There’s been something of a trend in recent years of experienced ex-members of celebrated hardcore and post-hardcore bands forming punk rock supergroups and arriving fully formed with their first record. I’m thinking Hammered Hulls, Open City, LS Dunes, Fiddlehead. And now Beetlehead.
They may not have quite the history of some of those bands (members of Beetlehead were in Secondsmile rather than Lifetime and their brother isn’t Ian MacKaye) but the record absolutely holds it’s own against them. Indeed, a little under 3 months after I was lucky enough to see their first live show (at The Pump in Trowbridge) the album is up there with my favourite records of 2023.
In terms of sound we’re talking the melodic end of shouty post-hardcore allied to more dreamy post-punk/shoegazey guitars – the sort of sound that Title Fight laid the blueprint for and Citizen, Turnover and Basement ran with. As someone who worshipped at the twin altars of Fugazi and My Bloody Valentine this kind of midway point is a sound I cannot get enough of.
The album starts with, erm, “Start” – a huge riff eventually giving way to a quieter passage in which four short lines are sung before the guitars kick back in and it’s a theme of the album that words are not wasted. There are just a few lines in each song and they’re often repeated. It’s a trick Fiddlehead also pull and there are definite similarities between the two bands. Fiddlehead songs tend to be about grief, friendship and loss; Beetlehead’s friendship, pain and regret. Both have a sense of hopeful melancholy and a kind of maturity that comes with age and experience. And both bands manage all this simply and effectively. Indeed, the ability to get across so much emotion and feeling in so few words is a real skill.
Third song Neverlone is a great example of this as well as being a real stand out. It starts with a gently strummed electric guitar before bursting into life with the lines “Will the good times outweigh the bad? Will I appreciate everything I had?” The guitars sound incredible, as they do throughout the album, and it’s a testament to the band’s ability that everything is so fully realised straight off the bat (that first show I mentioned felt like a band with 200 gigs and multiple tours to their name). They’ve done all this without an agent and without a label and you get the sense of a group of people happy to be playing together and determined to do so on their own terms. It’s DIY and punk as fuck.
There’s variety on the album and no mean intelligence in the sequencing. Yes, a lot of the songs are built on warm and fuzzy chord progressions, but there are also quieter passages (the almost ambient opening to Friends Like These and extended ending to Learning Curve) as well as a beautiful instrumental exactly halfway through the record. The guitars shimmer and twinkle and build to a climax before cutting out suddenly and we’re straight into Apology, another highlight. “It didn’t mean that much to me until it did” The vocals sound great throughout – the singer has a trick of kind of going up in pitch at the end of each line and consequently sounds somewhere between Pat Flynn and Robert Smith. Sinister One even begins with the kind of jangly guitar and melodic bassline that wouldn’t be out of place in a Cure song.
I really do love this record. It hits so many buttons for me and I’m already finding bits stuck in my head after half a dozen plays. I have just one complaint (and it’s not really a complaint more a wish) and that’s that there is no physical release. I’m someone who has to OWN the music I like, have an object to refer to. And a record this good can’t stay digital only, can it? If there’s any justice in the world then it’s surely just a matter of time until someone picks it up. Until that happens though it’s available on Bandcamp and you should totally check it out.
https://beetlehead.bandcamp.com/album/everyone-gets-to-come-back