It’s a great week, scratch that, a great year when The Beths have a new album out and if you are a fan of New Zealand’s own euphoria generator then Straight Line Was A Lie will not disappoint. Positing that “Linear progression is an illusion” (as depicted by the cover art which is a surrealist analog clock) and that life is all about maintenance and “finding meaning in the maintenance”. The Beths’ post-COVID album Expert In A Dying Field was a huge critical success but since its release in 2022 principal songwriter and singer Elizabeth Stokes had only fragments of songs as she was hampered by poor mental and physical health, and some fraught family dynamics. This led to her taking SSRIs which Stokes said meant “I was kind of dealing with a new brain, and I feel like I write very instinctually. It was kind of like my instincts were just a little different, they weren’t as panicky.”
The solution was to break down the normal writing process and shake things up, such as reading On Writing, How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and Working by Robert A. Caro as well as using a Remington typewriter to write streams of consciousness every day for a month, and going on an extended writing retreat to Los Angeles. The fluidity of these methods allowed them to be open to all creative inputs, with the typed pages acting like therapy as Stokes had to address many things that she didn’t want to but had to.
The band have been making music and playing it live since 2018’s debut Future Me Hates Me and it’s inevitable that the rigours of constant recording and touring plus life’s adversities can wear you down (your brain can push pause even if you don’t it want to). Reading this back story before listening to the music might lead you to think Straight Line Was A Lie was going to be a collection of songs that would make Joy Division sound like Girls Aloud, but the cathartic process of taking time to take stock has worked wonders. Instead of trying to untie the Gordian Knot of emotions The Beths have treated it like a rollercoaster and jumped on to scream along with its many twists and turns.
Rather than travel down the path of self-indulgence or by creating a rock opera with a symphony orchestra they have not stopped making songs that soar into the pop stratosphere such as ‘Straight Line Was A Lie’, ‘Mosquitoes’, ‘No Joy’, and ‘Take’ which have no-brakes-propulsion and get the blood pumping. There is bite in the sweetness on tracks like ‘Metal’, the Bangles-esque joy on love song ‘Roundabout’ (which features the most delicious, repeated guitar riff) and ‘Ark Of The Covenant’ which is one Robert Smith away from being a classic Cure song.
But it’s the middle of album that contains two songs which point to the bittersweet heart of Straight Line Is A Lie. ‘Mother Pray For Me’ has the tender feel of a nursery rhyme. It has a riff that stitches the song together while Stokes soft vocals seeks the connection with a difficult parent/daughter relationship. ‘Til My Heart Stops’ seeks to rise above life’s travails while seeking life’s simple pleasures: “I wanna ride my bike in the rain”, “I wanna fly my kite in a hurricane”, “dance ‘til I drop”. ‘Mother Pray For Me’ in particular has been playing in my memory since I first heard it.
Straight Line Was A Lie has new wave grit wrapped up in pop colours. The processes used to bring the album to life (chemical and psychological) have not dampened anything, only deepened the subject matter and brought self-reflection and emotional depth into the mix. But there is still plenty of wry humour and those massive Beths tunes that will get brains tingling and audiences jumping at their live shows.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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