Elsewhere: The Beta Band: Hot Shots II

By GRAHAM REID

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You know how it is - an album hijacks your stereo for months and friends wonder if you've become slightly obsessive.

That certainly happened round my way with the first Beta Band CD. I had more barbecues, long nights and relaxing summer days two Christmases ago with them than I would care to count.

The lazy, odd grooves by the UK quartet, about whom I knew absolutely nothing, was the soundtrack to summer and if the record company paid commission on albums sold on the strength of an afternoon at my place I'd probably be thinking of retirement.

Well that's pushing it. I'm told that very wonderful CD - a collection of the band's first three EPs imaginatively entitled The 3 EPs - sold fewer than 1000 copies here.

For those missed it - and it's not too late of course - a product description of what this three-quarters Scottish, one-quarter English outfit do is quite difficult.

Think folk-rock with samples, slide guitar, hip-hop beats, cheap instruments, lazy vocals and catchy repeated phrases such as "dry the rain" which attach themselves to the subconscious.

Think Beck's post-folk but more rural and British. Think long and loping grooves full of bent pop and odd sounds. Think some kind of angular genius.

The Beta Band - who got an amusing namecheck in High Fidelity, although John Cusack pronounced it "bey-ta" - made the most refreshing and unexpected sound out of Britain in years. And sounded all the better for existing amid Oasis bombast, Radiohead anxiety and manufactured bands marketed to pre-teens.

The world was at their feet, and of course they blew it.

They announced their debut album would be a double disc (and insisted on triple vinyl) and would include two 30-minute tracks recorded at a hut in the Scottish Highlands. Hoorah!

Needless to say the record company they'd signed with, EMI, thought the better of this and words were exchanged.

When that album finally did appear - imaginatively entitled The Beta Band - it was a single disc which opened with the unpromising The Beta Band Rap.

The album was okay, but not a patch on The 3 EPs and sales suffered accordingly. Matters weren't helped when the band denounced the album as "shit" and an even more unpublishable description.

That album, the difficult debut, sold less than a third the figure of The 3 EPs in this country.

It looked like the end of a short, fascinating career for a group who came off as grim miserablists in interviews. Or effectively mute.

But the Beta Band are back, and their Hot Shots II (Regal/EMI) is almost a return to earlier form. It's certainly the first album to be named after a Charlie Sheen movie, which gives the lie to the perception they are po-faced, cold-water-flat dwellers.

Hot Shots II has all the familiar, appealingly quirky Beta elements: the softly shuffling trip-hop beats, the folkadelic sensibility, catchy chanted choruses, shifts between foreground and backdrop in the vocals, the interpolations of strange and cheap toy instruments, wobbly deep bass, a lo-fi warmth, a drizzle of melancholia, ambient vinyl crackles and so on. And lyrics are sometimes disconcerting (the album opens with "I seen the demons but they didn't make sound, they tried to reach me but I lay upon the ground") or sometimes defy sensible interpretation.

But the sympathetic and slightly creepy psychedelia of Quiet deals with agoraphobia much like Syd Barrett might have if he hadn't lost his marbles ("You can go outside where the sun and the people blind you."). And Life is one the most endearing songs about separation and self-doubt you're likely to hear: "I went to look for shadows but the shadows they found me ... I want to love my woman but she chose him over me ... is this me for life? Me for life?"

It's the very human-ness of this music which engages. Whether it be the sense you too could be in this band and bang a kid's drum or blow lazy trumpet. Or in lyrics like those in Eclipse: "I got a whole heap of questions I won't hide from you ... I don't want to be the type of person that sits alone with a book, on my own ... with a book on my own."

This could be considered introspective British pop in the manner of Travis and Coldplay - but with more playfulness, fewer obvious hooks, less attachment to traditions, not so much self-consciousness, of smaller details and a bigger ambition. They even manage to rock out on Human Being.

So actually it doesn't sound like anyone else at all. It sounds like the Beta Band of The 3 EPs and that's excellent news. They've hijacked my stereo again.

You know how it is.

Label: EMI