The BEAST With Two Bassists - 'Smoke Swig Swear' Album Review
/I Walk Around Town, Quietly Contemplating
So what if we both wanna play bass?
South African supergroup BEAST came about from a childlike notion of two friends wanting to do the same thing and, even if it was a ludicrous idea, follow through with it.
So the story of their formation goes, as documented in a Benitha Vlok-directed companion film to their debut album, Smoke Swig Swear.
Rian Zietsman and Louis Nel, the guitarist and drummer of alternative rockers Taxi Violence, both wanted to play bass in a band and decided that to just assume that role in duality, getting to work on laying down some tracks, despite both never having played the four-stringed instrument before.
Enter Sasha Righini, drummer of the melodic indie rock group The Plastics. BEAST had limbered up, ready for an exploration into the dark, grimy corners of garage rock.
As with any beast, the grunts and moans of the band’s instrumental attack are its lifeblood, pumping sludgy sub-human fuel through the veins. BEAST truly found its voice in Inge Beckmann, songstress of the avant-garde electronica act Lark, now appearing in a frighteningly sexy form as grungy she-devil. Her operatic feminine shrieks cut through the growling riff-fest, with simple, biting lyrics, a dynamic vocal range, and a punky attitude to boot.
Now your words mean different things to me
Inge Beckmann singing Mudhoney's 'Touch Me I'm Sick' in their 'Smoke Swig Swear' short film
This back-to-basics approach removes all pretension, leaving a lean, unapologetic, minimalist monster.
Whilst BEAST’s actions might speak a lot louder than its words, Beckmann’s blunt, brutal yet evocative tales seem to spill out over the eight-song set as a series of a surreal sketches.
The shrapnel of song includes devastating one-liners that fly by on album-opener ‘Fill The Hole’. or flow in the stream-of-consciousness effluence of ‘Walls’ (“Walls in my head vibrate when I drill holes in them/Rapidly rising rampart/Enemies are closing in”). Vivid character studies emerge in the ominous ‘Man In Between’ and comparatively light ‘Cat Lady’, whilst ‘Hand of God’ sees her snarl apocalyptic omens with religious fervour.
Twice As Nice
BEAST’s preposterous twin-bass setup is relatively unique, especially in the South African music scene, but Zietsman and Nel have felt their way towards something that works for them, the former playing a lower, rhythm-led role akin to that of a normal bassist, whilst the latter employs a higher, chord-based attack.
On most songs, this matrimony manifests as a churning colossus of punk-influenced metal, occasionally channeling Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘robot-rock’ style, particularly on the deliciously melodic ‘The Grape’, where interwoven mid-fi murmurings are propelled by Righini’s relentlessly powerful drumming.
But it’s best when BEAST is left as untamed as it should be. Even the album title (Smoke Swig Swear) lays the band’s intentions bare, and to be honest, they don’t care how you interpret their primal urges.
And if you harm no one, do then what you will
In the keynote speech from this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) music conference, Dave Grohl (of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame) outlined his path to rock stardom, and how he found his voice through persistent practice and solo adventuring.
He recounted a story of how he learned at 12 years old to create his own one-man band through the creative use of his old handheld tape recorder. The results were not revolutionary, but they were his: “To my chagrin, though, what I got was not Sgt. Peppers. Rather a collection of songs about my dog, my bike, and my dad. Nevertheless, I had done this all myself, therefore making the reward even sweeter.”
Whether you’re taking tentative steps towards greatness a ’la Grohl, or making an unrefined return to the wild as in the case of BEAST, finding your voice through music shouldn’t be fraught with concern or overthinking. Just play bass, bru - we’ll figure it out.
BEAST Album Launch (23 February 2013)
Photo by Gerhard de Kock