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Since the release of the first single, Desert Sky,
in 1997 Beachwood Sparks have been seen as extremely
successful sixties copyists. Aping on last years Once
We Were Trees, an intense pursuit of the ‘open your
eyes’ ethos deemed to be suitable for changing the world,
the band has been rail-roaded because of this into a
revivalist siding. That acid panacea never got anywhere
thirty-years ago and the more successful of the counter-culture
found that the high-pressure skills they had learnt
in chanting ‘middle-class, middle-weight, middle-brow,’
made them extremely efficient lawyers and as much part
of their parent’s generation as the final assimilation
of any generation into another. For the Sparks the music
is eulogised; the embarrassing politics of the past
are not.
 Stripped
of time and place in this way, with no contextual challenging
of the here and now, the band does not realign itself
with the present to pursue a new musical foray. Perhaps
it saves the group though from the ridiculous stereotypes
of Woodstock. For the sound is the evolved guitar jangle
of mid-Byrds on Younger Than Yesterday and Fall On You
Moby Grape, without the forced intentions of a generation
agenda. Last year’s second album, Once We Were Trees
endured throughout 2001 because of its close resemblance
to the familiar strum of West Coast Pop, however recording
the album at J Mascis’ private studio was not a dry
run through of a previous decade.
“It all could have been just an exercise,” thinks Brent
Rademaker, founding member of the Sparks, of the records
so far. “It could have been all just a re-creation of
old productions, for example, samples from our favourite
albums and different musical styles like country & western
music and hillbilly. But when it came to Once We Were
Trees it had to be something to reflect what was going
on, but not in an overt sense where direct statements
and references would date us in a couple of days.”
“With each record it has to involve our lives and souls
and stuff like that, otherwise it’s kind of pointless.
We could have broken up after the first album if that
was the case. What I can tell from the first record
was that being in Los Angeles we were definitely making
our escapes to the deserts, canyons, everywhere, definitely
getting out, and by the time we recorded the last full
album we had gone through so much as a band it was really
easy to say ‘get out of the city.’ What the difference
had to be was that the songs had to sound like they
weren’t over done.”
The sun-gilded country of You Take The Gold and The
Hustler have moved away from the Burrito Brothers Cosmic
Americanisms found on the first album, towards a combination
which could only be played at this moment. Country lilts
and lap steel are fed through distortion, with the psyche-musing
lyrics at points inaudible through the delayed and prepared
white-noise of the avant-garde influenced indie-rock
of Sonic Youth. The group have dispensed with penning
sincere homages and gone for a full reinvigorated and
revivified take on when R&B became filtered through
folk-rock. The inside cover of the album best serves
this notion with the denim clad band melting into the
pastoral phased photography of the sleeve, while retaining
their presence seeping through the leaves. A fading
photograph, not forgotten in the present.
“That was exactly what we were singing about in the
songs,” confirms Brent. “We had to find a way to exist
in music that would allow us to breathe. Like living
in Los Angeles, it’s a really big city but we had to
find ourselves by trying to make our lives feel like
they were being lived in some small west-coast town
which people could connect with and not get lost in.
There are some metropolitan aspects to the songs sometimes,
but as far as our label was concerned we had to get
a record out without compromising that scale.”
 The
references to the smaller of scale mislead. The scope
of the band has grown considerably since 1997. The new
mini-album Make The Robot Cowboys Cry has taken in,
though not explicitly, the same area Mercury Rev were
aiming for on Deserter Songs. Here is a collection of
songs concerned with the expansionistic ethic endemic
in the ‘Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’
As a country founded with the main purpose to steadily
grow into a fulfilled shape, the interest in the beginnings
of this expansion with Spanish exploration feeds into
the Rev’s concerns of what to do when the journey has
ended. And you are looking out at the Pacific and with
no more land to traverse. With Drinkswater, Ponce De
Leon Blues and Ghost Dance 1492, Beachwood Sparks have
laid to rest the last vestiges of a heard musical heritage
and adopted the low acoustic strum, similar to Let It
Run, of thinking directly for themselves.
Brent concedes: “It was funny how that all came together.
It was when we were travelling together. We were doing
a really long tour just of the States for two months
with The Shins. We saw a lot of places and that seemed
to feed into the recording for the mini-album.”
“It wasn’t a pre-conceived concept, but it was out of
a lot of conversations and a lot of books read and a
lot of feelings about living in America, and we were
confronting it by travelling so extensively for the
first time. So it was bringing in not impressions of
the land, more directly seeing and observing. I think
a lot of things that happened in the 1800’s, 1700’s,
1600’s still reaches down now and affects us. We were
pondering our own country’s existence.”
Concerned with and taking impetus from the grand scale
of their home country has not diminished the appeal
of the Sparks here in the U.K. Playing the 100 Club
on Oxford Street last year the night attracted Kevin
Shields and Jason Pierce, both now fierce advocates
of the band. Where once Brent watched the shows and
listened to what these men had respectively produced
with My Bloody Valentine and Spiritualized, those who
he admired were now admiring him.
“It was weird, man, to see those guys who we liked and
liked their records.” The fan in Brent talks: “If they
had just walked past and glanced at me I would have
not thought anything of it, but because they came up
to us and it was like ‘that was just so good, that was
so amazing,’ that has been much of the kick of playing
over here. Once it was quite studious when we first
came over, but with what we are doing now and something
to do with the line-up now it really seems to relate
to people. We’ve got people cheering choruses and guitar
parts because they liked ‘em so much on tape that when
they get to hear it live it’s like whoosh.”
Before touring further and then going into Europe to
play festival dates, Brent has seen enough to encourage
and not tail off the Beachwood enterprise just yet.
“What has been happening on this tour compared to the
last one is the feeling, not just the emotions of the
songs, but also our states of mind and also the whole
of the group coming across in the music and in the performance
shows what has happened to us and what has happened
that day, and it’s really connecting with people. It’s
how we stay new throughout playing live, by taking the
day we’ve had and putting it into the way we play and
the audience has a lot to do with it now. They’re a
big part of it because they know the songs and are interested.
We like it here because of all of that. We’ve just been
spoiled on a lot of these shows.”
If you fancy spoiling the band before they fly back
to the States, Beachwood Sparks play 93 Feet East, London,
19th August.
Make The Robot Cowboys Cry is out now on Rough Trade.
Will Jenkins for Crud Magazine© 2002
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