Black Gold

King Biscuit Time:
Black Gold

[Poptones; 2006]
Rating: 7.5
The Beta Band at the turn of the millennium were a big, wet, slobbery kiss of too much at a time when so many bands were content to dole out single-serving power pop tunes like misers in bowl cuts. It's probably stretching it to call them the turn-of-the-millennium Faust when they were more like the British equivalent of an Elephant 6 band (less Brian Wilson, more Jamaica). But they certainly share that German band's lazy countryside psychedelia, love of jump cuts, and general stoner hobbit humor. Who could hate such good natured, effusive goofballs?

But good-natured or not, the Beta Band never managed to cross over. And in 2005, they broke up, disillusioned and in hock to the record industry, after delivering their weakest (and most conventional) album. Shortly thereafter, singer Steve Mason revived his King Biscuit Time side project. The first KBT releases, collected on 2000's eight-track No Style EP, mixed creaky jungle, spastic hip-hop, soundtrack effluvia, psychedelia, and soft pop. The new Black Gold opens with "C I AM 15", a grainy dancehall tune. But the song, with its burst of deejaying at the climax that takes a sideswipe at George W. Bush and Tony Blair, is a red herring; on most of Black Gold, Mason downplays the beat science.

Throughout Black Gold, Mason sings from under the covers or into his cellphone or half-asleep in an airport at 5 a.m. It's a melancholy record, with the same happy-to-be-sad feeling of Betas songs like "Simple". On "Left Eye", Mason implores, "love me, love me, love me" as descending piano notes disappear into a golden mist of organ. Rather than the communal sing-alongs of the Betas, Black Gold is for headphones, for humming alone on a late night walk. It's hard to imagine a rousing group chant of "loneliness, sadness, joyless, lifeless" (from "All Over You") at future King Biscuit Time gigs. "Paperhead" climaxes with a crescendo of distorted guitar, but sounds like it's fighting inertia to sound appropriately worked up.

But I could still listen to Mason's creaky, lonely voice all day. It was always the rubber cement that held the Betas' rickety balsa wood genre constructions together. And he's yet to lose his knack for gentle beauty. "Impossible Ride" stretches swooning woodwind into a horizon of reverb, while Mason's guitar pokes through like sunlight through pines. Like the Betas' Heroes to Zeros, Black Gold isn't a flashy record. For the moment, Mason seems to have abandoned the audience-baiting japes of "The Beta Band Rap" or 15-minute journeys into the heart of collage like "Monolith". But unlike Heroes to Zeros, Black Gold sounds agreeably homespun. This is electronic music made in the garden shed and psych-folk still connected to the twitching wires of modernity, and all the better for it.

- Jess Harvell, May 12, 2006