I don’t know much about Beta Satan, except that “girls” is a lot of fun and probably should be played loud. Loud as fuck, to be precise. A lot of people know about my reluctance to research bands on the internet, and yes it is true, I am afraid of what I might find when I type in “Satan”, “Girls” and “beta”. The “beta” probably won’t do much harm, though. Anyway, Beta Satan sound like a revved up, bass-heavy, rocking version of Franz Ferdinand at the beginning, especially because the singer has a decidedly english accent. That is before they turn it all loose. Then it turns into something as much fun as the Eagles of Death Metal, only not so cheesy and good. Everything builds up on big-ass bass riffs and heavy drums, some lines of singing and a shitload of crazy ideas. Should be Josh Hommes favorite band to get drunk to and party by now.

See, the Beta Satan is a demon in the making. It has been assembled to a certain degree and is now let loose onto the public, the early adopters and primary users, to feedback and get the bugs out (pun intended, I hope). You can help him by joining his “Party on the Death Star” and have “Great Moments of Pleasure”. His main goal in live is clear, as it is stated with the title of this albums: “girls”. An endless issue of fascination, mystery and enigmatic behaviour. It is all fun, fun, fun, until daddy takes the smack away. Then it is all self-built bongs with 82.3 % alcohol moonshine on the horsefarm. I know how those Scandinavians can drink, if they can afford to. Yeah, fun. With a label named after a Monthy Phyton joke, what did you expect. One of the best and most legendary Monthy Python jokes, (“of course, there is a real dead frog in there”) mind you, but still. Hm, I still wonder if these dudes are from Denmark or Great Britain, but who cares, really?

On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to shake your butt to the overspeed bassriff of “Rave Kenneth”, you better check your pulse. Or the way they trash through a dozen songs in a little over half an hour, so elegantly yet with so much of the attitude and charisma of juvenile delinquents. Beta Satan has that certain groove in its rock that many new rock bands and all Garage rock bands miss out on. Even when they go into this somehow cubist riff-thing that has been called post-punk-revival when bands like Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkey and all the other Wire ripoffs were young. (Okay, I just want to show off how hip I am...) One of their songs that has these bang-bang-bang rhythms is even called “Math and Chemistry”, and is either about the way songs like these magically work even though they sound wrong in the beginning, or about how the singer remembers a girl from school.

That, or that the world is built on the principles of math and chemistry – which is a far stretch, really, because why should a band called Beta Satan be worried about the fate of the world. And also, because it is wrong. Math is just a subordinate science for physics and other natural sciences. Find these weird thoughts? Then better not listen to “Girls”, because that seems to foster weird logic and rationalising in some ways. And those are neither connected to THC nor to those cannabinoid substances found in herbal mixtures sold under various names in “head shops”. Legally. Like this record. All I can tell you finally is, that it makes a hell of a difference if you are listening to Merzbow on a soft volume level or if you give yourself the full neuron destructing blast volume. It is somehow the same here. Without the dead frogs dressed in chocolate, though.

www.crunchy.dk

12/2008