The Beige - El Ángel Exterminador

by Nathan Stafford


Sophomore release from local exploratory jazz/pop project

El Ángel Exterminador is a CD I can listen to all day long. Ambient, smooth musicianship, laid-back, yet unpredictable song structures, lots of nice, acoustic & stringed instruments, stirring lyrics and punchy delivery, using vocals as an ingredient, not in your face all the time. Not a jam band, but accomplished players set out with a lot of freedom and a cool cohesive vision of what a record is.

This record is definitely suited for long play; it’s atmospheric, interesting, but not overbearing at any time. If you have a keen ear, you’ll want to rewind the song, to hear that little sound or echo you caught out of the corner of your ear. The way everything transitions, you can start at the first track and feel how the album moves along, nearly every song turning into a huge, monstrous musical exploration at the end. Much of the album is instrumental, the lyrics pulling you back in to this world from the offbeat musical world The Beige has created.

You’ll notice a couple of different vocal styles on this record. I was immediately hooked-in during the opener “Road” with its almost Nick Cave or Bill Callahan/The Smog singing style; that mono, slow, half-speaking. Here’s my main critique of the rest of the album: On the later songs, I was missing that vocal. It went to a more straightforward, while aurally pleasing singing style in the middle songs, which certainly connects the listener and shows versatility, but I feel it’s a little middle of the road at times, when compared to the mysterious musical world around it.

There was a definite Cake feel to “Underground is Waiting”, which I really like, but I was craving the vocals I heard in the first song intro. That kind of baited the hook for me, but I kept waiting for it to come back.

As I see it, there are two ways to listen to this record: In a set of headphones, scientifically observing every little echo, every unique keyboard bend, and really getting into the lyrics; or you can put the CD on, go about your busy day doing whatever, while having it play in the background and still manage to pull you out of whatever you’re doing for a second and say, “wow, that’s nice”.

One of those moments happened when I heard the main guitar in the instrumental track “Ponce de León”. It’s so simple, so clean, but a little warped beauty, over spacy bass and drum shots. All the while, there’s something humming and whirring in the background, getting closer and closer, only to fade away into nothing with everything else. Later on, the hooky double bass on “Underground is Waiting” draws you in, and there’s only 6 lines of lyrics in the whole song.

The Beige show that music can have modern production, and still contain that man-made substance, but I suppose it is the modern man we’re talking about here. These guys recorded and self produced everything (Produced by Rick Maddocks & Jon Wood). I want to find out more about field recording, though. It fascinates me.

I first encountered singer-songwriter/author Rick Maddocks of The Beige in March ’09, when I caught another project he’s in called Slowmobile. The music was all created live, using real instruments, with looping and field recordings for good measure. I asked Rick back then about how he goes out and gets those field recordings:

“I spent a week in Havana and recorded as much as I could: echoing voices in a near empty church, a lone trumpeter in a quiet plaza, recorded a flamenco class in the Gran Theatro de Havana; captured a kid on tape singing a dirty little tune after he bummed a smoke on the Malecon.”

It remains a mystery to me, if any of those specific recordings are used on El Ángel Exterminador, but you can hear little murmurs of things, a trace of something here and there, totally distinguishable to the people who made this music, but to the rest of us, it could be any mysterious sound, man-made or other.

The album winds out with the elegant “Este Pais” or “This Country”, and a final composition-bookend, coming in at 7 minutes and 52 seconds, called “FIN”. It’s other-worldly.

This is not an album that’s going to pick you up and make you wanna dance. The press materials I received called it the “Great Canadian feel-not-so-good album”, but if you are looking for some original music to sink your teeth into, or to just distract you for a minute, The Beige are not as bland and neutral as their name might suggest. With intense imagery, theatric or cinematic composition style, and wide range of elements, this album will not disappoint.

*The Beige play a CD Release Party for El Ángel Exterminador on January 23rd at St Paul’s Anglican Church (early show). Tickets at Red Cat Records, Zulu Records, Highlife Music and info@thebeige.ca