I’ve got to get
my alphabet shit
back together.
They say smoke
follows Beauty
but damn it,
BECK follows
Beauty too.
And so here I
am with another
corrective, trying
to write a poem-
like-thing about
an absolute favorite
discovery of the last
few years,
Beauty Pill.
My friend Eric
turned me on to
this band a few
years ago. I think
he told me they
reminded him
of XTC. I didn’t hear
that, but what I did
hear was something
perhaps equally
tantalizing and brilliant.
Art school kids turned
rock musicians, I just
learned that the first
album of theirs I bought,
Beauty Pill Describes Things
As They Are, was recorded
as part of an art exhibit
for which spectators could
watch the album being
recorded through glass
partitions, like visitors
to a kind of music zoo.
Each tune is a kind
of mood piece, rhythmically
intricate, sonically dense,
a wonderfully strange
mixture of analog
instrumentation and
percolating electronics,
funny at times, equally
dark and foreboding,
laden with lyric hooks
as unlikely as mustard
on peanut butter and jelly.
“Slide the bureau against the door”
is a line I find myself
repeating over and over,
and I’m haunted by
the lyric in which a woman
dreams that she and
her lover are trapped inside
a car sinking in a body
of water, in which she croons,
without panic or shame,
“You turn to me and whisper,
‘You and me, we’re fucked.
We’re free.'”
Inescapably hooky and
strange is the tune about
a black customer
at a coffee shop who
longs to be the favorite
of the vaguely “Afrikaner
Barista.” Even the sleepiest
tunes on this record are
intoxicating in their own way.
One of my favorite albums
of the last decade.
Earlier, they were more rocking,
less atmospheric, but the
magic was still there. Impeccable
musicianship, groovy percussion,
a terrific blend of Chad Clark’s
lead vocal and guest lead vocals
by various female singers, who,
surprisingly, sound uncannily similar
to each other. Beauty Pill
is one of those bands that make
me grateful, somewhat full of myself,
to be a person who actively
seeks out new music.
It never gets old. I am so lucky,
surrounded by
an embarrassment of riches.
Notes on the vinyl editions: Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, Findings Records, 2023 reissue of the 2015 album on coke bottle clear vinyl. Blue Period, Ernest Jenning Record Co., 2022, black vinyl. I think Blue Period is a compilation of the best of the band’s earliest work, dating back to the early oughts, mostly, but not entirely, from an album called The Unsustainable Lifestyle.
In case you’re just joining me: I am listening to (almost) every record in my collection in alphabetical order and writing a poem-like-thing in response.
michael jarmer 