Beak> – Beak>

Album Reviews • Tuesday November 10th, 2009 • 1:57 pm

The debut album from Beak> plays out like an eerie flipside to Out of Season, the lone album released by Beth Gibbon and Rustin Man. On that record, Portishead’s lead singer took the band’s confessional slant and their jazzy inclinations in a new direction, making something rustic and organic, a smoky, seductive singer/songwriter album that was all acoustic but still sounded not too far removed from her band’s regular groove. The other half of the Portishead equation is represented by Beak>, led by Gibbons’ partner in crime, Geoff Barrow; this is their experimental side, their moody electronica pushed to the extreme. Taken together, these two albums present a fascinating deconstruction of what makes Portishead tick; apart, they’re entirely different animals, seemingly unrelated if not for the shared banner under which both flags fly.

Gibbons, of course, is the heart and the humanity of the band, and she took those attributes with her into Out of Season. By contrast, Beak> is weird, sinister, and esoteric—vintage Krautrock with a modern flair. It’s low-key and laid-back to the point of being downright creepy: The music is all meandering keyboards over a foundation of skittering drums and throbbing bass. Simple almost to the point of mood music, this stuff is repetitive music that slowly reveals subtle variations over time. In other words, mood music.

How the listener will respond to it, then, is a matter of his or her context. Fans of this kind of low-key electronic music will likely find much to love here; Beak> roots their music in the kind of slinky Krautrock that so many indie bands of today are exploiting, including Portishead, by the way. But it’s not at all flashy; rather, it’s exploratory, the sound of Barrow and his two like-minded rhythm players working a groove and sustaining a vibe. For those whose entryway into electronica has been paved by Radiohead (or Portishead), meanwhile, Beak> might prove to be an interesting but ultimately wearying experiment, perhaps a bit too abstract and artsy to really work as an engaging listen on its own.

But what’s interesting is that, essentially, both factions will be right. Beak> does much to prove just how cyclical and inter-related these various expressions of electronic music are, demonstrating both how great a debt bands like Radiohead owe to vintage Krautrock but also how integral to this music’s sound Radiohead has become. Indeed, as wordless vocals are moaned from somewhere deep in the mix, sounding for all the world like the disembodied voice of Thom Yorke emerging from the ether, it’s hard to tell whether Barrow and his companions are paying tribute to heroes of the distant or the very recent past.

And speaking of recent heroes, it’s worth noting another connection: British rock critic John Mulvey wrote about Beak>’s work in a joint review of The Flaming Lips’ Embryonic, primarily based on the album’s back story. Barrow, a notorious perfectionist, made this music as a way of shaking off his own fussy tendencies, imposing Jack White-like restrictions on himself by forcing the band to create this music very quickly and spontaneously, live from the floor and with no dubbing. Thus, what you hear with Beak> is a live performance by an electronic act—something uncommon enough to make it noble, and enough to elevate Beak> just ever so slightly above the point of a pure but unobtrusive experiment.