There is a musical heritage accredited and followed in the States that is dismissed and erased in the UK. Where most American groups, even with the eradication ethos of punk, acknowledge a rich pop inheritance and are willing to incorporate with references past-masters or have a revisionist view of ignored forebears, UK bands are more often not so readily aware of anything prior to the advent of ‘Our Lord’ Noel Gallagher.
Whether it is Americana content matter or filching the guitar breaks from Electric Prunes and Moby Grape records you can find a distinct lineage in American music, however this is not to say that there a cold and hard Greil Marcus academic study to undertake to find this sonic heritage. It is easy to understand when listened to.
The idea of a continuing presence in a band’s music of others always happens, however it is strange to consider that someone like The Strokes who have been applauded, lauded and bought for their revisionist CBGB’s sound, see the Beachwood Sparks dismissed as imitators of soft mid-sixties burrito flavoured folk-rock.
The release of Once We Were Trees last year saw Chris Guntz’s circle-eyed psych/country quartet grow from the always referenced Gram Parsons styled foursome to a reinvigorating Byrdsian exploration of mind, experience and classification. Dedication to internal exploration not seen since our parents pretended to be storming the streets, before falling back into acceptable middle-class lifestyles, mowing the lawn and turning a blind-eye to South American revolutionary rhetoric and falafel, has rock mixed the rural-idyll and the mind’s eye.
Beachwood Sparks has expanded on internal voyaging on their new mini-album by concerning themselves with the exploration, which led to the founding of America. Ponce De Leon Blues seeks the personality of one of the major Spanish explorers, often forgotten as Columbus’s second in command, with a glockenspiel backed tune redolent of long drawn-out afternoons and ice-cold tea. Now, the Santa Maria becomes one of the haunting presence’s of the group’s music and not the sound of thirty-five years ago. The spirit of founding and understanding uncharted waters, although not of the old sea dog yarns, has moved the Sparks from Buffalo Springfield documentarians to an avenue of pursuit all their own; without snidely jettisoning a rich and fulfilled history of questioning and then appraising the Land of the Free.
As Galapagos sails its course of harmonised vocals and down-home banjo, the listener moves from the canyons of Southern California through an electric kool-aid acid-test environment to an area of distortion of white-noise that removes the band from accusations of a hippy-drippy nature to a group capable of fashioning a mildly disturbing climax to a song. The rise of expectation seen in discovery, whether it is physical or mental, has the band not bellowing like the clarion call to a new experience that this album’s forbears were so excited about on the heath at Haight-Ashbury. The Beachwood Sparks are interventionists in favour of an option to explore much like Columbus, who chose himself to undertake his own voyage and not be part of an overwhelming feeling to follow others. A small and simple gesture such as personal choice and involvement in experience has made a beautiful, beautiful record.