![]() Over the course of a set that drew from their three albums, the band showed itself schooled in the familiar architecture of a pop song. (There were also plenty of twentysomething women who didn’t need dads as chaperones or music tutors.)ĭad-aged myself but of a prickly resistance to nostalgia, I get suspicious when music goes down as easy as this. Fortunately many of the old fellers in attendance had cool daughters there too, and, from what I could tell by the way they quietly mouthed along with Stokes, of their own accord. No idea what kind of audience they have back home, but stateside the Beths are squarely dad-rock, feeding off fond recollections of power-pop and New Zealand indie among men of a certain age. If I don’t let that put me off, though, you sure shouldn’t. Ever since I’ve seen Weezer comparisons (in Genius of all places), I unfortunately can’t unhear them in the Beths’ elements of jumbo hookery, so seemingly at odds with their jangle yet expertly fused. He repeatedly careened into brawny solos without ever exuding macho, and even his most discordant flights were carefully contained to tailspin back into place when his allotted time was up. indie, and you can hear echoes of that tradition in the Beths today.īut guitarist and co-writer Jonathan Pearce draws upon heftier pop-rock traditions as well. It was there that the Velvet Underground’s dungeon drone was mysteriously reincarnated as a jangle and chime that would resonate widely in both U.S. It helps that the Beths hail from New Zealand, a land with a knack for redefining rock to suit its cultural needs in a way that in turn helps foment musical subcultures abroad. The quartet began last night with one of their heaviest riffing songs, the title track from their 2018 debut, Future Me Hates Me, the singer dreading “Wide-eyed nights late-lying awake/With future cold shakes/From stupid mistakes/Future me hates me for.” A song later she was upbraiding herself for her cowardice on “Knees Deep,” from the band’s latest, Expert in a Dying Field: “I wish that I could say what I've been thinking/But I never have done and never will do.” And, well, “You Wouldn’t Like Me” speaks for itself, no?įor all this self-deprecation, the music’s never a downer. Stokes isn’t quite as calm and collected as her matter-of-fact vocals suggest, and in fact she can get pretty down on herself. As a singer then, she’s modest and human-sized, pleasant without being fussily pretty, slightly exotic to American ears thanks to the impossible New Zealander pronunciations of words like “friend.” ("Free-end" is as close as I can come to a transliteration.) As a writer, she’s analytic but not neurotic, a studious, steady-nerved dissector of the human heart who finds unexpected nuances in the most over-addressed area of popular music: romantic relationships. Her melodies waft along a plainspoken voice that flips smoothly into a breathy falsetto as needed. So why do I feel differently enough about the Beths to tromp out to the First Avenue Mainroom on a Monday night (a show delayed from February by our last quasi-blizzard) for 90 minutes of dreamy swaying and tuneful bouncing? Well, that’s for me to try and figure out.Īt the center of the appeal is Elizabeth Stokes, and don’t let her band name fool you: She goes by Liz not Beth. ![]() That’s how I often feel about guitar-pop bands these days-I know the tricks and the tropes, and no matter how deftly you rearrange them, the appeal seems less novelty than familiarity. Songs? Really, you want more songs? We have songs at home.
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