The Beta Band
St. Andrew’s Hall
Friday, Oct. 24
There are not many shows where I’m going up to strangers and excitedly asking them, “Did you ever think you’d see the Beta Band live?!”
Luckily for me, this crowd was in just as much disbelief as I was to see this Scottish band tour their excellent compilation album The Three E.P.’s at a nearly sold-out St. Andrew’s Hall.
After 20 years away from their last Detroit tour date, the Beta Band delivered on that excitement on all fronts.
Let’s set some context. Remember John Cusack in the movie High Fidelity, where he plays a record store owner who can easily sell five copies of The Three E.P.s just by playing “Dry The Rain,” the unanimous “hit” from the record? It was a huge moment for the band, which I’d argue most fans discovered from that moment in the movie.
The song itself sums up the hard-to-pin-down sound of the Beta Band, who I often think of as Portishead if they were in a good mood, or the warm Balearic version of most of the Brit-pop that was coming out at the same time as the Beta Band’s heyday. (The band themselves have criticized some of that Brit-pop movement, but let’s not forget it was the praise of Oasis and Radiohead that helped launch them, too.)
There’s a warm twang to “Dry The Rain” -- it could be an alternative country hit in some other songwriter’s hands, or a country-meets-R&B thing in some other singer’s voice.
It slowly builds to an anthemic boil, with lead singer Steve Mason repeating the trance-like chorus: “If there's something inside that you wanna say / say it out loud, it'll be okay / I will be your light.” There’s that hopefulness that lurks in a lot of their lyrics.
Every minute of it hit at St. Andrew’s Hall with the Beta Band onstage. The multi-facetted musicians rotated among instruments in between nearly every song, showcasing the level of talent on display here. I was perched with a friend in the hanging balcony just over the stage, allowing me to see the details of how the members of the Beta Band brought it altogether.
Even lesser known tracks from the album, like the mesmerizing duo of “Push It Out” and “The House Song,” got a huge welcome from the crowd. No casual fans here -- these were diehards who were likely at the show 20 years ago.
Here’s hoping the Beta Band keeps these “revisiting the classics” tours up, because Detroit is already hungry to see these Scottish delights again.
