Michael Beach: Dream Violence | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Michael Beach emerges from the collective, psychic miasma, worn down, brutalised, but ready to screech, shriek and croon about all life’s injustices. A musician’s musician, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and has worked with other highly tipped underground types, from the gritty guitar thunderers of Thigh Master, to the ghostly rock’n’roll echoing of Charlie Megira. Like a lot of rockers with a strong knowledge of the craft, Beach follows the stream back to its source, channelling a deep undercurrent of blues beneath all the other shades of alt, garage, punk and power-pop you’ll hear. He puts it to work doing what it was designed for: wailing about woe, the beautiful possibilities, ground to bits on the harshness of reality, expressing the dissonance that’s left in your head, the Dream Violence that’s the distance between what should be and what is.

Given that the blues is still, as it ever was, at the basis of all today’s popular music, it shouldn’t be surprising that Beach’s blues sound, with its various historical inflections and personal idiosyncrasies gives off echoes of a lot of musicians who’ve riffed off the tradition in a similar manner. Everyone who talks about Michael Beach will give you a different set of influences they hear in there: from Neil Young to Bruce Springsteen, to Kurt Vile and Reigning Sound or Kelley Stoltz (who just happened to produce the record). I’ve heard people make some Australian comparisons, including the Go Betweens. For me, personally though, Beach’s early work like Blood Courses, is reminiscent of the sinuous, muscular solo work of Tom Lyngcoln, while over the course of four albums of deepening intricacy and power -and with help from Innez Tulloch and Matt Ford from Thigh Master and Utrillo Kushner (of Comets On Fire and Colossal Yes among others)- it’s easy to compare Beach's contemporary output to one of Australia’s best blues bands, The Drones; well, maybe if they were fronted by Tim Rogers.

That’s the first half of Dream Violence anyway. Richly brutal harmonies blair out, the musical realisation of Beach’s fevered accusations levelled at all the world’s wrongs. “We got the modern existentialism, lying on the factory floor / Try not to look it in the eye / There’s people to be made, people to adore / We got de facto blues!” These are surreal recollections wallowing in the nauseous sensations of the modern condition.

All that psychotic energy is so intense that it burns itself out long before the record is done. That’s no problem though. Beach starts to downshift, elegantly, on Curtain Of Night. The embers slowly wink out as he wistfully rasps: “Pull the blankets close when it gets cold /  Watch your thoughts all disappear / Behind the curtain of night.” I’m not sure that established fans will be expecting what the evening brings, which is ... piano ballads. You Found Me Out gets its Billy Joel or Ben Folds on as Beach pulls the focus from a broken world right in tight on to the intimate melancholy of busted romance: “You found me out / On a ship at sea / You pulled me in / Made a mess of me.” The title track is stricken dumb by its sadness: Dream Violence depicted as a meandering, ambient blues, before the piano returns and the record ends with chill sweats and a whimper on Sometimes I Get That Cold Feeling.

The blues has always been about drawing out the poison of living and infusing it into cathartic music. This record proves, if evidence was really necessary, that, unlike a lot of other medication, the blues is just as effective as they always were. The weird visions and grim realities, the high hopes and nasty disillusionment that fuel Michael Beach’s Dream Violence might be hard for him to live with, but they make good listening.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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