The Beta Band: Hot Shots II

When the British music press latches onto a new group, it's best to approach that group with an open mind and healthy skepticism. It could be the next big thing, or the next Gay Dad. The Beta Band's first release, the self-descriptive collection The Three EPs, arrived in America amid a flurry of excitement, but aside from a few magnificent moments (the best of which was featured prominently in the film High Fidelity), it proved more intriguing than overwhelming. Casting scaled-down folk against a smorgasbord of backdrops, from guitar-rock to odd samples, The Three EPs captured an inventive band still finding its sound within a sea of ideas. The collection spotlighted a group with bottomless potential, but The Beta Band's self-titled debut album did little to fulfill that promise. A mess that lost track of its songs in all the sound collages, it also had the dubious distinction of getting publicly disavowed by its creators, who dubbed it "fucking awful." Fucking awful it wasn't, but it wasn't particularly good, either, and it looked like the end of the road for the group. It's a pleasant surprise, then, to find The Beta Band fulfilling much of its initial promise, quietly, on Hot Shots II. A sleepy, late-night album with far more focus than its predecessors, it finds a mood and sticks with it. The chant-like lyrics—which reference spaceships and use the consumption of pizza as a symbol of personal fulfillment—don't bear a lot of scrutiny, but they fit well into the album's overall scheme, which combines hushed vocals and acoustic strumming with synthesizers and canned beats. Even the mood-breaking bonus track "Won," which alternates between a remix of Harry Nilsson's "One" and some surprisingly credible rapping, works pretty well. There might be a future for The Beta Band yet, but if not, its members can at least take pride in having made the best album ever named after a Charlie Sheen film.