Having been largely unable to tour their second album, 2020’s Jump Rope Gazers, The Beths were determined to make up for lost time with its follow-up. Expert In A Dying Field was written in the mind-numbing throes of the pandemic’s peak – when the Kiwi power-pop outfit were truly pining for their return to the stage – and as a result, almost every second of the record feels tailored to be belted out in front of an audience.
You can hear it in the tasteful crunch of the riffs on ‘Head In The Clouds’, and in the warbly, almost jittery lead passage on ‘Best Left’. It’s there on the pseudo-psychedelic wailing that steals the stow on the back end of ‘2am’, and in the luminous pop-punk vibe the band explore on ‘A Passing Rain’ – and, of course, in the absolute sonic calamity that is the tongue-in-cheek thrash-pop banger ‘Silence Is Golden’. On that track in particular, frontwoman Liz Stokes tells Australian Guitar there’s “a musical irony” to it, with “the tension and the loudness – a very controlled kind of chaos – coming from a place of actually wanting to be quiet and alone”.
In addition to being the lead single from Expert In A Dying Field, ‘Silence Is Golden’ was the first song from it The Beths played live. “It’s so cathartic to play something that fast and unhinged,” Stokes says of the rush she gets when she and her bandmates – lead guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Ben Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck – get to whip it out in the set, pointing out that in the new record’s gestational phase, the band were particularly enamoured by the similarly reckless energy of The Police’s 1978 debut Outlandos d’Amour.
With the album finally out on shelves, and crowds starting to embark on the soul-warping sonic journey that is its live set, we sat down with Stokes and Pearce to tap a little deeper into what makes Expert In A Dying Field the best Beths album yet.
What made you really want to embrace that live energy for this record?
Stokes: When we say it’s meant to be experienced live, we mean that it’s meant for us to experience live [laughs]. Nah, it’s for the audience as well – but we were just really missing being able to play songs. In the studio, you can make a beautiful album that’s really subtle, but really complicated to recreate live. And we enjoy making music like that as well, but I think there was a part of us that just wanted to make a real straightforward live album. We still wanted subtlety and complexity, but we wanted to be able to play it and not feel like it was missing a lot.
Pearce: And then the other side of that coin is that when you make your first album, you make it by playing live. We’ve come to really acknowledge that kind of beauty, and how special that experience is, so we were trying to make something as if we were making it to play live, in the way that every band does when they make their first record. In that phase of your career, you’re just writing songs to play them in clubs, you’re not not really thinking about going straight to the studio.
So how did that reflect in the songwriting itself?
Stokes: It probably didn’t change that much, because my songs tend to start off the same way – guitar and vocal, maybe some MIDI parts and a little riff-y type thing. I think a lot of it came in the kind of arrangements that we ended up going for. It’s not like a huge concept album in that way, where it’s like, “They must be easily playable live!” There are studio-y songs, and songs that took time to find their footing.
Pearce: I do remember times when you were thinking about your guitar playing, when you were writing songs, and you were intentionally trying to write more simple and repetitive things, as opposed to those detailed, maybe nerdy, studio-y guitar parts. Would you say that?
Stokes: Yeah, sure.
Guitar solos have always been an integral part of The Beths’ flavour profile, but there’s more on this record than ever before. Was that something you were excited to lean more into, Jon?
Pearce: I still kind of can’t believe how many guitar solos I get away with. I get, like, a dozen moments in the set, whereas other lead guitarists might look forward to one or two moments like that in a show.
Stokes: Jon got COVID towards the end of our run in Europe, so we played the last three shows as a power-trio, and I had to just fiercely rearrange all the songs to work in that format. And I learned a bunch of Jon’s solos, you know, in a way that sounded like a child playing solos they’d learned online. But I still got applause, and I was like, “Oh, I like this!”
Pearce: It’s a good feeling! You get to put your biggest boost pedal on and be real loud…
Stokes: Why are there so many solos, though? I think it’s just that in my mind, I’m like, “rock band” – you know, it’s just always an option. You’re like, “Well, what happens after the second chorus?” You’ve got a few things you can do – you can have an instrumental, you can have a bridge, or you can have a solo.
Pearce: That’s why there’s always solos in music, because it’s always an option. And it’s the most fun option, so it’s the one we take the most often.
Was there a more enhanced spirit of experimentation this time around, too?
Pearce: I think the answer to that has to be “yes”, but we’re also really nervous about letting that experimentation become self-indulgent. We try really hard not to be self-indulgent musicians – even though there’s all these styles that we really like, and might want to use...
Stokes: It’s nice to hear that it sounds more experiential. Because once again, it’s one of those things where we feel like we’re doing things that still feel like us – we don’t feel like we’ve gone, “Oh, we’re gonna do something completely different! It’s gonna be so different!” We’re just trying to push into the corners of our own little box. And we like the box!
It’s just the spirit of guitar music, you know? And pop music as well – there’s just so much of [those genres] to dive into, and there’s so much of it that is so different, that you really can find a lot of ways to express two guitars, bass and drums while mining from a similar vein, and still, hopefully, explore different sounds and different expressions of that formula.
What guitars were y’all swinging in the studio?
Pearce: I almost always play my ‘70s Les Paul Deluxe, which has mini humbuckers in it. We were a little bit more adventurous with Liz’s guitar choices in the studio, but I find a lot get a lot out of the Deluxe, you know, so I use that almost all the time.
Stokes: That’s kind of your “sound”.
Pearce: That’s right. And I have it in the studio all the time – I record other bands as well, and I love to let other people use it and suggest it for certain guitar parts... But it almost never sticks. It’s the only thing that’s acceptable for The Beths, but it almost never works for other bands. It’s got the Les Paul power – that kind of throaty midrange grunt – but then because it’s got the mini humbuckers, it’s like a tiny bit brighter, and maybe a bit more forgiving on the lower levels of distortion. I can play quieter while still sounding loud, and it just holds up and sounds great. And it’s gold!
Stokes: I still played a fair bit of my G&L Fallout, which is the tribute one – the cheaper one – which I still love. It’s got a humbucker and a P-90, so it’s the most crucial sounding instrument that we have. So that’s always a staple, and most of the time I play that in the middle position. We also came into a Rickenbacker for this album…
Pearce: Yeah, it was a six-string Rickenbacker – maybe a late ‘90s one, with the toaster-style humbuckers.
Stokes: That was a really beautiful-sounding guitar. And then we also have this guitar on a long-term loan from a friend of ours – it’s a Jerry Jones Neptune, which is like a U2-style Danelectro, and it’s just a beautiful guitar to play. It’s somehow always in tune, the neck feels amazing, and it’s just got this nice, jangly sound, but with a good amount of sustain.
Pearce: It’s got those lipstick pickups, and it just, like... Strumming along on that guitar just sounds immediately awesome.
