masks weighty existentialism below a chocolate coating, cloaking common truths below hooks that promote out rock golf equipment. “It might be worse than this,” Stokes admits on “Ark of the Covenant,” “it’s laborious to think about it.”
These revelations are tougher to swallow once they’re plated with out jangle. “Mom, Pray for Me” makes an attempt to sort out emotional inheritance below an earnest finger-picked riff and quiet, plaintive vocals. Stokes’ accented intonation charms, however the intimation of battle stays frustratingly obscure: some form of loss, a “her” whose absence prompts the mom to be “battered by the waves of grief.” Melodically, the tune loops just a few too many occasions. Thematically, it by no means lands with the identical specificity and texture that makes different tracks shine. The band’s tight, canny songwriting is so winsome on a lot of the album that weaker tracks, or trite phrases like “I’ll all the time be hooked on your power” on the in any other case charming “Roundabout,” momentarily break the spell.
Straight Line Was a Lie proves that it’s doable to sandwich life’s gnarliest realities between hooks that might take up everlasting residence in your auditory cortex. It’s a balm to know that even when we’re only a constellation of atoms or glorified mosquito fodder, we now have nature to make us really feel small, medication to deliver us up for air, and anthems to howl again on the void.
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The Beths: Straight Line Was a Lie
