AEM090 Beat Radio

Beat Radio is a synth-influenced Amer­i­cana out­fit that’s had more lineup shuf­fles than Spinal Tap has had drum­mers. The moniker dates back before 2005 when five musi­cians came together to form the band. Fast­for­ward to the present day and there are still five mem­bers, but the road in between was any­thing except smooth. Three orig­i­nal mem­bers departed for good, even­tu­ally replaced by Dan Bills (synths/keys), Evan Duby (lead gui­tar) and Brian Ver Straten (drums). Mike McCabe (bass) took a sab­bat­i­cal around 2008 and, in the words of the remain­ing musi­cian Brian Sendrowitz (vocals/guitar/casio), “…I found myself sud­denly with­out a band– I spent the next year work­ing on Safe Inside the Sound mostly on my own.” The band, or ‘col­lec­tive’ as Brian has taken to call­ing Beat Radio, had been whit­tled down to one (a ‘col­lec­tive’ of one!). It takes no small amount of guts to hold onto your dreams in the face of loss and adver­sity, but strug­gle has always pro­duced great art. Like a fire that rekin­dles from a sin­gle ember, so it was with Beat Radio. “I started col­lab­o­rat­ing with Dan Bills about halfway through [Safe Inside the Sound], and he ended up play­ing on the album and bring­ing a lot to it on keys and synths. When the album was fin­ished this past fall we started play­ing out reg­u­larly again and the band grew slowly and organ­i­cally.” By the end of 2009 Beat Radio was stronger than ever. “We’ve been play­ing as a 5-piece since Decem­ber and it’s def­i­nitely the most fun and reward­ing expe­ri­ence I’ve had play­ing in a band.”

Credit: Gilbert Ng

Noth­ing pulls a band together faster than good mate­r­ial. Safe Inside the Sound boasts an album’s worth of solid songs that run the pop gamut between alt-Americana and indi­etron­ica. The win­some melodies, dressed up in synth pro­gres­sions and digibeats, will tempt the melan­choly onto the dance­floor half the time (and have them weep­ing into their beer the other half). There is a Great Plains sad­ness here, a “seen them come, seen them go” folky sad­ness that points to the ear­lier song­writ­ing of Sendrowitz: “Before Beat Radio, I’d done more acoustic based singer song­writer music.” With Safe Inside the Sound the com­po­si­tions hewed away from freeform folk paeans, towards more tightly reg­i­mented pop struc­tures. “The biggest change was writ­ing songs to rhythm tracks.  Before that, lots of my songs had a strummy, looser sort of feel – like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.  With Beat Radio songs, I’ve set out to make songs that were sim­pler, more like pop music, and hope­fully more uni­ver­sal.” There is an inher­ent opti­mism in pop music that coun­ters the more tragic tones of Beat Radio, result­ing in a del­i­cate dialec­tic between sad­ness and joy that speaks to the heart.

Safe Inside the Sound sells the indi­etron­ica hard for the first three tracks of the album. Opener “Fol­low You Around” is par­tic­u­larly impres­sive. A cho­rus of quasi-industrial synth sounds paints a pic­ture of quiet emo­tional dev­as­ta­tion– the per­fect back­drop for Sendrowitz’s heart­bro­ken vocals– before explod­ing into a thun­der­ous blitzkrieg of teeny-bopper tran­scen­dence and pitch-shifty solos. After t ini­tial elec­tronic flour­ish, Beat Radio starts to grad­u­ally fore­ground the gui­tar over and above the synths. “Stranger Flow­ers” is straight­for­ward, strummed folkrock melan­cho­lia, albeit with dig­i­tal beats. “Green Lux­ury Condo” drops the beat alto­gether in a reflec­tive paean to the melody of “Amaz­ing Grace.” It’s around this point in the album that you real­ize Beat Radio’s influ­ences are less MGMT, more the folk and coun­try greats of yore. So when you hear “Hard Times for Dream­ers” towards the end, with its mosey­ing gui­tar, dusky lyrics, and man­dolin, you’re hardly taken by sur­prise. Most every track on Safe Inside the Sound could become your new favorite song. The real acid test of the album though is the singing of Brian Sendrowitz. He wor­ships at the altar of some other polar­iz­ing vocal­ists: J Mas­cis, Neil Young, Daniel John­ston. Either you get his style, or you don’t, and that will make all the difference.

