Thor Harris of Swans weighs in on 'Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are'

• Butterscotch Records

Guest writer and SWANS percussionist/multi instrumentalist Thor Harris weighs in on Beauty Pill's forthcoming album, Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are (out April 21 via Butterscotch Records).

This record sounds gigantic! Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are draws from everything we’ve heard from the Washington D.C.-based group up to this point, and distills it into something new — pushing pop music into new territories. This is not a record made by kids. No offense kids. There are so many ideas and techniques at work here. So many in fact that upon first listen, Beauty Pill Describes Things as They Are seems a little broad and unfocused. Stick with it. These are musicians' musicians, and there is enough soul here for almost any listener to feel nourished. Rather than challenge listeners, this record affirms the idea that the ingredients we already have can be turned into a delicious fresh thing. Here, said ingredients have been masterfully stewed together by highly seasoned players drawing from a wide range of influences that arc like a well-made mix tape.

Some of my favorite records sounded awful the first time I heard them. I am a fan of ’70s and ’80s prog rock. King Crimson. Discipline — hated it . Love it now. Several of Brian Eno's vocal records had to grow on me, too. When I first heard krautrock bands such as Can, I thought it was a bit boring, empty, and long-winded. Now that's what I love about it. They’re like jam bands, but darker and groovier and they were doing it 30 years earlier. To be fair to myself, I was only 13 years old and still developing my now finely tuned ear. Other bands sounded beautiful right away. Daft Punk, Random Access Memories, or any LCD Soundsystem record for instance. Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are falls into the second category. Good on the first listen, great by the seventh.

Remember when Steely Dan was good it was so good? Dark, brooding, smart lyrics over lush instrumentation, and always with an awesome drummer? Well, Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are has that too. Muscular beats with finesse blended with lots of strange melodic choices. The group’s virtuosity is present, but tastefully reserved throughout the album. Chad Clark (vocals, guitar), Basla Andolsun (bass), Drew Doucette (guitar), Jean Cook (keyboards and vocals), and Devin Ocampo (drums) — I haven’t seen Beauty Pill perform live yet, but I will.

The male voice (Clark) drives the album, but there are three songs featuring a female voice — Cook — singing on “Ann the World” (a Beauty Pill original song), “Dog With Rabbit In Mouth, Unharmed,” and a cover of Lungfish’s song, “Ann the World,” breaking the record up nicely. Yes, there are two songs on the record called "Ann the World." These are smart musicians who are all very skilled at their craft.

A great record can occasionally be made in just a few days (see Nirvana’s Bleach. This is not one of those records. Beauty Pill Describes Things As The Are is the product of years spent crafting these songs to perfection — polished but not slick. Instead of a goddamn guitar solo here's some frenetic sax noise in “The Prize.” Or on the album’s first song, “Drapetomania” where an instrumental vamp comes, the meter disintegrates into a child's voice over a free jazz freak-out. The groove comes back in for a few bars, then, horrible static. Excellent choice.

Making robots share the stage with real live musicians ain't easy to pull off. But it happens here with seamless grace. Ableton can devour your record, but only if you let it. There is a nice dance between robots and real drums going on in songs such as “Afrikaner Barista.” The drum machine track is brought to life by these nicely placed fills. Trent Reznor is good at that too. I have done a good bit of this augmenting robots with real drums. It ain't easy.

It also sounds like several different people’s ideas came together for this record. There is nothing more interesting than the tension of different musicians’ ideas sharing space. When one member of the group decides his or her ideas are best, the band becomes less interesting by 75 percent. Beauty Pill comes across like a real band figuring things out together.

Lyrics are good if they are a little sad, smart, funny, and don't get in the way of the music. Check. These are not love songs, more like existential poems and character studies of modern times. The first line of the record is “I want more life, fucker.” The last line of the record: “The world vanished in a gentle breeze.” That's great. That comes at the end of a seven-minute cover of the Lungfish song “Ann the World,” which may be my favorite song on the record. It's a long dubby, slow groove full of electronic glitchy noises and vocal samples from some dude's stand-up comedy routine. Five-and-a-half minutes in, the samples drown out the groove before making room for an all new groove to fade in with a female voice singing that excellent line again: “The world vanished in a gentle breeze.”

The worst song on the record, “The Prize,” an Arto Lindsey cover, is still pretty solid. It’s kind of a jazz-fusion piece with nuanced distorted, tape-saturated drum beats, and acoustic guitar. This is mostly my fault because I'm not that good at jazz. It also has a cool instrumental solo at the end that sounds like a bassoon (played by Aaron Harman) and the sounds of farm machines — maybe processing chickens. Strings come in and cradle our sweetly bludgeoned ears to the end. Zeena Parkins plays harp on “Dog With Rabbit In Mouth, Unharmed” and “Ann the World,” not the Lungfish cover. Colin Stetson plays bass clarinet on all of the same songs as Zeena Parkins (fuck yeah, that's right!).

I like pretty music and I like ugly music. This is pretty music, bound by a thread (or a rope) of melancholy and humor. The public’s ear is hungry for syncopation and some funk elements, and there is a bit of that here. Remember those Tchad Blake-produced records by Soul Coughing ? Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are is built from a similar sound palette of unidentifiable noises, that occur naturally within the song’s context, placed like busted bits of tile in a mosaic.

I hope it doesn’t take another 10 years for the next Beauty Pill record to come out. Clark is brilliant at engineering and producing other peoples' records (Fugazi, Bob Mould, the Dismemberment Plan, Bernie Worrell, Marc Ribot, Sparklehorse, Mary Timony, and others). Here's to hoping he keeps putting his time and energy back into his own band for a while.

If you ignore this awesome band, you do so at your own peril. Asshole.

★★★★☆