by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Judging purely by the title, Beauty Pill’s early era has been a source of ambivalence for Chad Clark. Blue Period, the band’s reissue of their output on Dischord Records, (2003’s You Are Right to Be Afraid EP and 2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle, as well as a smattering of b-sides and demos), frames that ambivalence through their larger journey, suggesting that their early material is made richer and more interesting because of where they’ve gone since their nascent creative fixations. While that is a very healthy way to process past art, the records collected here are some of the most forward thinking and adventurous that have ever come from American indie rock and deserves more fanfare than all that implies.
All through Blue Period, Beauty Pill takes the kinds of big swings that most young bands never pull off, like noticeably decentralizing the front person role. Even at the time you would have to look at mid to late discography triumphs of much more established bands like Unwound, Modest Mouse, or Yo La Tengo to see those types of swings pay off. The disarming thing is that for all of the ambition, the music itself is approachable and warm, seeking the connection of the audience even as the songs go further afield conceptually. This plays out in the margins of the lyrics, an almost literary depiction of the trappings of 21st century modernity and the band’s own disdain for the modern inclination to collect experiences with no attachment, filling a bottomless need that is a substitution for an even more personal bottomless need. These are songs of deep-rooted discontent that you can hum along to or spiral out about if you’re so inclined.
The atmosphere of opening track “Goodnight For Real” is tense, turning the endless drive of the krautrock drums into a nightmare cruise. It just so happens that the nightmare leads to a shitty show where a shitty band is playing, the detachment in the scene palpable when Clark sings “every note they play turns their back to you.” The constant single note piano riff manages to both propel the song forward and convey the passive irritation of the song’s narrator. This penchant for impressionistic sonic metaphor helps keep the music engaging and surprising, like during the bombastic, arena rock fake out that fizzles into a shuffling, slow burn on “Lifeguard in the Wintertime.” Even now, when artists are purposefully making genre agnosticism a part of their appeal and songwriting, the transition between these parts remain ear catching because they convey more than simple eclecticism. Paired with the lyrics about a jaded lifeguard fantasizing about people diving into concrete and delivered by Rachel Burke’s high, lilting melody, the song becomes a portrait of an alienated worker made cold and the pleasure you can find in your darkest fantasies. When Burke allows her voice to drop on the second half of the climactic couplet (“The season makes me cruel / I have these thoughts in the summertime too”), the effect is sinister even as it conveys a certain humor through repetition, an inside joke with the audience.
While the subject matter is weighty, the band’s consistent tunefulness permeates even the darkest sentiments. Take “Prison Song,” which features Rachel Burke’s voice, the musical keystone of the record, over simple acoustic strumming and the musings of lovers estranged by incarceration and a love that’s curdled into obligation, or “Such Large Portions!,” which has some of the most indelible guitar playing on the record in the form of the lush, whammy barred chorus riff, pure kinetic energy before all tension releases and Burke’s voice comes out from the black. When she sings “The food is poison here, you can’t eat it / but in such large portions!” the sentiment is somehow even more biting when paired with the sweetness of her voice.
Beauty Pill is a band interested in humanity, evident from the shifting characters and slippery points of view — more often than not, the lyrical “I” is not strictly autobiographical, a refreshing change of pace from the confessional mode that many songwriters make their default. In trying to create from as many angles as possible, they end up stretching out across the musical spectrum in service of crafting the perfect world for each of their character studies; the authorial voice is strong enough to come through in even the subtlest musical choices, like altering the chorus of the original version of “Quote Unquote Devout” by both simplifying and speeding up the guitar part, an inspired use of compositional minimalism.
In retrospect, the most striking thing about these songs is how heavily Clark was relying on guitar for his main songwriting tool; for reasons both practical (the physical discomfort of playing guitar after a couple of life saving heart surgeries) and artistic (the more expansive songwriting palette and the shape shifting nature of the band itself), the band has since moved towards textured electronics and percussive interplay to buoy his distinct voice. It’s a move that’s allowed Clark’s vocal melodies to bloom and for Clark himself to sound like no one else. Where the tense post-hardcore and indie rock of Blue Period is concerned, the dynamism and fluidity of the guitar playing is practically another voice. “You Are Right To Be Afraid,” the title track to the EP, feels like the skeleton key to understanding this period as a whole. It’s a high energy punk tune with a plaintive guitar melody and a soaring chorus, the kind of song that lesser bands would try to write ten more times for the record because it’s just that good, and you get the impression that it was either a flex or a realization: entertainment is easy, art is hard.
Blue Period is interesting as an archival release because of its spartan presentation, completely excising things like live cuts from the era and the demos depicting songs that, aside from some production and arrangement choices, are pretty fully formed; even the decision to reverse the chronology and present the album before the EP marks this as more of a reintroduction than a true archival release, with the outtakes included feeling like a natural extensions of the worlds built on the proper releases. The differences between the demo and album versions of “Goodnight For Real” are small in number but impactful, the demo being more raw and featuring less of the vocal overdubs, swaths of synth, and ambient noise that lend the song its ethereal elements, which ends up placing more emphasis on the droning guitar and the splashes of cymbal that dot the ends of each movement. The psychedelic shift in the bridge is more driving in the demo, giving a burst of energy where the final product is content to simmer, but the heightened tension provided by the insistent, mutating single note piano riff and the beautiful Wurlitzer melodies in the final version are sorely missed. Still, it’s a revealing look into the process of Beauty Pill and how integral to their evolution fidelity would become.
This period of Beauty Pill is a snapshot of a moment where art for the sake of it emboldened the band’s purity of intention, in the process creating a classic record that transcends arbitrary genre divisions. While Beauty Pill have progressed astronomically from their early Dischord work, it’s a testament to their growth that even this early, there wasn’t a Beauty Pill “sound” so much as a Beauty Pill approach, a faithfulness to the idea that the human voice can express feelings that nothing else can and a willingness to have different voices refract through the lyrics. With Blue Period, Beauty Pill have reclaimed their early work as the soil where their identity took root while cementing their vitality as artists in the present.