The Ampeater Review finds Beat Radio at a par­tic­u­larly sig­nif­i­cant junc­ture in its devel­op­ment. The dig­i­tal 7” includes of some of the first post Safe Inside the Sound mate­r­ial to be released, although trac­ing time­lines with a col­lec­tive can be deceiv­ing. The B-side, “Lonely From Rock and Roll,” was actu­ally co-written in 2003 by Sendrowitz and Tim­o­thy Lan­nen, who, along with Robert Hauss­mann, were both char­ter mem­bers of the very first incar­na­tion of Beat Radio (both con­tinue to play music as the Diggs). The title comes from a humor­ous lyric by the Trag­i­cally Hip, but the under­ly­ing mot­i­ca­tion is more melan­choly. As Sendrowitz recalls, “It was towards the end of that band we were in, and believe it or not, it was kind of about the band break­ing up. I always really liked the song, but it always felt unfin­ished.  As a writer, I don’t ever really throw any­thing away.  Songs are like your kids, you want to see them through, see them get recorded, per­formed, etc.  I actu­ally fin­ished writ­ing the song in early 2008 and recorded a demo.  It was weird – the Beat Radio lineup from that time was sort of wind­ing down, run­ning its course, slowly break­ing up.  Maybe it was some­thing about those emo­tions that reminded me of ’03, and let me fin­ish the song at that time. Work­ing on the track over the last few weeks def­i­nitely brought me back to both of those times – kind of bit­ter­sweet mem­o­ries.  Do you know that Mer­cury Rev song ‘Holes’?  There’s that great line: ‘Bands, those funny lit­tle plans, that never work quite right.’”

The A-side, “High Time” is the inspi­ra­tional yin to the melan­choly yang of “Lonely From Rock and Roll.” Sendrowitz describes his writ­ing process for the sin­gle: “…I like the idea of try­ing to write a really sim­ple song that can be use­ful to peo­ple and maybe inspire them in a direct sort of way.  So many songs we hear these days are cloaked in mul­ti­ple lev­els of irony.  When you’re try­ing to write some­thing that is uni­ver­sal, you sort of have to let go of the fear of being cliché.  My wife Liz inspired this song pretty directly– there’s a line in it that says ‘there’s noth­ing for you going upstream.’  That’s some­thing we’ve been try­ing to prac­tice.  You have to be open to let life hap­pen– when you’re strug­gling really hard, swim­ming against the tide, you may be going in the wrong direc­tion.” The nar­ra­tor rumi­nates on “fac­ing your fate”, a ter­ri­fy­ing prospect for all of us. But the redemp­tive power of love and beauty means that none of us have to face that fate alone.

Since Safe Inside the Sound Beat Radio has tweaked their record release strat­egy in a move that is partly prag­matic and partly reflec­tive of their per­son­al­ity. The band’s goal for 2010 is to fin­ish and release two songs every month, thereby skirt­ing the album for­mat. “Most of [the songs] will come out via our Band­camp page…[the Ampeater dig­i­tal 7” is] an excep­tion, because this Ampeater piece is a spe­cial occa­sion!” In the new dig­i­tal land­scape where an album can cir­cu­late around the inter­net in less than a day’s worth of pop-and-fizzle, releas­ing tracks a cou­ple at a time allows a rela­tion­ship to form between artist and audi­ence. “I don’t know if sin­gles will become dom­i­nant over albums, but as an artist, it has been kind of refreshing…Having some­thing to share with peo­ple on a con­sis­tent and reg­u­lar basis makes sense, and is really reward­ing, because we’re in direct con­tact with our audi­ence.” That’s a wel­come approach to new media in a time when most bands use social net­works as one-way mega­phones to PR-indoctrinate their fan­base. So look them up on their Band­camp site, say hi on Twit­ter (@wearebeatradio), and keep an eye out for more sin­gles in 2010.

Mike Gutier­rez

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