Linear progression is generally a myth, yet one often projected onto artists, who must continually level up their sound without straying from their original vision. The Beths have indeed tightened, coloured, and expanded their approach since their 2018 breakout Future Me Hates Me, and while they’re not quite making a statement about their own trajectory with Straight Line Was a Lie, the titular realization extends to the way they handle both lyrics and instrumentation: careening between the immediacy, anxiety, and tenderness of their previous albums, but leaving space for different shades of weariness and anhedonia, a void that doesn’t dull so much as activate a new side of New Zealand quartet’s sound. “Let me be weak/ With a sad tear drying on my cheek,” Liz Stokes sings on ‘Best Laid Plans’, closing out an album all about gathering the strength to let it roll down. It sounds like pushing forward, illusory as it may be.
1. Straight Line Was a Lie
Like its predecessor, Straight Line Was a Lie kicks off by expertly encapsulating the album’s titular premise with the eponymous track. Liz Stokes cycles through the main realization a couple times – “I thought I was getting better/ But I’m back to where I started” – before the band loosens the edges of the song with some tentative hope, then naturally winding up again. Its fierce introspection is balanced out by some of their most dynamic backing vocals, making it one hell of a sing-along anthem.
2. Mosquitoes
The album’s second track keeps reminding me of Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter Stella Donnelly’s ‘Mosquito’, but it’s no endearing love song, even if it slows down the record’s pace. In January 2023, Oakley Creek, where Stokes would often go when she felt isolated at home, was ravaged by a flood. When she visited a few years ago, she wrote just these few lines on her notes app: “I’m only here to feed mosquitoes/ Only skin, only blood/ A little less now than there was.” It’s a strange but potent way of aligning the anhedonic side effects of her chronic illness with nature’s unfeeling power: “The current has forgotten how it felt to break the world,” she remarks. Stokes can’t help but keep going, exposing herself, not just to witness the wreckage but notice something thriving. For growth’s sake, more than just the memories.
3. No Joy
Stokes does away with metaphorical language to sing matter-of-factly of mental illness, but as she utters the words, “Heartbeat barely pumping,” the rest of the band only speed things up. They try to colour her unusually monotone melody with backing vocals, scribble in the frustration underlying numbness, and, when she feels her tear ducts full but unbreakable, the shrieking guitar solo seems to be pulling at them: a torrent of nothingness. Benjamin Sinclair even underlines the middle-eight melody with the flute and recorder, playfully dissociating before the spiral revs back up.
4. Metal
As Stokes’ mind keeps racing, the guitars get janglier on ‘Metal’, shimmering as she unravels one of her most pleasantly poetic choruses: “And I know I’m a collaboration/ Bacteria, carbon, and light/ A florid orchestration/ A recipe of fortune and time.” Her reckoning with the state of her own body – diagnosed with both Grave’s and Thyroid Eye Disease – is not as effortless as the band makes it sound, but nudges her to look at it with the same gentle objectivity towards nature’s cruel patterns on ‘Mosquitoes’. No matter how many times she delivers the hook, she doesn’t reveal what the “short word” is that she’s tempted to degenerate herself with, suggesting it’s lost some of its power. Atoms may be infinitely small, but combined they hold more sway than one stupid adjective.
5. Mother, Pray for Me
The gulf between mother and daughter becomes the subject of the Beths’ most gut-wrenching song to date. Moving down the fretboard for as clean and pensive an electric guitar riff can be, Pearce also blankets Stokes’ tender performance with organ and piano, but nothing else distracts from the directness of her words. “I wanted to hurt you for the hurt you made in me,” she sings, the most damning line on an otherwise conciliatory, sincerely prayerful song. She’s moved past resentment, her sweetness implies, but the relationship’s still hard to parse.
6. Til My Heart Stops
On the Future Me Hates Me highlight ‘Little Death’, Stokes sang breathlessly about love making her heart beating “harder at the cage inside my chest.” She yearns for that feeling to last on this song, which only slightly picks up the pace from ‘Mother, Pray for Me’, wishing to ride her bike, fly her kite, and dance until the want dries up. Once again, the band floods in with a brightness that seems to stretch the longing wide. She might not totally feel like a part of the world yet, but there’s an opening she won’t miss.
7. Take
The instrumentation suddenly stops being this big source of light, instead coiling itself up in Stokes’ march towards oblivion. This is not the first time the Beths have tackled recklessness, but it has never sounded so embodied, dark, and chugging. Pearce’s guitar screeches in sympathy, but it’s Tristan Deck’s drum fills that steal the show. “Take it to overwhelm the echoes bouncing on and on and on,” Stokes sings, but instead of letting the band go off, they keep bouncing off each other, further tangling up the tension more than resolving it.
8. Roundabout
What happens to love over time? On the playful and upbeat ‘Roundabout’, Stokes offers a wonderful answer: “Years added hue/ To the canvas we were sticking to.” Sometimes she has no idea what to write until putting pen to paper, and love’s not so different sometimes. We make it up as we go along, and here the Beths make it sound like it’s nothing to be scared about.
9. Ark of the Covenant
‘Roundabout’ is but a small burst of positivity sandwiched between the album’s darkest songs, and ‘Ark of the Covenant’ is especially immersive, in part thanks to the additional sound design by Michael Howell, who also helped out Pearce in the overall razor-sharp production. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Stokes repeats, almost overriding the sentiment of the previous song. Yet she’s now less afraid of diving into the unknown.
10. Best Laid Plans
Buoyed by new-wavey and adorned with string arrangements by the band’s Benjamin Sinclair, bongos, congas, violin, and viola, the closing track is Straight Line Is a Lie’s most audacious-sounding song. Stokes matches its vivacity in her lyrics, pushing through to remind herself why it’s all worth pursuing in the first place. I’ve been reading Where the Crawdads Sing, and as Stokes sings her final plea “to feel a different gravity,” I’m reminded of a passage about how “gravity holds no sway on human thought.” As the book’s protagonist learns, “Time speeds and bends around planets and suns, is different in the mountains than in the valleys, and is part of the same fabric as space, which curves and swells as does the sea. Objects, whether planets or apples, fall or orbit, not because of a gravitational energy, but because they plummet into the silky folds of spacetime—like into the ripples on a pond—created by those of higher mass.” It’s fluid, in other words, which makes Stokes’ hopeful vision all the more palpable.
Great Job Konstantinos Pappis & the Team @ Our Culture Source link for sharing this story.
