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The Beths’ ruminations on the genetic tombola all humans face are wrapped up in sugar coated noise, a brave recounting of a hard personal chapter.
Of all the qualities that indie (make up your own definition) music is meant to wear on its sleeve, philosophy isn’t one that springs to mind.
Yet The Beths‘ fourth album Straight Line Was A Lie doesn’t just own some for a title, it goes on to explore the ideas well beyond any sort of cookie cutting template.
Prepare to be taken outside your comfort zone.
To back up a bit; a quartet from Auckland featuring singer and writer Elizabeth Stokes, The Beths debuted in 2018 with Future Me Hates Me but, released four years later, it was Expert In A Dying Field which brought them their first domestic number one and some impressive critical and commercial traction on both sides of the Atlantic. Barack Obama is a fan.
Always disarmingly open, the circumstances around Straight Line Was A Lie found Stokes at a crossroads.
On the one hand, a step forward had been in taking an SSRI, the outcome of which were a slew of different perspectives, but the unanticipated side effect was to throw a veil over the writing process.
Falling back to a typewriter and screening herself off in LA with creative partner Jonathan Pearce, the free-associative results required greater moulding than usual.
Here’s where the previously mentioned make-up-your-own-indie thing comes back to bite though; The Beths happily use fuzzy guitar dynamics topped off with smart vocal interplay (think Beach Bunny or The Illuminati Hotties), but Stokes turns vulnerability and self-examination into an art form.
First time listeners can get comfy quickly as a result, but only so comfy.
The titular opener begins with the statement lines, “I thought I was getting better/But I’m back to where I started”, an evocation of humanity’s tail eating process, one its singer describes with: “Linear progression is an illusion…What life really is is maintenance. And finding meaning in the maintenance.”
There goes about a million personal empowerment podcasts.
Any flinch mechanism however is tested on Metal, which finds Stokes in the aftermath of diagnoses for both Grave’s and Thyroid Eye Disease.
The singer’s ruminations on the genetic tombola all humans face are wrapped up in sugar coated noise, a brave recounting of an undoubtedly hard personal chapter.
Even more unavoidably close up, Mother, Pray for Me is the tenderest of finger picked ballads, full of ruminations on how the blurred lines of forgiveness and drift leave instability as the only true outcome; Stokes has admitted she cried all the way through the writing process.
If that feels like peering through a door crack when you know you shouldn’t, closer Best Laid Plans takes another pronounced right-hand turn, the honeyed vocals, bubbling tom toms and jangle chords echoing the pop-centric stylings of Haim or Olivia Rodrigo.
For not so obvious reasons, Straight Line Was A Lie’s more abrasive edges when they come do feel like some kind of relief, a heading back into the shitstorm with two fists ready.
On Take and especially No Joy, the proto-punk scree add weight to the multiple journeys, the major threat level reduced to minor peril on the latter with, “Spirit should be crushing/But I don’t feel sad/I feel nothing”.
Straight Line Was A Lie has its genesis in the idea what we’re never really in control of our destiny whatever we choose to believe.
On it, The Beths skate the thin line between philosophy and therapy. Pull up a couch and find out how.