by David Bartholow

Beta frontman Steve Mason

By the graces of rolling green hills and warm bowls of sour porridge, brisk British climates and hearty-but-bland diets consistently breed mighty musical forces. While mainstream American rock acts churn their drivel, spilling it here and there on everyday people, bands across the Atlantic's way - bands not necessarily so consumed by any popularity contest - strive to make music with relevance. Some inevitably falter in their pursuit, while others brazenly confirm rock's resilience.

Radiohead, influential bipolar Oxford art rock champions swimming in a pool of their own self-indulgence, require no introduction or elaboration.

Devilishly tickling the fancy of dirty hipsters and thirsty critics, Iceland's supposedly promising Sigur Ros recently emerged with a near-epic debut, but demonstrated the limits of their dynamic approach at a recent Chicago affair, where the band, sadly, delivered a set full of disappointing new material. Oh, and if only words could describe the pain one feels when Sigur Ros frontman Jonsi Birgisson sings off key - indeed, one never expects to leave the local concert hall with bleeding ears.

Along the often-inspiring, frequently disappointing British art rock trail also stands London's (via Glasgow) much-lauded, sometimes derided Beta Band. While some bands take themselves too seriously and others seemingly aim for obscurity, the Beta Band walks a more irreverent line, and stumbles or succeeds depending on the step.

Unabashedly donning their influences on their knickers, the Scottish four-piece melds genres relentlessly, creating, if nothing else, innovative idiosyncratic hip-hop Britpop art pop pop pastiches which feature all said sounds and styles at once.

The Beta Band are a conscious, reserved Scottish jam band; they are a quirky Britpop band; they are a progressive rock band; a spacey Star Wars R&B troop.

A group far more influential than it is commercial, the Beta Band admittedly has had a clumsy stay in rock's limelight. Band members candidly acknowledge that their career has been marred by a series of certain, how do you say, tactical errors and miscalculations made along the way, (all) usually committed when the hype soared to irresponsible levels.

The Beta Band panics and pisses under pressure.

Upon the release of the Beta Band's perceived masterpiece in early 1998, the self-explanatory 3 E.P.'s album, the British music press established the Betas as the next regional "it" band, the new Brit rock wünderkinds in a post-Ok Computer era. A 12-song collection of poppy percussive space rock excursions, The 3 E.P.'s won the hearts of in-crowd rock elitists and Noel Gallagher, and propelled the band as rock's saviors du jour.

As if to say it wasn't wholly predictable, though, trivial forces contributed to a slight Beta Band backlash. The glamour associated with celebrity-attended live gigs, not to mention the truckloads of critical hype that preceded the release of their first studio-proper album, both served as self-fulfilling indicators of the excessive media-driven anticipation. Equally enjoyable and frustrating, the band's self-titled major label debut was anchored by an apparent penchant for thematic musical masturbation. Lacking in focus, but dripping with their fundamental, but exhausted essence, The Beta Band came across as a grossly ill-conceived opening statement.

More disappointed with the release than anyone else (Band frontman Steve Mason famously called the effort "fucking awful"), the Beta Band nonetheless managed to maintain their reputation as they deftly honed their lewd and rousing art like a gaggle of young and blonde au pairs. Both the alleged strength of their live gigs, and that brief plug in John Cusack's High Fidelity reinforced the validity of their craft.

After solo explorations and scant gigging in 2000, the band holed themselves up in a London practice space for three months to write and compose the material for their second full-length offering, the more focused and refined Hot Shots II, released in July 2001. At the cost of the quirks and the aimless musical banter, the effort finds a more reserved, even mature Beta Band paying severe attention to structure, form and texture all the while retaining the poppy peculiarities which make the band so distinctly, um, Beta Band.

This past summer, the Beta Band was asked to chair the coveted opening slot for Radiohead's first stateside tour in three years. Thom Yorke went so far as to justify his band's choice by declaring that the two groups shared a common purpose in their music. Taking on the challenge, the Beta Band, in a whirlwind move, turned leftward, and tarnished their live reputation before eager American audiences.

While hoping to reach a larger U.S. contingent, and inevitably doing so anyway, the band curiously abandoned their glorified live approach - which includes something like jamming and full-band percussion interplay - to press tiny little buttons and perform over pre-recorded keyboard and drum tracks as if they were a sideshow karayoke band.

To abandon a surefire winner for a 45-minute dose of amateur hour, well, that showed little tact.

When the band launched their second headlining U.S. tour earlier this fall, outsider expectations were low from the get-go, so the band wisely reinstated the old format - hell, the tour press announcement went so far as to ensure that there would be ample live instrumentation.

True to their pre-tour claim, the Beta Band marched through Chicago last week, and ignited a sold-out Metro with wholly live renditions of classic cuts from all three releases. Owning their oldest material, and purposefully delivering the Hot Shots tracks, the band also debuted two songs with unparalleled force - one of the numbers was particularly noteworthy for its striking resemblance to the Clash's "Rudie Can't Fail."

Mason, clad in a kimono before stripping into an all-white, low-key hip-hop suit, stood centerstage, as his bandmates, turntablist/sampler John Maclean, drummer Robin Jones and bassist Richard Greentree, enclosed around him whilst decked out in semi-spacesuits.

With the stage covered in colored streamers, the Metro more closely resembled some trendy psychedelic '60s lair, or a souled-out funk palace, not a gritty rock club.

And in most respects, the music mirrored the atmosphere the event created. At times sounding like a soulful party band with a purpose, and at others a percussion-oriented parking lot drum circle, the Beta Band simultaneously summed up the various extensions of rock music and its very primitive origins. And, unlike bands who play music for the executives, the Betas indulged their own musical drive, summoning their heroes - the Beatles, Parliament Funkadelic and Grandmaster Flash, among others - in each musical move.

There were even times when the Betas resembled a modern day Devo, only different.

Set opener "It's Not Too Beautiful" soared in clouds of trance-inducing smoke as Mason's treated, atmospheric vocals drove the number, and the crowd. Hot Shots tracks, "Al Sharp," "Alleged" and the first single, "Squares," were fully recommunicated in the live setting, their decadent air demonstrating undeniable anthemic qualities, but lacking in overall impact.

The crowd's reaction to "She's the One," a Beta Band classic performed during the encore, mostly summed up the discrepancy between newer and older Beta Band material. In short, crowd response indicated that the Beta Band may not surpass their earliest works. Primal youthful flair sometimes disappears with age and introspection. With the Beta Band, it's unclear.

Though they are not masters of cool, or chancellors of tact, the Beta Band are purveyors of low-key, honest artistic pride; they are good, but not exceptional musicians carrying a barely-lit rock 'n' roll torch in an uncharted direction. If history takes its natural course, the Betas will flounder and succeed over and over, stumbling then and again on the disconnected path they travel.

David Bartholow claims he threw a 52-mph fastball in 6th grade. He can be reached at d-bartholow@northwestern.edu.

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