The Beths: Expert In A Dying Field – Album Review

The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field

LP| CD | DL

(Carpark Records)

Out now

Bursting with exquisite harmonies, chiming, fizzing guitars and drums, poignant, articulate lyrics, and enough hooks to snag fleet of flying fish, Kiwi quartet, The Beths’ 3rd album, Expert in a Dying Field, is another 12-track platter of peerless indie power-pop, infused with a haunted poet’s insight.

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Formed in Auckland, New Zealand in 2014, and consisting of Elizabeth Stokes (Vocals, Guitar), Guitarist Jonathan Pearce, Bassist Benjamin Sinclair, and drummer Tristan Deck, The Beths had released two highly critically acclaimed and successful albums, 2018’s Future Me, Hates Me and 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers, before recording Expert In A Dying Field throughout the pandemic restricted years of 2021 and early 2022, firstly in their home nation, and then in Los Angeles.

The album opens with the pulsing title track, which finds singer Liz Stokes sifting tentatively through the ashes of another relationship turned to flame and asking the eternal question – ‘How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?’, attempting to mine meaning from the confusion, doubt and pain that follows, reasoning finally that ‘You can’t stop, can’t rewind, Love is learned over time…Till you’re expert in a dying field…’

When the Pete Townsend-style power chords and drums kick in and the harmonies soar on the elongated final chorus, the effect is both exhilarating and moving, proving that some songs can make you sing out aloud and sigh at the same time.

The kinetic, punk-pop rush of Knees Deep follows, featuring some driving drums, spiralling scuzzy guitar, and another hopelessly addictive chorus. It is a song both joyous and wistful, like all great power-pop should be, with Liz lamenting with painful honesty that ‘ I wish I could say what I’ve been thinking, but I never had done and never will do…’

The juddering, frenetic, panic-attack punk paranoia of the spiky Silence is Golden leads into the gorgeous, lilting ballad Your Side, and as Liz asks ‘If this is love why’d you have to leave…’. Every single listener will sigh in sympathy, beguiled no doubt by a voice that bonds the listener to the song and to the band with a rare intimacy.

The deceptively jaunty I Want to Listen finds comfort in ‘Laughter and tears, courage and fears’, an apt summation of many of this album’s themes, as does the swirling, anthemic, Head In The Clouds, while the shimmering, harmony drenched, Best Left follows, with its disconcerting, chanted chorus of ‘Some things are best left to rot…’ battling against a backdrop of snarling, grungy guitar and angry, staccato drums.

Change In The Weather is another incisive, joyous examination of love’s vicissitudes, while the skipping When You Know You Know is a pure slice of pristine pop. The lyrically startling A Passing Rain is haunted by more ghosts than your average Scottish Castle, featuring some furious, raging guitar and see-sawing drumming, and the achingly sad refrain of ‘How can you hold me…When I’m dissolving…’ Liz again railing that ‘I cave…Like I am built to break…’  A song with wounds so raw you can almost see them glow red through your speakers.

The tender, bruised, insomnia-slaked 12-2 am ends the album on a suitably atmospheric contemplative note. Liz’s voice is as soft and vulnerable as moonlight on wounds, while Pearce’s guitar aches and twinkles beside her. Tristan Deck, a driving force on the album, here adds some subtle sympathetic, percussion, as the harmonies snake in and out of the song, as warm and lonesome as steam writhing up from a winter street grate.

Expert In A Dying Field is the Beths’ 3rd album and their best so far, both as joyous as morning sunlight and as melancholic as the first fallen leaves of autumn, featuring a band at the height of their powers, and a singer/songwriter and lyricist in Liz Stokes of rare melodic skill, empathy and insight.

An Expert In A Dying Field indeed…

The Beths are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

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Words by Stephen Canavan. His profile his here.

Source: louderthanwar.com